Page 38 of The Scarlet Ball

“Cheaper than it looks,” Mrs. Howard muttered to me with some of her old spirit. “It is what you get for hosting a public ball, after all.”

“But it’s beautiful,” I said, gazing up at the falling false stars, and something about it closed a hand around my heart, that it should be so beautiful and that I should be there to see it. Cheaper than it looked—well, so was I, and I might have started crying if I didn’t want to keep from ruining my makeup.

The musicians played their tuning note, the dance coming to order, and we took our seats at the room’s perimeter with myself in the middle and the Howards to either side. As Mrs. Howard had said, it wasn’t the type of engagement that was meant to attract the lords. Despite that, some part of me was wary, looking around like a fawn in the forest for signs of the wolf.

A woman in a fabulous dress of striped black and cream satin came at us like a warship in full sail. She brought with her a kind of weight and presence that changed the very air around her. Where she walked, people drew back or leaned in. It was impossible to tell if she was hated or adored, but it was very clear that whoever she was, she could not be dismissed. Mr. Howard rose to kiss her hand, Mrs. Howard offered her both of hers, and she gave me a brisk look.

“What have you to say for yourself, Miss Iphigenia?” she asked as if we were continuing some long-ago fight. “Do you find yourself pleased?”

It was clear the question was not whether I was pleased, but whether she was pleased with me.

“I am too young yet to find myself pleased,” I said with a slight smile. “At the moment, I merely find myself curious.”

“A fine thought for a modern young lady. May your curiosity be satisfied.”

She gave me a velvet pouch and sailed on, leaving me staring after her. As I watched, one young woman flinched back from her as if she was a demon herself and one mother seized her daughter’s hand to drag her forward.

“What in the world did she marry?” I murmured to Mrs. Howard. I didn’t think I had seen her at the White Ball, but it surprised me that I would not remember.

Mrs. Howard made an amused sound. “Oh, it would be a step down for her to have a husband like mine. You see, that is Mrs. Astor.”

“I could wreck this city, but she could pay me enough money that I wouldn’t,” Mr. Howard said. “Well. I might think twice.”

I saw her name on buildings and streets, on the hotels, on the furriers’ wagons, the newspapers. I would not be surprised if I saw it written small on every blade of grass and coal pebble in the city. It struck me that it was her name on those things, not the Howards’ or the Websters’ or the Manchesters’ or the Diehls’, and she had done it all without the help of a demon lord. First it pleased me that there was a force greater than the demon lords, and then I realized it would be smarter to be frightened. You feared a wildfire for its devastation, for the sudden and unthinking loss of life and property. You feared people that rich for their idle whims alone.

I opened the velvet bag she had given me to find a silver case inside, pegged closed by a silver mechanical pencil slid through two curling loops. It was a dance book with blank pages sewn in, and soon thereafter, society matrons with their likely-looking young sons approached us to fill it for me.

It was a public ball, so no young man could approach without some helpful relative to make the connection. It was a startlingly quick process, Mrs. Howard and the other woman establishing the link between them, however tenuous, leaving the young man free to claim me for a dance. Some of them had been prompted by their mothers, one rather older candidate looked at me like a piece of cake he was considering, and perhaps one or two looked genuinely interested. It was my job to smile demurely and to present the right combination of interest and reserve, and tonight, at least, that was not difficult. If she ever came back, Ginny Marshall could do much worse than to find herself married to Paul Simmons of the Philadelphia Simmonses or Ned Dorsett whose mother was a lesser Vanderbilt instead of some wildfire or earthquake.

Some of the women of Mrs. Howard’s coven were in attendance as well, Mrs. Dryden shepherding the unsuitable Odile, and Mrs. Lloyd, with no daughter of her own and her husband trailing after her so close he almost trod on her hem. When they stopped to exchange a few words with the Howards and to compliment me on my dress, it came to me that the Lloyds were one of those couples who had chosen only each other and no one else; if he looked anywhere but at her, it was only because he had to, and every other word out of her mouth was “My James says this” or “so James told me.”

Mrs. Howard looked after them when they went with that placidity I knew signified great displeasure.

“She has given him his way too often this year,” she murmured to me. “First the matter with that opera singer, and then her own niece. Florence Adler was sixteen, she could have come to dance the White Ball, and instead—”

“James Lloyd is mad over his wife and always has been,” Mr. Howard said easily. “If she wants to feed him well, what of it? I’ve never seen them happier.”

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, never taking her arm from his. She had been calculating his appetite for decades, and I realized as I never quite had before that her life relied upon it. Mine did as well.

The dancing was almost set to start, and then a narrow woman in green and bronze approached us. If Mrs. Astor had been a warship in full sail, this woman was a rowboat driven before a hurricane. She came so fast she nearly tripped over her own shoes, and something about her fear was contagious. Unease rumbled through my belly, threatening to crawl up my throat, and that was before I saw the young man standing behind her.

They cleaned you up well, I thought with numb shock. When last I saw you, you were all red.

“Mrs. Howard, it is so fine to see you again. If you recall, we served on the animal welfare reform committee together,” the woman in green and bronze said, a peculiar tightness to her face. Her eyes were red, as if from a winter cold or from weeping.

“Of course I remember,” Mrs. Howard began. It sounded like a lie to me, but then Mr. Howard stepped forward, the first time he had shown anything beyond a polite interest in the proceedings. In two smooth strides, he put himself in front of me and Mrs. Howard, and there was a set to his shoulders that made me think of men on the docks, ready for a fight.

“We’ve not made enough time for each other in the new year, Mrs. Rowe,” he said, not looking at her at all. “It would be wonderful to have you and the family back to the old place. And especially … Sebastian, was it not? Your son?”

Mrs. Rowe’s hands were clasped before her. Someone just glancing at her posture would have thought her overly earnest. It looked to me like she was holding herself together in the middle of a powerful gale, and I could feel that same terrible wind tugging at me as well.

“Yes. Yes. I would like to introduce you to my son Sebastian. He’s been traveling through Europe the past year. Please!” she burst out, her face crumpling momentarily, and Sebastian—or rather, the thing that had taken over Sebastian’s face and body and family—touched her shoulder.

It was a curious gesture, gentle but entirely without affection. He never looked at her. He was looking at me, and there was something strange about his eyes, something that made the hair stand up on my arms.

Mrs. Howard stepped forward to stand beside Mr. Howard. I could see that she had come to a decision, and she reached forward to take Mrs. Rowe by the hands, chafing them as if it was only the cold that troubled the poor woman.

“We are very pleased to make Sebastian’s acquaintance. You know my granddaughter, Iphigenia Marshall. Iphigenia?”