Page 25 of The Scarlet Ball

Then I shook my head, returning to the papers spread out on my lap. There was nothing for her here, and putting Katie or anything from my old life in Mrs. Howard’s way was asking for trouble. Later, if there was a later, I would see her again, and I would say thank you. In the meantime, I had gossip columns to read.

It sounded like Calpurnia Michaels (“joined aunt and uncle for an unexpected tour of the Continent, we wish her all the best!”) and Dorothy Goodman (suffered a tragic injury after a fall down the stairs, now must use an ivory foot and a cane) had suffered similar fates, and from the girls we’d begun with, we were down to thirteen. It struck me that a season in the brothels had similar rates of attrition, but what did it matter? There were always more girls, and there would be here too, in five years or ten, another crop anxious and eager to dance with the demon lords.

I slept a great deal, and when I wasn’t sleeping, I was eating my food one-handed while I read the papers, every inch of text, examined every illustration. I gave myself headaches looking so intently, but then I’d simply lie back and wait for the throbbing to pass before I took it up again, paying special attention to the scandal sheets. They weren’t any more truthful than the prestigious papers, but at least it wasn’t always the truth Mrs. Howard and her friends preferred. I would have liked them best for that alone.

A few days after the White Ball, before breakfast because she thought it sharpened my wits, Mrs. Howard forced me to go over the events of that night, forward and back, every detail no matter how significant or insignificant, every step I took or did not take. I thought she was trying to find ways to improve my performance, but Mielle told me she had interrogated her husband in the same fashion.

“It is the new one, I expect,” she said, mastering perfectly the arch way servants spoke about their masters when they did not entirely approve of their doings. “I imagine they’ve never had a disruption like him before.”

“Crashing the line of the dance, starting a brawl? Sounds like any other rich young man to me.”

She pursed her lips and would not say more. When I ventured out late at night for a bit of food from the pantry, I saw the light from under Mrs. Howard’s door. I could not make out her words, but I could hear the stuttered sound of her study, No, no, not that one either. Perhaps the Sumerian? Still no …

A week later, I was allowed out of bed to do the visiting rounds and lunches, and Ginny Marshall still hadn’t been found. By this time she could have made it all the way to California if she had some wit and cash. She might have made it to Buenos Aires or even to Paris or London or any number of places. Wherever she had gone, she wasn’t here, and so I slept in her bed, ate her food, wore her clothes, and took her baths.

Sometimes, in passing, I caught hints of the search, Mrs. Howard talking on her ivory-handled phone or speaking in clipped terms with things that needed no door to enter. She never lost her temper, never anything so gauche, but her voice took on the piano-wire tension of a garrote. I made sure to stay out of her way.

“Why doesn’t she send him after her?” I asked Mielle one early evening. She never allowed me to do my dance lessons in chemise and corset, but afterward, she would let me strip down to my combination to enjoy a platter of salmon mousse and baked butter crackers on the settee in my room.

“Would you send an army to fetch back a straying lamb?” she asked. “Would you drink an ocean when you were thirsty?”

“I might if the lamb was valuable enough, and I don’t drink saltwater. What, do you?”

She pointedly ignored me the way she did whenever I tried to learn about her, and I sighed.

“Still, I see your point. Imagine him going into a cathouse or a nunnery, brr.”

Mielle never called Mr. Howard by his name; I’d fallen into the habit of not doing so either unless I must. I couldn’t tell if it was habit or respect for her, but for my part, it was a small rebellion. I knew the name meant only a little more than nothing. It could be discarded, it could be changed like any other name. I was called Judith because one of the teaching sisters at the convent had a taste for bloodthirsty tales, I’d seen Mrs. Howard name Mielle, and Henry Howard was Henry Howard because a gentleman could not get by without a name.

I was picking up more names, as a matter of fact. Every day, new calling cards and letters were piled on the silver tray by the door, and I flipped through them like a deck of playing cards. I was expected to read Ginny’s correspondence to keep up with my role, although Mrs. Howard had the final say on which invitations were accepted. None came from Tilly Manchester, but more of the others than I would have expected would love to see me for lunch or hoped that they might call on me soon; Hugette Keynes wondered if, despite the weather, I was available for an afternoon or two with her mother’s pet charity, the reform of Chinatown on Mott Street.

I sat with that note in my hand for a long moment, examining Hugette’s capital Cs, the confident swoops, the exuberant flourish of the tails. I saw them from time to time on the streets, skinny men dressed in what seemed to me to be deliberate defiance of the country they’d come to. I was wary of Chinatown the same way I’d been wary of the small Annamese population in Paris, mostly the servants of returned diplomats and military men. They were cooks, nannies, valets, and house boys—they had nothing to do with me when I was at the convent, and when I worked the houses, I made sure I had nothing to do with them. You only have to be mistaken for a chambermaid once before you hate it, and whatever else, I needed to be more expensive than the maid.

The Chinese in Manhattan were a community of bachelors. I saw a few Chinese women, isolated servants here and there, but they belonged to the mansions of the newly rich who had made their fortunes in Chinese porcelain, tea, and cloth. The women came back with the furniture and the silk robes, working as nurses and ladies’ maids and serving as souvenirs of adventures in the exotic East. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen an Annamese woman, even one half-French like I was, but I was used to white faces, not ones like mine.

There were rumors of course, secret nests of slave girls kept quiet on opium, fed to some gold idol when they were worn out. I didn’t much believe it. If they could bring in girls, they’d be selling them to white men and not walking Broadway with cigar boxes. When I saw them, the cigar sellers, the laundry boys with their enormous white bundles, I turned my head and walked more quickly.

Holding Hugette’s invitation between my fingertips, I recalled my lessons on the business prospects of Mrs. Howard’s friends. The Keynes had strong interests in steel and artwork shipped through Pak-hoi and Kiung-chou. Hugette would have grown up around Chinese scroll paintings, drinking gunpowder tea from transparent porcelain teacups. She might have had one of those Chinese nurses running after her when she was small.

My fingers closed on the notecard, pressing creases across Hugette’s splendid penmanship. Decisively, I crumpled the paper into a tight ball and threw it onto the fire. It would be ash before Mrs. Howard could see it, and I met Mielle’s eyes defiantly.

“I have enough to occupy me before the Gracens’ ball on Friday, don’t I, without going about doing good works.”

“You do need more time to practice your dancing,” she said blandly, and I smiled.

The Gracens were one of the families with a long connection to the demon lords, and they were hosting a private ball that Friday, which meant everyone there would know everyone else and there would be no need for introductions. The young gentlemen present would all have been invited by name or at least by family.

“And what about the lords?” I had asked, when the invitation had first arrived.

“They will know you. They will find you.”

I thought of blood poured out of a silver bowl, blood like a river, blood like a road, and I shuddered. Of course they could find us.

The night came, and Mrs. Howard produced a pink gown in satin, the lace dyed a soft cream to create the impression of froth and strawberries. There were cunningly crafted glass strawberries to pin in my hair and a design of strawberry leaves stitched into my slippers. It would have been the most innocent display without the sharp bite of my corset and the seeming acres of pale flesh revealed by the wide neckline.

“We should paint a strawberry right there,” I sighed, poking at my breast where it rose out of the lace. “It seems a wasted opportunity.”

“Whore’s tricks,” Mielle said primly, clasping a chain holding a single pink pearl around my throat. “You need debutante tricks here.”