Page 37 of The Scarlet Ball

There was the terrible reek of burning flesh and fabric. My stomach twisted, and Mrs. Howard took a hard grip on my arm. For a single mad moment, I thought she might instruct me on the best way to throw up like a lady, but instead she only stared at her husband’s back as he stepped forward, looking from side to side with interest to see who might decide to move against him rather than away.

“God above, but he is terrible,” she whispered, and then he turned back to her, only a man’s face on him again, only concern in his eyes.

“Darling, we’re close, only a half block from Richmond Hall. Our coachman being unavailable, we should walk. Here, let me help you down.”

As if in a dream, I watched him pull out the little steel step attached to the carriage’s door. He helped Mrs. Howard down first, and then offered me his hand, bare now of the gloves he had been wearing when we left the house. His hands were still too warm, and he made an unhappy sound when I flinched.

“I hope they did not frighten you,” he said.

The ground beneath us ran with meltwater, the bricks blackened from Mr. Howard’s work. To either side, there were bodies that I refused to look at, some still groaning, others still. There were a few distant shouts against us—Witches, demons—but they were faint, and Mrs. Howard looked over my dress with a critical eye, tugging up the short train at the rear so she could hold it out of the muck. Still her hands shook, and I wondered how often she had seen Mr. Howard like that, burning bright, himself and not the tame creature she had made of him.

We walked away from the carriage and team as if they had nothing to do with us, and soon I saw what had set the mob off.

The Poor Helen’s Ball was held at Richmond Hall, one of the oldest assembly halls in the city, and in honor of the occasion, they had decked the place out with summer. Within the iron railings of the fence, winter melted away to lush green grass and a garden overwhelmed with hothouse color. Peonies burst open like fireworks, pink and blue and a rare lovely lilac, and they released an intoxicating scent better than any perfume. It was the smell of living things and warm earth, and for just a moment, I wanted to fall down into it, to hell with my dress and the Howards.

Richmond Hall was lit with extra lamps on tall posts, throwing all this glory into sharp relief. It was beautiful—the work, I guessed, of French herbalists like the ones who kept Versailles in endless summer—and of course it was a thing that bled money. This was beauty hung from a standard and waved hard to show the world what the rich enjoyed. In the dead of winter, with the recently struck-down workday limits and news of the dead miners from Mendon Quarry, that beauty called all eyes to see, and the ones that looked were furious and famished both. They’d rip us to pieces to get to that warmth, they’d go through us like paper.

The demon lords would never allow it, I mused as we entered Richmond Hall, but in the same instant I knew that for a lie because they would love it, all that blood, heads hitting the ground and every day a new anthem to the brave new world that would crawl out of the corpse of the old one. They would stop it, perhaps, if their wives commanded them to do so, but otherwise they would never find themselves more pleased than to see every person who now streamed into Richmond Hall split apart for the eating.

The Poor Helens, Mielle had told me, were a gathering of ladies who rather thought they might have liked to be nuns, if only they weren’t rich, married, Protestant, and enjoying all of it. As a result, it was a dull sort of affair for all the glamour that surrounded it. It was public, for one thing, and tickets could be bought, even if there were many, many families to whom the tickets would not be sold. Mrs. Howard had bought our tickets in person, standing in line like some market girl at a table staffed by three of the richest women in New York, and I did not see her forgiving it at any point.

“Silly, mealy-mouthed lot,” she had said, coming back from the sale. “And if it wasn’t for the fact that Mrs. Astor is one of the patronesses, and Mrs. Hildebrandt providing the musicians, I wouldn’t have you go at all. The lords certainly will not bother. Still, appearances must be kept up. One never knows when some of these new-money sorts will prove clever.”

Richmond Hall itself had a kind of lumbering grace, something that had survived the city’s fanaticism for the new and the fashionable, rising up like some old bear out of its hibernation to find a city where once its forest used to be. It was tall, stately enough, but narrow, and we joined the crush of people waiting for entry into the ballroom. It was tight and crowded and yet for all that wealthy people hate little more than having to wait in line for anything, they tolerated it for the chance to attend.

We’d come to a complete standstill in the crowd, Mr. Howard looking around as if he still wanted to see some mayhem, Mrs. Howard pretending we were quite alone. I found myself staring up at the painted ceiling, as far away as Heaven itself, a carved tableau that had become darkened and dimmed from all the years of beeswax candles before they changed to gas. Behind the soot and grease, you could see the figures still, four of them running about in a forest, as from the corners, fairies and players laughed and pointed. The motion was slow and sluggish now like some wind-up toy whose spring was wearing out, and from time to time the trees shook under the weight of the soot, dropping leaves shaped from curls of shaved wood onto our heads.

I watched as one drifted down to land on Mrs. Howard’s upswept hair, a lurid green against the gray. Without thinking, I went to pluck it away, and Mr. Howard’s hand caught mine, heat starting up fast.

I bit my tongue to keep from crying out, but before I could even start to panic, he let me go with a chagrined snort.

“Sorry, Ginny,” he said. “I suppose that crowd out front has got me on edge.”

No, it’s got you hungry, I thought, and I dropped the wooden leaf to the ground.

We made torturous progress up the staircase to where the double doors would be opened to us. I heard the names shouted by the majordomo as the attendees went before us, some of them names I had heard before, most ones I hadn’t. How marvelous it was that a thing like Mr. Howard could walk among them all invisible except for when he called for a cigar or another brandy. How marvelous it was that I could.

A sense of dread came over me as we drew closer and closer to the door. I didn’t understand it. I was not brave, but I wouldn’t run until there was good reason to run, either.

I wanted to run now.

There were too many people around me. There was a demon lord beside me. The stairway was pinching itself narrower as we ascended, and soon we’d be single file. Soon we’d be walking a narrow rail one by one, inching over some fathomless abyss, and when that wind started blowing, as that wind would always start blowing, over we would go, shrieking and screaming and—

I hissed with pain as Mrs. Howard dug her nails into the soft skin above my elbow, on the inside of my arm. Clever old bitch, she had even whipped out her filigreed sandalwood fan to cover what she was doing. I expected some sharp word, something about skinning me alive and leaving my meat for the burning dogs of New York. Instead the look she gave me was almost pleading.

“Stand,” she said, her voice pitched for my ears alone. “Stand. Stay. Please.”

It shocked me, her words and the softness of her chin. I had known before that she needed a place for her granddaughter, the ability to maintain her position in this witches’ den. Right now, in this moment, she needed me.

Slowly, I nodded, and her eyes filled with relief, the only indication that she had even for a moment been desperate. I sneaked a look at Mr. Howard, who scarcely seemed to have noticed any of this, and it felt like instead of three, we were two.

When I looked up again, I realized with surprise that we had come to the door at last. The majordomo took the card from Mrs. Howard’s hand, and then he stepped forward through the door.

“Announcing Mr. Henry Howard, Mrs. Henry Howard, and their granddaughter, Miss Iphigenia Marshall.”

His voice rolled out like a red carpet and we entered Richmond Hall properly, the ballroom, the battlefield. It was dark, far darker than the more modern halls would be. They had gas, but they had chosen to switch it off for the evening. Instead, the light shone cold and bright and lovely from a silver moon that hung where the chandelier ordinarily would. Unlike the true moon, with its pocked and rutted face, this one was smooth as a mirror, gleaming down benevolently onto the people below.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught something shimmering from above and then falling. Blinking, I reached up to catch it only to have it disappear, and then it came to me that it had been a star. From the ceiling painted to look like the night sky, stars fell down upon us, pinpricks of light that descended from on high trailing gossamer trails behind them only to fizzle out a few feet above our heads.