The Founders’ Masquerade

POV: Josiah

The gate of Charter Hall had not changed in eight months, and that was the first thing that frightened him.

Josiah sat in the second carriage with a viola case across his knees and a half mask of black silk tied over the upper half of his face, watching the Terrace come up the hill to meet him. The road wound through the gardens in long white curves, lined on both sides with electric lamps on iron poles, one every twenty paces, each a pale blue-white globe that hissed faintly in the dusk. He had forgotten how many there were. In Ash Docks, a good street had one gas lamp to a block, and a bad one had a boy with a ladder and a bucket of oil. Here the night had been abolished. Every leaf on every clipped hedge stood out sharp and shadowless, as if cut from tin.

Beyond the lamps, the Hall.

It rose from the crown of the hill like a wedding cake built by a mathematician: white stone, tier on tier, terraces and balustrades and colonnades, a hundred and forty windows blazing, and above it all the vast glass lens of the Meridian Dome, catching the last of the sunset like a held breath. On every cornice stood a statue. On every statue stood a pigeon, brought in by the groundskeeper at night and fed, he had once heard, on a special seed to keep it from fouling the marble.

He had stood guard at that gate for four years. He had loved it.

"You've gone green," said the voice at his shoulder, low and amused.

"I have not."

"It's not a criticism. It's an observation." Hollis lounged on the opposite seat in an ill-fitting black evening coat, a cornet case at his feet. It did not contain a cornet. "You look like a man being driven to his own hanging."

"I am trying to remember," said Josiah, "how to walk through a gate."

"One foot, then the other. It's mostly habit."

On the seat beside Hollis, Felix, in a borrowed dress coat two sizes too large and a mask that kept sliding down his nose, had gone the color of cheese. He was whispering something under his breath. Josiah leaned closer and heard: "I am a violinist. I am a violinist. I am a violinist from Philadelphia."

"You are doing very well," said Josiah.

"I am going to be sick."

"Not on the cello."

Felix clapped his hand to his mouth and nodded.

…

The line at the gate moved slowly. Torches had been lit along the drive for effect, though no one needed them; the carriages inched up in a glittering file, disgorging silks and brocades and ostrich plumes, and the Watch moved among them with lanterns, checking invitations and lists. He recognized the uniforms, the dove-gray coats and polished brass buttons, and the eyes beneath the shakos, which were calm and a little glazed. They had had their cup that evening. He could see it in how they stood.

He kept his own eyes forward. He made himself breathe in for four.

At the front of the line, under the stone arch, with a lantern in one gloved hand and a leather-bound list in the other, stood a tall man with sandy hair and a narrow, dutiful, freckled face.

Marcus Dray.

A lieutenant now. When Josiah had known him, he'd been a sergeant, still trying to grow a mustache. He had been the best marksman in the company and the worst liar. He had once confessed to a dead mouse, in the barracks, that he had eaten the last of the ration cheese.

"The Brandywine Quintet," said the coachman, from the box. "Of Philadelphia. By invitation."

Dray came to the carriage window. The lantern swung. He looked down the list, and up again, and the light fell across five masked faces and a great many instrument cases, and did not linger on any.

"Your invitation, if you please, gentlemen."

Dex, in the leading carriage, had already handed his through the window. Josiah could see the back of the head, and the cane. "Maestro Lucien Aubrey," said the young man's voice, in an accent Josiah had not known he had: slow, silken, and faintly Philadelphian. "These are my players. We were detained at the Crestwood. A matter of luggage, I am afraid. I do apologize."

"Of course, Maestro."

"My colleagues are somewhat fatigued. They've traveled a great way. May I ask if the Chairman has been informed of our arrival? We are anxious to begin."

"I'm sure he has been, sir."

The lantern moved to the second carriage.

Josiah did not turn his head. He kept his eyes on the middle distance and his hands on the viola case, as a man holds a rail. He sensed, rather than saw, the weight of the Lieutenant's gaze. It swept over Hollis, who yawned. It swept over Felix. And then, as though on a hinge, it came to rest.

He knew what Dray was seeing. A tall man in a black mask. A straight back. Shoulders squared, head level, hands exactly upon the knees. A man who sat in a carriage as though standing on parade.

Oh, God. I have not learned to slouch.

"A moment," said Dray, slowly.

"Oh!" cried Felix.

It was shrill. It was fairly dreadful. Josiah had never in his life heard a human voice produce quite that note. Felix had sat bolt upright, ripped off his mask, flung it into the air and caught it, and was gazing at the Lieutenant with the wide, blank, ecstatic innocence of a spaniel.

"Is that the Hall? Is that the real Hall? I've seen it in an engraving! It's much larger. It's much larger! Is it true there are four hundred windows? My uncle said four hundred, but I said that's not possible, the architecture of the period, the load-bearing walls— Is that gold leaf on the cornice? It is, isn't it? It's, oh, goodness, it glitters!" He drew breath. "I do beg your pardon. I'm the second violin. I get excited. Are you an officer? What a splendid coat! Did you design it?"

"Er," said Dray.

"It's a very good button. I've always thought the button is the thing that makes a uniform. In Philadelphia we have a captain of the guard who wears a bad button, and I said to my mother—"

"Sir, if you would—"

"—she said it was a scandal, and—"

"Sir."

"Yes?"

"The cases," said Dray. "I am required to inspect the instruments."

He said it with the faint, glazed, pleading look of a man who has run into a very small, very loud wall. Josiah found, to his lasting astonishment, that he wanted to laugh. He bit the inside of his cheek. Beside him, Hollis had folded his arms across his chest and was staring out of the window with an expression of great innocent calm, like a statue of Patience.

…

They searched the cases on the gravel.

Two sergeants came with lanterns. They laid each instrument on the ground and opened it, and ran their fingers along the velvet and rapped on the wood. Josiah watched the viola go over. Then the violin, and the second violin, and Hollis's cornet, a real one, bought secondhand in Ash Docks, and the harp, whose case took four men to move.

Then they came to the cello.

It lay on its side on the gravel, a long black coffin. Felix had gone as still as a post. A sergeant bent, thumbed the catches, and lifted the lid. The inside smelled of rosin and cedar. A bow lay in its clip. The sergeant ran a hand around the felt, found nothing, and then, with the thoroughness of a man doing a thing he had done a thousand times, pressed down on the floor of the case with his whole palm, hard.

It did not give.

Lead, thought Josiah, with a swim of relief. The lead strip. He ballasted the floor. He did not dare look at Felix.

The sergeant lifted the end of the case, grunted, and set it down. "Heavy," he said.

"It's a cello," said Felix. "They're very heavy. They have a lot of, a lot of feelings."

The sergeant looked at Dray. Dray looked at his list. He looked at the line of carriages, trailing back down the drive in a river of light, and at the clock on the gatehouse, which said ten past eight.

"Pass them," he said.

It had taken four minutes. It felt like a year.

As the gates swung back, and the carriage lurched forward under the arch, Josiah let out a breath he'd been holding since Palisade Road. His shoulders were wet. He turned to the window and saw Dray standing in the lantern light, watching the carriage go. The younger man's face had a puzzled, uneasy look. He was frowning at something, not at the carriage but through it, at the memory of a straight back.

He did not call out. He lifted his lantern, very slightly, as a man lifts a hand to a stranger, and let it fall.

…

Inside, the light was blinding.

Josiah had expected it. He had not expected how much it would feel like walking into a mouth.

The Great Hall of Charter Hall was a hundred feet long, and every inch of it was glass. Glass chandeliers hung from a glass-paned ceiling. Glass panels set in the walls threw back the light from the chandeliers, and from one another, in an endless tilting regress. Mirrors stood between the windows in gilt frames. Mirrors lined the pillars. A dance floor of polished black glass spread out beneath the feet of four hundred guests, who moved over it in a slow wheel of silk and satin and lace, each reflected upside down below, as though a second ball were taking place under the ice. And over it all, from forty-eight great globes in the roof, hung the electric light: white, clear, steady, humming.

It was beautiful. It was monstrous. He had once thought them the same thing.

He was in the second line, behind Hollis, marching in file after the Maestro. They had been given a footman. The footman was a boy of fourteen or so, in a powdered wig, with a smooth shut face and enormous dark eyes. He walked in front of them with a candle held out at arm's length, though the Hall was bright as noon, and he did not once look to either side.

"Do you know, I've never seen a boy so quiet," whispered Felix.

"Do not speak to him," said Josiah.

"Why not?"

He didn't answer. He had seen the boy's eyes. He knew the look. It was the look he had seen on a hundred faces in the Palisade corridors, orderlies and cooks and laundry girls, the look of people who had been, in the Council's cheerful phrase, eased. It was not unhappy. It was nothing at all. It was the look of a lamp with the wick trimmed down.

Along the walls, they stood in rows. Footmen and maids, in uniform, silent, with trays. Every one of them had that look.

I stood beside them, he thought. I saw them every night. I thought, how orderly.

He went on walking.

…

The Gallery of Founders ran along the north side of the Hall behind a colonnade, a long, dim, hushed passage hung with portraits. It was the only part of the building lit by gas, because the Council believed, with a sentimentality he had once admired, that the dead preferred it. A velvet rope kept the guests from straying in. Beyond it, in a line, stretched the twelve Founding Houses, each in oils, in a gilded frame: Prescott in scarlet, Aldous in bottle-green, Rennick in black, and nine more, scowling or smug.

And at the far end, higher than the rest, in a frame carved with bees, hung Hannah Merrick.

She was a small woman in a gray dress, painted in the plain, flat, unsmiling manner of the early republic. Her hands were folded. Her eyes were gray and clear, and seemed to follow you down the length of the gallery. There was a faint smile on her mouth that he had never decided was kindness. Below her, on a brass plate, in letters worn nearly smooth by a century of fingers, was written: SHE GAVE US THE LIGHT.

He knew what was behind her. He had stood in front of that frame with a lamp in his hand, in the small hours, and watched a clerk swing it aside on its hinge and go down into the dark.

Two hundred and twelve steps.

"There," said a voice at his ear, soft as silk.

He nearly flinched. It was Viv, a serving girl now in a gray dress and a white cap, with a tray of champagne held at the level of her chest. She did not look at him. She was gazing past his shoulder with the vacant courtesy of a hired hand.

"Later," she breathed. "Not the whole house. Just the frame. I've checked." And she turned and slid between two pillars, tray tilting, and was gone.

…

The Brandywine Quintet took the stage at nine.

It was a low dais at the north end of the Hall, banked in white roses. The harp had been set up at the left. There were five chairs, five stands, a spray of lilies. Dex took the podium last, on his cane, in a swallow-tailed coat and a mask of silver mesh, and for a moment, before he lifted his baton, he stood quite still and looked at the room.

Josiah, from his chair, watched him look.

It was not the gaze of a boy. It was the gaze of a man looking at an enemy through a window, with great attention and no heat. Four hundred guests glittered below him. A minuet was fading. The conductor's baton rose, and the Hall, with that quick well-bred hush of the very rich, turned its masked faces to the stage.

The baton fell.

The first bars of the waltz were Strauss, a light, rolling, dishonestly cheerful tune, one of the Viennese ones, all lilt and sparkle. Josiah's bow was on the string before he thought. He had not played the viola in fifteen years. His fingers remembered. It was a small dark instrument with a voice like a deep sigh, and he found that it did something to the center of his chest that he could not afford.

Felix, beside him, was sawing away with ferocity and a total absence of pitch. It did not matter. Under the lilt of the waltz, nobody could hear the second violin.

And behind them, at the harp, with her hands moving over the strings in long unhurried ripples, sat Roz.

She had her eyes half closed. The silver notes poured out from under her fingers in clear cascades, sweet and cool, and through them, under the cover of the melody, he heard her voice. It was barely louder than a breath.

"You're shaking."

"I am not."

"Your hands."

"They are steady."

"Your heart is shaking." She did not open her eyes. Her fingers rippled up the strings, and down. "It's going like a hammer. I've been listening for ten minutes. I could hear it from the carriage."

Josiah's bow wavered on the A-string. He corrected it.

"It is nothing," he said, without moving his lips. "It will pass."

"I know it will. I'm not telling you to stop." A pause, a soft run of harmonics. "I'm telling you I can hear it. So you won't think nobody can."

He said nothing.

He did not understand why it helped. But some stiff thing in his chest, wound tight for eight months, loosened by a fraction. He played on. The harp played with him, under him, a quiet current beneath the viola's dark line, and for a few bars, in a Hall full of lies, in the light of a thousand glass mirrors, he was not alone on the stage.

…

It was in the second waltz that the doors at the far end opened.

It was a small movement, and nobody applauded. But the great wheel of dancers faltered, and parted, and a ripple went through the crowd like wind through wheat. Somebody had arrived. Josiah looked up over the music, and for a long cold second the viola in his hands was only wood.

A large man in a Colonel's dress uniform stood in the doorway. He was ruddy, broad-shouldered, white-whiskered, and his kind blue eyes were crinkled at the corners with the innocent pleasure of an uncle at a christening. He wore no mask. He had never needed to. A little group of ladies had already gathered about him, laughing, and he bent over each of them in turn, and said something that made them laugh again.

Colonel Ezekiel Hargrave.

Josiah's mouth went dry. His bow, for a stroke, went wrong; a ragged scrape, quickly covered. His fingers found the notes again by habit. He kept his face down. He fixed his gaze on the music stand, on the black swimming dots, and felt the Colonel's eyes travel the room as a lighthouse beam travels the sea, unhurried and benevolent and complete.

They passed over the harp. They passed over Felix. They passed over a man in a black half mask, with his head bent and his shoulders drawn in, playing the viola.

They paused.

He did not breathe. In the roses, in the white light, he felt the whole weight of the old man's attention come to rest on him, like a hand set down on a table.

Do not look up. Do not look up.

"Strauss," said the Colonel, to the lady at his elbow, warmly. "How very charming. Do you know, I have always thought the viola the saddest of instruments."

The eyes moved on.

And at that moment the electric globes in the roof dimmed, one by one, in a long slow wave, to a gentle gold, and the first sets of the evening began. The quintet swung without a pause into a second waltz. Roz's fingers did not falter. Beside him, Felix let out a tiny noise like a punctured bellows.

Josiah played. His heart was pounding in his ears. He lifted his head and looked out across the golden dark.

He saw the dancers. He saw their masks, feathered and painted and gilded. He saw the glittering heads turning, turning, turning, in silence, as the wheel went round. And he realized that the Hall was very quiet. The music filled it, but beneath the music, where there should have been the murmur of four hundred voices, there was nothing. No laughter. No whispered scandal. The footmen stood along the walls with their trays and their lowered eyes, and the Houses turned in their slow circle, and nobody spoke.

It was not reverence. He had once mistaken it for reverence.

It was the silence of people who had forgotten what they were afraid of, and were afraid anyway.