Page 1 of The Scarlet Ball

One

Night settled lightly over Twenty-Third Street, a veil and not a shroud, and with the retreat of the cold September sunset, the shadows grew dark and long. Mine stretched to meet my feet as I walked-not-ran along the curb, a gaily striped box tucked under my arm. I moved so fast my shadow could barely keep up, and long before I reached my destination, it was lost to the greater shadows that swarmed the streets.

We ran, my shadow and I, past the tall new houses, the storefronts where wonders peered from the plate glass windows, the monstrous rush of the last train as it rattled by overhead, shaking fragments of soot free to dapple my coat and my hat. A cold wind came rushing down the street from the sea somewhere beyond, blowing a tiny ember against my cheek to sting for a moment before I brushed it away in irritation. Above me, the arriving storm rumbled as if with some private humor or surprise, but I ignored it and kept walking.

After almost two years in the city, I could do that. I could walk out into the street without checking that it was clear from the doorway, I could take the same route coming and going to the shop. I still spent too much time looking over my shoulder, but that’s no bad thing for a woman alone. You shouldn’t be caught looking for direction on any busy New York street in any case. It draws attention: contempt from the people who know their own way, interest from people who like that you don’t know yours. Sometimes, however, it could not be avoided, and I paused with my back to one of the pillars of the Fourth Trust Bank, the fluted marble biting through the wool of my dress as I studied the scrap of paper I’d been given and the address spelled out in Madame Valois’s crabbed hand.

14 E 23RD ST.

HOWARD HOUSE

SOLELY TO THE HAND OF IPHIGENIA MARSHALL OR OTHERWISE HER MAID

Well, that was clear enough. I pushed myself away from the pillar, and then I shrank back again at the advance of dim fire rolling down the street.

New York, from the moment it became New York, had suffered a plague of wild dogs. There were the dogs descended from the ones who had gone stray from the native encampments, and to their number had been added the ones who had come off the ships and promptly broken whatever contracts with men they had made in the old country. The dogs of New York were a menace, the terrier types that could eat stones off the street and be fed, the long badger hounds that could bite off fingers, the tall deerhounds that held themselves like nobility even when they were eating garbage.

The dogs of New York ate and bred and swelled like the fortunes of Fifth Avenue. A dozen years ago, some enterprising city leader had decided to douse the roaming packs with German fire, a trick that had worked well in Brussels and Berlin. American dogs were made of something different, and while some succumbed to the flames, suffocating the streets with the smell of burning hair and charred meat, others continued as if fire was nothing to them, wearing flames around their throats or down the ridges of their spines like smoldering armor.

They were common on Mulberry Street, where my boardinghouse was located. Madame Valois and her neighbors paid off some local bullies to beat them back with staves and clubs soaked in water. Here on Twenty-Third Street, they were next to unknown, except this evening apparently they weren’t.

They rolled down the center of the street, a pack two dozen strong. The lurcher at their head, his ruff aflame like a wreath around his neck, lunged at some poor woman’s trap; her dappled gray shied in a panic, and the trap tipped over on one tall wheel. The lady herself flung her weight in the opposite direction, and for a moment I thought she would save it. Then there were a pair of flaming bully dogs at the sides of the trap, snapping at her feet with their terrible jaws, and it went over after all, her shriek carving through the baying of the New York hounds.

Above us, the lowering storm rumbled, doglike itself, and even as I retreated, my skin prickled with electricity, my nerves dancing. It was a maddening tingle, the moment before the lightning strike, the prickling sensation of some stranger watching you too hard as you left the theater. It was danger on the way, but I had no time for it because I had danger here to deal with, in the form of fire and sharp teeth.

One of the dogs, shorter and squat like a pile of bricks, turned from the carnage to face me, and I drew back with a hiss, clutching my box more tightly in my hands. It took a step closer, slavering droplets of flame from its wide jaws, the fire that burned along the ridge of its back flaring with interest. Beyond it, a trio of naval officers had rescued the lady from the worst of the damages, but her gray wasn’t so lucky. It’d gone down with the trap, and even as it tried to rise, the lurcher leaped up onto its thick neck, pushing its head down in a welter of flames. The trap itself, fit only for kindling, went up with a soft boom and I fell back with a shout as the dog lunged at me.

I stumbled but managed to twist to one side as I lowered my arm, allowing the handle of my bag to slide down to my hand. The dog leaped, its stub tail wagging fast and low as if this was the most splendid game, and as the hem of my dress started to crackle and singe in the heat, I swung my bag at its face.

My bag, pieced together from strips of velvet and satin and tied up with a length of slick silk ribbon, made satisfying contact with the dog’s head, or at least the stone I carried in it did. The impact traveled all the way up my arm as the dog howled misery.

It staggered and I shook my weighted purse at it, the hatbox cradled under my arm. It looked like it might like to try again, but then frigid-cold water sloshed over us both, and the dog ran, yipping after its mates who had been sent fleeing from the wreck of the trap and the dying gray.

A shopkeeper about my own age swung his bucket over his shoulder, pleased with his work. I watched incuriously as he turned to me and pleasure shifted to confusion at the sight of my face. Then he scowled, seeing his efforts wasted on a foreigner, and brusquely turned away as I set myself to tidying the bow on my box and ensuring that the pasteboard sides had held up. In a moment, it was as good as new, and I hurried along on my way, my sodden skirts slapping against my legs.

Madame Valois required her girls to be well–turned out, but fortunately, well–turned out in shopgirl black was easy. All around me, as the streetlights lit themselves pair by pair starting at the great houses and traveling down Twenty-Third Street the way I had come, women stepped out in a bloom of color against the night, in fuchsia, vivid orange, absinthe green, or lapis blue. Those colors would all show fingertip stains and muck off the streets easily, but of course they would never be stained in the first place. The ladies’ white porcelain faces lifted laughing to the New York lights that would never go out, and before their men handed them into their carriages, they gazed around in wonder as if wonder was their business and they had no other in the world.

As I walked, I caught glimpses of Madame Valois’s work, her clever upturned brims, the cunning use of stripped pheasant feathers that curled down in elegant arches. I saw as well the work of the shops she sought to emulate, the creations of Mrs. Layton who had come from London in a delicious swirl of scandal, and Madame Bouchard, whose name lived on Rue de la Paix alongside the House of Worth. A dainty silvered wren fluttered its wings at me from the hat of a statuesque blond lady as I went by, Madame Bouchard’s work for sure, and for some reason I felt an answering flutter in my chest.

Such a beautiful thing, I thought, but I also knew where some of that beauty had come from; Madame Valois had tried a similar trick with the local sparrows, and she had only ended up with a table full of shrieking, broken birds. The silvered wren was beautiful and alive, and it seemed there was always a cost for that. Not so long ago, I had worn such things, and better. The story I told myself about not wanting them had worn painfully thin.

Howard House was boxed in on either side by newer townhouses and bordered with narrow strips of empty land to keep it aloof. It speared sharp dark turrets into the sky, two full stories taller than every house on the block, above them and refusing to look down. It was too proud for Continental enhancement; instead the Howards had to show their wealth in stern clean lines and dignity, no frolicsome adornments or cherubs on the lawn here.

The real splendor of Howard House lay in its windows, glass as clear as fresh water and tall enough that someone could walk straight out into thin air without bowing down before they did so. Tonight, it seemed that every single window in the place was illuminated, throwing out a fortune of light. As I circled to the rear entrance, it struck me as strange that I could see no shadows in the upper stories, no gentlemen standing silhouetted, no maids running to catch up with their chores. Instead, it was only undisturbed light, and I frowned.

There was no man at the rear entrance either, for all that gangs of footpads had emptied out houses only a few blocks south. I’d seen the goods from those raids, gold braid and yards of real silk velvet in the handbarrows of the clothes hawkers, the cast bronze head of a Roman-nosed horse in with the scrap. It was the roughest kind of crime, no elegance or tricks, just forced entry and flight. Still I imagined how wonderful it would be to run through the halls of a place as dignified as Howard House, grabbing what I could carry, smashing what I could not grab.

Now I wondered at the lack of a guard, and there was a moment, when the door fell open at my inquiring knock, that I might have simply turned around. What came next would not have come, or rather, it would have come to someone else.

Instead, the door fell open, and then as I started to cautiously call out, it was yanked back like a child from the path of a stampeding horse. A girl dressed in starched servant black, weeping so hard she could barely see, barreled into me and caromed off. I hit the doorjamb with a curse, turning to shield my box, and she uttered one more injured wail before spinning off into the night.

I stared after her and considered following, but I didn’t like the feel of the gathering storm that snapped at my heels; besides, if I left without completing my errand, Madame might dock my pay. I shrugged to myself, entering the house and pulling the door closed behind me. At least if they accused me of breaking and entry, I could say that the door had been opened for me. Such niceties were important in New York and could save you where sense and mercy would not. Paris was never so regimented, or perhaps there, I had just never had cause to notice.

I had just gotten the door latched behind me when there was a great gust of wind, the kind that sweeps from the water and crashes so hard into the buildings that the windows rattle in their frames and loose shingles fly from the roofs. I grinned to myself at the image of a frustrated gambler, bluffed out of the pot, slamming his fist on the table at his missed chance.

“Better luck next time,” I muttered over my shoulder.

The delivery door led into the great cavernous kitchen where an enormous cookstove sat cold and empty. The whole place had the feel of a tomb. The long table where the servants took their meals was covered with a vast white cloth, draping over the shapes of dishes that had been hastily set aside. Curious, I lifted one edge of the cloth, morbidly sure I’d see some body underneath, but instead it was only a plate half-scraped of turnip mash drowned in brown sauce and a pile of bones chewed so well I could hardly do better. Nothing easy to hand or mouth, so I let the fabric drop and continued on my way, twitching my black cloth coat to better lines and straightening my hat.