Page 9 of The Scarlet Ball

“I cannot imagine that you are not hungry,” she said as if I had not spoken at all, and the door opened.

I smelled the dishes before I saw them. There was a moment where I was appalled at myself, and thought that after what I had seen that night that I should never eat again, but that vanished quickly. Horror is no antidote to hunger—I am not sure I have ever met anything that is, especially when the food came out of the Howards’ kitchen. It was young quail rubbed in butter and then fried, a beef aspic so thick you could stand a spoon in it, and the cherries again, the gorgeous red impossible cherries that in some way had gotten me into this mess in the first place.

The hunger awakened in me so fast that you could never convince my body that I had ever been anything else. I was starving, and in that handful of moments, I would have leaped over any number of girls’ bodies to have food in my mouth, to feel the weight of it in my stomach.

There are many places in the world where food is laced with magic. People who are tempted by the sudden appearance of favorite childhood dishes made by those long lost, who dine on rare meat and forbidden apples, they can be spelled into any kind of bondage. This I can say, though: The food that Mrs. Howard gave me that night had no magic save that which food always has. It is the only cure for hunger we have ever found, and in enough quantity and quality, given regularly and enjoyed, it is a binding as powerful as any Renaissance warlock ever imagined.

I stopped short of eating the quail with my hands, just barely, but I lifted the bowl of aspic to my lips as if it were a glass and drank it, almost choking. It was rich and salty, alive in a way that told me I could sleep that night and wake up in the morning still sated, and I didn’t lick the bowl, but it was a damn near thing.

My hand paused over the cherries, and Mrs. Howard was at the door, watching me with an expression I could only call indulgent.

“My, such a little beast you are,” she said in tones of great satisfaction. “Sleep. We shall talk tomorrow.”

The door closed with a final click.

In my shift and bare feet, I ran to the door, but it was too late. I struck the polished hardwood with my hands, I twisted the handle ’til it should have broken, I even kicked it with the ball of my foot, sending a jangle of pain up my leg. It was locked, and whatever else was happening, I would not be leaving that night.

I went a little mad then. There was a storm inside my head that howled to get out, and by the time I was done, my entire body ached and I knew that no amount of screaming would bring anyone to my rescue.

I flew across the room to the window that I had hesitated at what felt like a lifetime ago, and this time, I did not stop with my hand on the latches. The rain before had only been a prelude—now the storm had arrived in New York in full force, a hurricane come from the open sea to strike with the impact of a prison warden’s steel-bar flail, and it greeted me with a howl as I threw the shutters open. I was instantly soaked in freezing-cold water from the top of my head to my knees, and I threw myself at the sill.

I do not think I truly intended to go out the window. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had because the wind howled and blew so hard that my feet barely touched the floor as I tripped backward several paces. It was so strong, I staggered, and I would have fallen if I had not caught onto the back of a chair to haul myself up. Then the wind swept out like an exhaled breath, leaving everything silent in its wake.

Outside the rain came down hard, and there would be neighborhoods knee-deep in water in the morning. The flood might drown dozens of people, make four or five times that number homeless, but it was still better than the fire. Across the city, my roommates would wonder where I was as they bedded down in straw that smelled like smoke.

My strings cut, I latched the window again, and I crawled into the bed where the counterpane had been turned down just for me.

Four

At Madame Valois’s, the work started at dawn most days, a flurry of flashing needles and shears flying through buckram and beaver felt. By nine, there would already be deliveries on the way, some girl crying over a slap or a scolding. Someone might have already lost the tip of her finger to the shears and wadded it up with some linen scraps so that she might continue. There was work to be done and employment to be kept, and we worked with the fear of starvation and the cold of the streets leering over our shoulders.

At Howard House, it was past eleven by the time Mrs. Howard entered to find me waiting for her in only my shift, reclining back on the divan as if it were a pile of velvet cushions in some too-expensive opium den. In Paris, they’d sent me to the opium dens with some of our more adventuresome clients. I looked the part, they said, even if opium knotted up my guts and gave me children’s bad dreams. I’d learned to simply pose and think of nothing while my clients imbibed, and now I did the same, waiting and watching for Mrs. Howard’s return.

“Well,” she said, looking around. “You’ve made a mess.”

I had not lost my temper like that in a very long time, not without someone paying me for the display. I had overturned the table and chairs, I had dashed the vases to the floor. I had knocked over the screens, doing terrible damage to the woodwork, and I had hung off the drapes until they tore with the most satisfying purring rip. I reigned over the destruction like a hog over mud, and now I gazed at Mrs. Howard, waiting to see what she would do.

Mrs. Howard toured the damage as if she was at some demented gallery. She prodded at a broken marble bust of some beautiful dead woman with her toe, she uttered the softest sigh over the food I had trampled into the rug. Finally, she came to sit next to me on the divan, which was almost the most remarkable thing that had happened to me in the last twenty-four hours. She sat too close; I could smell the orange flower–and-smoke scent she had applied ever so discreetly to her wrists and the hollow of her throat. It was like having a hungry panther next to me, but it wasn’t that she was the kind of a woman that could have you turned out into the street and over to the jail if you displeased her. Instead, it was that we saw each other eye to eye as if we were somehow equal, and uncomfortably, I sat up straight.

“You never paid me,” I said as if that was all that mattered, and she produced a spinach-green treasury note from her reticule and gave it to me. I snapped it in my fingers as if I was unsure if it was a fraud, and then I crumpled it in my hand uncertainly.

“All right, now we know each other better,” she said with satisfaction. “Tell me, why did you not set the place afire? You could have done it. I’m sure a clever thing like you knows how to turn on a gas jet.”

“I’m not in the habit of setting myself on fire out of spite,” I said stiffly.

“No, I suppose that wouldn’t have been very clever of you, would it? But the portraits, the ones of my dear lost Scylla and that man she married. They’re whole, why didn’t you reach for them?”

“I didn’t notice them,” I lied. Of course I had. Black-haired Scylla and that man she married had watched everything I did from the wall beside the bed, and what kind of rest was that for whatever young woman slept there usually? Their eyes were those of saints, sentimental, reproving, and sorrowful.

“And the windows. They are only glass that might be shattered. You have an appetite for shattering things, I already know this about you.”

I didn’t bother to answer her. She had all the answers. She could give them to me if she was so inclined.

“You did not burn the room around you because it would send for the firehouse. You did not attack the portraits because you know people run mad when even the semblance of their dear ones are attacked. You did not break the glass because those windows face the streets. You are aware, in short, that the rich will suffer many things so long as those things cannot be seen.”

I started to rise, but she caught my hand with the speed of a striking snake. She did not hold me tightly—she did not have to. Even when I wore silk and danced with generals, I knew that some people would not tolerate being denied or thwarted, and I sat still. She released me, gave my cheek a soft stroke where last night she had prodded it so hard.

“You have lost your job by now,” she said. “And your place down in Mulberry Street will be given to another if you do not claim it by this evening.”