Page 67 of The Scarlet Ball

I shrugged. Sebastian leaned up on one elbow, touching the wetness on my face before I pushed his hand away.

“After that, I had to leave Paris. The big man came back to stone dogs still trampling the foundations of the building they’d destroyed, howling for their lost home and so dangerous they had to be smashed to dust with enchanted hammers. Of course all of his fine things were damaged beyond repair, and of course he knew I was the only one behind it. I heard he put a price on my head, or rather, just on my head. I like it where it is, so. Here I am.”

Sebastian was silent. I had nothing else left, so I just waited to see what he would do. Finally he rose from the bed and looked down at me. His face was calmer, more human again. There was still, I thought, a tension to him, the set of his shoulders, the way he held his elegant hands, that he would never lose, but he was no longer ravenous.

When you tell a story about something that happens to you, you flatten it. Instead of memory—hot, cutting, strong enough to fetch you a blow that will put you on your back for a week—it becomes words. The words are a bag that help you to carry it, and now, having told the story to Sebastian Rowe, the bag was all I had left. There were only the words. I had loved a boy named Alex. We had tried to steal from a man who ran the gangs in Place Pigalle. We had failed, Alex died, and I ran. I had the words, but the rest was gone, and a sob of gratitude and sorrow and fear caught in my throat. I bent over as if someone had punched me in the stomach, covering my eyes and breathing hard through my mouth.

I thought I would be sick, but when Sebastian’s hand came down to touch my shoulder, when he asked me like a human man might what I needed, what he could do, I was furious.

I cast his hand from me like it was a filthy rag, and I let rage give me a spine and a voice.

“I am leaving. Let me go. Don’t touch me.”

Still I was surprised when he listened, standing up straight with his eyes lowered respectfully to the ground for all he was as naked and thoroughly disheveled as I was. The silence throbbed like a sore tooth, the places where we had touched and should have been touching still ached with the memory of warmth.

Odile had died in this room. If I looked at the far side of the bed, I would see the dark stain, some rags, all that was left of her. I could see what he would have left of me if I had not given him Alex. Despite that, I could not help wanting him to touch me again, and I could not bear it. I pointed at the pile of his clothes.

“Don’t say a word. Get dressed. Get out.”

My control over him was fragile. Maybe I should have run from the room naked after all, because even that scandal was less likely to get me killed than staying there, but I waited, and I braced myself for what might happen if he decided to defy me. Finally he dropped his gaze and did as I said, mute as I had demanded.

As soon as the door closed behind him I rang down to the kitchen for the fastest thing they could send me, and when the maid appeared with a covered dish, I gave her nearly all the money in my bag to help me dress again. If she was shocked by the ruin of the room and my clothes, she gave no sign, instead bundling me back into my clothes with the stolid indifference of a cook stuffing a turkey. When I was properly dressed, she sneaked me down the back stairs and out through an alley to the street in front of the hotel, where I climbed into the first carriage I found.

I made it back to Howard House without incident; at least, I believed there was no incident. The coachman might have struck a bevy of nuns and kept driving, and I would have been none the wiser.

The house was mostly dark when I returned, and the footman who let me in stifled a yawn as he closed the door behind me. Suddenly the dark parts of the house were unbearable, and I all but fled toward my room. I needed walls, I needed a door I could at least pretend would hold against the things that wanted to eat me.

Somehow I made it to bed, barely able to wait for Mielle to undress me before I crawled under the covers. She was too restrained to ask what had happened, but without being asked, she took a seat by the bed, hands folded in her lap, eyes always open.

Obscurely comforted, I let sleep take me.

SOME GREAT DOG had a hold on my shoulder, teeth gripped hard so that I couldn’t tear away. I tried to beat at its face with my free hand, but I was too heavy to struggle, too tired to care, almost bored as it dragged me away to whatever fate awaited me.

Oh, I should be terrified. I should be wailing and screaming and fighting, I told myself, but even that admonishment came with no real urgency.

I somehow had no interest in protecting myself from the danger of the beast, and that was strange enough that I came up flailing, a surge of panic finally waking me up as I thrashed in my sheets.

It was no dog after all, but Mielle, her hand closed on my shoulder, her face gilded by the light of the lamp she held. It was still dark with that frigid dawn chill to the air, earlier than I had woken up in more than a month, and I sputtered in offense.

“It was just a dream,” she said, and I nodded, mute. “Do you wish me to bring you something to help you sleep again?”

“No. No, please. If I do, I’ll dream, and I don’t want to dream.”

“All right. Some food then, perhaps.”

Her voice had a peculiar tightness to it. I knew she could smell Sebastian on me and what we had been doing together. I almost wished she’d get the I told you so over with, but I couldn’t bear to prick her right now.

I thought she would bring me up a tray, but she came back to my bedside holding a wrapper and slippers. Well, perhaps it would be better to get up. We didn’t speak as she led me down the servants’ stairs into the kitchen, which was empty now for the late hour. The hearth was still burning, the gas keeping it bright and lively. Mielle put a kettle and a small pan onto the heat while she went to rummage in the larder for something fast and easy.

“There is some leftover chicken that might serve, as well as a red wine reduction and some potatoes,” she murmured, and I sighed at how simple her problems were. I was dealing with demons, and she was pondering a midnight snack.

While she busied herself in the pantry, I drifted over to the fire where a glint of something gold caught my eye in the light. Whatever it was had been burning for a long while. It glowed low and sullen when I raked it out, and it cracked when it cooled. I scooped it up with a long-handled spoon from the rack, and just as Mielle threw a pat of butter onto the iron pan, I recognized it for what it was: one of the brass acorn buttons from Katie’s blue coat. The fire had been hot enough to blacken the metal, but I saw it as it had been, stitched in a row with its sisters as Mielle carried it out of the room.

She had bought those buttons on a string from one of the barrows last spring, rolling them between her fingers before finally putting down a good three days’ wages for them. There was one extra after she finished her coat, and she’d given it to me with a flourish. I meant to use it for a collar button, but I never had, just left it on the sill in my room on Mulberry Street, and God, but I was careless—

“This wants raking,” I heard myself say. I was miles behind both my faces, the real one and the false one. I didn’t know which one was speaking, but it did not seem to matter as Mielle threw the chicken into the pan, the butter sizzling.

“It does. The scullion will be up in another three hours. I will be sure to do it before then.”