Page 42 of The Scarlet Ball

Mrs. Howard stared at me, and then deliberately, she swooned. For a split second I wondered if I had finally made her so angry it killed her. Mr. Howard caught her before she hit the floor, crying her name in alarm.

She opened her eyes, waving away the concern of those who had swarmed around us with the grace of a queen.

“This winter, it wears on us all,” she said with the slight tremulousness of someone who is bearing up admirably. “Iphigenia, I am so sorry to take you away from this, but I am afraid I must ask your help.”

She rose with Mr. Howard’s assistance, and with her arm around my waist, the two of us supported her as we made our way to the rental carriage. He must have frightened the rioters badly. The streets were mostly empty as we rode, and Mrs. Howard leaned against her husband’s shoulder, reconciled for the moment.

“You will not do that again,” she said, her eyes closed. “I did not hire you to malinger.”

Even as she said it, it was without the cutting edge she would have used a week ago. I wondered what had passed between them, or what had passed out of her. The word came to me, extinguished, and I wished I could spit to get it out of my mouth.

I surprised Mielle returning to my room. She nearly dropped her mending, and then she stared at my face as I fell onto the settee next to her.

“There’s a storm in love with me.”

“What?”

“A storm. Sebastian Rowe. He didn’t die, or he did, but—”

I gave her a more or less coherent account of everything that had happened as she undressed me and put me into a chemise for sleep. By the time she was brushing out my hair, both of us seated at the foot of the bed, I was calmer, even if it was still threaded with anger. It was better than being afraid, anyway.

When I finished my story, she was silent. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“Would you listen if I did?” she asked, shifting to rise from the bed. She stilled when I turned to take her face between my hands.

“Tell me what a storm is.”

She wrapped her hands around my wrists, pulling them down from her face.

“Storms never served,” she said quietly. “Fire rages, but you still invite it in your house to cook your meals and warm your children. Water floods, but you still harness it to mill your grain and to float your ships. In the South, the enclaves of Washington and Atlanta, the ladies marry the early frost and the black ice to end the too-long summers. Even a rockslide may budge rock to seek for ore. Mrs. Howard and her friends, they marry floods. They marry fires. Every single one. I understand there are women in the Far East who will marry the lords of the wet season or the dry, seeking to bring balance to their homes, but this is not that. This is corralling disaster and putting it to work for you.”

“Putting a fire into a nice suit and adjusting its tie,” I said thoughtfully. “Making a flood sit at a board meeting.”

“Yes. They serve out of love, but they serve. And storms do not.”

“Has no one ever tried?”

“Why would they?” she asked, her voice fraying. “What work could they put him to? What good could he do?”

I thought of Mr. Howard, so eager to leap into the mob, not even out of rage but simply for the pleasure of burning. I started to say that there was nothing good about any of them, and then it came, a brisk rap that made us both look up. We turned to the door, but when it came again, we realized it was not the door but the window.

“No,” I muttered, “absolutely not.”

Ignoring Mielle’s cry of protest, I lunged across the room, and when I threw the window open and looked down, I knew at once who I would see.

Sebastian Rowe stood on thin air, and around him, above him, behind him, the storm coiled like a restless animal. He looked at me with that same smile that had lured me into the statue garden, that had me saying yes before I said no. It was still handsome, and I let that thought fuel my anger.

“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” I hissed. “Why are you here?”

He spread his hands as if it were obvious. Perhaps it was to him.

“I asked when I might come to you. You said to ask you later, and here I am.”

“Later like at a luncheon! Later at a ball or a dinner or—or the opera! Not outside my window.”

“It’s what human men do,” he said stubbornly, and I gritted my teeth, remembering the real Sebastian Rowe pulling me back to him in the garden. It was what human men did.

“It’s not what you do,” I said. “Not you. No. You—you send gifts. You send me things you think I might like, expensive things, things that are hard to get. You ask when you can ask to see me next.”