Page 62 of The Scarlet Ball

She held up her over-full mending basket, a blue coat with brass buttons I didn’t recognize on the top, and swept by me without meeting my gaze. A part of me wanted to call her, or better yet, to take her by the elbow and bring her back, but she was Mielle, who would never speak straight. She’d been especially cryptic after she learned about my new position in the Howard household, granddaughter rather than substitute. At some point, I meant to sit with her and to explain that this was better. I could free her more certainly as Iphigenia Marshall than I could as some comfortable woman in Boston. I would make sure she understood that after this, we could go anywhere, do anything, enjoy the kind of freedom that so few have ever tasted. I just hadn’t been able to find the right time, and the more the distance between us grew, the more difficult it was to broach the conversation. I would try again that night, I decided as the door closed behind her.

That evening, Odile had invited me to dine at Herons, the club appended to the Great Heron Hotel on Park Row. It was a somewhat scandalous choice for a girl like her—that night’s headliner was the new Creole Show that had been making such noise uptown, an all-Black revue featuring singers and dancers from all over the South. Mrs. Howard’s generation deplored it, thinking it undignified, but still they went to see it.

She greeted me with a kiss on the cheek before we were shown to our table, and I wondered if she sat a little too close as the performers came on. After a very good tap dance and a somewhat puzzling angular free dance, I turned to catch Odile looking at me with cow eyes, her chin in her hand, her reliable lovely smile on her lips.

“You’re so beautiful, no wonder the storm went mad for you.”

“The storm was always mad, and you’re better off out of it.” I spoke too sharply, and she gave me a meek and chastened look.

“I likely am, everyone says so. But still. For a brief moment, it was magic, wasn’t it? There will never be anything like that again for me.”

I wanted to tell her how stupid this was, that she would be lucky if she never tangled with the likes of the demon lords again. She would live a long and pleasant life out from their shadows, and I tried not to think about what it might be like to never have the storm against my skin, to walk the halls of a palace of ice.

“There will be other things,” I said by way of consolation. “There will be men who won’t burn you to a crisp for putting a foot wrong in the waltz, beautiful houses, exotic lands. There will certainly be men—from what I have heard, your choice of them—and then a wedding and a honeymoon. Don’t sound so sad.”

“And love?”

I started to answer too bluntly, the champagne gone somewhat to my head, but then the master of ceremonies came to the stage.

“Tonight, at great expense, we have procured a rarity for you, ladies and gentlemen, a blossom from the East—”

“Oh, no,” I muttered, downing the rest of my champagne. A waiter saw and promptly came to pour me more.

“From the peaked roofs of Cathay, she was plucked from streets paved in jade and sent to the forbidden harem of the great emperor. There she learned the dances that are never performed for any beside the emperor himself—in her country, men who see her dance have their eyes stabbed out with red-hot needles.”

The master of ceremonies made a sizzling sound with his mouth, and half the audience, Odile included, flinched gleefully. He grinned, spreading his arms wide.

“But alas, she was sent from the harem in disgrace, and so she came to our great country, here to throw herself on the mercy of kinder hearts than she has found in her homeland. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the Lotus Princess!”

In a clangor of bells and cymbals, the curtain went up, revealing the Lotus Princess kneeling with her forehead pressed against the boards. She rose to her feet as the music reached a crescendo, swishing two enormous feathered fans in front of her to hide her face. She was small and doll-like, and under the hot lights of the stage, she was as pale as a candlestick, her hair as black as mine. In a silk robe that clearly had nothing underneath it, she fluttered around the stage with tiny steps, swishing her fans before her face, first one and then the other. Every time it looked like her face would be revealed, the other fan came up to obscure it, and a hot uneasy coal sat in my stomach, anticipation and dread at once.

Like you haven’t done similar things, I thought to myself. Like you didn’t make up forbidden dances and laugh about them afterward.

“How beautiful she is, and how little,” Odile cooed, and I nearly slapped her. It wasn’t for her words or her breathless admiration; it was that she had dared speak of the woman on stage at all. I drained my champagne glass, just barely smart enough to keep from asking for another.

The Lotus Princess swayed like a tree in a high wind, her head rolling on her shoulders like a ball. She danced with a fluidity that recalled snakes—maybe she had been a snake dancer at some point. They’d been in vogue in Paris, all of those beautiful gemlike serpents from Africa, all those girls who said they came from stone temples and jungle villages.

The music rose to a fever pitch. My face was hot, my eyes were dry, but I was afraid to blink, afraid to miss it when—

On the last crashing note, her fans parted and she gazed out at the crowd, her face painted white and dramatic dark lines outlining her eyes. Her mouth was small and red and set like stone, there was a red circle painted at the center of her brow. Something in me split open, and what came out wasn’t the champagne that I had been drinking so steadily, but something grief-stricken instead. It only grew worse when she disappeared behind the curtain, and I thought I might be sick. I was sick.

“I have. I have to. Wait here,” I said, standing up from the table.

Odile gave me a startled look, and I stumbled back, shoving my way to the side of the crowd as a pair of jugglers appeared on stage pitching blown-glass globes between them. Inside the globes were salamanders glowing in shades of orange and violet, and when the jugglers caught them, they flared brighter. The resulting judder of the lights made me think of fire, made me think of Mr. Howard and the rioters at Richmond Hall and the fire on Mulberry Street, smoke crawling down my throat. I clapped my hands over my ears, shaking my head violently.

A waiter touched my arm, concerned, but I shook him off to stumble away, bumping my hips off the tables, almost sprawling into some poor woman’s lap. Somehow, I stayed upright, and operating mostly on luck, made my way backstage. It was as dim and smoky as the front of the house, but thankfully somewhat cooler. I touched my heated face, but when I brushed my fingertips across the stitches at my temples, I jerked my hand away, terrified suddenly that I might dig my nails in and pull it off entirely.

“Please,” I said to a Black woman in overalls passing by. “Please, the Lotus Princess…”

She gave me a skeptical look, and before she could call someone to kick me out, I tore open my reticule and shoved a few folded bills at her.

“Please. Please. I have to.”

It was apparently enough that she didn’t question what I had to do, and she led me down a tight hallway that seemed to descend into the earth itself. Twice, we had to plaster ourselves against the wall to let someone go by, but finally she gestured at a door no different from the others.

“Right there.”

She left, and I didn’t hesitate at all. I grasped the doorknob and gave it a vicious yank, throwing myself off-balance so that I had to hang on to the door or fall. When I righted myself, I looked inside, into a room half the size of my dressing alcove at Howard House. Contained within was the brilliant splash of color that was the Lotus Princess, her silk dress a livid chemical green, the fans hung up behind her a rakish red.