Read an Excerpt From The Scarlet Ball by Nghi Vo

Please enjoy an excerpt from The Scarlet Ball, a new historical fantasy by Nghi Vo, publishing with Tor Books on October 6th. We’re thrilled to also include an audio excerpt, read by Natalie Naudus.

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One thing I had learned over the course of a not uneventful life is that you never know where a night is going to end up. How many times had I heard these same words before? I covered my laugh by hurriedly reaching down to unbutton my coat. The evening was falling into focus for me. I knew this better than I knew my way around feathers and needle, better than I knew English, and my English is perfect.

I was good at taking off my clothes, and in a moment, my jacket, skirt, and blouse were draped over an upholstered chair, hanging down in lank dark folds that I was suddenly glad to be rid of. Shopgirl black showed no marks, but God almighty, it was dull.

“You’re clean enough, and the hair is right. You’ve kept yourself tolerably white in that shop, and gloves will cover up the wreck of your hands,” Mrs. Howard said, critically examining me where I stood in shift, corset, stockings, and shoes. My underthings I’d kept from France, finer than would be suspected from my dress, and she frowned.

“I won’t ask where you got those,” she said, and I gave her a bland look.

“I can give you the direction of the shop in Paris, if you like. They do very good work.” She ignored this, gesturing impatiently for me to step forward.

It was perhaps the strangest thing yet when Mrs. Howard herself pulled the dress over my head, a rush of satin and silk that cost enough to keep a family of six for six months or more. Still it was nothing more than cloth, a stiff shell with strips of grosgrain ribbon lining each seam on the inside, until she came around behind me. Her fingers practically flew up the long, long row of silk-covered buttons that ran straight up my spine, and when she did up the last one, I let out a long breath, staring in the mirror at what I had become. No shopgirl wore a dress like this. No whore did either, and I closed my hands into fists because I didn’t want to mar the watery shine of the silk.

“My dear, whatever is all this?”

The voice was deep and indolent, the words equally measured and indifferent. I raised my eyes in the mirror to see a tall lean man standing behind me and Mrs. Howard. He was dressed for dinner, shirt perfectly white and his short gray beard immaculately trimmed; handsome for his age but not ostentatiously so. Mr. Howard, I guessed, but there was something loose about the way he stood, the way his shoulders shifted under his dinner jacket. He tilted his head inquisitively, examining not how I was in the mirror but how I looked from behind. It should have been familiar, a lecherous man not bothering to hide his interest right in front of his wife, but somehow I knew it wasn’t, and a surge of primitive danger stiffened my spine. All at once it was hard to breathe, and the thought came to me, It’d be better to die facing him.

Mrs. Howard kept her hand on my shoulder, kept me turned to the mirror, and in its silvered reflection, I could watch them as they spoke.

“Henry. Henry. Look at me.”

His eyes went to her, and it was as if I had shed a wet wool coat. Suddenly I could stand up straight again. I could breathe again, I could think of running or of snatching up the marble bust in the nearby niche in the wall to defend myself. I might have done it, but Mrs. Howard’s hand, implacable as iron, held me in place.

“That’s not Ginny, I don’t think,” he commented. “Is she for me?”

“She is not, either. Go on, old man, look elsewhere for your meal.”

In the mirror, Mr. Howard’s face wrinkled, a fast ripple of flesh over unyielding bone, revealing a mouth full of teeth that could never fit in a human skull. Then it was gone again, leaving behind a placid face with an amiable expression in its wake; I realized it was a smile. Mr. Howard found himself pleased.

“As you say, my dear. Tell me, will we be departing by eight still? I should want Carter to brush out my new coat if we are.”

“Say eight thirty,” she said, as if they were quite a normal woman and her husband. With a nod, he turned. His brilliant black shoes made a brisk tap on the floor, and the door opened and shut with a clean click, neither of which I had heard when he entered, and I thought with some distant dread that of course he hadn’t used the door to come in.

“What is—”

“My husband,” she said impatiently, as if that should have explained it, and perhaps it did. She looked fed up with my stupidity, but then she paused. “You must take care when he is around. Do not be alone with him, or you will be the only one to blame for what happens to you.”

“I can handle any man,” I retorted, “but he’s not one, is he?”

At that, Mrs. Howard looked satisfied, a cat remembering a good meal, but she only steered me to the vanity. Up close I saw that the round freestanding mirror behind it was framed with a narrow band of gold, stamped with curling lines that brought to mind dancing flames, and when I sat down I was struck by how clear it was, pure silver behind flawless glass. I wasn’t sure I had ever seen my face with such clarity. Distracted, I leaned in closer— only to recoil, startled, when I saw my lips move in a smile without my intent or indeed any movement from me. A moment later, my reflection was mine again, and Mrs. Howard snorted.

“That mirror is very old, and it likes its tricks,” she said, as if that was any explanation, and she turned my head so she could see better. My hair came down in a shower of pins, and she raked it out with a wide-toothed ivory comb. I’d washed it two days before, but she still sprinkled it with powder to draw out the grease, using a brush to take out the rest.

“The length and color are good, but otherwise thank God for the wax.”

It surprised me that she did it herself. Just as she had known how to pack me into the dress, she knew how savagely hair could be treated, partially twisted up into a knot as a small pair of steel tongs were heated over the gas lamp, the tinted wax softened in her clean fingers before she applied it to give me tidy waves. She worked with a single-minded focus that had no regard for me, and despite the pulling and the faint sizzle and the smell of spilled beeswax in my nose, my eyelids started to droop.

I hadn’t slept in so long. During my first week in New York, I hadn’t slept at all, and when I finally found a place, it was in a room lined with pews where we smashed in side to side, wedged so tightly we wouldn’t fall to the floor when we finally dropped off. I drowsed now, and I dreamed not of the passage to America, or a violin playing frantically before it shrieked with human pain, or the long hours at Madame Valois’s shop, but of Paris instead and all the fun I’d had there before the fun stopped.

“There.”

My eyes opened, and I looked at my own face in the mirror, Mrs. Howard’s hovering like a spirit’s over my shoulder. It was my own face, sly and round with wide scornful lips and deep eyes, but with my hair done up in the fashionable Newport knot, I was something else, a chimera perhaps, or a piece of lovely glass put in an overly expensive setting. The ruffle of lace around the collar of the dress looked suddenly fragile, and all I wanted in the world was to tear it.

My hand came up, but as if she could read my mind, Mrs. Howard pressed it to the top of the vanity, bringing the other to join it. I thought for a moment she meant to trim my nails. There was no need; we scoured our hands in saltwater before Madame Valois allowed us in the shop—she’d make it bleach if she thought she could get away with it. Then I realized I could not move my hands from where she had placed them, and I stared after her in growing alarm as she left the room. I was as helpless as a child at prayer, and I could see my own panic in the mirror. The house could burn down. Mr. Howard might return. I threw myself back, and hissed with pain because the vanity did not move and neither did my hands. I’d tear my skin clean off before I won myself free.

Before I could contemplate how much of myself I might leave behind if I had to, Mrs. Howard returned. She set a red morocco leather case on the vanity by my hands, and then she pulled up the light chain she wore clipped to her fabric belt, her chatelaine, which held a few pill boxes, a discreet pair of spectacles, and a sheathed pair of scissors.

The scissors were lovely, silver chased with gold, and the looped handles were designed to resemble a fern frond curling on itself in a figure eight when they were closed. She snapped the blades a few times, and it occurred to me that for all they looked like embroidery scissors, they did not sound like them. Instead, they sounded like the enormous shears we used at the shop, great ugly things with rusted handles but pure clean blades, capable of snipping through wool felt, quills, and leather.

These she laid on the vanity, and then she drew a curved needle from the case off the chatelaine, threading it with coarse black thread. In the gaslight, the needle glinted, impossibly sharp. You needed a curved needle for the mattress stitch, for joining two edges over an uneven surface.

Finally, she opened the leather case, drawing from it a shimmering, rustling skin thing, perforated like a mask was with holes for eyes and nose and lips. The mouth seemed particularly wide, stretched as if in a cry of fear or pain. This she laid out flat, as if to let it relax out of any possible crease or wrinkle.

“Now, then,” she said, cupping my chin, “you are certainly going nowhere with a face like that.”

* * *

The carriage was well-sprung, and the team of bright bays moved as smooth as smoke. Inside it, I sat up straight on the velvet seat with my hands folded over a beaded silk reticule and my eyes fixed on precisely nothing.

“I smell blood,” Mr. Howard said from the opposite seat. “It hasn’t been spilled, though, has it, darling?”

“I am too careful by far for that, Henry,” Mrs. Howard said, distracted as she twitched the green baize curtain back to inspect the street outside. The rain had faded to an angry drizzle, the streets drained somewhat from the initial deluge, but echoes of angry thunder promised New York that the storm, far from being done with us, was only waiting like a cat at a mousehole.

I could move my hands now. I could move anything I liked, and after the torrent of pain, the raw, strange, sour feeling of a too-sharp knife parting what had once been whole, a kind of hot numbness had taken me over. It wasn’t the languorous, luxurious ease of opium or the excitingly heavy weight of absinthe. Instead it was as if someone had pulled out all of my teeth and for some reason, I simply did not care about it. I thought in a kind of horrified way that perhaps she had done exactly so. I had a memory of my teeth pulled out and laid on a cloisonné tray in two rows for inspection. Two had not passed muster and been replaced with two pearls, or perhaps I had only dreamed that. I hoped I had only dreamed that.

The carriage slowed to a crawl and then a stop entirely, and Mrs. Howard let the curtain drop. The only light came from Mr. Howard’s fingertips where he idly sketched strange figures in the air. They would flame up, and for a moment, I thought I could perhaps decipher them, and then they were replaced with some new shape, the idle kind of magic that rich men used to impress women. The figures swam like fish in water, and when he caught me looking, he smiled and winked.

Our little secret, such winks said, but I didn’t wink in return. I was afraid to. The face I wore, the new face, felt as if it could come loose at any moment. At any moment, the silk thread Mrs. Howard had used to connect it to my skull would fail, and it would fall into my lap, and oh, but I would bleed, a gush of blood to stain all this velvet, it would never come out, it—

Mrs. Howard jabbed me hard in my side, skillfully finding the place between the bones of my corset where it would hurt the worst.

“Don’t lose your nerve now,” she said. “I chose you because you could be still and silent, because I believe you can follow orders if it will make you money. Has any of that changed?”

I wanted to scream at her that of course it had, that I had changed. She had changed me. Judith Ban, the industrious determined girl who worked for Madame Valois and lived with two other girls on Mulberry Street, didn’t wear Worth dresses. She didn’t wear pearls at her throat and her ears, she didn’t ride in carriages that moved like boats on a calm river, and her face was the one she was born with. She sure as hell wasn’t white.

I was someone else now, but it turned out that that person could also be still and silent. She was afraid and furious, but she was still ambitious, and under the face Mrs. Howard had given me, I felt something like an itch. She had sewn so fast—I imagined an insect trapped under the skin feeling for some exit, and then I realized.

I wanted to smile, because madly, strangely, and truly, I wanted to see what would come of all this. She had taken my bag with its handy stone away from me, but somewhere under the layers of cotton and silk and skin, I was still myself.

I have never been helpless.

I held that thought in my teeth, and I waited as the carriage rattled on to our destination.

Excerpted from The Scarlet Ball, copyright © 2026 by Nghi Vo.