Page 53 of The Scarlet Ball

Mrs. Howard smiled, or at least, her lips moved slightly. It looked like something was in her mouth trying to get out.

“This is the first lesson that Iphigenia learned. First come the bones, and then comes the flesh. If a thing has bones that are then dressed in flesh, how far might they go?”

She called for Mr. Howard, who had stood at the door watching all this with an eagle eye. Someone passing by might have thought he was interested in two grown women drawing hopscotch squares in the icy road, but a moment’s scrutiny revealed that the only thing he saw, perhaps the only thing he could see, was Mrs. Howard. I suppressed a shudder at the memory of Sebastian’s eyes on me and full of me as if he had already devoured me to keep in his belly, forced myself to shake it off as Mr. Howard joined us.

He examined the chalk marks on the ground, walking around them with a professional kind of courtesy before giving Mrs. Howard a wry look.

“I see you have no urge to do things by half measures tonight. Very well.”

Chalk for bones, and the fire for flesh, and Mr. Howard took a deep breath and blew sparks into the air. The sparks danced in the wind and spiraled over the marks we had drawn. Just like Mielle dressed me and made me a respectable debutante for the evening, fire dressed the chalk, flesh dressed the bones, and he traced out a pair of blood-bright bays in harness, weaving them out of thin air before turning to do the same for the carriage. Last, he cast sparks over the two chalk marks Mrs. Howard had made on the walk, and a coachman in hat and greatcoat stepped forward with a bow.

All of this happened in less than a count of three: coachman, carriage, and two identical horses, except that the one I had described favored its right foreleg, lifting it restlessly off the ground. If you could ignore the licks of fire that danced on the coachman’s brim and the rims of the carriage wheels, the way the bays struck sparks from their hooves, it was a common enough sight.

“It’s something for nothing,” I found myself murmuring, and Mrs. Howard shook her head.

“It’s never something for nothing,” she said. “In one way or another, everything is paid for.”

The coachman had no face, nothing to support the scarf pulled decently over the place his nose would be. There was something moving under the leather of his glove but it was certainly not flesh, and I let go of his hand as soon as possible, bundling into the carriage opposite the Howards as he closed the door. The carriage swayed as the coachman climbed up onto his perch, the whip cracked, and the wheels began to turn.

At first I was fooled into thinking that it was a fancy bit of enchantment intended simply to impress when we arrived at our destination, something designed to make Mrs. Payne or Mrs. Wade-Jones sick with envy, and then I glanced out the window.

We rode over a plain of white, endless white. It stretched in all directions to a distant horizon that was parted from the black sky with a line as sharp and clean as the slash of a Sheffield razor. It hurt my head to see such a thing, for it had more in common with a simple drawing on a piece of paper than it did with any real place. When I looked down, I saw a line running along the rolling carriage wheels, heading straight to the horizon where it met another line at some distant point I could not see. It was the road that Mrs. Howard had drawn for us to ride upon, and I realized in a way that I had not before that this was her will, carried out by Mr. Howard’s power.

“Where are we?” I asked, my voice hushed. When I spoke, I could taste tiny grains of salt on my lips, and that was the white, an endless salt field.

“It’s the first,” Mr. Howard said. “We were here first, and we were so lonesome and so hungry and so bored. We didn’t have games to play, or anything good to eat. We didn’t have anything except each other, and after some while of that, there were fewer of us, and we were still hungry.”

“Some of the others believe it is Hell or at least a part of it,” Mrs. Howard said, gazing out the carriage window. If she was discomfited by the strangeness of the place, she gave no sign. “It certainly does seem the sort of place that forbids the idea of God, but that seems foolish to me. I think it was once an ocean. I think that if you stepped out to crack the salt, you would find underneath it the bones of fish far greater than those you find in our Atlantic. I think once it lived.”

Her words made me shiver, and Mr. Howard firmly drew the curtain.

“No need to look out over that desolation,” he said. “There are things out there that you would not much like to see.”

“There are things living out there?”

He considered. “Not living, no.”

“When I was younger, I wanted to see them,” Mrs. Howard said unexpectedly. In black and in the dark of the carriage, her white face floated like some lonely salt spirit itself. “I wanted to mount a full expedition to this place, dig it up, find out what it was. Perhaps I would have seen the truth of the great fish sleeping under the salt. Perhaps I would have found the things that mothered the lords themselves.”

“You speak very freely tonight,” I commented cautiously. “I don’t know if you’ve ever told me so much before.”

I thought she might snap at me, but she just regarded me evenly.

“I do not waste my time with fools. Perhaps I have decided that you are not such a fool after all.”

“High praise,” Mr. Howard said with amusement. “You know, Ginny, she called me a fool on our wedding day, and has not stopped since.”

There was a portrait hung in the Howards’ small gallery, modest and framed in gold, of the Howards on their wedding day. The painter had the wisdom to make her striking rather than pretty, and her mouth was hard for a tender bride, but it was her to the skin. Mr. Howard had a slight smile on his face, unusual to see in such a serious setting. It made him look like he was hiding something behind his closed lips. It made him look like he had won something.

“What a wedding season we shall see if anyone survives this,” I said under my breath.

“I am planning to see it. You should too.”

We rode over the plain, the only sound my breath and Mrs. Howard’s, the cracking of the salt under the horses’ hooves and the wagon wheels. Despite our surroundings, I might have put my chin down on my plumped-up powdered breasts and slept, but there was a chittering in the back of my head. It was the chatter of some prey animal that has found itself in the middle of the kitchen floor, and it kept me awake.

You are not meant to be here, it told me. This is a place of eaters. This is a place of long hungers, and they will not be satisfied with your flesh or your skin or your bones or your guts. They will keep eating and keep eating until they find the very end of you.

And wasn’t that all life was? I thought of the brothels and then of the shop, where it’d felt as if I was snipping away seconds and minutes and hours from my lifetime. Those shears had seemed to me the very hungriest of things, and we kept them so sharp.