Page 72 of The Scarlet Ball

“She thought she could have him with me gone.”

“My fault, I imagine.”

“Your fault?”

Martha shrugged. “I certainly didn’t tell her to invite you to Herons and feed you to a demon lord who had chosen you, you can be sure of that. After the Rose Ball, she was out, and you were you. You’re not a fight I want, even by proxy.”

“But you told her I was. You told her she could, what, take Sebastian from me?”

“That was before the Rose Ball. Before the Rose Ball, it was anyone’s game. Now. Well, it’s ours, isn’t it? Yours, mine, Hugette’s. Tilly Manchester and Eliza Gelder’s too, but I think they’re going to lose.”

One day, she was going to be Mrs. Howard or Mrs. de Lange. She was going to be even more dangerous than she already was, but right now, she wanted to be friends. I accepted another pinch of good snuff from her vial.

There had been a small hope in the back of my head when I saw Martha, I realized. I didn’t want to be a tree like Bethany, but perhaps Martha could have gotten me away clean. I could have run west with a new name and a new face, I could have run south and melted into the riot of New Orleans or Atlanta. Now I saw that that route had closed after the Rose Ball, and the only way out was through.

Sixteen

Martha and her mother took me home early from Delmonico’s. I was developing a bit of a Cinderella reputation, always leaving early, but I chose to believe it made me seem discerning and aloof rather than simply sick of the same faces, the same corridors in the same traps.

Perhaps I should have been angrier with Martha over what she had suggested with Odile, but the fault for that lay squarely with Odile herself. She knew the rules, and yet she’d been foolish enough to take the risk anyway. A small voice lingered in my head: She should have known better than to try that with me, and I knew that if I said it to Martha, she would understand. You weren’t friends with a girl like Martha, but then you weren’t friends with girls like me either.

After I bid Mrs. Webster and Martha goodbye, I let myself into Howard House, and a heavy weariness overcame me. I had been forcing myself to walk, to talk, to dance for weeks, and now I lost the ability to force myself one step farther.

It’s alarming to look at a flight of stairs and know with a kind of scientific understanding that you cannot lift your feet to climb them, or it would be if I hadn’t experienced it before. My first months in America, I was afraid to sleep. I was afraid of assassins from Paris, my neighbors at the boardinghouses, the wild dogs, the wild children who roamed the streets with sharpened sticks and clubs, everyone and everything. Once or twice during that time, half-starved, without sleep, working my first days at Madame Valois’s shop, I had simply stopped like an automaton with her springs run down.

Now I knew to wait patiently, hoping that whatever invisible switch needed to flip in order to get me up the stairs and into bed flipped soon. How strange, I mused as I waited, that I should have the same thing happen here at Howard House as in my tiny room on Mulberry Street.

I might have stood there until morning, I might have stood there until the last trump, but then Mielle was by my side, touching my shoulder and guiding me. From someplace above and to the right, I watched her strip off my clothes and pull a nightgown over my head.

I slept, or at least some amount of time passed between lying down in my bed and Mielle shaking me awake again. “What in the hell—”

“You must get up. He came and brought you a present.”

I almost asked her who she meant, but then I registered the tightness around her eyes and her mouth, the way the visitor was only he. There was only one he who would be offering me presents.

“Are you all right? Did he hurt you? Did he say something?”

My worry seemed to calm her; at least, she stood straighter and smoothed out her dark skirts. She still wore the outfit I had picked out for her after the Rose Ball.

“As you said, he is not allowed to hurt me, and he very carefully offered the pleasantries that a young man should upon delivering a present to his intended’s house.”

“Despite doing it at— What time is it?”

“A quarter until six.”

“What, he showed up here—”

“Yes, saying that he begged your indulgence, he saw this little trifle, and he knew at once that you must have it. It would have been a marginally competent performance in someone else.”

“And instead it was him, yes. All right. Let me see.”

Mielle tucked me into a silk wrapper and led me into the echoing halls. This early, there were a few servants about their morning tasks. When a pair of little maids saw us coming, they turned their faces toward the wall, huddled shoulder to shoulder and as still as mice as we passed.

Mielle took me to the morning room, where Mrs. Howard and I would sit and read the papers. Set on the slate-topped table, there was a striped box uncannily like the one I had been carrying when I came to Howard House for the first time. I remembered the storm that night, the one that had seen the beginning of this misadventure, and the hair at the back of my neck prickled.

“Have you—”

“Of course not.”