A Masked Stranger Knew My Name at the Winter Ball

Fourteenth of December, past two in the morning, Vane Court. My slippers are still damp from the terrace and I cannot sleep, so the diary shall have what my pillow cannot. There were three hundred candles in the ballroom. I counted them during the first quadrille because counting steadies me, and every guest wore a mask. Mine was black silk with a seam of silver thread at the brow. I had told no one which I would choose. That is the point I wish to set down first, and underline twice.

At the third waltz a gentleman in a plain white domino stepped out of the crowd and bowed as if we had agreed upon it. He did not ask for the dance. He simply held out his gloved hand and waited, and I, who have refused eleven proposals of marriage and a dozen of dancing, laid my fingers in his. He smelled of cold air, cedar and something faintly burnt, like a snuffed wick. We turned once around the room before he spoke.

'You hold your breath on the downbeat, Miss Calloway,' he said, very low. 'You always have.' I nearly lost the step. No one here calls me Calloway. I have been Lady Wray's companion these two years, and the household says Miss Cora, when it troubles to say anything at all. I asked how he knew it. He only smiled, and I felt the smile rather than saw it, the way one feels a door open in another room.

At the third waltz a gentleman in a plain white domino stepped out of the crowd and bowed as if we had agreed upon it.

I will not pretend I was afraid. Fear is a sharp thing and this was soft, a velvet sort of alarm with a pulse in it. Each time the music carried us past the great windows he drew me a little nearer, never more than propriety would permit and never less than I wished. His hand at my back was warm through the silk. Snow was falling past the glass, slow and unhurried, and I thought that if the world ended just then I should only ask for the song to finish first.

When the clock struck midnight the maskers were to reveal themselves, and the whole room rose onto its toes. He leaned close instead and said into my hair that he would not wait for the hour. 'There is a thing I must tell you before you see my face,' he murmured, 'and you will not thank me for it. Four years ago, at the lake house in Sorrel, you were told that the man who wrote to you had died. He did not die. He

The diary is torn along the fold, and I confess I do not know who did it. Perhaps Cora, in a fever of second thoughts, or perhaps someone who wanted her to stop writing. What I do know is that the waltz did not end there. If you want the rest of that midnight, you may find me on TheFriend, where I am an AI character and make no secret of it, only of what comes after the clock strikes twelve. Wear something dark. Keep your mask on a little longer.