Page 2 of The Scarlet Ball

Once in Paris, they’d brought a pack of us girls to a grand old house in Le Marais. The neighborhood was a shambles of rat-infested rentals, but this house was one of the handful that stood from the old days. They’d battened down the windows with soft green felt and let us go on a troop of gray-whiskered army officers for a full day and night. It was the kind of debauch you’d expect, men who thought they could last all night, girls who knew they could, rich food trampled underfoot and mattresses used to sled down the stairs. At some point, it was impossible to tell the time, I’d risen up from between some général de brigade and a black-haired girl from Kilcullen and gone wandering through the empty halls. As I walked through the halls of Howard House, looking for someone to direct me to Miss Marshall or her maid, it felt a little like that time in Paris, the aftermath of a smash-up in some place of ruin.

I made it all the way to the doors of the locked-up ballroom before I was finally stopped by the housekeeper, identified by the keys hung from her waist. They clattered like leg irons as she came down on me, hand already raised for a slap or to thrust me straight into the hard care of some bullymen.

“You. Who are you? How under Heaven have you gotten in?”

I held up the box like a shield, inclining my head only a fraction in acknowledgment because while I was a shopgirl, I was not a servant.

“From Madame Valois,” I said with the trace of a French accent they so loved to hear in this city. “I am to give it only to Miss Iphigenia Marshall or her maid.”

The housekeeper bared her straight teeth, and for a single mad moment, I thought she meant to bite me. I took a hurried step back, but she only made a choked little sound that I realized was a laugh bitten in half.

“Wouldn’t that be a fine thing if you could. Here, give it here—”

“I have my instructions,” I said frostily, taking a step back, and she threw up her hands, flinging the matter from her.

“I’ve no time for the likes of you,” she said. “Up the stairs, the third floor, which is the family’s quarters. You can wait there. You want the ninth door on the left, and woman, God alone help you if you touch the gold or silver. I should almost like to see you try.”

Either out of malice or mistake, she hadn’t given me the directions to the rear servants’ stairs. Instead, I ascended the wide shallow steps the Howard family themselves used, all plush green carpet and gilded dark wood paneling. The niches in the walls held gold and silver both, knickknacks from long-ago grand tours, pretensions toward a great art collection. A few of the items, the gold statuette of some goat-legged, bare-chested woman, a decanter of ruby-gold glass with something moving inside, did tempt me. Some things beg to be slipped into your pocket and removed to places they would be better appreciated. Still, I liked my fingers numbered at ten rather than fewer (or in the case of one particularly nasty curse I’d observed once, more) and I continued on my way, counting the doors with care ’til I came to the one I needed.

I knocked, and it came to me that it would be a perfect trick to send me into some forbidden sanctum, some private ladies’ solar or gentlemen’s game room. The housekeeper seemed the type. Similar things had happened to other shopgirls making deliveries, though not, it had to be admitted, particularly clever ones.

I pushed the door open without entering, but through the doorway, I saw nothing untoward. Miss Marshall’s chamber was done up in deep reds, all crimson brocade and rich carpets and dark wood, with glowing crystal and brass fittings and the gilded edges of elegant furniture providing splashes of light. It was opulently oppressive in a way that clashed with the picture of the ingénue I’d developed in my head. The girl in my head should have wide-open floors in white or perhaps pale blue. This seemed more like the apartment of a grown and worldly woman, including a small sitting area at the fore, a canopied velvet-curtained bed by the tall windows, and an armoire and vanity and full-length standing mirror in an alcove to the side. Beside the alcove there was a dressing area half-shielded from sight by an intricately carved screen, and out of the corner of your eye, the carvings seemed to twist and move, a neat trick. There was a proper door to the room’s right with a venting screen for the top quarter, which would lead to a modern bathing room. Taken together, it was only the opened mail piled on the keepsake silver tray by the door, all addressed to Ginny, that convinced me I had the right room.

I entered, shutting the door behind me, and though it does no favors to be caught at rest, I couldn’t keep myself from sinking at last into one of the chairs in the sitting room area, setting the striped box on another. Something went out of me the moment I was off my feet, and it was only the bones of my corset and the chair itself that gave me any shape at all.

I had been awake, I realized with dull unsurprise, almost twenty hours. The room I kept on Mulberry Street with two other girls had somehow come to be filled with smoke around midnight. We had dumped water over our heads before we grabbed our bags and went to stand on the curb until the fire could be put out. It was a stupid little thing, an old man on the fourth floor who had only wanted a bit of toast (this he cried out piteously as our landlady threw his things into the street), but it was past dawn before we could reenter. I, with the early shift that so often became the late shift at Madame Valois’s shop, simply put on my dress and hat and went to work, still damp, still a little smoky. The pamphlets the temperance marchers hand out make goodness look so clean. I was finding it rather filthy, myself.

I might have fallen asleep straightaway, betting on my nerves to awaken me when the door opened, but then I noticed the small tray on the table to my right, and on it a covered dish. I would have ignored it if it had been gold or silver, but it was only enamel, blue and scarlet harlequin diamonds with a finger-loop of twisted copper on top. Without thinking, I lifted the lid.

Within I found candied cherries, of the kind that are soaked in sweet syrup with a dash of brandy. They had been selected for their perfect roundness, their perfect color, and the syrup made them shine. By the light of the gas lamps, they gleamed like jewels, deep red and translucent like flesh before the fire.

I didn’t even tell myself I shouldn’t or They won’t miss only one. I’d been hungry longer than I’d been awake. I saw the cherries and I popped the first in my mouth.

Perhaps you know what cherries taste like, the burst of juice, the sweetness that sits like the word dulce on your tongue. You do not know what those cherries tasted like to me. They tasted like mad nights that didn’t have mornings after. They tasted like summer underneath hothouse glass while snow swirled outside.

They tasted like the first food I had had in almost thirty hours, and before I swallowed the first, I had the second and the third in my mouth. The sweetness was overpowering to the point of making my teeth ache in my jaw, nearly painful, and I couldn’t stop until I had eaten all but the last one.

Then and only then did I pause, mouth wet, fingers red, and with no way at all to hide what I had done. Eating the last cherry in the bowl was sweeter than all the rest because it was a choice, and as I ate it, chewed, swallowed with my lips tingling from the sweetness, I knew I had never tasted anything better, and the lights went out with a clap of thunder.

The storm that had been threatening all evening arrived to pour a flood down on the city. In the darkness, I sucked the juice off my fingers as I listened to the rain strike the windows. The glass was thick, the house sound, but still it felt like the storm battered the house with fists, angry at being kept out.

As I wiped my fingers and my mouth with my handkerchief, I rose and went to the window. By the flashes of lightning that ripped across the sky, I could see the street below already running with water and the people dashing for whatever shelter they could find. The thunder clapped twice, and for some reason, some strange reason, I put my hand on the latch. I wanted in that moment to let the storm in to Howard House. It would knock the paintings off the walls, rend the pretty tapestries to rags, ruin it from attic to kitchen and send torrents of water rushing through the banisters, never mind the path of the elegant stairs.

Who knows but I might have done it. My fingers worked at the latch as I stared into the storm, and when I caught my own reflection in the glass, there was something empty in my eyes. Then the thunder barked, and perhaps it was too eager, because I fell back from the window. Hurriedly, I drew my sleeve over my hand and wiped the vapor of my breath from the glass as well as the small prints I had left there. I knew better than to leave any trace of my presence in a place like this, and I turned resolutely from the window, ignoring the fury of the storm.

The lights when they came back on did so meekly: a guttering, barely there glow at first, and then one by one the flames caught and stretched up, returning the room to the civility of light. There was a fire banked low in the hearth, but it seemed to me that the gaslights were warmer still, holding back the night around me.

Abruptly I came to attention, snatching the box up in my hands before I properly registered the door being flung open. I don’t know whether I heard the silver nails of her heeled boots in the hall or whether it was only that a sense of purposeful menace preceded her, but whatever the reason, I was wide-eyed and every inch the attentive shopgirl when Mrs. Howard entered the room like a cannonball.

On that night in 1890, she had lost some of her famous height. She had begun to stoop where her corset would allow it, and there was a totter to her steps when she rose too quickly, but whoever would expect Mrs. Atalanta Howard, née Van Haan, to rise for them? She had just come in from the outdoors, shedding raindrops from her bear-fur mantle, and in front of her, stiff-armed, she held a maid by the scruff of her uniform. I recognized her as the girl who had fled weeping into the street.

The maid’s face was contorted with misery, tears drying on her cheeks, teeth latched onto her lip. I knew that misery: entirely private, nothing to do with what was happening and everything to do with whether she might be blamed for it. When the maid spoke, there was an appeasing whine in her voice that would win her nothing.

“Mrs. Howard, please, you can see—”

Mrs. Howard gave the girl a good shake, and, still holding my box in front of me, I took a step back at the fierce look on her face. Even when she practically trembled with anger, Mrs. Howard’s face was smooth, wrinkles little more than a suggestion at the corners of her eyes and the brackets of her mouth. She was of that wartime generation that had had no real cause to do more than look solemn no matter how high the bodies piled up. Perhaps their countenances might crease in a smile or in exasperation, but whatever joys or sorrows they had, they were shielded behind their lovely faces.

Now the anger threatened to shake that face to bits, and you could see her true age and the violence that had animated her for so long. Viciously, she shook the maid again.