Page 21 of The Scarlet Ball

“As well they should be. I read about them in an old book about a princess of the Far East, how she was buried with them in a tomb guarded by a dozen clay soldiers. I wanted them, and Mr. Howard got them for me for our second anniversary. They’re good luck for our family.”

Now Mrs. Howard touched them as if looking to find fault, straightening the necklace, tweaking the one that hung from my right ear to face front.

“Beautiful,” she said, but she did not sound pleased. I thought it made sense. In a world where everything was expected to be beautiful, anything less was a tragedy.

In the hall, the great clock struck nine, and she straightened. She took Mr. Howard’s right arm, gestured me toward his left, and then she called for the blindfolded footmen to open the door for us.

I expected to see the slashing storm beyond the doors, the street flooded and perhaps a floating sheltered walkway built between the door and the carriage. I’d seen the wealthy do more dramatic things to avoid a bit of wet.

Instead, it was a hallway of trees to either side, their trunks so broad two men holding hands couldn’t circle them. The branches, bare for midwinter, met and tangled in a canopy overhead, and below, the knotted roots ran straight into the floor tiled in marble. The way was lit by caged ship’s lanterns trimmed in gold, hung from the tree trunks by gilded spikes.

“Oh, Hannah,” Mrs. Howard said with disdain. “As if we could ever forget your family set the ships on the water.”

“It was de Lange lumber in three ships out of four for most of the seventies,” Mr. Howard supplied helpfully, as we set out. “The old bastard was a forest, I think.”

The cold leached through the soles of my seed-pearl-trimmed white dancing slippers as we went, over marble with the chill and translucence of ice. Still it was clean, painfully and unnaturally so, and I thought that if I should flip up the end of my train, I would find it as clean as it had been when I left.

I could not tell if we were outside or not. It was as cold as if we were, and the trees certainly seemed to be living things, but nothing rustled in the branches overhead, and nothing moved in the shadows beyond the trunks. I thought it must be a real forest, but then it struck me that though it was real, it was also dead. Everything that made it a living thing, the animals, the insects, the worms, the moss, had all gone on to whatever came next and left this behind.

We walked for some little while before I saw the first pair of eyes, glowing yellow from the deep shadows, located at about waist height. They closed before I could say a word, but then another pair opened, and then another. Soon they speckled the darkness, all watching, none friendly. I started to speak, but Mr. Howard released my hand and his wife’s, stepping ahead of us lightly.

“Good evening, Paul,” he said brightly. “I missed you at the club last week.”

Without seeming to move, the eyes turned toward him, and he bore their weight with patience. Without seeing it, I knew his smile never wavered, and I realized it meant less than nothing. When he struck, he would smile just like this.

Abruptly, the yellow eyes closed, and we continued on our way.

“De Lange’s a good sort, but you do need to be firm with him,” he said aside to me, and I choked back an incredulous laugh.

Some while later, it could have been ten minutes, it could have been a month, we came to a door different from anything that would be seen in a fine New York house. It was from another age, cut from rough boards and bound in coarse iron. It stretched to the very tops of the branches, and it seemed to me it would take a dozen men to move it. It had come from some other place, just as the forested hall had, and Mrs. Howard stepped up to it briskly.

“I am Mrs. Henry Howard, and I rule here,” she said clearly, and before her words alone, the door split along an invisible center seam and opened to the stone hall beyond, as primitive as the door itself. Along either wall were chairs where Mrs. Howard’s contemporaries and the other ladies of her coven were seated, each with her husband behind her. It should have made the men appear as footmen or menservants. With their hands on their wives’ shoulders and the way they regarded the hall and each other, the effect was more one of knights or perhaps guard dogs, alert at their posts, aware that there was only one important thing in that entire place. Mrs. Howard gave me one last fierce look before she and Mr. Howard went to join them, leaving me with the other girls in white at the rear of the hall by the door.

It was not fire that lit that place (perhaps they did not want to give Mr. Howard and those like him the advantage), but something like cold moonlight from above. It put our faces into peculiar shadow, gave our dresses a hard glitter. My pearls looked soft and bruisable, as if they could be crushed between two fingers, eaten, perhaps, like grapes. There were faces in that crowd I recognized, the girl who had coughed up her voice in the basin, whose name I’d learned belatedly was Charlotte Jameson, and Amelia Wagner, who had bloodied the face of some fortune hunter when he came close to her sister. There was Tilly Manchester, her eyes so glassy I wondered if she’d been drugged. I knew them, but we all knew we were in this place alone, and alone we waited.

Finally, as if on some signal, Mrs. de Lange rose, resplendent in her burgundy gown stitched with gold, citrine glinting at her ears and in her dark hair. When she gestured, a man in old-fashioned livery stepped forward and pulled a small leather book from his pocket.

“Miss Iphigenia Marshall,” he cried, and first of all of them, I set out across the floor.

It seems a simple thing to walk the length of a hall to greet a woman and her husband, but once again, the trick was to do it perfectly. I walked with the weight of a thousand pearls on my shoulders and the dignity of Howard House balanced on my head. I wasn’t afraid, exactly, but there was a tension like fear in my belly, something close to excitement. It was a performance, and I was good at it, good enough that my step stayed slow no matter how close I got to the front of the hall, and my face still, and my train pulled as straight as an arrow behind me.

I gained the front of the hall, and Mrs. de Lange took me by my bare hand.

“I do so hope you scream a little, my dear,” she said in the warmest tones, and she pressed an enameled box with four slits in the underside to my wrist. When she pulled a lever back and let it snap forward again, four sharp razors flashed out from the bottom of the box, scoring my wrist with the precision of a whip crack. The blades were so sharp it barely hurt at first, but the shock and offense at being wounded would have made me cry out if I was not ready for it. Mielle had told me what to expect. Mrs. Howard had showed me the marks on her own wrist, made with a razor blade.

I was ready, and I only smiled as Mrs. de Lange put a golden bowl under my wrist to gather the blood. Seeing my own blood (not Ginny’s blood, not Howard blood for all that I wore their face) hit the gold dizzied me, but I kept breathing, in and out, forcing myself steady until I could breathe naturally once again. I stayed on my feet. The darkness crowding the edge of my vision receded. Mrs. de Lange looked disappointed, but she gestured for a woman to come forward and clean my wrist before leading me off, and the next girl was called.

I watched in a peculiar state of calm as each girl came and was blooded in her turn. One or two dripped crystal tears, others froze in a rage that told me they’d never been struck a single time in their lives, but they all suffered it, and then we stood, a few shy of twenty, below the dais with our wrists bandaged and our blood ringing in our ears.

When we were all called and gathered, Mrs. de Lange stepped forward, the golden bowl with all our blood mixed in it in her hands.

“We are well-come, and we are well-gathered,” she said, her smooth charity donor’s voice ringing softly off the walls. “We have married well, and every woman knows, we rule here.”

“We rule here,” came the answering chorus from the sides, and she smiled.

“The years have turned, and we have come to the White Ball again, which, God and all his angels willing, will be followed by the Rose Ball, and the Scarlet Ball on the shortest night before the sun returns. Our daughters are grown, and may they find husbands worthy of their beauty and their will. Drink to it.”

I almost looked around for a blandly handsome waiter with a tray of champagne flutes. Of course the strongest they would give us would be ginger beer or punch, but this time, there wasn’t even anything like that. Instead it was Mrs. de Lange tipping the bowl in her hands, and the blood, our blood, dripping down onto the floor.