My heartbeat quickens with panic. I can’t. I can’t.
“Funny, once I couldn’t wait to go into the realms. But now…without Pip…now…,” Felicity says out of the blue, a rare moment of doubt. She trails off, but she doesn’t need to finish for me to understand what she means: everything is different. Once, we had a need for that world’s magic. But our lives have moved on and become so busy—mine with school, Fee’s with travel, and Ann’s with both the theater and Charlie Smalls—that we’ve felt less of its pull. We are no longer schoolgirls. We are young women, making our way in a world that seems at best to tolerate us, and then only if we behave according to rules we had no part in making.
All the adrenaline of the past two days and from this latest attack of panic leaves me at once. I feel faint. I stumble, and Felicity and Ann right me.
“This time it isn’t acting. We really do need to see you home,” Ann announces just before she makes Felicity secure us a carriage.
* * *
When I return to the Ashfield, there’s a note from Juliet pinned to my door.
Gemma, where are you? Marian Tortham is wearing the most appalling dress. I’ll tell you all about it over dinner. Eight o’clock downstairs?
Fondly, Juliet
Alone in my room once more, I lie down, exhausted and drained. Sleep overtakes me.
In my dream, I stand again at the gate between the Borderlands and the Winterlands. The cold bites at my skin, excites my blood. The beating heart encased in bone thumps louder and louder, till it is like distant war drums getting closer. The gate asks me its age-old question: What is your heart’s desire?
“You know what it is,” I answer, my voice as bitter as the wind coming off that vast, desolate place.
The heart exhales, a small sigh that could be satisfaction or regret—which, I cannot say. I step across the threshold into that forbidden land, running through smoke until I am before the Tree of All Souls. I see through the bark into the tree’s womb. He sleeps within it, curled upon himself, naked. The heart inside the Winterlands gate beats a steady rhythm, gaining speed like war drums. The tree is moving. Its limbs unfurl, pushing out, racing along the ground, reaching for me. I cannot lift my feet. I cannot do anything but stare at him. His head turns toward me. His eyes snap open. They are cold and dark and fathomless.
I jolt awake to Juliet banging on my door. The light outside my window has faded to a purplish gold. Dusk is well under way. Night comes soon. When I open my door, Juliet stands outside with her impish, freckled face and gap-toothed smile. She holds what looks like a hatbox. Her smile fades. “Gemma! Are you ill? You look just awful.”
“Thank you, Juliet.”
“Oh, isn’t that just like me? I’m sorry, pet. I didn’t mean it like that.”
I like Juliet. She’s a cheerful soul from Poughkeepsie. “No one wants to be from Poughkeepsie,” she often says in her flat American accent.
“I’ve had…unexpected visitors,” I say. It isn’t quite a lie. “Friends of the family.”
“Say no more! My brother and his wife were here, and I thought if I had to take one more stroll down Broadway, listening to them prattle on about New York being a modern Sodom and Gomorrah and asking when will I come to my senses and go back home, I’d lose my mind!”
“What’s that?” I ask, nodding at the box.
“Oh. Someone delivered this for you. I brought it up.” She frowns. “But it isn’t your birthday. That was June, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I say, pleased that she remembered.
“Well. Whatever it is, it looks fancy. Beautiful red bow. Or, no, what would Professor Lyttles call it if we were painting? Ruby? Crimson?” She snaps her fingers. “Scarlet! Like Hester Prynne’s mark of shame!”
“Scarlet…,” I say. Already my fingers are at work untying the ribbon. My pulse beats faster, like the drums of my dream. I lift the top from the box and fall back, a hand to my mouth as my stomach lurches.
“Gemma? Gemma!” Juliet races to my side. “Merciful heavens! What on earth?”
Inside the box, nestled in a bed of silk, is a human heart. There is a note stabbed to it with an initialed hatpin. Gingerly, I remove it and read: Greetings from the Order of the Scarlet Woman. Sekhmet. The hatpin is engraved with initials: E.S.
I turn to Juliet, wild-eyed. “Did you see who left this?”
Juliet nods, frightened. “I might have? Not her face, really, but there was a woman just leaving as I came into the lobby. She wore a red cloak, same color as the ribbon on the box. And she had on a pendant just like the one you wear, Gemma. The funny little moon with the eye—say! Where are you going? Gemma? Gemma!”
I stagger along the hallway of the Ashfield and down the staircase, hoping against hope that the woman who delivered this bloody muscle of a gift is nearby, watching, waiting for me. Still dazed, I race out into the street. A carriage nearly runs me over. The coachman jolts the reins at the last minute. “Watch where you’re going! You wanna get killed?”
My eyes are wide and wild. Where is she? The street is alive with strolling couples. Women in white dresses, brown silk. Businessmen in black bowler hats. Chimney sweeps in gray finishing up a day’s work, ready for the cheer of a good pint. Where. Is. She?
It is not something I see but something I feel, like an invisible thread pulling my attention. Someone is watching me. I sense it. Slowly, I turn my head to the right, where the crowd parts just enough to expose a flash of bright color. There’s a cloaked and hooded figure at the end of the block, standing perfectly still in the storm, facing my direction. And then, quick as a snake, she turns and races around the corner out of sight, trailing a blood-red swish of fabric in her wake.
It was, of course, my aunt’s idea; my mothers never would have suggested it. In fact, when my tía put forth the possibility, my mothers’ exclamations of “No” were as clipped and identical as two branches snapping at once.
“It’s too dangerous,” my mother Lydia said.
“Do you have a better plan?” my tía asked, knowing neither of them did.
The thought had come to my tía the night we first heard about the ball. The kingdom that bordered ours would hold a great dance in honor of their prince’s coming of age. The king and queen would throw wide the palace doors, including to all young women who made the journey.
It was, apparently, never too early to have their son think of marriage.
Girls in our village spoke of all this as though it were some grand fairy tale, all jeweled gowns and candlelight. Something that had happened a hundred years ago, or a thousand miles away. Rather than a thing that would take place within days, in a land whose fields and forests ran up against ours.