Iona looked terrified, and then she glanced down at Hazel’s blood-streaked apron and looked even more terrified. “I wasn’t sure whether or not to bother you, but…”
After so many hours in the dimness of her slowly dwindling candles, Hazel had to lift her arm to shield her bloodshot eyes from the brightness of the outdoors. “Did you have to bother me, then?” she said. Hazel had gone so long without speaking that her voice had a strange croak to it, and the words were sharper than she’d intended. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for that to come out that way. What do you need, Iona?”
Iona wrung her hands. “It’s just, tonight, I mean, in a few hours. It’s the ball.”
The day was overcast, thick gray clouds hanging low in the sky. This was Scotland. It was supposed to be dreary. So how was it still so bright? Hazel wanted to retreat like a mushroom back to the shadowy dankness. “What ball?”
Iona looked behind her, as if there were another servant who might relieve her of the unpleasant duty of having to relay this information to Hazel. “The, er, the Almonts’ ball.”
Hazel blinked while the information connected inside whatever part of her brain was responsible for that sort of thing. “Oh, bollocks. Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks!”
Iona gazed at her sympathetically. “It’s already past noon, miss.”
“Past noon? Already? How?!” She had worked all night and then all morning, and hadn’t realized it. She stepped outside the dungeon onto the muddy brown path, and one glance at Iona’s face revealed to Hazel how much she reeked. Her hair was matted with a gummy combination of ink and cadaver gore, to say nothing of what was probably beneath her fingernails.
“It’ll be all right,” Iona said, although everything about her expression made it abundantly clear that she thought it would almost probably not be all right. “I told Charles to start the bath.”
“Figures,” Hazel said, taking long strides up the hill and back toward the castle’s main entrance. “The single party of the Season I can’t miss.” Iona scurried behind her. It would be a long and miserable afternoon and, Hazel knew, an even longer and more miserable evening to come.
20
IT TOOK TWO ROUNDS OF WASHING Hazel’s hair with her mother’s fine rose hip bar soap and another hour of brushing it out, but eventually Iona managed to make Hazel look somewhat presentable in time to arrive at Almont House late, but not late enough that it would be considered unforgivably rude. Hazel had let Iona tighten the laces on her boned corset firmly enough to allow her to fit into her blue velvet gown with the lace trim, and even she had to admit—as she glanced at her reflection in the glass of the Almont entry hall—that it suited her. The midnight-blue color made the pink flush of her cheeks look rosy and her eyes look bright, in spite of having stayed up all night.
“Cousin!” Bernard said, bounding to meet her at the entrance to the ballroom and extending his arm. “Welcome, finally. You look, well, marvelous.”
Hazel stifled a yawn by turning it into a polite smile. She rested her gloved hand gracefully on Bernard’s elbow and allowed him to escort her into the room. It was well-lit and warm, full of bodies and swirling crinoline. Hundreds of candles stood tall as soldiers in gilded chandeliers. Somehow, a dance card was secured around Hazel’s wrist, and a flute of champagne deposited into her hand.
Gibbs Hartwick-Ellis had grown a miserable little mustache since the last time she saw him at the theater; he was pressed into a corner, politely trying to extricate himself from a conversation with the boorish Baron Walford, who was leaning forward and all but pinning poor Gibbs in place.
Hazel shot Gibbs a sympathetic look. She had been placed next to Walford at one of her parents’ dinner parties, and even after studying cadavers, she still retched to recall his breath—to say nothing of the creepy way the Baron’s glass eye seemed to roll in its socket of its own volition.
Hazel didn’t see Cecilia, but Mrs. Caldwater was impossible to miss. The trill of her high-pitched laughter all but vibrated the crystal. Hazel would turn a quick circle about the room, make her presence known, and then return to the cadaver in her dungeon. （She had forgotten to visit the ice shed—the body would last only another few hours before the flesh began to disintegrate beyond all practical use.）
She could say she had a headache. Or she was feeling faint. No one seemed to ask too many questions about a woman feeling faint, nor about the broader cultural phenomenon of an entire society of women who seemed to swoon en masse. A fainting woman was so easily explained: either the weather this time of year was unseasonably warm or cool, and if it was neither, then certainly the lady’s corset had been laced too tight. No doubt all of the swooning made the men around them feel so useful and strong, to be able to lift a woman up from a heap among her skirts and fan her face until her eyelashes blinked her back to consciousness.