46. The Masquerade
Chapter 46
The Masquerade
And so our hours and days passed in pleasure and joy; and if that joy was altered somewhat by the bitter knowledge of the impermanence of our paradise, that color of wistful melancholy only made it all the sweeter: it made my every smile at Victor’s savage swagger, as he regaled me with promises of our impending triumph over Gremio, into a moment of effervescent evanescence; every sensual, lingering caress seemed all too brief. Stopping only to eat and drink, and to wash—once in a while for Victor to instruct Absolon on matters of needed supplies and preparations—we made love so many times and in so many ways that it became to me one long night of pleasure, both our love and our mutual desire as deep and as endless as that interminable dark night of his quiet, private world in the heart of the earth.
Our world, now.
He met my bold curiosity with his quick, subversive mind and impossible endurance: such a strong, overpowering lover, sensual and insatiable, and yet for all the ruggedness of his muscles and scars always so gentle a touch, as if his own brute force held no interest for him when he could overmaster me with a devilish gentleman’s finesse, fulfilling all my fantasies and fondest erotic fears of his art as I began to recognize the sensation of his shadow slipping into the heat between my shivering thighs, and I was made helpless again in his powerful arms with a single kiss—a touch—a thought.
And when we both were fulfilled for a while he always held me close, the mild caress of his scarred hands at once comforting and possessive, and as I drifted into strange dreams in the protection of his arms I saw him once more as some manner of black knight: I thought that our shared heartbeat stirred in him some distant memory of nobility, left behind ages ago in the grit and hoof-beaten dust of a highwayman’s long road, and that in his grim, wayworn chivalry he would shield me forever from all the ills of the worlds above and below.
Sometimes he slept together with me, while other times I thought he lay awake watching me, holding me safe; sometimes I spent what seemed like long, luxuriant hours merely sitting or lying with him in silence, warm in the loving assurance of his embrace, and that was enough—that was perhaps my favorite of all.
And even those few, brief occasions that we were not together, I felt him within me yet, as vividly as if we had never parted. I wondered at first if I had conceived, but he said I would not unless together we willed it to be so, and I did not inquire any further. I was more thoroughly possessed by his shadow—and he by mine, I sensed somehow, obscurely and yet beyond doubt—than ever had I been before, and the thought itself made my heart feel full.
It was not until the day before the masquerade ball—the eve of the Eve of the Equinox, that Hell decreed would stand for an early Walpurgisnacht, and become thus Victor’s scheduled doomsday—that he left me for longer than I was accustomed. Had I not awakened to his parting caress I might have slept on, so filled with his art that I would not have known he had even gone.
Instead, I waited.
I arose and washed myself, slipped into my white cotton nightdress, and sat on the edge of our bed watching the fire in the hearth. Though the fabric was thin, I was not cold, and I pulled the soft fur coverlet around me not for its warmth but for its touch, and for Victor’s dark, familiar scent. This was the nightdress I had rescued from my cold chamber in Hargrave’s house, I thought to myself, in the sunless hours of that fateful morning. Both it and the rest of the clothes I took had been moved from the bedsheet bundle left on the table in the great hall to the drawers of this bedroom—when or by whom, I could not say—and I thought, from the look of the bookshelf that stood before the ore-streaked stone wall, that at least some of the books from that same bundle had been placed upon its shelves.
And yet, for all of that, I had noted so far no sign of the broken hairpin-box that I held so dear.
A foolish thought. I pulled the fur coverlet closer.
I had not asked after that box, because I knew it to be so small a thing beside all the care and pleasure and love Victor lavished upon me, and now in his absence I knew I ought not to let it occupy my thoughts. I had him now, I told myself, and he had me, and therefore I ought not to mourn an early token meant to merely symbolize and suggest what I had now in itself?—
And it was in that moment that I became aware of the familiar sound of Victor’s Hessian boots on stone, and I felt the somber set of my mouth warm into a smile.
He looked as proper a gentleman as could be managed, striding into the chamber and forcing the door shut behind him with the heel of his boot: he was wearing his top hat, his pocket-watch, his black leather gloves, and all the rest—this black cloak moved differently, like the one he had worn to Crystal Palace Park; a modern garment cut to the current style—and while he wore it all well, the fashion of the day suiting and even flattering his massive form, at the same time it only served to remind of his own encroaching wildness. The genteel veneer of society could conceal the jagged scars and the crude tattoos, but it could not hide the solid command of his step—the flex of heavy muscle beneath the fine fabric as he hefted easily in his arms a large object I could not quite discern for the dimness of the room—the flicker in the firelight of the dark, burning eyes beneath their thick black brows.
“I find a certain measure of irony,” his deep voice rumbled; he was standing before the fire now, his broad back to me, and I thought that he seemed to be placing something upon the mantel, “in the fact that the finest German clockmaker in London is, himself, so nearly incapable of keeping track of time. Were it not for my reminders ,” his voice darkened for a moment, “he would never have finished it by now. But his work is the most masterful I have yet seen this century.”
A little thrill of his art rushed through my body as he stepped aside, the candles on the mantel flaring to life and then half-calming into shivering flame. When I saw what he had set between them, I caught my breath—and then I rose to my feet, letting the fur coverlet fall to the rumpled bedclothes behind me, and I walked to him in my nightdress in a kind of tremulous disbelief, my melancholy over the hairpin-box driven from my mind.
“A clock, sir,” I breathed, tracing a curious fingertip along the elegant carvings of its dark wooden case. “I had only mentioned once that I did not know how to tell the time down here, and you?—”
He grunted quietly in answer before I finished, the sound muffled by the mask and the scarf he wore over it when he walked abroad. “I commissioned it the next day.”
Saying nothing more, I wrapped my arms around him, pressing my cheek to the black silk damask of his waistcoat to feel the warmth of his powerful chest: he was so fully, finely clothed, and I was scarcely dressed at all, but not for a moment did I feel ashamed. He held me close with his right arm, his leather-gloved hand stroking my long, free hair—I had not for some time now had occasion to prefer the restriction of a bun—and only then did I realize, idly, that he still carried some kind of parcel in his left hand. For the moment it was of no matter to me at all: at his gentle, possessive touch I embraced him more tightly yet, stroking and stroking his broad back with a strange, sudden desperation, as if the caress of my small hand against his brutal body could somehow stop time for us.
“For you,” his deep voice rumbled through me. “To welcome you home.”
I smiled wistfully against his chest, trying to hold myself steady through the warm tears gathering at the corners of my eyes.
“Let it remind you,” he continued, “that after the last dance tomorrow night has finished, and the final note has rung, we are coming home again. And then we will have all the time in the world.”
“I know, sir.” My voice cracked. “Thank you. I know we will.”
For a long time—fourteen minutes, by the hands of that beautiful clock on the mantel—we only held each other, his heartbeat against my ear and the crackle of the hearth the only sounds.
“In the meantime,” he pressed the parcel in his left hand lightly against my side, “I also bought you this.”
I pulled away from him only far enough to look into his dark eyes and then take the parcel into my hands, and unwrapping it with a combination of care and eager curiosity I found myself holding in one hand an exquisite mask in what I recognized to be the old Venetian style—a work of art in shades of shining black and silver, lace-like in its opulent detail, clever and delicate and yet appealingly strange, almost vaguely grotesque—and in the other hand the most magnificent dress I thought that I had ever seen: the most sensual fabric I had ever touched—the most wantonly indulgent excess of the work of the mind and hand that I had ever owned.
“Oh—sir—” I began, stuttered, and fell silent, struck entirely dumb, and for a moment I only watched as he removed and set aside his hat and his scarf, releasing the latch of the steel mask beneath the latter; he unfastened his black cloak and threw it casually over a chair, unmasked and down to his white shirt-sleeves in the firelight.
My trembling hand set the Venetian mask on the mantel with the clock, and I wiped my damp palms twice on the thin white cotton of my nightdress before I held the gown he gave me up to my body for size.
“Well?” he grunted, and I could hear the warmth and pride in his voice as clearly as I could see the smile change the brooding darkness of his rugged, handsome face. “Does it suit you?”
“I—think it’s my size?—”
Amusement flickered in his black eyes as he drew closer, his leather-gloved hand touching the smallest part of my waist in a light, massaging caress.
“I know it’s your size,” he moved to stand at my back, never breaking his touch, such a vast and solid shadow as he bent his head down to whisper in my ear from behind that I felt the light of the fire change, “because I know every inch of you, my Elizabeth. By heart. I have never picked up an artist’s chisel, but even were I stricken blind I could sculpt you in marble by touch alone—if only my hands had the patience to part from you so long.”
The hiss of my own indrawn breath seemed too loud in my ears as his hand slipped slowly between my body and the impossible black dress I held, the heat of his palm spreading over my stomach until my spine shivered against his hard chest.
I let my head tilt back against him, closing my eyes with a teasing smile. “What a braggart you’ve become, sir.”
“You prefer a humble man?”
“Not for all the world.”
“Good.” He pressed a warm kiss to my neck, and I felt his voice rumble through the pulse in my throat. “Because you inflame me entirely. You bring my every excessive tendency to life.”
“I don’t even want to think about how much you must have spent—the dress, sir; I’ve never seen anything like it—the mask—the clock on the mantel?—”
“Then don’t think. Feel. Do they bring you joy, Elizabeth?”
“Yes, sir, with all my heart,” I said without hesitation, leaning back into his strength as I let my hand settle on the back of his where it rested on my hip, my fingertips in the gaps between his black leather knuckles. “Yes. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You do not find that the dress lacks for anything?”
“Lacks for anything? How could it?”
“Consider it carefully, my Elizabeth. Be discerning. You will not offend me.”
“All right, sir,” I replied; his gloved hands were idly stroking my hips from behind, and I felt a kind of anticipation in him as he watched me hold out the dress in both hands before me, turning it this way and that to study it more carefully in the light of the candles and the hearth. It shimmered as I did so, the fine black fabric shot through with silver thread: there was a modern elegance to the cut, an understanding of the present fashion for a woman’s silhouette and yet at once an entire rejection of prim restraint. I thought its hem likely short enough to flash my ankles as I walked, and the neckline was low, almost daringly bare, framed in the most subtle sculptural lacework of roses and vines.
But I knew he was awaiting something, some evidence of a critical eye, and I racked my brains to develop an opinion beyond sheer gratitude and awe.
“I cannot lie: I can find only incredible beauty in it,” I said at last, “and no fault at all. But if I must —if I were pressed?—”
“Continue.”
“I suppose, with the neckline as it is, for the sake of balance it ought to have something to adorn that bare expanse?—”
I stopped, distracted: his hands had left my hips, and I thought that I heard the sound of something soft—his gloves, perhaps—falling to the floor, and then the rustle of what I took to be the chain of his pocket-watch behind me.
“Yes,” he replied abruptly, quietly. “Continue.”
“But I must make a point to emphasize,” I continued, “that there is no necessity of?—”
I stopped again. He was drawing my long hair aside from the back of my neck; I instinctively closed my eyes, readying myself for a kiss—and I felt instead a mild weight settle gently over my upper chest, and the brush of his scarred fingers against my nape as he fastened the clasp.
My incredulous hand flew to my chest to touch it, my eyes opening at once as I tucked in my chin as far as it would go to stare down at the necklace he had laid on my breast, glowing in the flame light with the luster of ocean pearls, flashing with the fire of cut diamonds.
Then I turned to that dark, grim man behind me, and with the dress draped over my shoulder I threw my arms around him, rising up on the balls of my bare feet because I could not bear to wait the half-second for him to bend down lower, and I kissed him, kissed him with abandon, as if in the wild surge of my love for him I had finally gone fully mad.
And when the fateful evening came it was in that scintillating, impossible dress, the necklace adorning my bare décolletage and the Venetian mask over my face, that I rode into the setting sun on the Eve of the Equinox, sitting side-saddle before my highwayman on his great black horse.
The heavy hooves rang slow and hollow on the cobblestones of the crowded London streets, ceaseless in their steady rhythm. Traffic parted before us. With this spell we will pass them all by unnoticed , Victor had told me when he lifted me onto his steed’s back, as if they are no more than sleepwalking ghosts . Yet I could not help but feel now that we were the ghosts ourselves, passing down the city streets unseen and unheard, my new finery catching the last sinking rays of the light of day.
A final flash, and the sun was gone.
Victor held the reins casually in his left hand, but his right arm clasped me a little tighter and I leaned back more fully against him, my glance meeting his before I turned to gaze forward again.
Never did I doubt that Victor chose his costume in part because it allowed him to be armed. Beyond the iron dagger he always wore at his thigh, his sword and his pistol were to protect me, I knew: a notion equal parts consoling and ominous. And yet all pragmatic concerns aside, he made so natural a highwayman—in his tricorn hat and his long double-breasted coat with its fine silver details, clad all in black but for the red robber’s bandana that covered his steel mask—that I could not help but wonder if somewhere in time, a hundred years ago when the style was newer and the roads were more lawless, he had worn such clothes and weapons before.
I remembered when he set out in so desperate a fury to seek for the herb to save me, and I went to the window in my fever and saw him ride down the mired road past Hargrave’s house in the rain; I remembered his black stallion’s ember-red eyes in the dark. And as twilight fell now over the city streets and the first lamplighters began their night’s work, I tried to catch a glimpse of the eyes of the horse we rode as I waited, wondering.
A languid shift of the reins in Victor’s left hand and we turned down a narrower street, into the dark beginnings of the gathering fog of the night, parting a loitering crowd who stepped aside for us in instinct without knowing why.
“I don’t like it here, dear,” I watched a man with overlong whiskers concede to the woman on his arm as they stepped up to the pavement. They glanced up to me with pale faces, then through me, as if I were not there at all. “This place feels wrong,” the man went on. “Haunted. Let’s go home.”
I wondered, idly, what became of them after we passed them by.
The rolling swagger of the strong back beneath us continued on, easy and inexorable in its rhythm; the slow, hollow hoof-strikes never faltered.
How cold the streets looked in that grey faerie-hour, the passersby shivering in their huddled cloaks and shawls. I knew the look of a cold night, even when it did not touch my skin: I was warmed by Victor’s presence behind me, possessed so fully by his shadowy art.
My lace-gloved hand tightened where it rested on his thigh, and I felt the powerful muscles flex beneath my palm in response to my touch.
“Not far now,” his low voice rumbled.
Soon the fog deepened at our side, or so I thought—but it eddied around our black mount’s hooves despite the stillness of the air, and I knew that I heard dim, distant voices, and that I saw fantastical faces form in the mist and then dissipate again. Behind us, through the eyes of my Venetian mask and far past Victor’s massive shoulder, I saw haloed lamps in the darkness that burned too blue for oil or kerosene.
“ They can see us?” I whispered, and he slowly nodded his head.
“Our fellow revelers,” I heard his deep voice in the back of my mind, “in town for the masquerade. Some from miles beyond the city, some from many miles more below it. London is alive tonight.”
A couple on a silent grey mare rode beside us—her hooves made no sound on the cobblestones, and I did not notice we had such company at all until I saw Victor bow his head in an acknowledging nod. They looked to me an ordinary lady and gentleman, disguised only in simple black domino masks, and they smiled at me as I imitated Victor’s greeting. I looked ahead then, thinking I ought not to risk inviting conversation, but soon I became curious, and thought to endeavor to better focus my Sight upon them?—
When I turned back, they were as thoroughly absent as if they had never been there at all.
“Assessing the competition,” Victor pressed into the back of my mind, his amusement clear in his tone. “Some of the contestants are quite ambitious.”
I willed my words to him silently in turn. “I don’t understand.”
“Most of our fellow revelers are disprites, masquerading as mortals for a single uncanny evening: at once a pastiche and a parody of the society of man. An entertaining and at times insightful occasion, once you understand their humor. Some of the costumes will be broad satire, some painstakingly well-observed, such as that couple riding beside us. They seem to have found us impressive, yet ultimately no threat to their claim upon the prize.”
“Because—thanks to your art, I shouldn’t doubt—they took us for disprites in disguise? And then they thought themselves to look more convincingly human than do we?”
“Precisely.”
It was not for any purposeful lack of disclosure on Victor’s part that he had told me little of the masquerade until now: he had offered to do so, in our long night together underground, but I told him to wait until the hour itself had come rather than spend our time on things which would change nothing: no matter the nature of the masquerade, I would endure it with him. Whatever it would take to play my part in our revenge against Gremio, I would do it, and with relish.
The rest was mere details.
“At the stroke of midnight,” he continued, “the champion of the masquerade is declared, and tradition is such that the winners call for the rest to divest themselves of illusion. Then the masks fall: a rather spectacular sight. All that once appeared to be nearly human—the mundane, the beautiful, and the grotesque alike—vanishes into the uncanny variety and monstrosity of the other world.”
“I should like to see it, sir.”
“Indeed. And so you will. And Gremio will be found and banished before that hour. Before midnight strikes.”
Before midnight strikes. His words echoed in my mind as we turned another corner, so deep now in the darkening London fog that I was scarcely aware of what lay before us until the moment we passed beneath the arch of the cemetery gates.
From somewhere behind us came the sound of a distant clock tolling the hour.
Seven chimes.
The revelers would drop their mortal masks five hours from now.
And if we did not banish Gremio before the end of the masquerade, the tolling of the midnight bell would become Victor’s death-knell.
I said nothing. In the darkness I thought that we passed the dim hulk of a grassy mound to the side of the lane, and I wondered if I saw or imagined twisted trees on its crown, still naked skeletons of the passing winter as they reached their brittle fingers toward the road. I leaned in closer against Victor, resting my hand on his broad chest, caring nothing for who or what might be watching as my palm warmed against that strong, grave, steady heartbeat I had come to know so well.
His right hand tightened on my hip as a new, slow surge of his fortifying shadow spread through me, rising through my marrow and my blood, its tingling thrill stimulating both my skin and my Sight: not until now had I noticed the wan blue glow that limned every headstone and looming monument—some bare and solemn, some entwined with creeping ivy—as we passed down the cemetery road. I could not help but think that we were riding into the fog, toward some unseen source of it all—and that someone had lighted the way for us.
I stayed silent as I willed my voice into his mind. “Do you think it a trap, sir?”
He grunted softly, the sound muffled by his bandana-covered mask and the closeness of the black mist.
“The ghost-light may be merely decorative—this is a festive occasion, after all,” he replied, and I sensed his grim amusement. “Or someone may be helping guide us on our way.”
“Someone who knows us to be mortal?”
“Most likely. They can see in this fog yet more clearly than can I.”
“Fortunato…”
“Possibly. Or Fortunato may have turned, in some fit of caprice, and presumes now to help us to a fresh pair of graves.”
“Then he ought to know that I’d rather share one, were it to come to that.”
I heard a deep, subtle rumble in the back of his throat, and in the sensation of his sorcery within me I thought that I could feel the swelling and filling of his heart. Foiled by my mask and his, I longed so suddenly and desperately to kiss him again, and yet I knew that now it could not be. Perhaps not even until the masks fell at midnight.
Midnight.
My head must have bowed; I found myself watching the road before us, idly noting the faint fire-glow of the stallion’s eyes in the strange, dim light: the kind of eldritch detail which would have fascinated me only a moment ago, but was now of no meaning beside my swift monomania on a single, terrible thought:
I wondered if Victor and I had already kissed for the last time.
Surely he had sensed my melancholy: his hand moved from my hip to hold me by the waist; his shadow closed in, more profound than the darkness of the cemetery lane.
He knew. He felt it as acutely as did I.
I laid my hand on his, holding him as he held me, my grip not fainting or weak but firm, defiant, strong.
“Maybe someday, sir,” I amended my former statement, “we’ll come to that shared tomb. But not tonight.”
With a wordless call of command and a shift of his weight he urged the great black stallion into a run, his shadow surging, the ghost-glow of the gravestones rushing past us and the nighttime fog of London in my flying hair.
We did not slow until the cemetery was behind us; before us was so dark a bank of fog that I would have seen nothing at all were it not for the pale blue glow of a single point of uncanny candlelight, unextinguished somehow despite the sooty black dew that had begun to settle over the city like a dripping pall. The strange light lurched aside, then halted, wavered, and lurched again—carried by a drunk, I thought, stumbling for the door of the next pub, though I could not make out the figure’s shape nor face—but to my surprise, Victor called out toward the blue candle.
“Two from the heath,” Victor said, halting our mount’s walk with a subtle pull of the reins.
“From the heath, eh?” The voice seemed to come from the light, which steadied itself somewhat, and I thought of the will o’ the wisp Victor summoned at Crystal Palace Park. “Thought you were out-of-towners. Lot of you this year.”
“I do not doubt. Which way to the stable?”
“Down left a ways. That horse real ?”
“As real as you and I.”
“Ha! Fair enough. Here, I’ll take him. Worthy costumes, by the way—who knows? You two might stand a chance at the title.”
Victor dismounted first—a remarkably easy, athletic motion for a man of his size—and I balanced on the great black saddle before he helped me down, taking me into his strong arms for a moment before my little shoes touched the slick pavement. He gave the reins to the outstretched hand of the man who held the pale blue candle—for he was a man after all, or at least a disprite in the shape of one, though his face was distorted by the uncanny shadows—and I saw before us the light of an opening door.
It looked like the heavy wooden door of a shabby old pub, wet and blackened by the mist, and try as I might I neither saw the movement of shadows nor heard the sound of revelry within.
“The masquerade ball is in there ?” I willed the words silently into Victor’s mind.
He nodded slowly, taking my hand in his, our fingers entwining in the narrow gap between us.
“Lady and gentleman,” the man with the pale blue candle called out of the fog, and I heard the sound of hooves on cobblestones slowly fade into the night as he led Victor’s black stallion away, “welcome to Walpurgisnacht.”
The door was wide ajar now, and a disconcertingly featureless, fiery glow emanated from within—but Victor did not hesitate, and so neither did I.
“Hold onto me,” he whispered, his voice no more than a low vibration in the air, “as tightly as you need.”
With clasped hands we stepped over the threshold, and I thought that I had stepped into a vivid, fervid dream.
Inside was no dingy pub, but a ballroom of such vastness and strange splendor as I had never imagined, let alone seen in waking life.
My eyes squinted as if burnt, as if this were no sight for a mortal woman to behold: there were too many crystal chandeliers shimmering with fire, and too many grand, sinuous staircases that wound down to the bone-white dance-floor, descending out of nothing—I knew somehow that there was no upper story, only the catwalk ledge along the high rim of the ballroom, its drip-castle Rococo balustrades hung with long garlands of early summer flowers full-blown in their glory months too soon. A reedy, hissing flourish of music rippled through the air, impossibly baroque, notes upon fevered notes whirling from some unseen harpsichord played by hands with too many fingers, and I thought that if I listened I would go insane—I turned my head to the side, as if that would quiet the sound somehow, and my eyes found a corner table laden with a sumptuous, bountiful feast. There was a roast pig (or so I first assumed) on a silver platter with a carving-knife ready in its haunch, but the longer I looked, the less porcine the charred jaws that held the apple seemed—I hoped the thing on the platter was a pig—I turned away, watching with a terrible fascination as dancers spun beneath those bonfire chandeliers, nowhere safe to rest my eyes nor my mind.
Not until Victor squeezed my hand was I certain that I felt myself exhale. I squeezed back, belatedly remembering his words and gripping him for a harbor in the midst of this extravagant, madly roiling sea; his shadow spread into me, steadying me, slowing my shuddering heart, and with it came the new, secret terror of what would happen—here, before this teeming ballroom of uncanny revelers—if the shivering thrill of that dark art rose to my head, or sank to my thighs…
“They tend to be rather behind the times,” Victor’s low voice rumbled in the back of my mind. He was comforting me, and I knew it; he was drawing me back to the world. “Not current on recent trends.”
A pale woman with an immense bouffant and a strange beauty-mark passed us by on the arm of a man with a curling white wig; she took an unusual interest in us, her gentle eyes lingering too long, and not until her attention turned at last back to her mate did I think that I glimpsed a long tail trailing amid the cascade of her gown, and her bouffant became before my eyes a writhing pile of smooth, thready snakes.
I wondered who she was and why she had lingered so, and whether I was as unsettling to her as she to me, and if she could have been one of Victor’s daughters or great-granddaughters—or one of Gremio’s spies.
“I do not believe I know her,” Victor’s voice intoned for me alone; I did not know if he could at last see into my mind, or if our thoughts on the matter merely ran alike. “None of them are as they seem tonight. Nor am I. Nor are you. And even were they to See through my spell and to know you—no matter what rumor of your art from that night at Crystal Palace Park has spread among the hollow hills or sunk down to the warring cities below, they still would not know you entirely. You were dangerous then, but you are far more dangerous now.”
Behind my mask, I smiled.
“Yes,” he continued, “watch for some sign of Gremio—I am certain you need no reminder of revenge!—and but for that, for such time as we spend in this place, put all else from your mind.” The touch of his warm, rough thumb was tender as it stroked the back of my hand. “This is our night—your night—as much as it is theirs.”
My heart leapt: with a last florid trill the music fell away into silence, and the myriad dancers on the main floor seemed all to pause and settle into each other’s hold, and Victor led me by the hand into the throng: I strode with him past the feasting tables and the loiterers laughing and mingling in the back of the hall, between the couples waiting for the next stirring of the harpsichord as they parted politely for us—but when I glanced behind I caught them watching us, watching me , until (in perfect impersonation of human nature) they at once turned back to each other as if nothing had ever been amiss.
Victor stopped with me in the center of the crowded dance floor, drawing me in close, bending his head down until I felt the hard steel form of his bandana-covered mask press lightly against my ear.
“Do you wonder still why they watch you,” I heard him breathe, his deep voice so low it made me lean my head in against his to listen, “my Elizabeth?”
The flourishing, rasping strains of the harpsichord rose again—slower now, but no less mad, accompanied by a few string players—and from my new vantage point I could nearly make out the musicians on the raised stage until Victor led me into a gentle, swooning turn, and I focused all of my mind upon following him through a series of smooth steps I did not know.
“Now,” I whispered in reply, “I imagine they watch because they are either amazed or amused by my audacity to call these movements of mine dancing , when so clearly I have never attended a ball before.”
“Have you not?”
“No, sir. An orphan living in a library is not generally invited to such things.”
I heard a low sound in his chest; I felt his arms clasp me closer: one hand still held my own, drawing me with him; the other rested on the most sensitive part of my waist, its intimate pressure guiding me to follow. “Then every ball they held without you was the poorer for it.”
“How you flatter me, sir.”
“I do not flatter,” he intoned quietly, the rumble of his voice warm and low, “nor have I even begun to praise you. Other than your poor assessment of your dancing , why do you imagine these revelers watch you?”
“Because they sense a mortal shadow?”
“Perhaps. Yet there are others here who have affected such a sensation, with some degree of accuracy, as part of their disguise. No, I think, upon reflection, that I have after all costumed you poorly.”
“Poorly?”
“Your beauty, my Elizabeth.” Something in his whispered voice arrested me, pricking up the fine hairs on the back of my neck: I would have missed a step if not for the gentle, insistent guidance of his hand on my waist; his other hand released mine only for him to touch the underside of my chin, beneath the edge of the fine mask, and I raised my eyes to meet his. “Your beauty is too uncanny for this place—this night—this earth.”
“Oh… sir.”
“They ape the mundane,” he took my hand again, his slow, muscular turns growing in power as he led me, the music swelling from the stage, “but I could not bring myself to dull you; even your mask hides none of your grace. They watch not because they think you human, but because for the occasion you are not human enough : some fine faerie who could not deign to dim her sheen, unbound from the relentless laws of man. My brave, brilliant Elizabeth,” he continued, his whispering voice filling with the fury of his ardor, “as resplendent in her radiance as the high midnight moon: may the honor of your first dance be mine?”
If I cared for custom, I would have noted then that, even in my inexperience, I knew he ought to have asked before we began, and that I ought to have cared that he did not—but we lived in a thousand sins, from the innocent improprieties of our twinned hearts to our machinations against Hell itself, and one more transgression was the happy price of that moment of defiant joy.
“It was yours since before we stepped into this ballroom, sir.” With my free hand I reached up to the side of his face, touching that narrow gap of dark olive skin and coarse side-whiskers between his robber’s bandana and the black brim of his tricorn hat; I watched with a desperate, aching heart as my mild caress caused those burning eyes to close, to indulge in a single, stolen moment of contented peace. “It was yours since that bleak midnight at Witch’s Corner when first you took my hand.”
I felt his broad chest swell as my hand drifted down to rest against the double breast of his long black coat, feeling the rumble of his deep, slow growl against my palm.
And there I let it remain as we danced, as I moved with him, as beneath the blazing chandeliers he dared to sweep me breathlessly away through the teeming peril of the inhuman crowd. I cannot say that he was especially light on his feet —it would take more than airy caprice to drive that solid, massive frame—yet he had his own muscular grace, and yoked with his unerring anticipation of musical time he moved with a formidable, sensual power: in the midst of that crowd there was a forbidden thrill to the friction and the heat of his body against mine, a strange intimacy to how the sound and the stirring of all the other couples around us seemed to fade away like ghosts until I had a vision of us dancing alone in an old silent ballroom, two human hearts in the empty vastness of the night.
In a moment the vision faded as the music from the stage fell and then rose once more; I knew that I needed to be watchful, to scan the crowd for signs of our enemy, and yet for all its danger I wished that that night, that dance would never end.
It was yours since that bleak midnight at Witch’s Corner when first you took my hand , I thought again, my own words echoing in my mind: in the nights and the days after our escape through the underground— our first escape from Gremio together , I reminded myself—when the memory of that grim, foreboding masked man from the spiritualist shop haunted my mind, scarcely could I have imagined that in mere months I would be in his arms in the center of the beauty and terror of a monsters’ ball, the gilded chandeliers hanging from the high frescoed ceilings burning like makeshift witches’ fires from every Faustian fable of Walpurgisnacht?—
And then, before my eyes, the chandeliers dimmed and smoked, their fires dying.
The harpsichordist struck a poor note, then another, and above the heads of the slowing dancers I thought that I saw him first pause on his bench and then suddenly stand.
Victor’s hands gripped possessively, protectively around my hand and my waist as we stopped, his eyes alive as I saw his gaze scan the crowd and then fix on the stage. I tried to rise onto my toes to follow his line of sight, but two tall couples had come to a stop directly in front of us, and I felt as if I were sinking into a confused mire of incredulous, murmuring voices and the scents of other women’s perfume.
“Hear ye, hear ye,” I heard an exasperated voice sigh loudly from the stage, the words of its proclamation entirely at odds with its disaffected monotone, “ladies and gentlemen, on this joyous Walpurgisnacht I am pleased to present the moment you’ve all been waiting for?—”
Sardonic laughter erupted from several places in the crowd. A woman’s voice from somewhere behind me loudly advised the speaker to speak for himself; a man somewhere to my left grumbled his displeasure at the music stopping for what he presumed would amount to an advertisement.
“I am here,” the entirely dispassionate speaker continued, his ennui seeming only to grow with every word, “to proudly present an announcement from a most noble figure—the one who has made the timing of tonight’s singular occasion possible: His Most Esteemed and Exalted Grace, the one and only?—”
Victor gripped me closer yet, and it was not until then that I realized my damp hand was clutching at the breast of his long black coat as I waited the long, terrible half-second until the voice from the stage finished its droning, superlative phrase:
“—Mr. Gregory Emory, Duke of Tartarus.”
“Who?” a thin voice to my side piped up.
The exasperated voice from the stage sighed again:
“Gremio.”