The Housekeepers(63)

“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.