Page 7 of The Scarlet Ball

“Now, come eat, for the lords are hungry, and God alone knows what they might leave when they’re done.”

A ripple of laughter ran around the table. I didn’t join, and I saw that the other young women didn’t either. The girl across from me, a high-cheekboned brunette with amethysts like frozen violets at her throat, took a careful breath, and she could not stop two patches of color from coming to her face. Her lips were still, but if I touched them, brushed the pad of my finger over her lower lip, I knew suddenly that I would find them bitten under that delicate touch of paint that someone had applied so skillfully.

The food came then, and it was no great pain to keep myself from it. They placed no food in front of any girl at the table. My plate was an expanse of fine white porcelain, a vision of hunger as the footmen came around to set Mrs. Howard on with a perfectly clear chicken consommé followed by a plate of white scallops, steamed and then replaced into their half-shells that were fanned on the plate. On it went like that, through a fresh cold white salad and a chicken under lemon sauce, each bite falling apart, and the whole time, I sat with my spine straight and my eyes lowered.

The strange thing, the strangest thing, was that none of the men ate either. Not a single one. You might starve a girl, but you could never starve a man, not a rich man who was used to being well-fed all his life. He would never stand for it, and he sure as hell wouldn’t stand it in silence. Like the girls, however, they sat with their plates bare, and now that I had a moment to watch them, I saw more. I saw well-tailored suits of clothing, I saw beards and mustaches groomed to the precision of a stroke of ink over white paper.

I saw what I was meant to see, and then I saw the fixed and unblinking eyes, and I heard the breathing, or rather, I didn’t hear it. When Mr. Howard sighed as they brought out the braised chicken with slivered almonds, I realized it was the first breath he had taken since we sat down, an expression of longing. The husbands waited just like the girls did, but where we did it in compliant silence, there was something far more avid in their patience. Across the table from me and to the left, one gentleman tapped the edge of his empty plate with a silver-capped nail, and it chimed like the tiniest loveliest bell.

Through my lowered lashes, I watched the girl across from me. I mirrored her perfect posture, and when she caught herself slouching forward just the tiniest barest bit and jerked upright, I realized that she was watching mine. When she caught me looking, it put the faintest curve to her lips, the most tremulous suggestion of a smile. I remembered that after all my face was not my own, and she had every reason to smile at me. I gave her the slightest of nods, letting my mouth soften just a touch.

I see you, we said to one another. I see you there, and here we are together, and if we have nothing else, at least we have that.

Dinner ended with the announcement of the dessert course, and to the table they brought platters of apples. It was the season for apples, the hard little winesaps, the spicy pippins, but instead of green or gold or red, these were white, an uncanny warm bone color. When they were sliced to serve, a deep pink juice welled up from the cuts, staining the plates and the flesh of the apples themselves. They released a thin but unmistakable scent: apples of course, but the iron tang of rare meat as well, and Mrs. Howard picked up her portion with her gloved hand, biting into it with a solemn kind of savor, letting the pink stain sink into the fabric of her glove.

I thought that now this display, whatever in the world it was, was over, but instead the gathering separated. The men proceeded to the library, and now their masks were better. They were bluff and good-natured as if they had been well-fed. They looked right, they looked human, and I thought uneasily of how completely I would have been fooled.

The women decamped to the drawing room, which was a long narrow space that must have run nearly the entire length of the house. It was lined along one side with tall windows, and the storm had descended on New York in earnest, throwing sheets of water against the glass. The gas lamps were clustered at the front of the room, leaving the far end shrouded in darkness, and I could not say for sure that nothing moved back there, that nothing closed its eyes so that we would not be alerted by the shine.

We entered, the other girls and I, as stiffly upright as chess pieces, our guardians with an altogether different kind of tension. Mrs. Howard waited with a chilly look upon her face, but another woman, stout with a soft cupid’s bow mouth, gestured imperiously with her ivory-handled fan.

“Well, Hannah?” she said, looking pointedly at Mrs. de Lange. “Have we bowed and scraped to your satisfaction?”

Mrs. de Lange took a comfortable seat on the divan, gesturing so that the other women did likewise. Now the girls were the only ones who stood, and in our long narrow dresses, all of us in various springtime shades, we had an almost desperate ghostly glow in the low light. Some sparkled with jewels, peridot or citrine or amethyst like the girl who had sat opposite me at dinner. Others had flakes of mica scattered in their hair, and it caught what light it could. Shining, we waited.

“Oh we shall do very well this year,” said Mrs. de Lange with a smile. “What beautiful girls we have, don’t you think? What well-brought up, careful, and lovely girls we have brought to table.”

She spoke as if we were plucked hens, and a tremor ran through the girls at that. There was no visible movement, no sound to give them away, but nonetheless I felt it. Every girl there but me knew what this was for, what we were for. I thought of the unearthly things that looked so much like men who had taken themselves to the library, the things their mothers had married.

“That is something on which we can all agree,” Mrs. Howard said. She sat so straight you could not imagine her back touching the back of the chair. “Are we done? We have bowed, we have eaten, and we are begun. What else do you want?”

“A proper beginning, Atalanta,” said Mrs. de Lange, suddenly sharp. “A proper beginning after all this time. We shall have that, and if there is one of you who thinks to argue, I shall remind you that you do not set the place. I do.”

There was something charged about it, something she did not say but that all the women heard. One woman, grayer than the rest, bowed her head, her hands clasped in her lap. The rest fell back behind their faces, fuming or snarling or scornful and doing it all behind barricades of delicate powder and utter cool serenity.

Mrs. de Lange waited to see if there would be any further dissent, and then she nodded. “I think I want a game to see us properly begun.”

“Oh, but surely it is too early. The White Ball is still a month away,” one of the other women protested. It sounded like it had been surprised out of her, and Mrs. de Lange’s mouth tightened with displeasure.

“Yes, and that is why I should like us to play now. It is not a salon, it is not a kettledrum, it is not for goodness’ sake a dance. Just a game. Yes?”

There was a tense rustle of agreement, and Mrs. de Lange rose to her feet, taking up a candle from the box on the hearth and lighting it from a lamp. She carried it to the far end of the hall, and it struck me suddenly how far away it was, especially when you were never permitted to run. You never ran, not in dresses like these, and I took a slow breath. I glanced at Mrs. Howard, but she gave me back nothing but flint—you could strike sparks off the way she looked at me.

“We are going to play Rabbit Rabbit,” said Mrs. de Lange in tones of great satisfaction. “You remember this one from when you were children, don’t you, girls? Rabbits move when they can see. They are still in the dark. They are only safe when they come home to their burrows, and for the sake of our little game, we shall say that this armchair here beside me is your burrow. Now, Violet, will you take the door?”

This last was directed to the woman who had sat with her hands clasped together, and she actually moaned when she was named. Still she rose up gracefully and went to stand at the door, her hand on the enamel-and-gold knob. She did not hold it as if it led only to the hallway, and we all heard it then, a low rumbling sound from beyond, something hungry and something with teeth.

“Oh,” said one of the girls close to me, her voice faint. I heard another’s breath quicken, some lean little animal, a bunny perhaps, but ready to run and ready to leap.

“Such times,” Mrs. de Lange said. “Now, the lights, please.”

The room was plunged into darkness, and the only light the candle in her hand. In the other, she held a plain black cloth fan, flicking it playfully back and forth. When she held it in front of the candleflame, it blacked it out almost entirely, leaving only the barest traces of light to be seen. The dark in turn closed in, only pushed back by the light when she took the fan away.

“Now. Violet, open the door, and rabbit, rabbit, run.”

I was farther away from the burrow than the rest. I was almost by the door where the lady stood with two twin tear-tracks carved through her powder, and I felt the rush of wind as she turned the doorknob and heard her cry as the door was wrenched open. We did not run, not in those dresses from the Continent, but still we had only taken a few steps when Mrs. de Lange covered the candle.

Mrs. Howard had hired me to stand still, and so I did, every muscle tensed, one foot before the other and my weight balanced precariously between them. I became terribly aware of the curve of my own fingers, the tilt and turn of my head. As well I was terribly aware that it was not some draft that had entered the room, but breath—something, or rather some things, breathing as they came to walk among us. They were heavy-footed, their forms breaking the scanty light between me and the candle, and once or twice, I heard a crooning sound that bore the unmistakable hint of something delighted, of laughter.