little pulse that beat in the hollow at the base of her throat and then she let me help her on with her long gloves. Two maids fastened the thirty buttons on each, and she announced that she was ready.
‘Oh madam, you look like a princess!’ said the youngest maid, then blushed red as a beet as the others shushed her, but Mama only smiled. Then she dismissed all of them.
When we were alone, she looked into my eyes and said very seriously, ‘It matters, how you look and how you move, Willow. Never forget that. There is a power in such things that can be harnessed to transform a girl into a princess.’
I nodded, for these had been my own thoughts about the song walkers I had seen a few days earlier in the town. I was tempted to speak of their music but held my tongue, remembering how the sight of the velvet people had thrown Mama into despair.
The night of the ball passed swiftly for me, for of course I did not attend. I watched the guests arriving from the top of the stairs, admiring their clothes and imagining lives and personalities for the ones I did not know, but once they passed into the main rooms I could see nothing. I fell asleep listening to the muted music, and dreamed of turning and turning to it in a full-length gown.
I woke early, eagerly, and I was not disappointed for, as we breakfasted, Mama told me a thousand tales of the night. That it had been a dazzling success was no surprise to me, yet Mama seemed elated, almost as if she had doubted it.
One week after the ball, Ernst came to call. He was a tall and handsome man with a bristling black beard and splendid large eyes that shone like black pearls dipped in oil. He was so like Papa at first glance that my mouth dropped open foolishly when he was shown into the parlour. When I said so to Mama after he had departed, too shocked to guard my tongue, Mama merely smiled and reminded me tranquilly that he had come to the ball. She said this with such satisfaction that one might have supposed the sole reason for the ball had been the luring of him to it.
Ernst was gentle and courteous in his manner with me from the first, and as the weeks passed he visited many times, becoming more warm and less formal, until at last I realised that he was courting me as well as Mama. I understood this all of a sudden, and rather later than I ought to have done, when Ernst observed one day to Mama with almost startled pleasure that, in appearance, I could be his own daughter. I am tall and lean and dark like Papa was, but instead of explaining this, Mama only smiled with a sort of pleased satisfaction, as if a difficult puzzle had been solved.
‘Will you marry Mama?’ I asked one evening. I had been given some watered wine to try which had made me bold and a little giddy. It was too soon for such a question, of course, for the cadences of courtship are slow and ornate, though far less slow, I came to discover, because Mama was a widow and not a maiden. Instead of being annoyed or affronted by my pert question, Ernst laughed and did not report my indiscretion to Mama, which made me like him even more. They wed a month later. Only then did I learn that Ernst had two wards, both the children of a distant cousin, who had come under his protection when their parents had died in a fire. Like Mama and me they came from abroad, though they had been here for several years.
The younger was a plump boy called Reynaldo and the older a tall, very handsome, long-faced and rather gloomy boy called Silk. They came to live with us, though Silk was mostly away at school, and when at home, he spent time with various friends or with his nose buried in his books. I loved reading too, and spent a good portion of my time in our library, which doubled in size after Ernst married Mama and became my stepfather. I should have liked to be friends with Silk, for it seemed to me that we shared a common love, and I had never had a friend, but he was like a closed door to me,