Miss de Vries did something strange then. She closed her eyes. “You want to be paid.” She began chuckling, a low and troubling sound. “I see. Of course. How entirely predictable.”
Alice felt her skin growing hot. She wanted to step backward, but she held her ground. “I’m very grateful to you, for giving me the opportunity.”
“Are you? You don’t seem it.” Miss de Vries’s eyes shimmered in the half light. Her voice hardened. “What of my other offer? What of that?”
Alice hesitated. She felt the pull in her gut, the temptation. “I’m not cut out to be a lady’s maid, Madam.”
Miss de Vries’s eyes were bright, fierce. “I’m offering you something far better. You would be my companion. I would show you the world. Florence, New York. You’d have a salary, since that’s so important to you.”
That word companion. It made Alice’s heart flicker. “I’d be no use, Madam,” she said. “I’ve nothing you need.”
“Need has nothing to do with it,” said Miss de Vries, voice rough. “I need nothing. I wish to keep you. You understand?”
The ball might have been taking place a hundred miles away. The roar was distant, contained beneath sediment and rock.
“Keep me?” said Alice, trying to laugh. “You can’t keep me.”
Miss de Vries’s expression changed. “Whyever not?” she said. “Shouldn’t you like it?”
Her voice was strained.
Miss de Vries was very close, then. It was possible to make out the beating of her pulse. There was something heightened, hectic about it. It matched the rhythm of Alice’s own.
Miss de Vries reached for Alice. Her touch wasn’t cool. It transmitted heat. Alice saw Madam’s lips: soft, faintly touched with wine.
Would she like it? Alice wondered. The room held its breath.
Miss de Vries’s eyes widened, as if checking herself. It was an expression Alice had never seen on Madam’s face before. Uncertainty: delicate, shivering in the heat.
Alice reached out to touch the most brittle parts of Madam’s dress, around the shoulders. She alone knew where the joins were, where the clasps could be found. It was her strength that loosened them.
Miss de Vries closed her eyes. But she didn’t move. She inched closer, the tiniest, clearest fraction.
Alice went further. She closed the breach between them. She kissed her mistress, the air wreathed with orchids, lamplight flickering overhead.
Winnie stood back from the smoke machines, her nostrils burning. Her scalp was slick with sweat. Her hands shone with greasepaint.
Now, she thought. Now.
The Janes nodded.
Winnie pulled air into her lungs, opened one of the doors, and let loose a cry. “Fire!” she shouted.
Her voice came out as a croak. “Fire, fire!” Figures appeared at the foot of the stairs and she hauled the doors open fully.
Smoke billowed out around her. Blueish, stinking, sweet—far more than she could have hoped for. She covered her mouth and ran down the stairs, arms aloft.
“Fire!” she cried.
The Janes followed Winnie downstairs. They observed the pleasing majesty of it all. Footmen running. Noses turning upward. Disbelief. The orchestra falling silent, waltz frozen midspin.
“Fire, fire!” yelled a voice.
And then it was real, the fear. It unfurled itself like a ribbon. The guests were like starlings in flight, a drunken, frightened rush of powdered hair and crooked crowns and ermine trains.
Jane-two tested her voice. “Fire!” she bellowed. “Everybody out!”
“Oh, give over,” muttered Jane-one, pressing a hand to her ear.
Together they worked the crowd: pushing, shoving, scaring, very nearly ramming people down the stairs. Mrs. Bone’s men, the ones dressed as guests, helped. “Out, out, out,” they chanted, and it was remarkable to see the world obey them, growing increasingly frightened. “I’m choking!” cried one. “Smoke! It’s in my lungs!”
By the time they reached the front porch, they could hear Lord Ashley. Clearly, he was the worst sort of person in a crisis, bellowing orders for horses, buckets, hoses, causing even more confusion than before. Jane-one observed the chaos on the pavement, countesses calling for their husbands, ministers calling for each other, and a hundred motors jammed at every junction.
“They need to call for the fire brigade!” exclaimed Lord Ashley. “Now!”
“They have,” replied Mr. Lockwood. “I’m sure of it.”
“That bloody pyramid,” said Ashley. “It’s blocking the bloody road.”
Jane-one spotted the lamp-boy lurking by the railings. He had a weaselly, toothy look about him.
“You, boy,” said Lockwood, reaching for him. “Run to the fire station.”
“Sir, there’s people inside. Upstairs. I can see ’em moving around…”
Lockwood shook him. “Aren’t you listening? Get them to send the engines.”
A window opened, and one of Mrs. Bone’s men looked out, waving his arms, scaring back the crowd.
“Who’s that?” said Ashley. “Who’s inside?”
“Get back, get away from the house!” the man was shouting. A cry went up, and people began backing away, into the street, making for the park. “We’ll get the drapes down!”
Lord Ashley shouted up at them. “Quick, men, that’s it! Get those curtains off their rails!”
Jane-one heard Mr. Lockwood say slowly, “Where is Miss de Vries?”
Winnie came into the hall. “Ready?” murmured one of the men, peering upward.
A pulley above them was wheeling madly, taking the long chain with it. The pulleys had been looped onto the iron braces underneath the glass dome. They held a platform, operating like a gigantic version of the electric lift, wide enough to shift half a dozen big crates between the ground floor and the upper floors of the house. Their faces showed the strain of holding all the ropes. The dome shimmered over the front hall.
Please, God, let it hold, she thought. She could almost feel the glass quaking.
“Someone give the word,” said the first man.
Winnie’s mind scrambled. Plans, papers, schematics, diagrams, calculations, machinery, pulleys, inventories and ledgers. Hired hands and fences. Prices marked up in the ledger. Tricks, tales, lies, glorious acts of make-believe. Puzzle pieces, carved up and scattered by Mrs. King for them to piece together. Games for women.
It’s not a game to me, Winnie thought.
In her dreams, she had seen Mr. de Vries, and she had chased him through long, white, glistening corridors, longing to catch him and trip him and drag him to the ground. It had woken her last night, hot and panting, sheets twisted. This part of the job was supposed to be the end of the story. Emptying the house, taking the world’s breath away, that was the point of it all. To bring everyone low, to the same awful level.
And then what?
She had one plan, one laughable plan. A hat shop, she thought in disbelief. I wanted to open a hat shop.
It wasn’t enough; it wasn’t nearly sufficient. Mrs. Bone’s list burned in her mind.
If just one of those girls had made friends, then they wouldn’t have got into trouble. Shepherd couldn’t have picked them off. But when you were alone, you could be unstitched, you could have your lining ripped out.