‘We must have a ball,’ she said in a dreamy voice. ‘That is how things are managed where I was born.’
I stared at her, arrested by the notion that she was about to speak of her childhood, but she only went on staring at the trees. The next day, she began to make preparations for what was to be the most lavish ball the country had ever beheld.
‘A ball is like a summoning spell,’ she told our mesmerised housekeeper. ‘It must be carefully designed and composed. It must be so magnificent that no person will fail to hear of it or dare decline our invitation.’
The ball was to be held two months hence, in autumn, and everyone of consequence among the clay folk sent an acceptance when they received the thick invitation cards individually embossed with dark red roses by an artist hired to perform the task. None of the velvet people was invited, and when I asked Mama why, she said only that it was of no concern of theirs. As the day approached, supplies began to arrive by ship as well as chefs to cook them and footmen and maids to help guests from carriages, take coats, offer champagne and serve food. Fresh ingredients were brought from all over the country and exotic flowers shipped from nearby islands and kept in the cellar with the rare wines and ports Mama had brought with us.
I did all that I was told. I held open doors and helped to place things and to polish crystal and silverware. Mama even allowed me to help design the flower arrangements and to iron her evening gloves and kerchief, but knowing that I was not to attend, some part of me was inattentive to the preparations. It was this part that now pondered the velvet people. Since my mother’s strange behaviour the day the neighbour had called, I had become more aware of them, and I often found myself watching them closely. Indeed, my early mornings were now focused on the moment when a tribe of them would pass by the house every few days, always in those cool hours before dawn. I watched them often enough to be sure that they always took exactly the same route across the paddocks and around obstacles. It even seemed to me they trod in exactly the same places each day. It was as if the strange, exquisite music their feet drew from the land depended upon their treading the same steps, as if any deviation would alter the music. I became convinced that they walked by the house not to go anywhere or to accomplish anything save to practise the making of music, which the clay people utterly ignored.
In Dusty Town, I noted the confused, lumbering movements of the velvet men clad in the ungainly attire of the clay folk, whose steps drew no music from the land. Was it the clothes they wore that stopped them from finding the music, or an inability to find music that made them don the clothes and ape the ways of the clay people? Perhaps in building their great untidy settlement, the clay folk had made it impossible for the velvet people, who had once passed over this place, to walk where they used to walk, so that the music had been irrevocably broken. I had noticed that the same velvet people passed our house, though sometimes there were a few extra people, or one or two fewer. Perhaps the impossibility of walking their own ancient songlines had destroyed those velvet people whose song paths had been built over, trapping them within Dusty Town to wither like leaves caught in a grate. In any case, they seemed to me as different from the wild velvet people as a separate race.
One morning when we had come to the wharves very early so that Mama could supervise the unloading of some hundred-year-old eggs to be served at the ball, I elected to stay in the carriage. I had been sitting for a time, wondering at the fact that even now, when there was no one in the street, the dust hung suspended in the air. A wind blew up. I was startled because I had never known a breeze to blow here, and had supposed that there was something about the shape of the hills surrounding the town on three sides, and the closed nature of the harbour, that prevented the wind from entering. I turned to look in the direction