Page 45 of The Scarlet Ball

I twined the ribbon around my fingers, glancing over my shoulder at the girl who had sold it to me. She’d stopped to tease a pair of sisters by fluttering her wares over their heads. She was working, and when she went home, she’d likely have to give an accounting of her work to whoever had bought the ribbons in the first place. For now, it looked like fun.

I saw Odile Dryden and Amelia Thomas with a group of girls I didn’t recognize, and the difference between them and the others was stark to those with eyes to see, invisible to those without. Odile and Amelia were apart, wary even if they called and laughed as the others did. When the oldest Benton boy approached, the one who had been so terribly sick a while before and then came back with eyes the flat maroon of Georgia clay, they went as still as statues, waiting to see what he would do. He charmed the other girls, and then he turned to Odile, offering her his hand.

“Well, that is fine for her, some little Southern mudslide,” Mrs. Howard murmured. “There are worse matches, I suppose. Mud is slower than water or fire, and she strikes me as a girl who needs the head start.”

I glanced over my shoulder at Odile, who was allowing the Benton boy to fetch her a hot chocolate. From the look on her face, no one might ever have been so kind to her before, and I thought of girls kept so starved for romance that they’d love a monster not for what it could bring them, but just because it loved them.

As we approached the pond, I recognized some of the young men I’d been introduced to recently standing at its edge, busy strapping skates onto their shoes and sliding out over the ice. One of them straightened when he saw us, greeting Mr. and Mrs. Howard before turning to me.

“Will you come out with me?”

“Oh, I haven’t my skates with me,” I began, but then I bit off a cry as he seized me by the hands and dragged me onto the ice in my shoes.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Mr. Howard starting forward before Mrs. Howard made a gesture to hold him back. They wouldn’t be doing me—or rather, they wouldn’t be doing Ginny—any favors by stepping in. If she couldn’t handle some idiot on ice skates, how in the world would she tame a demon lord?

“This is fun, isn’t it?”

Despite the suddenness of my entry onto the pond, it was. He was sure-footed and strong enough to guide me over the ice as we skidded along. Even in my shoes, the ice was smooth and slick, allowing me to glide along with relative ease, but I almost tripped when something reflected gold underneath my feet.

“What’s that?”

“The Vanderbilts,” my partner replied, and that was enough.

There were great curling flakes of gold embedded in the ice, and where the ice wasn’t cut across with skate marks, you could see rose petals as well. Gold and roses, frozen for the pleasure of New York, and now I could see some ragged little boys and some grown men as well chipping at the ice near the shore, trying to get their hands on it.

My partner twirled me in a circle, catching me a bit too familiarly around the waist when I nearly fell.

“There’s a stand across the way where you can buy skates of your own,” he suggested. “We can skate together, wouldn’t that be grand?”

He was a Tilney, I remembered, one of a veritable pack of boys this generation. Not so long ago, he would have been sent to distinguish himself on a field of battle or to bring glory on his family through God in the monastery. Here, at worst he might be sacrificed to a demon lord so his family could maintain their place in society, or if he was lucky, impress a rich girl with his connections and personal charm. I didn’t give him good odds when it came to either.

“We could skate across the globe if only you gave the word,” he said, endeavoring to be charming. “Have you heard? In Paris, they skate in summer.”

He’d made the error of skating me too close to the edge of the pond. I hopped neatly to the bank, giving him a good brisk shove so that he stumbled. It was not hard enough to anger him, but it was pointed, and he shot me a hurt look.

“I’ve been to Paris. You needn’t tell me about it.”

“That’s not what I meant—”

“Of course not.”

Rather than look at his face and hear the words that came out of it, I stalked away from the frozen pond. The crowd was thinner here, the vendors giving way to the exhibits that the Vanderbilts had brought in to educate and delight. There were the winning sculptures from the snow-sculpting contest: an enormous white bear with smoking coals for eyes, a woman clad in the style of the Greeks in sheer fabric that upon closer inspection turned out to be thinnest ice. There were domed ice lodges, like those in which people close to the North Pole lived, and wooden houses filled with steam.

I walked past all of them, and I thought of Paris, where just a few years ago, I had skated in the summer.

There was no magic to it, nothing more than an Englishman’s cleverness. When I was a little girl, it had been the talk of France, how the aristocrats could now skate in summer while the rest of us sweated into our clothes in the sun. When I grew up, I had a pair of silver-chased skates gifted to me by a rich Swede; he took me to the Glaciarium, winter brought into summer through the cunning manipulation of ammonia forced through cooling pipes.

Perhaps the magic was that there was no magic. It wasn’t cheap, but anyone could gain entry to the Glaciarium if they had the money for a ticket. How delightful it had been, to fly over the ice in my furs, the cold of the rink a relief from the sweltering city outside. I missed it, I missed Paris and I missed—

I stopped, looking around in confusion.

When I started walking, I had had no destination in mind. If there was a road, I would have walked along it, if there was a path, I would have used it. Instead, now I was among trees, and I did not know them at all.

Central Park had a reputation for wilderness, but that reputation existed among people who never left the city. I never really did either, but on the long train rides from Paris to Italy or Spain, the train cut through old forests, places where the trees massed together like an angry mob and the branches met overhead like hands in prayer. This place that I had walked to unawares had more in common with those forests than it did with Central Park or New York.

It would have been the simplest thing to call out. I didn’t know who might hear me if I did, though, so I turned around. Following the half-remembered story told to me by a drunken explorer, I focused on one tree that seemed directly in front of me and walked toward it. When I reached it, I selected another, and in that way, hopefully, I would walk in a straight line right out of these woods.

Eight trees later, I stopped because that did not seem to be working, and that was when I became aware of the silence. Silence usually meant solitude, but when I glanced up into the trees, I could see birds on the branches, a squirrel dashing to cover. I was not alone, but something had sent the world silent. I touched the trunk of the tree just to feel something real and solid. Then I lifted my head and looked as if I knew what was there, what must have been there the entire time.