The Meridian Ball

The invitation had come by the Duke's own footman, on cream card edged in violet, and it had named her.

His Grace the Duke of Draymoor requests the pleasure of the company of the Viscount Wynmore and his ward, Miss Calla Merrow, at a Masquerade in aid of the Foundling Hospital, at the Rooms of the Meridian Society, on the eighteenth instant.

Garrick had read it three times standing in the hall. Then he had turned it over, as if the back might contain an explanation, and found only the Duke's seal, a spiral in violet wax.

"A man does not ask for a ward by name," said Pike, who had come to dinner and stayed to be troublesome, "unless he wishes to see whether the ward will come."

"And if she does not?"

"Then he will know that you are afraid of him."

"I am not afraid of him."

"No," said Pike. "You are afraid for her. It is entirely different, and considerably worse."

Garrick folded the card and put it in his pocket and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. He had made up his mind in the first minute. He could refuse, and be marked. Or he could accept, and be watched. It was the old problem of a king with one piece on the board. The only move was the one that kept her close.

He had told Ixara that evening, in the library, across a careful yard of carpet. She had looked up from her book and said, "I would like to go," in a tone so mild that he distrusted it at once.

"You will remain at my side."

"Yes."

"You will not speak to the Duke except to say good evening."

"Yes."

"You will not go near the lower floors."

"Captain," said Ixara, "I will be the most obedient ward in London."

And she smiled, very slightly, and turned the page.

…

He did not see her until the carriage.

Mrs. Hatch had taken her in hand at four o'clock, and Betsy and Tobias had been dispatched on a series of mysterious errands, and a dressmaker had been summoned from Soho who had, according to the housekeeper, sewn a gown for the Princess of Wales. Garrick had gone to his club. He had returned at half past eight, in his black domino and his plain white half-mask, to find the carriage waiting and Odette on the stair in her shawls, flushed and bright-eyed and nearly dancing with excitement.

"Oh, you must wait," she said. "You must. She is coming. Mrs. Hatch said I might watch. I have been planning. Garrick, do be still, you look like a mourner at a wedding."

He was still. The front hall was lit with candles. Tobias stood by the door with the cloak. On the landing above, in a gap of the banister, he saw Mrs. Hatch, a rigid black shape with her hands clasped before her; and behind her, rustling, a pale gleam of silk.

"Now," whispered Odette.

She came down the stairs.

He had thought, in the part of his mind that composes such thoughts in advance, that she would look foreign. Strange. Costumed. That she would look like the rest of the masquerade, a thing to be admired for its oddity and forgotten by supper.

She did not.

She wore black. Not the matte black of mourning, but the liquid, living black of a moonless sky, in a gown of heavy silk that fell from the shoulders like water. It was cut low. It was cut, he thought, with sudden violence, very low, in the new French way, so that the long dark line of her throat and shoulders rose bare and burnished from the neckline like the stem of some night-flower. And scattered over the silk, in thread of silver so fine it was almost invisible, were stars. Hundreds of them. They caught the candlelight and winked. They ran down the bodice and across the hips and trailed in a glittering river along the train, so that she seemed to move in a small private firmament.

Her hair was unbound, or nearly. Mrs. Hatch had done something with it, a crown of braids pinned high and set with tiny pearls, and the rest left to fall in a heavy dark cloud to her shoulders. Her mask was silver gauze, covering only the eyes, with a tracery of beads along the cheekbones.

Her mouth was uncovered. It was the color of crushed plums.

She reached the foot of the stair and stopped, and looked at him through the gauze.

"Well?" said Ixara.

"You are late," said Garrick.

It was an extraordinary thing to say. He heard it leave him. Odette made a sound like a stifled cough, and Mrs. Hatch, on the landing, said "My lord," in the voice of a woman looking at a dropped tray.

"Am I?" Ixara's lip curved. "My apologies. The dressmaker had a great deal to say about the corset."

"I'm sure she did."

"She said it was a pity to cover so much. I told her it was a matter of principle."

"Calla," said Odette, with delight.

"I mean to say," said Garrick, quite stiffly, "that you look very well."

"Thank you."

"Very suitable."

"I am glad it is suitable."

"It is a costume of..." He cleared his throat. "Night."

"Yes."

"Of the sky."

"I thought you would like it," said Ixara gravely. "It is the only thing in this country I understand."

He took the cloak from Tobias's hands. His fingers were not entirely steady. He put it around her shoulders, and for an instant his gloved knuckles brushed the bare skin at the nape of her neck, and she drew in a breath so quietly that no one but he could have heard it.

He did not look at Odette. Odette, he was perfectly certain, was grinning.

…

The Rooms of the Meridian Society occupied the whole of the Hall's first floor, and on the night of the masquerade they were the most beautiful place in London.

He had been there often. He had read papers there, and dined there, and been elected there at twenty-five by a vote of nineteen to two. He knew every curve of the ceiling. And tonight it seemed unfamiliar, as a house does when one returns to it after an illness. Candlelight blazed in a thousand crystal drops. The long gallery had been hung with silvered mirrors and wreathed in white roses, and from the musicians' tribune came the sweet quick sound of a harp and a flute. Three hundred people moved over the polished floor in masks and silks and powder: Harlequins and shepherdesses, Turks and Muses, a bishop who was certainly not a bishop, a pair of Greek gods whose laurels had slipped.

And all of them, as he led her through the double doors, turned.

It was not dramatic. It was only the faintest wave, as a field of grain bends under a wind. A fan paused. A glass lowered. A woman in a gold shepherdess's costume said something behind her hand to her neighbor, and the neighbor said something back. A young man in a satyr's mask stopped in the middle of a sentence and did not finish it.

"They are looking," said Ixara, under her breath.

"They are," said Garrick.

"Is it the gown?"

"It is not the gown."

She glanced at him. He kept his eyes on the room.

"Take my arm," he said. "Do not let go of it. If anyone speaks to you, say how very interesting. It is the most useful phrase in the language."

"It means the opposite of itself."

"It means whatever the listener wishes. That is its genius."

She laughed, a low surprised sound that carried to the nearest group, and two heads turned, and he felt, through the cloth of his sleeve, the small hot grip of her fingers.

Hold on, he thought. And then, dazed: to what?

…

The Duke of Draymoor received them at the head of the room.

He was dressed in white. Not a costume; he never wore one. A coat of white satin, a waistcoat embroidered with silver spirals, white silk stockings and white kid gloves, and over his upper face a plain white mask that left visible only his mouth, long, pale, composed, and the cool blue gleam of his eyes. He stood on a low dais with his hands loosely folded, and the crowd moved around him as water moves round a post.

"Wynmore," he said, and extended a hand. "At last. You have been missed."

"Your Grace."

"And this—" The pale eyes moved. They paused. They rested on her face with an attention so entire, so unhurried, that Garrick felt the skin of his back prickle. "This will be Miss Merrow."

Ixara curtseyed. It was a good curtsey, low, slow and correct. She did not speak.

"I had hoped to meet you in the carriage," said the Duke gently. "I was passing the Hartwell road, and I saw a lady in the window. I was struck, you know, by her profile. I said to myself, there is a woman who would be at home among the stars."

"Your Grace is too kind."

"I rarely am." A faint smile. "I wonder, Miss Merrow, whether you would honor me with the first dance. It is a minuet. I know that the young prefer a country measure, but one grows sentimental."

Garrick felt her fingers tighten on his arm.

"I regret," he said smoothly, "that my ward has not yet been taught the minuet. She is newly arrived from Lisbon, and—"

"Then I shall teach her." The Duke's eyes did not leave Ixara's face. "It is the simplest dance in the world. Do you not think, Miss Merrow? One merely walks, and bows, and does not look away."

He is testing her, thought Garrick, with a dreadful clarity. He is measuring her pulse.

"I am afraid," said Ixara, in her careful, rounded, Lisbon-accented English, "that I have promised the first dance already."

The Duke raised one pale brow. "To whom?"

She turned her head.

She looked at Garrick through the silver gauze. And in that moment, with three hundred masks watching and a Duke waiting and the candles burning in their thousand drops of crystal, he understood that she was not lying, because she had not yet been asked, and that she was asking him now, silently, without a word, to make it true.

"To me," said Garrick.

He bowed to the Duke. He offered Ixara his hand.

"Excuse us, Your Grace."

And he led her out onto the floor.

…

He had never liked dancing. He did it as he did most things, correctly and without grace. He knew the steps, he knew the count, he could carry a partner round a room with the efficiency of a ship being warped into harbor. He did not expect to forget them.

She did not know the minuet. She did not know any dance, he realized, within the first four bars, except the ones that her body had learned on bare earth. But she watched. She watched the couples to their left, the couples to their right. She caught the rhythm in half a measure and turned her head and moved, and the long silver-starred train swung out behind her, and Garrick, who had not been surprised by anything in twelve years, found himself looking down into the gauze-edged eyes of a woman who was following him perfectly and leading him nowhere he had intended to go.

"You lied to the Duke," he said, very low, as they passed.

"I told him a promise had been made."

"It had not."

"It was about to be."

"You are," said Garrick, turning her, "a most dangerous woman."

"So I am told."

"I mean it as a warning."

"I know. I am listening." The long curtsey, the rise, the clasp of hands. Her palm was warm through the kid. "Is it as I was told? Does the fourth bar always feel like a drowning?"

"Always."

"Good. I thought I was ill."

He could not help it. He laughed, once, short, startled, and a woman in a gold shepherdess's costume looked sharply round and then away.

The music rose. The room spun. He was aware of her hand in his, of the warm scent of plum and iron, of the beat of the stone under the floor, a slow, enormous, aching pulse that came up through the soles of his shoes. It was there in the music. It was there in the movement of the crowd. It was in the whole room like a held breath, and the woman in his arms was listening to it with every nerve, and he knew, without being told, that she was hearing it speak.

She cannot be here, he thought. Not here, so close. Not for this long.

And yet she is dancing.

"Is it calling?" he said.

"Yes."

"Does it hurt?"

"Yes." A breath. "But not as much as it did. You are very warm, Captain. It is easier when you are warm."

The words went through him like the first drink of a winter.

He said nothing. He turned her on the final figure and drew her in, and the music ended, and the room applauded, and he stood a moment longer than was proper with his hand at her waist and her face tilted up to his.

"Garrick," said Ixara.

It was the first time she had used the name where anyone could hear.

…

It was in the interval after the minuet, as he was fetching her a glass of lemonade from the sideboard, that Garrick saw the Magister.

He knew him at once, though they had never met. There was no mistaking the gray cassock beneath the long black domino, nor the small silver lantern pinned at the breast; the Order of the Lantern did not trouble to conceal itself, even at a ball. He was a man of perhaps fifty-five, narrow and upright and very still, with a long ascetic face, deep-set eyes and a mouth like the edge of a closed book. He stood against a pillar, not drinking, not talking. His gaze moved across the crowd with the steady unhurried sweep of a lighthouse.

It stopped on Ixara.

Garrick set down the glass.

He did not hurry. He crossed the floor with the deliberate stride of a man going to examine a barometer, and he reached her side just as the gray figure detached itself from the pillar and drew near, and bowed.

"Lord Wynmore." The voice was dry and mild and carried no farther than it needed. "I am Osmund Crale. I have long wished to make your acquaintance. Your treatise on the tides was very instructive."

"You flatter me, Magister."

"I never do. It is a vice I gave up in my youth." The deep-set eyes shifted to Ixara. "And this is the lady I have heard so much about."

"Miss Merrow," said Garrick. "My ward."

"Miss Merrow." Crale inclined his head. "I am told you come from Lisbon. A fine city. I knew it before the earthquake. I am told it is much changed."

"Yes, sir," said Ixara.

"You have a charming voice. Not Portuguese, though, I think. There is something in the vowels." A pause, courteous and exact. "Something older."

"My mother's people were from the islands."

"Ah. Madeira?"

"Yes."

It was a calm answer. It was a good one. Garrick saw Crale accept it with a small nod, and felt, in the muscles of his back, a relaxation that was not quite relief.

Then the Magister drew a slow breath through his nose.

It was almost nothing. A faint dilation of the nostril. But Garrick saw it, and he saw the eyes change: a flicker, quick and bright, like a candle passing behind a shutter.

"Forgive me," said Crale. "It is a failing of age. I find that I notice scents. You wear a most unusual perfume, Miss Merrow."

"I wear none, sir."

"No?" He tilted his head. "Burnt plum, I would have said. Something sweet. Something very faintly of... incense." The mild eyes rested on her face. "I cannot place it. It reminds me of a case I once had in Cornwall."

The room seemed very quiet.

"It is the pomatum," said Garrick, in an even voice. "Mrs. Hatch makes it herself. It's an old recipe from Bristol. She has used it on my sister for years. Plum kernel, I believe, and beeswax."

"Indeed?"

"I could send you a pot."

"You are very kind." Crale's expression did not change. "But I have no hair, Lord Wynmore. It is the one advantage of my profession." He bowed again, to Ixara, a shade lower than before. "I shall call on you, Miss Merrow. We must talk of Madeira. It is a subject I find most interesting."

He went away through the crowd, gray among the silk, and was lost.

Neither of them spoke. A waltz began in the gallery, and the couples reformed, and laughter washed over them.

"He knows," said Ixara.

"He suspects."

"It is the same."

"It is not the same. A suspicion is a guess. A fact requires proof." He found that he had hold of her wrist. He let go. "Come. You need air."

…

The balcony ran the length of the Hall's east front, a long stone terrace hung with white climbing roses, and at this hour it was deserted. Beyond the balustrade lay the dark garden, and beyond the garden the roofs of Mayfair, silver under the thin hook of the old moon. The music came muffled through the long windows. A breeze stirred the roses.

Ixara went to the rail and put both hands on it.

She was trembling. He saw it now: the fine, fast, inward tremor that she had been holding off all evening, the silk of her bodice shivering at the breath. She had put her mask back, over the eyes. Under it, her mouth was set hard.

"It was loud," she said. "It was so loud. All of them. All the time. And the stone beneath. I could not think."

"You did well."

"I am not a sheep to be praised for crossing a bridge."

"No." He came and stood beside her, a respectable foot away. "You are the only person in that room who did not need to be."

She turned her head.

In the pale light her face was bare, shadowed, serious. The stars on her gown had gone dim. The old moon lay in the garden like a dropped coin, and above it the sky was wide and clear and utterly black, and he thought, This is her sky, and did not know what he meant.

"Do you want to know what I saw?" said Ixara.

"Yes."

"I saw you, in the minuet. Not the smoke. Only my eyes." She spoke slowly. "I saw a man who did not want to be touched, being touched. And enjoying it, very much, and believing that no one could tell."

"I do not—"

"Garrick."

He stopped.

"I am tired of it," she said quietly. "Of the quibbles. Of the hands behind the back. Of the cold voice. I do not say you must change. I say only that I can see, and so can you, and it would be a kindness to stop pretending that it is a surprise."

The roses stirred. A single petal fell between them.

He knew what he ought to say. He had the words at hand, all arranged: You are my responsibility. You are a guest in my house. I am not a man for whom such things are possible. They were good words. They were true. They had served him for years.

He looked at her mouth.

It was a mistake. He knew it as he made it. And she saw him make it, and did not look away, and he watched her chest rise on a breath and hold it.

"I shouldn't," said Garrick.

His voice was rough, and quite unlike his own.

"I know," said Ixara.

And she lifted her face, and put one hand flat against his chest, over the pounding of his heart, and kissed him.