Page 8 of The Scarlet Ball

The fan came up, and still we did not run. Running would be a mistake, too much motion carrying us forward, unable to stop on our marks when Mrs. de Lange dropped the fan again just a few seconds later. In the nearly complete dark, the things could be seen. They were invisible when the candle shone, but now I could make them out, watching with unblinking eyes. There were three perhaps, or four. Perhaps only two. They grew taller and shorter step by step, and one approached me and thrust something like a face up to mine. I did not move, I did not blink, but even in the dark, I could tell that there was no face there, no mouth or nose or eyes, but yet it saw me.

Something ran a finger over the fabric covering my thigh, the slight motion tickling dreadfully. Something touched the tiny stitches under my jaw, and I imagined a cat, curious and perhaps without malice, but claws don’t need malice to snag or to tear, and my head echoed with a shout like the tolling of the Notre Dame bells: Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, oh don’t breathe, don’t blink, don’t—

Mrs. de Lange flicked the fan again, and this time we were all quicker. Those things wanted us to move, they wanted us to flinch, and it was only the bare rules of the children’s game that kept them from what they really wanted, which we could feel in their breath and their claws and the crooning sound that wanted so much to be real laughter.

Twice more the fan fell and rose. Two of the girls had reached the armchair, safe for the moment. I was still the last, but I told myself that she had imposed no time limit, safe was safe no matter when you got there.

I don’t know what the girl with amethysts told herself, or if she told herself anything at all before she fell. She was just ahead of me, and what I remember, what I remember so clearly and what she must have seen at the last, was that she was close. She was so very close, safe, she could go home, and when the fan dropped, I saw her body still in motion, lurching forward, hand outstretched.

In the darkness, there were shapes, and they fell with the weight of stones, of buildings toppling into ruin. There was a great sweeping sound, and I did not flinch back as something feathered and barbed just grazed the cheek of my borrowed face. I am sure that my lips trembled. I know my eyes shut tight. If the things in the dark had been alert as they were a bare moment before, it would have been me they had, but it wasn’t.

The fan lifted, light again, and there was a shriek in my head, a howl of offense that we were still playing this terrible game. I got a glimpse of the girl before me, her head twisted all the way around with her hair still coiled so beautifully, her amethysts turned into garnets by the rush of blood—Oh that is useful, they all say that it shall be garnets this winter and not amethysts—and all I could think was that I could not step in that blood, I couldn’t, I would leave footprints, I would stain my shoes, and oh God, but it was her blood, her blood, and she was so afraid at dinner, had she known this was coming, and still she had sat so beautifully, never even tried to sneak a mouthful of the soup or the fish or—

I was still thinking these mad stupid things as I leaped. There was no decision involved, none whatsoever. There was a moment of flight, the strike of my foot on the carpet, the stomach clench as the stout wooden heel of my shoe turned and the bone of my ankle momentarily took all of my weight. I twisted, throwing my arm out because it was in my head that I could not fall, I could not, and then there was nothing left but to let myself drop into the armchair itself. My eyes were wide open as if they would never close again, and I kept my chin raised, because if I dropped it, if I lowered my head by even a fraction, I would see her again. I was already terrified that I would never stop seeing her, that I would see her every time I tried to sleep, as if I would ever try to sleep again. I sat as if someone had forced a sword down the column of my spine, and then every light in the place snapped on just in time to let us see the far door, which after all only went to the hallway now, snapping briskly shut.

Then there was nothing in the room but women, all but one alive and only me seated. I gave them back stare for stare as if they were all there to please and gratify me, and briefly, very briefly, Mrs. Howard’s face lit up with victory like a flame.

“A pity,” said Mrs. de Lange, after a long moment.

The evening dissolved then. Mrs. Howard called for our coats, and we took our leave as two stone-faced footmen came in with a white sheet for the poor girl in amethysts. Her guardian stood by with her hands hanging down loose and empty by her sides, and the other women gathered their girls to them, grateful they were able to do so. One of the girls held her hand over her face as if she was laughing or crying. I got a brief look at her on the curb, from where I stood between Mr. and Mrs. Howard, and I realized, no, it was not laughter or tears. Instead she was trying to swallow a scream. As we got into the carriage, a for-hire Brown’s carriage this time rather than the Howards’, she lost the battle, and her thin wild cry followed us down the street.

“Well,” said Mr. Howard amiably, “how was your evening, my dear?”

Mrs. Howard took his hand in hers, playing idly with his fingers the way a girl would play with her kitten’s paw pads, staring at me all the while.

“Better than I had any right to expect,” she said.

Three

We returned to Howard House, and Mrs. Howard escorted me herself back to Iphigenia Marshall’s room. We had left in a great hurry, and with the drawers of her wardrobe pulled out and the bottles on her vanity toppled, Ginny’s room had a looted air to it.

I protested when Mrs. Howard sat me down at the mirror again, but she held up her little fern scissors, gleaming wickedly gold by the light of the trimmed lamps.

“Will you let me do my work, or are you prepared to sleep in that face?”

A horror came over me. I had borne it in the carriage and at the de Langes’ mansion, but now that Mrs. Howard mentioned it, I could bear it not one moment longer. If she had not hiked up her skirt and put one bony knee into my thigh, I might have fled, tearing it off my skin. I do not know if I would have succeeded, but instead, Mrs. Howard was there, the crisp snipping sounds of her little scissors sending deep shivers down my flanks, around the sides of my breasts, and behind my knees. She took me by the hair to keep me still, stalwart as a farm girl with a sheep for shearing, and so she worked all the way around the border of my face, under my chin, along to the point of my jaw, following my hairline. It was all of a piece, the silvery nerve-jangling sound of the scissors, the thin and tearing pain as someone else’s face came loose from my own.

As soon as I could breathe again, I forgot every grace that I’d ever had forced on me and began to gasp and pant. At the last, I did push her, and Mrs. Howard hissed with dismay as the last few stitches tore away, the silk thread cutting like a garrote through skin. A trickle of blood ran down the side of my neck, and Mrs. Howard caught up a cloth from the vanity to press it against my skin.

“There, you ridiculous thing. Hold that there until it stops. If that blood strikes that dress—”

I obeyed her mutely and angrily, watching as she more carefully trimmed away the tattered bits of the mask and sopped up the few drops of my blood that clung to it. She folded it into thirds, an unexpectedly small and translucent package, shaking her head as she replaced it within its leather case.

“She really was so very beautiful,” she said almost wistfully.

“She—”

The word stuck in my throat as the realization slithered through my brain: It wasn’t some artisan’s work with thin leather or paper. In Italy, there are masters who will make you a new face to your exact specifications from skin-thin ceramic. What Mrs. Howard had given me was not made, but grown, and the girl who had worn it had been beautiful before the knife and cuts and the blood.

I don’t know what I meant to say, and in any case, it was not as if she would listen. When she looked at me, she was perhaps a little calmer, for all I now knew it was nothing that came easily or naturally to her.

“Here. Turn around. You cannot handle that dress on your own.”

I could, but silent, I put my back to her and she stripped the dress from my shoulders. It was marvelous—it did not strike me how monstrously heavy it was or how confining until the buttons were undone. The weight that had been distributed with such grace from my shoulders and my hips felt like some great cracked shell coming away from my body as I stepped out of it. I felt lighter by years when I was free, but I was also without armor. With the right face and the right dress, I might walk down the street with all the protections New York cared to give a rich young white girl. Without, I’d be food for the dogs. So what else was new.

Without Mrs. Howard’s help, I kicked off the shoes, and shook the pins from my head. My hair fell in lank waves around my shoulders, and I twisted it back up angrily. I wasn’t angry when I was wearing that splendid dress, it occurred to me. Maybe it was too heavy to allow for anger, too tight, too consuming.

“I am leaving,” I said, unable to keep my face still and calm. “I am leaving, and—”