Page 68 of The Scarlet Ball

This was how it happened. This was how you became Mrs. Howard with her dead daughter and her fled granddaughter. This was how you convinced a storm to hunt for you. This was the foundation that this house and so many others were built on, dead girls with nothing left behind but their mutilated buttons, their burned-up clothes.

I jumped when Mielle set the plate in front of me. For a moment, I was hungry. It was food, it would steady me, it would keep me alive. Even better, it would taste good.

With a cry, I dashed it to the floor, the dish shattering, one of the pieces flying into the embers of the hearth. The rest of Katie’s buttons were in there, I thought distantly, and I had the brief but powerful urge to reach my hand in, to pull them out. After all, the fire was my grandfather, and it would not hurt me.

“No more,” I said to her, my voice too shrill. I forced it back down. “It turns out I am not hungry. Clean this up, and then come draw me a bath.”

“Of course,” she murmured with her head bowed.

I watched as she filed the larger pieces of the plate into her hand, the chime of broken crockery almost musical in my ears. I thought of how she had taken me down here for food rather than bringing it to me in my room, and how that blue coat, Katie’s coat, had been on top of her mending pile. She was the one who had told me that Katie had come looking for me as well.

She’d been telling me all of this from the beginning, in so many ways, and I had heard her too late.

Fifteen

I kept trying to think of who should be told. Surely there was someone who needed to know that Katie wasn’t coming home, but there wasn’t. She’d spoken of it dismissively late at night in the shop, a brother out West, a mother she couldn’t stand in Boston.

“She says I ought to send her my wages,” Katie said with a snort. “She said she had the keeping of me for fourteen years, she should see something for that.”

“You don’t send her anything?” asked Liz Doyle with clear censure. “I send my mother half my earnings, you’re so lucky.”

Her tone said something different but Katie refused to be cowed, her needle stabbing briskly into the ribbon band of the toque in her lap.

“Lucky, that’s me,” she said, and then for some reason, she’d met my eyes over the worktable and smiled.

We were alike in that regard, no one to miss us, our money all our own. There were plenty of girls like us, our loyalties to ourselves with no duty to anyone. It was a good life until it wasn’t, until we answered the wrong advertisement, took up with the wrong mistress, married the wrong man.

Maybe someday someone would come looking for Katie, but probably they wouldn’t. Katie was past caring, and the only reason I cared was because I had finally recognized that while I dressed better and ate better than she ever had, I was just as disposable and would be as easily forgotten.

Of course this realization changed exactly nothing. Life among the Four Hundred did not stop for war or fire or famine, and it would certainly not stop for the loss of one poor Irish girl. It didn’t even stop for the disappearance of Odile Dryden, who they gave out had gone to take the cure in Capon Springs. The only signs remaining of her in New York were Mrs. Dryden’s puffy red eyes and a miniature of her locked up in an old man’s collection. Beyond that, nothing.

I forced myself to put both Odile and Katie out of my mind as I went about to the usual dinners and charity meetings. I was sullen, dragged along in Mrs. Howard’s wake, but it didn’t seem to matter. She didn’t need me to be one of the energetic ones, always on about this pet cause or that one, sanitation for the city, votes for women, rights for immigrants. She only needed me to be seen in my sharp dresses, in the mink ruff and muff set, with the winter pinking my cheeks. When I complained, Mrs. Howard told me that I should be grateful. All she required were aid meetings and luncheons; I was allowed to manage Sebastian on my own.

It was not as if she had much of a choice. Sebastian and I were becoming something of a minor cause célèbre among her peers. At least something about my misadventure at Herons had gotten out, and a few keen eyes had caught sight of the ice palace at the Snowflake Festival. I didn’t understand at first what kind of scandal it was, but they didn’t care about the sex.

“By all rights, you should be dead,” Mrs. Howard said bluntly. “They’re not tomcats to tease or sailors you can taunt. You are meant to be showing him how well you tread the dance, how well you know the rules.”

“Instead I’m showing him my tits,” I said with a spark of defiance, but Mrs. Howard didn’t seem to notice.

“Whatever it is you are doing, he seems to like it, and here’s the proof before me, no matter what Hannah bemoans. You’re alive, and every day you are, you are proved right in your methods.”

At the moment, my method was avoidance. I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to speak with him. I didn’t even want to think about him, but that was impossible because nearly every night, I dreamed about him.

In my dreams, we were back in the room at Herons, and things went differently. Sometimes, he ate me while I laughed. Sometimes, he lay back with the anxious look of a virgin, and I ate him. Both of those I might have tolerated with understanding, if not pleasure. What I could not so easily forgive were the dreams that outnumbered all the rest two to one, where we devoured Odile Dryden together. Sometimes I wore my old real face. I was always so happy.

I wondered if he dreamed about me. Perhaps it was in his letters, which arrived daily to the house. They came addressed from Mr. Sebastian Rowe on Ninth Avenue, the letters all shaped out with care in handsome black ink. Maybe he told me I was in his dreams, or that he could not live without me, or that I had better come to his side or he would break down my window and eat me anyway, but I never knew.

I grimly fed his letters into the hearth in my room, holding them so close to the flame that my fingertips singed. When I did this, I would often feel Mielle’s stare weigh on the top of my head. I had not told her much about what had happened at Herons, but she had seen the state of me afterward so she knew some of it, and being what she was, could no doubt surmise the rest.

Despite the letters that came to Howard House, sometimes three or four a day, Sebastian himself never came any closer. People delighted in making it a point to tell me where he was, the Marrakech, Delmonico’s, riding a fine black mare in Central Park, but I was blunt in telling them I did not care. So long as he kept his distance, I could think and plan.

In truth, I could do neither. Every time I circled this particular dog track, I found over and over again the same thing: At some point, we would dance at the Scarlet Ball, and if I did not attend, out of cowardice or defiance, he would be fully within his rights to come hunting me. That was the choke point, and no matter how hard I looked, I could not see beyond that.

I brooded over the issue when I had time; otherwise I was kept running from ball to opera to restaurant to aid meeting and back again. With the New York winter season reaching its most hectic days and hungry journalists at the doors to mark upon who came and who did not, no one could afford idleness, least of all a debutante who wished to be thought of as worth something.

Right in the middle of this, the invitations for the Patriarch’s Ball were released and one arrived at Howard House for us, delivered directly to Mrs. Howard’s hand. It was a necessary distinction, of course it was, but not as select a prize as the Assembly Ball or the most exclusive private functions. It was the dreary kind of privilege that is a snub if it doesn’t come, a burden if it does.

What distinguished this one, however, was a duke.