Page 73 of The Scarlet Ball

She would open it if I ordered her to, I realized, and suddenly I very much wanted to. There was something unsavory about the box, not menacing but somehow disgusting. It turned my stomach, and I didn’t want to touch it.

“Whatever’s in there is smaller than me. It can’t hurt me,” I joked weakly, and I reached for the string tying the lid to the bottom. The bow slithered free, and then with my fingertips, I gingerly removed the top of the box, allowing a fluffy layer of white tissue paper to bounce gaily out. I plucked the topmost layers away, and they were pure white. A few more, and they were stained pink, and after that, they were sodden red.

I should have stopped there, but of course I couldn’t. Impatient and a little sick to my stomach, I pulled out a great handful of bloody tissue, casting it to the floor behind me. I forced myself to look, and then I found I could not look away.

Staring up at me from a bed of white tissue paper was the face of the big man who ran the gangs out of Place Pigalle. His eyes were still clear, and I saw the specks of green in the left one, the dimple on his chin, the rakish gold ring piercing his septum. He looked fresh enough that he might speak, and I waited, insides water, to see what he would say.

Mielle clapped the top of the box back on, and I staggered back, both hands pressed against my mouth like some heroine in a melodrama. Then I took a deep breath, steadied my thankfully empty stomach, and came back to the box, removing the lid again.

It was no illusion, no trick. He was dead and beyond any resurrection they might be able to scrape together, even in the depths of the cour des miracles. The whites of his eyes were crystal clear, but the skin where his neck had parted ways with the rest of him was fringed and frayed.

I looked until I was certain that it was who I immediately knew it was, and then I replaced the lid on the box, shutting away that sightless gaze forever.

“This should be burned,” I said, nudging the box with my fingertip. “Please be discreet, I shouldn’t like to see this written up in the papers.”

Mielle took the box without blinking, but she paused, giving me a long look.

“Who was it?”

“No one who will be mourned,” I said decisively, though that wasn’t true. He had a wife and children, probably another mistress or two. After the initial pang, I didn’t care about them. I was left with a rolling tumult of horror for the act, fear, anger that it had been done without my demand, and coming up like a groundswell to cover it all, relief.

As Mielle left to dispose of the head Sebastian had so thoughtfully gifted to me, I walked around the small room seeing everything with new eyes. The colors looked more vivid, the rug and the wall hangings soft and touchable. I ran my thumb down the spine of an onyx jaguar on the shelf, warmed myself by the banked fire.

On an impulse, I cast the curtains back, revealing a dove-gray winter morning. The sun wasn’t properly up, the shadows still long, but the road stretched out in either direction.

I was free. I could go where I liked, wear whatever face I wanted when I did it. With the big man dead, I could go back to Paris and take up my old life. The sword that had hung over my head for almost two years was gone; Sebastian had melted it down and used the steel to make rings for my hand, a necklace for my throat.

That was how he would do it, I realized abruptly. He would adorn me with blood and murder, and every time he bit where I told him, every time he broke what I wanted broken, I would like it a little better. Hell, I liked it too much now, even in the horror, even after Odile. I was revenged for my exile, Alex for his death.

I sat with the thought for a moment, that Sebastian had saved me, and then a harder voice spoke in my head, so cold it burned.

He saved you for himself, that voice said, and in the early dawn, safer than I had ever been, I knew it for the truth.

MRS. HOWARD EFFECTIVELY disappeared after the Patriarch’s Ball. I expected to hear from her about my scene with Sebastian or the fact that I had gone home early with Martha and her mother, but when I ventured down to the dining room I found Mr. Howard reading the paper and no Mrs. Howard at all.

“She has said she will be occupied until the Scarlet Ball, and I will not see much of her until then,” he said when I asked.

“More time for your club and your riding, I suppose.”

“I suppose.” He smiled, startlingly wistful and startlingly handsome for it. “I miss her when she is not about. Isn’t that strange? We have spent all our lives together, save for a few trips here and there. Yet I miss her so very much when she is gone.”

I realized as I waited for my poached egg and melon that I finally believed it. He would miss her. He’d eat her. He’d savage her corpse, lick the memories out of the cracked eggshell of her skull, incinerate the work of her life so that it would always be a part of him, and in the end, when he realized it was the end, it would drive him mad. It wasn’t a consolation in the least, the idea of Sebastian mad over my corpse, or satisfying; I knew that the reprieve I had won was temporary at best.

Still, as the days went by, Sebastian was as scarce as Mrs. Howard. At least I knew where she was, dug into her locked room at her club. A few times, I stopped by with some chestnuts or an almond pastry to share. It seemed like a thing a diligent granddaughter might do, but both times I was turned away by the attendant, who told me firmly that Mrs. Howard had sent word that she would not like to be disturbed.

The third time I was turned away, the woman, whose face still gave me such a pang, made a sympathetic noise.

“The ladies who come here value their privacy. It is a refuge for them, a place away from their homes.”

“And their families?” Maybe I wanted to pick a fight with her, but she only nodded thoughtfully.

“Say from their common cares. At a certain age, a small amount of solitude can be very welcome.”

Mrs. Howard at her certain age might have her solitude; I was still required to be seen out and about, sometimes with Mr. Howard to play escort, sometimes with Hugette Keynes or Martha Webster and their chaperones, rarely on my own.

I was growing, willy-nilly, into liking Hugette, who was of an unexcitable disposition and satisfied with her family’s standing in New York and in the coven. Mrs. Howard called the Keyneses dull, but instead, I saw that Hugette was content. She did not need to be the best. She had nothing to prove, and so long as she performed ably she would survive and marry well.

Mr. Howard, on the other hand, still frightened me. The first time I realized I was getting into the carriage with him alone, I had to tell myself how unlikely it was he would suddenly devour me; I was now the kind of girl who didn’t get eaten, though of course that was only a comforting lie. Rather, he was too well-behaved to eat me, as it would upset his wife and what would the papers say, and I made sure to do as little as possible to draw his attention.