Page 35 of The Scarlet Ball

“Oh, do they let trees sit the exams now? And here I thought allowing Black men and white women was so forward.” I could hear the shrillness in my own voice, and I glared at Martha to steady myself.

“She couldn’t run. They would know immediately where she’d gone and bring her back. She couldn’t fight and she couldn’t bargain, so she decided to hide. This is what we came up with.”

“She’s just. Going to be a tree now?”

Martha looked offended.

“No matter what you’ve decided about me, Ginny, I’m not a monster. No, of course not. It’ll all fall apart when autumn comes. The leaves will drop, and there she’ll be, free and unmarried and ready for her first week at the Woman’s Hospital Medical College in Chicago. My second cousins are Tollands. I’m here almost every week. I’ll see to her.”

“I’m sure you will.”

She shrugged at the skepticism in my voice. Together, we gathered up Bethany’s clothes and cast them into the furnace at the back of the greenhouse. It occurred to me that for some families the greenhouse would make use of magic instead, stealing bits of summer from places that wouldn’t miss it, or at least couldn’t stop them. It’d be expensive, but not more expensive than the endless coal that kept the peonies and orchids in bloom here. The Tollands were old New York and would rather show the world that they could pay for it all.

“Believe me or not, when she drops her leaves and sheds her bark, I’ll be here for her. Is it so impossible that I mean her well?”

We’d drawn abreast of Bethany again, the last in the line of trees. Martha had set her pot crooked, but that was the only hint that there was one more tree than there should be. Martha reached out to pat the trunk as we went by.

“I’m not a saint,” she said, as we made our way back into the hall. “I wouldn’t do this if it cost me too much. And fewer girls coming to the Rose Ball, well, that’s good for me, isn’t it? I want a good marriage and a good man as much as anyone does. I think there are a few who might think of me, even one or two who might offer, but one never knows with men.”

“They’re not men. They never were.”

“You are right. No man would move a mountain just because you wish it, or flood a barren land green because you asked him to. My grandmother has that. I want what my grandmother has, and I want it before she and Grandfather pass on.”

“Your mother?”

“Ill for the first White Ball she could have attended, married by the time of the next. So be it.” She shrugged. “I want what I want, and I am not sorry for it. But if this isn’t what you want—”

“I’m exactly where I want to be.”

“If you change your mind, come to me before the Rose Ball, when it might do some good. I can help you.”

I knew she hadn’t been the girl who helped me in the dark. She wouldn’t have, either. One less girl at the Rose Ball meant one more chance for her to shine. If she lasted the season, what a terror she’d be with a ring on her hand and a demon lord at her side.

Still, there was Bethany, and there was her offer to help if it was needed. It wasn’t nothing.

We crept back into the reading together to find the poet was in full spate, crying out the perfidy of love to the skies. I returned to my seat, alone now, and across the way, Martha settled in next to her mother, little and birdlike where Martha was a valkyrie.

“O pain, O discordance!” cried the poet. “Betrayal rushes headlong, and what it tramples is food only for the trees. Wherefore, then—”

After the reading, I saw Mrs. Payne going from person to person, her mouth drawn tighter and tighter into a hard, frightened line.

“Have you seen Bethany?” she kept asking. “Have you seen my Bethany?”

Nine

A few nights later, the blizzard that had been threatening to materialize for days came into its own, great gray clouds hovering over the city like vultures, and it snowed from dawn, not stopping for the dusk. From my room, I watched it pile up, first up to the knees of the horses, and then up to their bellies. They struggled through the drifts to make that last delivery, that last ride, that last fare, sending up great plumes of steam from their sweating hides and their hard breaths.

By morning, the snow came from the street to the very doors of the house, and the streets themselves were trampled down to dirty mush with a layer of treacherous ice underneath. If I were still living on Mulberry Street, I would be out in it with the rest, hems soaked with icy filth, shoes filled with melted snow and weighed down with exhausting cold that wouldn’t let up until April or May.

By contrast, Howard House stood serenely against the cold with the very floors heated by forced hot air and warmth emanating from the ornate grating as if the house itself was breathing. We had the hearths burning as well, the ashes scraped out first thing in the morning and lit for us fresh at dawn, and one morning, rising early, I caught Mielle sitting curled up by the fire, as close as she could get to the coals.

I came to sit next to her, offering her a share of the blanket draped around my shoulders. When she took it, I felt the quiet thrill of coaxing a timid cat to nuzzle your fingertip. She accepted the blanket without a word, and I felt like I had won something.

She didn’t turn to look at me but kept staring into the fire. In moments at rest, you could see more clearly there was something not quite human about her. She breathed less than I did, and there was something canted strange about the geometry of her face. She had eyes and ears and a mouth, pretty ones, no less, but the longer you looked at her, the less you believed they operated as a human’s did. Catch her at an odd moment, and they’d open wrong, too wide or doubled or revealing some strange extra aperture or organ that would betray her uncanny nature. I found that wisely or not, I was looking forward to it.

“Can’t you feel it?” she asked.

I had no idea what she was talking about, but then her hand tightened on mine, and I paused. Listened.