Page 30 of The Scarlet Ball

“Do you want something to eat?”

“No. No. I don’t know if I’m ever going to eat again.”

She accepted that for the moment and guided me to the bed, going so far as to ease me under the covers and draw them up to my shoulders. When she started to pull away, I grabbed her hand, and she paused.

“Stay. Please stay.”

She uttered the softest sigh, annoyance perhaps at her childish charge, but then the bed dipped as she settled with her back against the headboard, her hand still holding mine. I should have felt guilty for keeping her, but instead there was only relief. I could put off being alone for a little while longer.

“How do we live in the world with things like them in it?” I heard myself ask. My voice hardly sounded like mine, small and quiet, content to be ignored if no one wished to hear it.

“As you always have,” she said with a peculiar gentleness. “They have always been here. They will be here long after the rest of us are gone, sitting on the tallest ruins of what once were your tallest cities, waiting for what comes next. They have always been with you, only now, you can see them.”

I shuddered, squeezing her hand more tightly and turning to bury my face in the side of her thigh.

“I wish I couldn’t.”

“Do you truly believe that?”

I could feel sleep’s fingers curl around my ankles, ready to drag me down. Still her question caught me, and at last, I sighed.

“No. It’s always better to see them coming, isn’t it?”

I dreamed of nothing that night.

Eight

Last winter, Mrs. John Kerrigan stepped off the HMS Corydon in a magnificently fitted indigo wool traveling dress and heels made of polished mahogany. She was fresh from her triumph as Goneril at St. James in London, and she was ready to take the Americas by storm until she opened her traveling trunks and saw her dresses.

Every single one—her smart day dresses, her evening gowns, the grand confections of silk gauze, silver thread, and beetle wings she wore on stage, even her sleeping chemises—were drilled through with gaping holes to where her heart should be. It was a violent, theatrical kind of destruction, a threat from some rival or scorned lover. Mrs. Kerrigan, veteran of the boards, only cared about getting the matter fixed at once. For that she needed a milliner, not a dressmaker. Milliners worked small with drawers full of bits of fluff and odds and ends that could be cobbled into ornaments, and of course, only a French shop would do.

She swept into Madame Valois’s shop still smelling like salt sea air, and thirty minutes after that, trunk after trunk appeared, twelve of them altogether. When they were set on end, they came up to my shoulder, and when we opened them, the dresses came out in a rush, settling on every spare surface and hanging from every hook.

Madame Valois and two senior girls took care of her dress needs for that evening immediately, and the rest of us scattered to assess the damage and to see what might be done.

It was three weeks of hell, darning where we could, patching where it would not matter so much. Mrs. Kerrigan at least was from an old theatrical family. She knew the value of a repair that wouldn’t be noticed from the back of the house, but still it all must be repaired, and as invisibly as possible.

We slept underneath the tables, we paid for the sausage rolls that Madame Valois had sent to the shop. By the end of it, my fingertips were like leather and everything more than five feet away was fuzzy and unclear.

Still it was done and done well, and in thanks, Mrs. Kerrigan sent us all tickets for a Thursday-night performance at the Academy of Music. Dressed in what passed for our best, we threaded our way up a dark narrow staircase all the way to the top of the auditorium, looking down over the crowd. On a Thursday night, it was shopkeepers and servants and laborers, families that had come to get out of the cold, apprentices who had run away and knew that Friday would be busy enough that they could sneak back in without too cruel a beating. We were crammed in shoulder to shoulder, the noise rising to batter our ears. Then the velvet curtain swept open.

When Mrs. Kerrigan came out in the poison-green dress that I’d patched with a stripe of matching velvet ribbon, the crowd screamed their approval and kept screaming. She stood frozen with letter in hand, waiting for it to stop, but it just kept going, the screams turning to howls for quiet until finally it all came apart.

The fight started by the orchestra, spread out and up to the gallerie. The boxes were empty, since no one who was anyone would be caught dead there on a Thursday, but by the time Mrs. Kerrigan had cleared the stage, we’d barricaded the doors to our own section to wait out the tumult. It wasn’t safe to leave until close to midnight, when the only thing left of the brawl was a broken-headed man groaning in the street.

That was on a Thursday.

On Friday nights, the Academy of Music doubled the watchmen, and the carriages alongside the curb were owned, not rented. Mrs. Howard didn’t like the impression made by my early defection at the Gracens’ ball and I had spent the past week putting in appearances at every crush to which Ginny received an invitation, including some Mrs. Howard might otherwise have declined. I needed to be seen in fine health and high spirits again, so of course a German tragedy was exactly what was called for tonight: lost love, doomed deals, the good and the bad ending badly alike.

“It’s fine, I can pretend to be transfixed,” I told Mrs. Howard in the carriage. “I’ve done it for less interesting things.”

“No one’s interested in what’s on the stage,” she said dismissively. “Everyone worth knowing will be watching the boxes. Remember to sit square to the orchestra, and for goodness’ sake, don’t slouch.”

We were on our own that night, Mr. Howard off to wherever wildfires that looked like men went to entertain themselves. There had been some difficulty between the Howards lately. There were no thrown shoes or harsh words; instead it expressed itself in a strange quiet, the silence that came just after a gunshot, or maybe the one that came just before.

This time, there was no hurried scuttle up the back stairs. We were escorted to the Howards’ box by an usher, and within a few minutes a delightful girl had shown up with glasses of punch and a plate artfully set with two butter cookies and a dollop of blackberry jam.

“Leave them, they’ll soil your gloves,” Mrs. Howard said absently, looking over the crowd. “There’s Dorcas Dryden with Odile. Such a shame.”