Page 33 of The Scarlet Ball

“Wait.”

I opened the door and looked back over my shoulder at her. “Yes?”

“Please just remember this. There are ways out of any trap, and for some of us, this is a trap.”

I didn’t know what her game was, some kind of rescue for poor little rich girls offered up to demons or something more deadly, but I didn’t really care.

However, as I sat through the rest of the opera with Mrs. Howard, watching the actors die onstage one after another, her words came back to me.

All of us, I wanted to say, sneaking a glance at Mrs. Howard’s face. At rest, she was expressionless, gone someplace far inside, but I knew that there was no place she could go where she would not find the thing she married.

It’s a trap for all of us.

MARTHA LET ME alone after that. Whether she was trying to catch me out or do me ill or even do me an honest good turn, she had made her play and failed. Over the next few weeks, I saw her in the mix just like I saw all the other girls, but she politely ignored me and I did the same for her.

I had not reckoned on how small New York society really was. Of course we would have to deal with one another again, and of course it would be over spilt blood.

One afternoon, I received word that I was to go out alone that night. It was nothing elaborate that should require a chaperone, just one of those dozens of intimate affairs held by the people hosting them to display their exclusivity. It was the sort of thing where learning who hadn’t been invited was more important than who had been. Mrs. Howard was pleased enough to attend to more important matters, and I could tender her apologies to the hostess.

I didn’t realize until I came to the Tollands’ house that it wasn’t a dinner or a musical performance, but a reading. The Tollands had secured a poet for the evening, a lanky, monstrously unfashionable young man sitting with his eyes lowered at the front of the room, a sheaf of papers held to his heart as if they would protect him. There was a still-faced man with the deferential attitude of a valet behind him, and when the poet grew too restless, he would settle his hand on his shoulder, calming him immediately.

It was a small gathering, just thirty people or so, and all of us settled on the mismatched settees and chaises as the still-faced man bent over the poet’s shoulder, whispering something in his ear. As he spoke, the poet straightened and finally stood, revealing his scarecrow frame as he strode to the lectern that had been set up for him. He gazed down upon us like some old god in a smiting mood, and slowly, he lifted his sheaf of papers before him.

“Love,” he intoned, “how are we to speak of love?”

“Oh no,” whispered the young lady seated next to me, and I bit the inside of my cheek so I would not laugh.

It got no better, unfortunately, and I had to exercise all of my skills to sit still and to appear absorbed in the unending ballad of R and H. It was a long tale with lengthy asides about the moors and the seas and the eye of Heaven gazing down remorselessly on the lovestruck and the doomed, full of torturous metaphors for love and betrayal; I made a game of counting the wherefores, and I hit nineteen by the time the poet, overwrought, covered his face with one long bony hand. He needed to gather his strength for the final two-thirds, and so we had an interval. I was wondering if I could sneak a draught of the champagne they were serving when the girl seated next to me took hold of my hand.

“You must save me,” she murmured urgently, and jerked her head over her shoulder. A dozen yards away, I saw a woman with dark brows and a downturned mouth watching suspiciously. I recognized her as Mrs. Payne, another of Mrs. Howard’s number, which meant that the girl who held my hand so tightly must be the infamous Bethany.

There were the normal escapades of course, an indulgent aunt who allowed her to wear red to some cotillion when she was thirteen, stowing away aboard an uncle’s yacht to Italy when she was fifteen. It was the standard rich-girl antics, but there were other rumors of her stealing opium from the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and sneaking into a dissection at Cornell. I knew she had been at the White Ball and that very first awful dinner, but ’til now I had never seen her so closely, not her enormous black eyes or the hard set of her jaw. She had a stubborn look; she was the kind that will never let go once they’ve decided a man, a fortune, or a fight was theirs.

“I’ve heard there’s no saving you,” I said, intrigued.

Bethany leaned a little closer. “I need a friend for fifteen minutes. Less than that. Just walk out with me for the interval. If I’m alone, I’ll be stopped by every fool on the floor.”

Bemused, I let her lace her arm through mine, and we walked out into the reception hall. The Paynes were a minor sort of power in Mrs. Howard’s world, but it seemed like they were doing better in the real one. More than one young man diverted his path to try to speak with her, and I could see why her mother kept such a weather eye on her whereabouts. For my part, I warded her left flank, and then we were through the brief mob, walking down a dim and empty hall.

“I don’t think the powder room is this way,” I said.

“I don’t think it is either,” she said without letting go of me.

It occurred to me that perhaps I should be worried about what she might intend for me, but in truth, I didn’t get that sense from her. She walked forward with a bounce in her step and her eyes alight, every step faster until she was nearly running. Wherever she was going, she wanted to get there as quickly as possible.

Finally we came to a door in the hall. To me, it looked no different from any other, but Bethany stopped here.

“You can go now if you want. Or I suppose if you want to come in and see, you should.”

The specter of the poet and a dozen more wherefores rose up before me, and I followed her through the door into a dim greenhouse, so large that the trees towered over us and the glass walls were only glints through the trunks and stems and fronds. They must have spent a fortune warming the place; it was like stepping into a hot bath, and something small and cold in my chest uncoiled with a happy sigh.

I wasn’t sure what I thought I would see in the Tollands’ greenhouse, but it wasn’t Martha Webster, pacing back and forth and wearing a long canvas apron over her burgundy gown.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said to me.

“I didn’t expect to be here. What’s all this?”

“It’s freedom,” Bethany said gleefully. “Martha, did you get everything? Please tell me you got everything.”