“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.”