I stop breathing.
“What, is she here? I didn’t notice her.”
“You wouldn’t. She’s plain as. Wearing some goody-goody fifties green thing. With a sweetheart neckline.”
“Ugh.”
“And she’s a ginger. Awful hairdo. She’s been schlepping around the place all night.”
I want to scream, to burst out of the stall and take her down. She’s pretty skinny; I bet she’s not that strong. But she’s mean. She’d probably be a hair-puller. I close my eyes and will myself to keep very still.
“Doesn’t sound like much of a problem, then,” says Nicola’s friend.
Nicola laughs. “No, not really. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I don’t want to keep the poor man waiting too long.” They both giggle and swish out the door.
I stay frozen in my position, head between knees, staring down at the little puddle of tears on the tile. My mind is numb; it feels like I’ve had an injection of novocaine between the eyes. I can’t move until I figure out what I’m going to do once I leave this bathroom stall. What I’m going to say to Henry when I go back out there.
The door swings open again, and I hear a group of women, laughing and talking loudly, pile into the room. One of them rattles my stall door, trying to open it. “Oh, sorry,” she says, after a second try to push in the door, “someone in there?”
“Out in a minute,” I manage to say, my voice strained and croaky.
I walk out of the bathroom in a daze and head down the hallway towards the ballroom, still not sure who I’m going to talk to, what I’m going to say. I pass by the cloakroom and pause. I consider getting my coat and leaving. Then I hear a woman giggle, and Henry’s voice telling someone how beautiful she is. I open the door a crack.
Henry’s kissing Nicola; he’s pressed her up against the wall, and one of her legs is wrapped around his waist. He’s pushing her dress up. I slam the door open. He turns and sees me.
“Where, why—you’re not supposed to be here.”
Not even an apology. Not even like he’s doing anything wrong groping another woman in the cloakroom. Instead, it’s my fault, because I’m not supposed to be here. Just like every time I was overreacting or in a bad mood. I take two steps forward.
“Fuck you,” I say. “You wouldn’t even be here at this ball if it weren’t for me!” I grab a handful of coat hangers and wing them at him. I keep walking forward. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You fucking asshole.” I throw some more hangers, then shove them both back against a rack of coats. I get my fingernails into Nicola’s shoulder, scrape them down her arm. Henry steps in front of her and takes hold of both my wrists. Nicola touches her upper arm for a second. She looks straight at me, smirks and readjusts her underwear.
“Don’t touch her.” Henry shakes me. “You’re being hysterical.”
“I’m not even close to hysterical.” I twist my wrists free and shove his shoulders again. I want to grab his thin hair and hit his head into the wall. He grabs me by the forearm and pushes me into the middle of the room.
“Calm down. You’re making a scene.”
There are a few people peeping through the open door of the cloakroom.
“This has been a long time coming,” he says. “You can’t say you’re really surprised.”
“A long time coming? We’ve been living together for what, three months? We haven’t
had
a long time. I moved here—we were starting a life here together.”
“That was your idea, Dani.”
I am acutely aware of how ridiculous I must seem. A joke. Even Nicola’s looking at me with an expression close to pity, or disdain. I start to back away from Henry.
“There you are, Dani!” Maria sweeps in, puts her arm around me. “I have been looking everywhere for you.” She looks around the room and knows intuitively what’s going on. Someone like Maria always knows what’s going on, while someone like me bumbles along, believing that she and her boyfriend are going through a rough patch, when actually she’s been a blind idiot.
“Come with me,” she says, pulling me closer to her. She keeps her arm around my waist, says good night to the spectators who have gathered and walks me out the door. We head towards the ballroom.
“Maria, I can’t go out there. I’m a mess.”
“No, no, there is a spot, a little alcove, hardly anyone sits there. We will talk.”
I’m sitting on a plush, gold-trimmed chaise longue in an alcove with a huge bay window. I hear the din of people talking and having fun on the dance floor. This should have been a perfect night. Instead, I’ve shoved and slapped two people in public and now I’m hiding in an alcove, crying, mascara dripping. In a designer dress. At the Art Institute Ball at the Grosvenor Hotel in London.
“Dani, this is all beneath you,” says Maria. She’s perched on the window seat. “That Henry, he was never good enough for you.”
“But I thought you liked him. You always went to his studio, Edward liked his work.”
Maria hops off the window seat and sits beside me. “I was only friendly to him because he was your boyfriend. I wanted to get to know him so I could know more about your life. Be in your life. It has always been about you.” She wipes the last undried trail of mascara off my face. “There, beautiful as ever.”
“But that girl said—”
“That girl is of no importance.”
“But you said she was nice, pretty. She’s more than pretty. And her dress was—”
“Too obvious. She is a pretty mannequin. That is all.”
“What I am going to do?” I’ve driven my life into a brick wall. I moved across the ocean to make risky career choices and to be with my boyfriend, who has now dumped me in the most humiliating fashion possible at a posh ball. I am so stupid. So stupid. “I’ve ruined everything.”
“Dani. But you are being ridiculous. Stop. Henry, he did you a favour. You could never be happy with him. Better now than another year from now. You do not have to waste any more time. This is an opportunity.”
“For what?”
“For whatever you want to happen. Quit Stowmoor, do the afterword, the consulting. Go where you please. Now,” she says, standing up and taking my hand, “you will not go back home to deal with that man tonight. Come to my place, text Henry to move his things out tomorrow. Tell him I will send Edward to move them out if he will not. You sign my contract, and resign from Stowmoor. Then you will be free.”
The diamonds sparkle at her throat. Maybe she’s right.
A ray of early afternoon light jabs the room. I hear a rattle, a clunk. A curtain sweeps back; the room floods with brightness.
“Come, now,” says Maria, walking towards me with a tray. Her footsteps are punctuated with a
clink-clink
of teapot against china plate. “A little food, yes?”
She sets the tray on the nightstand beside the bed. I peep out of the covers, eyes not yet adjusted to the afternoon sun. I see the tag of a tea bag, a bunch of purple grapes, a stack of arrowroot biscuits. I don’t move; instead, I answer her with an unintelligible moan, a half growl, half whine. My head still pounds from last night’s champagne and crying.
Maria pulls back the feather duvet. I blink, try to bury my head into the pillow. Tea pours from pot to cup.
“Drink,” says Maria, holding the steaming tea in one hand, drawing me into a sitting position with the other. My body follows her lead; I sit up, take the cup. She hands me an arrowroot. I gnaw the edges between sips of tea.
“I checked your phone. Henry agreed, he is moving his things today.” Maria sets the mobile on the tray. I nod absently, too numb to be annoyed at this invasion of privacy. “It will soon be done, Dani. You will see.” She tries to finger-comb my hair, which is tangled, half matted from sleeping on my updo. I nod again and she hugs me.
A few hours later, I’ve managed to get dressed, in an old cotton jersey empire-waist sundress of Maria’s. I’m sitting on her beige sofa with a vodka martini, extra olives. I haven’t showered, but I’ve pulled the bobby pins out of my hair and piled them like a ceremonial heap of bones on the end table. A movie about a teenage American girl who has eight months to live flickers on Sky TV. She meets a boy, they fall in love and she still dies, but it’s okay because his love was her miracle. My martini glass is dry. I go to the kitchen to see if Maria will make me another.
“No, not yet.” She’s deep in the pantry, whispering on the phone. “It is under control. No, all is fine. For her, this heartbreak is delicate.” Pause. “She will. It will. Trust me. Let me talk to Sándor.” Maria starts speaking at full volume, in Hungarian. I jump, and the martini glass clatters against the granite countertop.
Maria stops speaking. Instinctively, I fumble in a drawer, pretend I’m looking for something. She strides out of the pantry, hand cupped over the receiver.
“You are all right?” Her voice is tense, an elastic ready to snap.
“Yes, yes.” The drawer is full of take-away pamphlets, a couple of cookbooks. “I’m looking for a shot glass. I need another.” I shake the martini glass from side to side. “Something stronger.” I play it half sad, half tipsy.
She smiles, reaches out and strokes my cheek. “I will help you. Only a moment.” She speaks a few short, clipped syllables into the receiver, then snaps the mobile shut. “Let me,” she says, unscrewing the cap of the bottle.
Twenty minutes later I’m sitting at the table, halfway through a large glass of vodka. Maria sits beside me, arm around my shoulders. The contract is on the table. She smiles at me, serenely.
“Let us finish with this business. Officially, let us become partners.”
She hands me a pen. I take it, click the ballpoint in, out. I’m swaying from the drinks and Henry’s betrayal; the scene last night makes me feel like my heart’s been wolf-mauled, left for carrion. Somehow, this rip, the pain, gives me a clarity; there is no more balancing act, nothing to keep from falling apart. It has all already fallen.
I look at Maria. Her light hair pulled back, grey cashmere sweater, diamonds still sparkling in that divot between her collarbones. She is luminous. But for the first time, she can’t court me. For the first time, I can acknowledge what I kept pressed down for so long, what I didn’t want to believe. She loves only herself. She wants me for something.
“I can’t sign it.” I take another slurp of vodka, slam the tumbler down. I stand, take a step away from the table. Maria’s face twitches out of her smile for a moment, twitches back in. She takes a few steps towards me, caresses my cheek.
“Dani, darling. You are upset. But this, we discussed. It is for you, for the best.”
“No.” I don’t move, just stare at her.
“Dani, darling.” She moves closer, faint smell of gardenias. She presses her silky cheek to mine, circles out, kisses me on the bridge of my nose. “You are so beautiful,” she whispers into my ear. “Come.” She takes my hand, tries to lead me back to the chair. “Trust me.”
I shake her hand free of mine.
Her phone rings. She answers, her voice elastic-band tight again, speaks in clipped monosyllables:
yes, no, I will soon, I will look.
She checks her email while still barking into the phone. A minute later, she comes back to me.
“Dani, you must not be feeling well.”
“Actually, I feel fine.”
“That was Edward. I must go out. See yourself to bed. You will sign this later, when you’ve slept. And, you do have work tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. Her visit with Foster.
“Later. Of course, Maria.” I sit down.
Ten seconds after the door clicks shut, I’m searching. First I go through the reams of paper she’s left on the table. Nothing but the contract and the diaries she’s already shown me. I move to her desk, rifle through the side drawer. Blank letterhead from the Museum of London. A stack of her business cards, heavy stock, cream-coloured:
Maria János, Archivist,
her email, her mobile. I move to the centre drawer: bills, electric, phone. I sit down on the iron lattice-back chair, straighten the papers into a neat pile.
Then it drops from the sheaf of white bills. A deep red business card. In black, cursive font, it reads
The Beauty of Báthory.
The next line, a website:
bathorybeauty.net
. I flip the card over. Handwritten in black ink, an address on Old Street. And a word, looks Hungarian:
gyilkosság.
It has to be a research group, I think. Please let it be a research group, a study group. I move over to the keyboard, type in the website.
A dark red screen appears, with the word
Beauty
in black gothic font. I click on the word. A login window pops up. ID and password.
I rifle through Maria’s papers again. It could be anything. I run through the obvious:
Báthory, Elizabeth, Hungary, Countess. Maria.
What for a password:
blood, beauty?
The word on the card?
I try a trick I learned when I first started at Stowmoor and couldn’t keep straight all the IDs and passwords I needed. I switch on the autofill option on the computer. Then open up browser history. Go back to the last time Maria logged in, which looks like this afternoon. Then I try the ID box again.
I go through about thirty words, from
Budapest
to variations on Maria’s name. Foster’s comments about “the network” keep wiggling their way into my mind. I don’t want to think this is connected. But if it is, if it is. I mustn’t panic. I am a trained psychologist, I tell myself, so think. What would Maria pick? She wouldn’t use something directly about herself. But she’d keep everything related.
I type in
t-h-r
...and the autofill punches out the rest:
throne1.
The curser blinks, black, black, black. I type
s-t-o-w
...
The word
stowmoor
appears in the password box.
The login page dissolves and for a moment the screen is black. A picture of Báthory materializes in the middle and floats to the top right-hand corner. Then a graphic of the letter
B
surrounded with vines appears and floats to the top left-hand corner. A menu bar slides down. In red, cursive font, it lists only four options:
events, news, classifieds, links.
Then a white box pops up in the centre. A window to a chat room.
The window is blank, and I stay away from it. I turn to the menu, click on Events. A calendar for this week opens up. Sunday, a cryptic listing:
A, LDN, 9p.m.