The Scarred Man is silent. Too silent.
And when I turn back, he’s already gone.
I stand for a moment, wondering what to do. But the current is too strong, and soon I’m pushed with the crowd. Even though the embassy is in the other direction, I can’t fight it. I am surrounded by people in masks and capes and long white dresses draped in red.
The sun is down, but it’s not dark. Not exactly. Not yet. The gaslights are growing brighter, though, and the bonfire still burns.
Firecrackers erupt in the street, and I jump. It sounds like gunfire, and I find myself pressed against the brick of one of the buildings, rocking.
“Hush, little princess …”
Maybe it’s the smoke, but I feel my eyes begin to water. I will not allow myself to cry. I will not crumble. I will not turn to ash and blow away like the tiny sparks and embers that fly up from the bonfire and float like fireflies out to sea.
“Dead and gone …”
The words come to me through the darkness, and I want to scream.
“No one’s gonna know you’re coming home …”
“Grace!” I hear my mother’s cries.
“Grace!” my mother screams, and I find it harder and harder to breathe because I’m surrounded by smoke and masks and the sky is the color of fire.
“Hush, little princess, wait and see …”
“Grace!” the word comes again, and I know these women in white dresses are each my mother’s ghost.
When I feel a hand on my arm I want to fight and run, but the man in the mask is gripping me too hard. It’s too dark and I’m too tired. I lash out, pushing and fighting with all that I have. I grab the offending hand and step to the side, spinning. But then the voice calls again, “Grace!”
With his free hand, Noah removes his mask. He leans down and looks into my eyes.
“Grace, it’s me!”
I’m breathing so hard now the air doesn’t actually reach my lungs.
Noah frees himself of my grasp and reaches for me again. Then he seems to think better of it.
Another man in a mask bangs into me, his elbow landing in my side, and I cry out. I think about another day, another mob. The knife wound in my side. The mob that was after Alexei. After me.
And just that quickly I can feel the panic take me, the air being pulled from my lungs. There are just too many people — just too much smoke.
“Jamie,” I tell Noah. “I need Jamie.”
When Megan appears at Noah’s side, she’s breathing hard, laughing. I can tell she’s been dancing around the fire. Her long black hair is swept back and tied with a red bow at the base of her neck. Her white dress is long and flowing, old-fashioned and high-waisted. It’s like she’s danced here from a dream.
“Grace!” she exclaims, breathless. “You came!”
“Was Jamie at the embassy when you left?”
It’s loud, and Megan can’t hear me, so I yell again.
“Was Jamie at the embassy?”
“I don’t know,” Megan says, shaking her head. “I haven’t seen him. Grace, what’s wrong?”
“I have to get back to the embassy,” I say, even though I have no idea what will come next. I can’t think that far ahead. This is no chess game. It’s my life. And it is spiraling out of control.
“Hush, little princess …”
“Stop it!” I yell, putting my hands over my ears, trying to block out the song that is echoing over and over in my mind. “Stop it!”
“Stop what?” Noah asks.
“That singing. It’s —”
In my mind, I start to say. But Noah is shaking his head and rolling his eyes.
“They’ll sing it all night,” he says, as if he is annoyed, too. He has no right to be bothered, I think. The song’s not inside his head.
But then I realize that if it’s not in Noah’s head, then it isn’t in mine either. Noah gestures at the crowd, at the men in their capes and masks and the women and girls in their dresses. I catch glimpses of red sashes waving in the firelight. It’s like seeing splashes of blood.
“They always sing it on the Night of a Thousand Amelias,” Noah says, as if it’s a simple fact, common knowledge, as obvious as the sun rising in the east.
“The what?” I think Princess Ann said something like that too, but she didn’t explain it.
“The Night of a Thousand Amelias,” Noah says. “You know how on the fourth night the masked men came and cut down the bodies of the royal family? The king and queen and the children were all wearing these white nightgowns or sleep shirts or whatever, but they’d been stabbed so many times there were big red streaks like —”
“I get it, Noah.”
I recall Ms. Chancellor’s words, the image of white muslin glowing in the moonlight except where it was stained with blood, and I think I’m going to be sick.
“Well” — Noah is getting into it now — “legend has it the royal family comes back every year and haunts the mob who killed them. So every year the women pretend to be little Amelia, all grown up and out for revenge.”
He gives me his Evil Laugh, but I just think about Princess Ann watching from her window. Noah doesn’t know his story is terrifying in a totally different way.
“The men dress in masks and capes like the men who came on the fourth night to cut the bodies down,” he finishes.
“They weren’t men,” I say, but the crowd is so loud that no one hears me. In fact, if anything, the song grows even louder. My mother’s voice is singing.