Miss de Vries moved fast, chains clinking lightly as she held her headdress in place. Alice hurried after her, watching how the dress moved. It had an armored structure around the waist, and yet it still flowed with a ferocious sort of grace. “I wasn’t sure whether to say anything, Madam. But, knowing how many people will be here tonight, I thought perhaps it was best...” Winnie would have approved of that, she thought, feeling sick. She was following the plan perfectly. But it made her feel as if her rib cage were being squeezed. Her nerves were dancing in her skin.
Miss de Vries’s tone was hard. “I’ll be the judge of that.” She was walking so quickly, faster than Alice could have expected, hurtling out of the room and toward the stairs.
When Alice had told her, Miss de Vries had clenched her hands, digging her nails into her palms, as if to punish herself. As if she expected treachery in her household, as if she’d been waiting for it all along. She’d hastened to her dressing table, yanking open the drawers, rummaging inside, searching, realizing what was missing.
She’d turned to Alice, face pale. “You’re right. It’s gone.”
She was angry, but the anger was operating somewhere deeper than Alice had seen before, something right down at the base of the bone. She could hear it in the roughness of Miss de Vries’s voice. “I cannot stand it,” she said. “Being preyed on like this.”
Alice said, feeling a prickling in her spine, “I should go and fetch Mr. Shepherd, Madam. Really, I should have gone to him first...”
It was the right move to make.
“Shepherd is a fool. He won’t fix a thing. These are my personal possessions.” She waved Alice away. “I’m going down to the servants’ hall myself.”
They’d counted on this. They needed her downstairs, dragging the household with her, holding everyone there while the attic doors were softly opened, and Mrs. Bone’s men began trickling downstairs. They hastened toward the lift, and Alice looked over Miss de Vries’s shoulder. Stifling a gasp, she spotted the Janes on a pair of stepladders in one of the adjoining bedrooms. The door must have swung open. They were right on their tiptoes, lifting the huge, brocade drapes clean from their rails.
“I’d best come down with you, Madam,” Alice said, voice rising. “To back you up.” She squeezed herself into the lift, blocking the Janes from view. “Down we go,” she said, breath tight, punching the button.
Later, Mrs. Bone would remember the moment, the fear and the thrill, when her niece came below stairs.
She was sideswiping a bread roll, stuffing it in her mouth, trying to fill her belly before someone shoved another mop and bucket in her direction. Then she felt it, the faintest tremor overhead. Footsteps, quick ones.
Here we go, she thought. It’s happening.
She rubbed her fist over her mouth, wiping away the crumbs. Swallowed. Cook was at the stove, closely encircled by her girls. The other servants were fighting to get past one another, impeded by the constant crush. There was a terrific hullabaloo, a medley of banging tins, shouts, wild bursts of laughter, a good deal of it aided and abetted by her own men in their costumes.
Mrs. Bone took a breath, flexed her fingers, kept her eyes straight ahead.
It was a voice at the door that broke through the din. Low, furious. “Mr. Shepherd.”
He was on the other side of the kitchen, but he turned at once—everyone did. The room slowed as Miss de Vries swept in.
There was a terrible falling-away of noise as Madam came to a standstill, gleaming with jet ornaments, bedecked in black with a gigantic beaded headdress, wearing no sort of mourning they’d ever seen on a lady before.
It was Mr. Shepherd who spoke first, who had to speak. “Madam?” he said, voice going up a note.
Miss de Vries snapped her fingers for someone. “Alice. Who was it?”
And there was young Alice, creeping out from Madam’s shadow. She looked gray in the face. Good girl, thought Mrs. Bone. It was all coming together.
“Mrs. Bone,” said Alice, in an undertone.
“Mrs. Bone,” Miss de Vries repeated. “Where are you?”
You wouldn’t credit it, Mrs. Bone thought. Danny’s little girl having a voice like that. Where did it come from, in such a laced-up body?
“Here, mum,” Mrs. Bone said, raising her hand.
She felt like the Lord himself, the way the crowd parted for her. She ignored the trembling in her hand, looked straight into Miss de Vries’s eyes. They were swampy, impossible to read. Mrs. Bone wondered, Do mine look like that?
“Anything the matter?” she said, bright as a button.
It was about to begin. Mrs. King watched the guests swarming in.
They came in crocodile formation, leaving their opera cloaks and mantles and shawls behind in their motors. They entered with flushed faces, feasting their eyes on the house and on each other. They wore ruffs, headdresses, sleeves the size of hot-air balloons, hoopskirts, powdered wigs, boots with curled toes—really, London knew how to do a costumed ball. In several cases they were already three sheets to the wind. Good, thought Mrs. King.
She had changed into her own costume in a tent in the garden, alongside the other entertainments. A Roman tunic-dress of white cotton, the waist armored and plated in gold, a scarlet cloak thrown over the shoulders. White patent leather boots, gold buckles, toes plated with metal. She echoed when she moved. Mr. Whitman himself had dressed her.
“Can you breathe?” he murmured as he fastened her mask. It was made of copper, light and beveled, the metal warm against her skin.
“Perfectly,” she told him. She didn’t need to look at herself in the glass. She buttoned her gloves, hearing the crack of new leather.
“Our fine empress,” Mr. Whitman said, and he sent her on her way.
The orchestra had taken up position in the ballroom, playing a waltz at full tilt. Buglers and trumpeters stood at the top of the stairs, blasting an intermittent tattoo every time a clutch of guests reached the saloon floor. The band in the street pounded their drums, sounding cowbells and gongs for good measure, and the whole thing made Mrs. King’s head ache. Even better, she thought.
The air was perfumed so thickly with orchids that the scent got stuck in the back of her throat. The gigantic wall of red peonies rose all the way up the stairs.
“Mrs. King?” One of the waiters they’d hired had glided up to her, eyes averted.
“Yes?”
“Message for you, from one of the ladies.”
“Go on.”
“She says, ‘You’ve got something up your little bird.’”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That’s the message, Mrs. King.”
She ignored it: she’d spotted William by the ballroom doors, as straight-backed as a Beefeater, brushed and shimmering in white tie and tails. His eyes were blank. How do we do it? Mrs. King wondered. It almost bewildered her. The bowing and scraping and the chores that made mincemeat of your dignity: carrying trays, answering call bells. You unraveled yourself, polishing butter knives, waiting for something to happen to your life. It had felt like a stomach punch when she turned thirty-five. I’m never, never, ever going backward, she told herself. She would be like a shark: forward motion or death, nothing else.
“Nice stockings,” she said, sidling up to William.
His eyes widened. She wondered if he would struggle to recognize her voice, muffled behind her mask, but he knew her at once. He controlled his expression, but his tone betrayed his astonishment. “Dinah?” he said.
“Don’t make a fuss,” she murmured, standing close. She could feel the heat of him, and she knew he could feel hers.
“What are you doing here?”
“I might need the tiniest little favor from you tonight.”
“You might need... Dinah, what on earth?”
She kept her face on the crowd, her body as motionless as a Roman soldier. “Ask me no questions—I’ll tell you no lies.”
Will was silent, stony faced.
Then he said, voice even lower, “I might be getting out. Madam’s offered me a new job.”
Mrs. King felt the cut. She said coolly, “That doesn’t sound like getting out to me.”
“Getting out of Park Lane, I mean. Going with her to her new household.”
“Her new what?”
“Her married household.”
Mrs. King took a breath. “I see.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice.
“And what do you mean, ‘favor’?” said William with a slight frown.
“What?”
“You said you need a favor.” He half turned to her. She could smell him: tar soap on his neck, the rough scent of wax. “What is it?”
Mrs. King had longed to be free. At liberty to put things straight, to order and corral and bend the world. To make corrections where corrections were required. It made her feel vast and enormous inside, as if her soul were built like a cathedral: a great and mighty project, reaching for the divine. To risk that now would be impossible.
“Never mind,” she said. “You’ve got other things on your mind.”
She turned and left. She didn’t touch him, although she yearned for it. He said something, but she didn’t wait. She didn’t want to hear.
Mrs. King took the grand escalier downstairs, slicing through the crowd in sleek white and gold. The other women were dressed as Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marguerite de Valois, Mary Queen of Scots—beruffed, beribboned, trussed up in lace. There was even an extraordinarily elderly lady who’d come as the great Palmyrene queen, Zenobia herself, stitched from head to toe in green velvet, bearing a gigantic headdress that looked set to snap her neck. She was held up by two men in seal-gray cloaks. Seal gray, thought Mrs. King. It reminded her of men visiting the mews house, men paying calls on girls. It made her clench her fists.
But there was one person there in plain dress. She saw the flash of silvery hair, a gentleman in dark tails, forging his own path through the crowd.
Just as she had predicted.
She was quicker than he was. She met him at the bottom of the stairs, putting a gloved hand out to bar his way. Lawyers never liked to be impeded. They were forever pressing on, counting minutes, charging hours. “Mr. Lockwood,” she said.
She saw him transition out of his private thoughts, arrange his public face. It was so much easier to watch people, to really watch them, when they couldn’t assess your own expression in return.
“To whom do I owe the pleasure?” he said with a perfect and wolfish smile.
She didn’t play with him. “Mrs. King.”
The manners fell away. They simply dissolved. Something hard and brutal entered his face. “Mrs. King,” he said, taking in her gloves, her tunic. His lip curled. Perhaps he remembered her choosing the name. She’d done it on his instructions. “Good heavens.”
She didn’t move. He glanced up the stairs, judging the crush. Down here the noise was growing into a roar, hundreds of people staggering through the porch and entering the front hall. She knew what he was thinking: what can people see, what can people hear, what reason will they construct for this discussion, when will the risks show themselves? She rattled through a similar list herself, every moment.
He smiled, eyes running over her mask. “Miss de Vries mentioned to me that you had made an unwelcome visit. She charged me to keep an eye out for you. I must confess I thought she was overreacting.”
“Foolish of you,” said Mrs. King. “For here I am. You’ve caught me.”
She was Jonah inside the whale. She was stepping right into the heart of the matter.
He snapped his fingers, and two younger men hurried over. They were dressed as dominoes. Clerks, she guessed, his own little entourage. Evidently, Lockwood liked having his own people in the house, too. “Accompany us to the library,” he said to them. “And guard the door.”
They gawked at Mrs. King. Then they saw Mr. Lockwood’s hand touch her elbow, and they squared up.
“I think we should have a private discussion,” Lockwood said.
“I agree,” she replied, lifting her mask.
“May I?” he said. He offered his arm. He wasn’t her equal—he would never countenance that notion—but he could pretend to be civil.
“No,” she said, and they walked upstairs, men at her back—trapped, as intended.