Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (39 page)

“I’ve come home every day just to watch for his sign,” Laura said.

She meant her monster’s sign, his five stones in a line. Rose said, “There I was thinking you’d come home to bathe in buttermilk, like me.”

Laura hadn’t spent the last days washing her hair in chamomile (or rosemary in her case) to brighten it, or having manicures and pedicures. Instead, she would come back from Fallow Hill midmorning, with Sandy Mason in tow, and they’d sit in the library or parlor alone together. Chorley had pointedly opened the door the one time they’d closed it.

“I came downstairs about fifteen minutes ago and heard a knock on the door, then someone tormenting the pump in the yard. He’d come in the back and left the film on the steps. With a note.” Laura pulled a paper out of the top of one glove and passed it to Rose.

The handwriting was in smudgy charcoal, the letters evenly sized and backward sloping. The note read: “I am under Market Bridge.” Rose turned the paper over and saw that it was a paste-scabbed strip from some bill advertising a dream.

“I have a bone to pick with him,” Laura said. “It’s almost as if he knows and is avoiding me.” Then, “Damn ball.”

“Damn inconvenient Presentation Ball,” Rose said. “Damn untimely debut.” Then, waspishly, “Our big milestones are very different these days, aren’t they?”

“Yes.” Laura was blunt. “But you want this film to see the light of day just as much as I do.”

“True,” said Rose. She came all the way into the darkroom, forgetting her fear of the contaminating chemicals. She took the canister from her cousin and stowed it in a drawer. “We’ll hand it over to Da tomorrow. He can deliver it to the Grand Patriarch. Or straight to the Commission of Inquiry. His decision.”

From the hallway Grace called, “Rose! Laura! Where are you?”

Rose swept out of the darkroom, clutching her cape around her. Laura followed, struggling to stuff her hands back into her tight kid gloves. Grace started fussing. “Where’s your wrap, Laura?”

Laura dashed into the kitchen to retrieve it. When she returned to the hall, her father had appeared. He kissed her on the forehead and said, “Have fun.” He kissed Rose too and wished her the very best of luck. “I wanted to go, but I don’t think I can manage the excitement.”

Grace was flustered. “Rose—are you all together under that cape? I didn’t get to inspect you.”

“Ma, I’m a work of art,” Rose said.

Grace hustled her family down the front steps.

Rose was muttering mutinously that it was silly to take the car when the People’s Palace was only five minutes’ walk away.

“You must be delivered to your debut, Rose. You can’t walk there,” her mother said.

“Here, let me help you with that,” Chorley said to Laura. He’d been watching her attempts to fasten the buttons on her right wrist with her left hand. He helped her into the car, sat beside her, and bent over her hand. She felt his fingertips on the inside of her wrist and said, dreamily, “Sandy will be there.”

Everyone laughed. “Yes, we
know
Sandy will be there,” chorused Rose and Grace.

At the People’s Palace there was a separate entrance for the debutantes and their mothers. This took Grace and Rose straight up the building’s secondary staircase to the debutantes’ dressing room. It was, in fact, a series of rooms, one where they left their coats, then a large, mirror-lined room
with love seats and ottomans, then an innermost room, with attendants in black-and-white uniforms, and lavender-sprinkled towels, big bottles of cologne, and a seamstress—should one be required. Rose looked at all these elaborate comforts and mused on the value Founderston put on the female offspring of its first families. It all made her feel rather like a prize racehorse being transported to an important fair.

The rooms were crowded with slender girls in white and their generally more substantial mothers, in every conceivable color. Grace, accustomed to dream palace finery, had welcomed the chance to get into something plain. When Grace removed her daughter’s white velvet cape, she felt that she was indeed unveiling a work of art. She stood beside Rose and basked in her daughter’s glow. Rose shone, she scintillated, and she towered over most of her peers, even in her flat-heeled dancing slippers. Grace saw various mothers bridle at the sight—the shock—of Rose’s beauty. Rose’s friends’ reaction was quite different. As soon as they caught sight of her through the crowd, they squealed and rushed over to Rose, who collapsed into their cluster, hugging and bouncing around, a giggly girl again. Grace blinked away tears. She was glad Rose couldn’t hold her composure—it was just too much, too soon, and could serve only to isolate her, to set her apart, among older male admirers. Grace could imagine it already, the sterile triumph that was waiting for her daughter, who, she judged, was too young to escape the traps of flattery.

Mamie’s mother was determined to make the best of the ball, to put on a brave face, and to show her daughter how to do it. As she said to Mamie when she was making her final, short-tempered motherly adjustments to her hair and wrap,
“There are some things that are simply expected of ladies, and that is that.” Mrs. Doran wasn’t blessed with docile children, but Mamie could usually be relied on to be calm, if only as a result of being chronically unimpressed. However, for the past week, Mamie had been stuffing herself shamefully, and for the last twenty-four hours, on and off, she’d been vomiting. Mrs. Doran was determined that her daughter wasn’t actually ill but was only giving way to nerves.

Everything necessary had been done for the girl’s debut. She had a double strand of pearls—a gift from her father. She’d had five hair appointments till they found a style that suited her. And she had gotten her way about her deviant black-and-white gown. She had her black gloves, her crown of flowers. Mamie’s interests had been served with the best possible care, attention, and expense. And now, her mother thought, it was time for Mamie to show that she could make the best of her lot.

What Mamie’s mother couldn’t see was that, while the ball had been still far off, Mamie had been happily scornful about it and anyone who hoped to enjoy it. She’d gone along with plans, scoffing at all the fuss. Then, one night, a week before the event, she woke up with a heart full of dread.
This was it
, the first occasion in her life on which it would matter that no one much liked her. She wouldn’t fit in, wouldn’t be just one more goose in the gaggle of girls. She was too serious, too ponderous. She wouldn’t be sought out. Her dance card had a number of names on it—friends of Ru, who understood what was expected of them—but no one would actually want to dance with her, or sit with her.

Mamie knew Rose had done her best for her. She also knew Rose understood that Mamie was unattractive—and it seemed to matter to Rose, though perhaps only as a
problem
with possible, partial solutions. Rose had served her friend;
Mamie knew that. But now Mamie was on her own, with her transformed classmates, and all the people who knew how to behave, how to enjoy themselves, how to rise to occasions.

The Doran family was half an hour late. Cas Doran let his wife, son, and daughter sit in the car for minutes before he joined them. He left the house flanked by officials passing him telegrams and taking dictation. Then, when the family got to the People’s Palace, Mrs. Doran spotted
more
officials in black bowler hats. “Cas, this is impossible,” she said as she eased her wide self, and wider skirts, across the seat. “Why must the government be in crisis on the night of the Presentation Ball?”

Her husband’s fingers closed like claws around her wrist, crushing the links of her diamond bracelet into her flesh. “The government is not in crisis, my dear. You must not say such things. And have you forgotten that you and Mamie do not get out here? That the car will take you around to the north door, and that it is only for reasons of security that I have been delivered before you?”

“I hadn’t forgotten.” Mrs. Doran settled herself again and rubbed her wrist. She heard Mamie whisper, “Stop it. Just stop it.”

Cas and Ru got out. Ru stood waiting for his father at the foot of the staircase. He kept adjusting his uniform tunic, pulling at its hem, twitching its collar. Mrs. Doran wanted to shout at him. The car wasn’t moving. It was in a line. And, for all his nonsense about security, Cas was standing on the steps holding court—with no one of any consequence, only his bowler-hatted underlings. She heard him say, “I have no use for another report. I want to see the man. Bring him to me.” Then he summoned his son to his side and went up the carpeted steps, pulling on his gloves.

Up in the dressing room, the society matrons presiding over the ceremony of the presentation were marshaling the girls.

Grace kissed her splendid daughter on the little patch of bare arm between her sleeve and the top of her glove. Then she let Rose go.

A matron said, “You young ladies all know which row you’ll be in. Please remember that the order of your presentation will be determined by the alphabet, not by any sentiments of friendship.”

Grace heard her daughter from among the white, glistening throng. “Yes, girls, we can put friendship in our glory boxes and get it out again after we’re married.”

There was laughter. One of the other mothers—perhaps someone young enough to remember the society dragons herding her—applauded.

Another mother sidled up to Grace and whispered, “This is all very strange.” As they followed their daughters down what seemed like endless hallways and staircases to the ballroom, Grace and this woman, whom she’d never met before, talked about their very different comings of age—Grace at twelve in an apron behind the counter of her father’s shop, and the other woman as a governess at seventeen.

The debutantes and their escorts bustled into the Great Hall before the ballroom. As they passed under the forty-foot lintel carved with the names of the founders, the woman beside Grace touched her hand and pointed out the name at the center of the shallow arch—
Tiebold.

Mamie and her mother caught up with the cavalcade of debutantes at the entrance to the Great Hall. The matrons were lining up the girls—one hundred and five of them, in fifteen rows, seven abreast. The girls had practiced, and the maneuver was quickly accomplished. Mamie was in the fourth row, Rose the thirteenth. Mamie craned over her shoulder to see her friend, highly visible because of her height and radiance. Inadvertently, Mamie caught Patty’s eye. Patty was babbling to any of her neighbors who would listen that she shouldn’t be nervous, she’d been to all sorts of assemblies all summer in the South. “Fancy dress balls, cricket club balls, the Masonic Ball in Canning. Girls who know how to dance don’t have to wait to come out. And all the married ladies dance because women are still so outnumbered by the men in our town …”