Copperhead

Chapter 2 THE IRONSKIN

The pressure slowly faded out and vanished, and then the room was the plain dark of a burned-out light. A hundred burned-out lights—all the electricity had winked out, and now the guests milled frantically about, crashing into one another, voices piling on top of the next, fluttering for explanations. Shouts rang out; orders coldly given by Grimsby: “Round the women up. Make them safe.” Don’t let them leave.

Helen felt her way toward the wall, tugging her iron mask off so she could not be detected by some man feeling it and attempting to make her safe. She had to get up the stairs and make sure Jane was all right. But the crowd was frantic and just as Helen’s fingers touched solid wall a heavy man crashed into her and she thudded to the ground. She felt as if she would have enjoyed a good panic right about then, but instead she kept her head down and reached once more for the wall. This time someone tripped over her, catching their sharp-toed shoe in her belly.

As she rolled away from that she lost the wall, and ended up trying to stand in the melee and protect her head from more high heels. She was jostled and bumped and then suddenly there was a hand on her shoulder, guiding her back to safety. Alistair.

She clung to the hand and gasped out, “Help me,” as the man in blackness steered her along the wall and toward the hall that led to the back stairs to the garret. She found the stairwell railing with one hand and pressed her husband’s with the other.

But the hand did not have a ring. It was not her husband’s hand. It disentangled itself, and the man it belonged to said in her ear, “Trust none of them,” pressed something small into her hand, and was gone. From the other room came commotion still, and blinks of light as the servant girls brought in oil lamps.

Helen held on to the railing and went up the stairs.

It was pitch-black, but her hand found the worn door at the top and opened it, and there was a faint bit of light from the fog-shrouded moonlight. Enough to see that what was in her hand looked like an old-fashioned flashlight, the sort that ran on the mini-bluepacks of fey technology and had not been seen since. But when she slid the button it came on with the yellow of the modern electric lights, not fey blue.

She might have wondered more about it, but her thoughts were filled with Jane, Jane, Jane, and she ran the flashlight around the slanted room, fast at first, then slower and slower as the sweeps revealed no Jane, and her shaking nerves told her to fear the worst.

A body lay on the daybed, one arm flung down, white in the moonlight. All the candles were snuffed out. Helen crossed to the daybed. Played her flashlight slowly from feet to head. The woman’s face was white and pale.

Millicent.

She wore her beautiful face, as Helen had last seen her, though in the vision just now she thought she had seen Millicent with no face at all. Helen peered closer and saw the red line running around the outline of her face, saw it was slightly crooked, as if it had been hastily shoved back into place so she would not be lying here with no face at all.

But Millicent was not breathing, did not move. She lay in her fine black dress, sunk in the bone-stillness of fey sleep.

And there was no Jane, still there was no Jane. A cold wind swept through the garret and Helen shivered.

Small footstep noise behind her, and Helen whirled. It was Jane, it was the mystery man with the flashlight—no.

It was the small boy. Tam. He blinked in the flashlight’s glare. He had a jar with a tiny creature in it and Helen’s heart burst into a million pieces.

“Everyone was shouting and it woke up Sam,” he said.

“Oh, Tam,” said Helen. She hurried over to him, keeping the flashlight away from Millicent and blocking her from his view. “Your stepmamma’s … resting now. Perhaps you can show her your pet later.”

She knelt beside him at the top of the stairs. From below the lanterns had turned back to light—they had got the power working again. She heard the heavy pounding steps of men, moving closer.

Tam wriggled the small jar of bugs out of his pocket. “Do you want to feed Sam now?” he said. He pressed the small jar into Helen’s hand as Helen crouched, listening, waiting. She pulled Tam to the side in the garret room as they came up the steps, all those men, thundering up and into the small attic room. Alistair and Hattersley and Morse, and more she did not know, for Copperhead seemed bigger every day. Grimsby was at the head of them and he went straight to Millicent, lantern swinging, a hunting dog to its prey. The yellow light gleamed upward onto his chin, casting cruel black shadows across his face. A white candle fell to the floor.

Helen thought how awful she would feel if that were Jane, if that were Mother, if that were someone she loved so devotedly that her heart would shatter to see them like that, trapped in the fey sleep, all unknowing if they could ever come out. She tried to transfer that sympathy to Mr. Grimsby, but she watched the black shadows curl across his face and could not do it.

“Millicent…,” Grimsby said, and then he turned, and his lamplight fell on Helen, holding on to his son. “What do you know about this?”

All the men crowded in, and Alistair turned on her, his face sharp with the surety of her betrayal. Which was not fair, she thought. “I don’t know anything,” she said, which was at least partly true. She had known that Jane and Millicent were up here. But Jane knew how to do the operation. Helen did not know what had happened to bring them to this disaster, and if anything, she thought it likely to be the men’s fault, the fault of that dreadful machine Grimsby called their salvation. “You all saw me downstairs. I thought I heard noises from up here. I came up to try to find Jane.” Her arm tightened on Tam, who, surprisingly for a small boy, did not immediately squirm away.

The movement seemed to call attention to the boy. “Come here, son,” Grimsby said in a thin, cold voice. Tam obediently wriggled free and crossed the room in silent steps that seemed to shake the floor.

“It is good you are here, Thomas,” said Grimsby, looking down at the boy. Tam seemed very small next to that tall thin man. He was a mannequin, frozen, his fingers tight on his glass jar. “I have very sad news to tell you, so you must be brave.”

The constriction inside Helen’s chest loosened an inch. Mr. Grimsby would make it okay. He and his son would become closer while they waited and worried about Millicent. He was not as frightening as she had always thought.

“Your stepmother is dead.” Grimsby stared down at Tam and Helen saw that little form suppress a flinch. Tam did not speak.

“I say, Grims—,” said one of the other men and then was silent.

Helen found her voice. “But she’s not dead,” she said, moving impulsively to Millicent. “She’s in the fey sleep. She might wake up.” Helen smoothed Millicent’s hair, pressed her wrist, willing the pulse to suddenly start.

Mr. Grimsby cut her off. “As good as dead, for what fey would be willing to revive her? Do not count on a children’s tale, a sleeping beauty revived. We have to prepare ourselves for the worst.” Now he knelt beside his son at last, but apparently only to pick up something he saw on the floor. Helen could not think what it might be, but the movement called her attention to another find—Jane’s carpetbag, humped in a bit of shadow by the door.

Grimsby rose, his hand clenched around his prize. “And I know what will be the most important to you, son. Justice. Vengeance. We will make the murderer suffer.” Pause. Beat. “And we know who the murderer is.” Grimsby pointed at Helen, a tactile placeholder for his accused. “The fiend who did this is Jane Eliot. The ironskin.”

Grimsby opened his hand and in the yellow lantern light she saw it.

A tangle of iron strips, the iron that had crisscrossed Jane’s perfect, fey-infused face.

The iron that had protected Jane from the fey.

The men looked curiously at Helen. Alistair’s face was lit with a wild mixture of worry and glee.

This must be problematic with his social standing, she thought, and it was as if from a long way away, just as she had felt downstairs when Grimsby’s machine had been running. He’s so pleased to have the news—he’s grown to loathe Jane—and yet no one sensible would want an accused murderer in the family.

If you had put a dagger to her throat and said how would Alistair react to something like this … well, deep inside she might have predicted it, every word. But she would have told that small voice it was wrong, that Alistair would never rejoice at such a thing. That she would never stand here seeing it now, in the flesh, Alistair—her husband, Alistair—rubbing his hands together and pondering over how Copperhead would trap her sister. The unholy glee at having an excuse to bring Jane down was written from ear to ear.

Helen had thought Alistair handsome when she met him, charming. The fact that he was wealthy was an added inducement—she was grateful for his wealth in a way she dared not remember, even now, without doubling up in shame. She had loved him once; she had been grateful. She had thought he would be kind to her. Was he not kind? She stared at the restless energy burning behind those reddened, soft cheeks, and wondered what she had done wrong to make him into who he was now.

“Well, Helen,” said Alistair. “Do you know where your sister might have run to?”

“No … no,” she said, and the part of her that was social, that carried on despite whatever true Helen felt deep inside, did a pretty little gasp for the men to see. Raised the pitch of her voice and said in a silly way, “Goodness, you don’t really think my sister did anything wrong, do you? If anything, it seemed as though that machine did something to her.”

“The machine did nothing to her except reveal her despicable behavior,” said Grimsby. “Meddling in things she didn’t understand. Shouldn’t be dealing with. If she crossed into those forbidden boundaries, she was as good as working with them.”

“Jane? No. She hates the fey as much as any of you.”

“It’s not a question of hating the fey,” Grimsby said. His blue eyes were intense; they burned into Helen as if they could see every little thought flicker across her brain. “This is what Copperhead is here for, Mrs. Huntingdon, don’t you understand? One People. One Race. Nothing good can come of mixing with the other, even with the best intentions. Humans will only be safe once the fey and dwarves are eradicated. Your sister was working with things she could not control, and when the machine revealed her actions to us, she ran.” With a sweep of his long arm he pointed to the skylight in the slanted roof, now open—the source of the cold wind Helen had felt moments ago.

Stoop-shouldered Morse crossed to the skylight and looked down. “She could have gotten onto the neighbor’s fire escape from here,” he said. A twisted smile played across his face. “Unless she fell and broke her legs.”

“She was frightened by the disaster she had caused, and she ran,” cut in Grimsby.

“I’m sure she meant well,” said one of the other men. Hattersley, the drunkest and most good-natured of the bunch.

Grimsby rounded on Hattersley, blue eyes flaming. “You dare say that with my wife right there?” He flicked his fingers in the direction of Millicent, a cold gesture somehow more dramatic than a sweep of arms. “‘Meant’ doesn’t enter into it.” Those keen blue eyes bored into Helen as he swiftly crossed the room and seized her shoulders. Suddenly she wondered how she could have ever written this man off as one of Alistair’s drunk friends. He was something else, something more. His iron grey hair was close-cropped; it lay flat across a sleek snaky skull. “You must tell us where she is. Where she would have gone.”

His eyes were penetrating her, sweeping back and forth. She was hiding in her own mind from him, darting between black bushes while the searchlight of his eyes swept the grounds. He would find her in another minute; everything she knew would come tumbling out. With an effort she gasped again, let a tear or two rise to the surface of her eyes. “Oh, Mr. Grimsby, you’re hurting me!” which was in point of fact true, but mostly it gave her a chance to duck her head away from his gaze, blink obscuring tears into place.

“Come, Grimsby, don’t manhandle my little one,” said Alistair. “She doesn’t know anything. You see her face—could someone with a face like that even leave the house? Let alone plot things.”

Helen turned her perfect face on the men, tears standing in her eyes. Her fey allure seemed to soften them all, even Grimsby, who dropped her arms and stepped back a pace. “Can we go home now?” she said meekly. “This is all so … so disturbing. That such a thing could happen to poor Millicent. And with Jane involved…”

“I must stay,” Alistair told her, “but I will have you driven home. I will come later.”

“Be safe,” Hattersley said kindly, and Helen nodded, picked up the carpetbag ever so casually, and fled down the stairs in careful slow meek steps, heart racing, brain burning clear.

Away from them in the hallways she walked faster and faster, grabbing her coat, her lilac gloves, her iron mask, kicked under a chair by the attic stairs. Her passage was slowed by the glut of couples hurrying home, away from the disastrous meeting. She nodded to them politely, trying to control the energy that burned within. Carefully tied the iron mask in place and told the massive butler to have their driver bring the motorcar around. There would not be any word to report to Alistair that she had done anything wrong.

At last inside the car, she curled her fingers around the door handle and slammed it closed, heart racing.

Jane was gone.

Millicent might die.

And then Grimsby was going to blame Jane for his wife’s death.

It was too clear. The men of Copperhead hated Jane already, hated that she was trying to help their wives regain some measure of freedom. The cowards like Morse and Boarham made fun of her when she wasn’t there (they were scared to do it to her face). Helen had tried to help Jane; Jane had tried to help Millicent, and now everything was a mess.

Worse, Jane would not have left Millicent in the fey sleep without a very good reason. Jane was too responsible, too duty-bound to run just because something spooked her. Perhaps Mr. Grimsby’s machine had caused her so much pain that she had had to flee. No, Helen did not like that idea. But perhaps the machine had messed up the operation to the point where Jane could not rouse Millicent. And then, the only thing Jane could do was press the old face in place in case Millicent did wake up, and run before the men caught her and hauled her off for their own brand of questioning.

And in that case, where would Jane have run?

“Mrs. Huntingdon?” the chauffeur said patiently again.

“Yes, please take me home, Adam,” Helen said. She found she was sitting in the middle of the backseat in a huddle, and she forced her legs to straighten to the floor. “How’s your mother doing? Are her legs still troubling her?”

“It comes and goes,” Adam said, “but she said to tell you thanks for the oranges.” The car started moving and then abruptly jerked to a halt. Alistair was banging on the rear window.

Helen swallowed and straightened as he pulled open the door and got in, slamming it behind him. “I thought you were staying here,” she said, her words muffled and hollow.

“I am. I am!” Alistair waved his hands in frustration. “You don’t know what it’s like up there.”

“With poor Millicent?”

“They’re all ranting at me, Helen. What do I do about you?”

“About me?”

“Boarham said if I’d cast Jane out this never would have happened, and Grimsby said I needed to have a tighter grip on you. He said you and Jane are working against us. That you aren’t following the party line. But I trust you, Helen.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

Alistair looked up at her, indecision written on his face. “I’m going to need your mask.”

“What?”

He nodded more firmly, as if trying to convince them both. “I need it, Helen. Grimsby said so, and he’s right. You need to be protected. I need to make you safe.”

“The mask makes me safe.”

“But you love your sister,” said Alistair. “I understand that, even if she’s not worth it. I do understand.”

“Yes?…”

“And I know you. You’re about to charge off to find her, or rescue her, or some sort of harebrained goose chase. I need to make you safe.” He reached up to Helen, and before she could think of any clever way to talk him out of it, before she could jump from the motorcar and run so fast, so fast, he unbuckled the straps and lifted it from her face, leaving her skin exposed to the warmed air of the vehicle.

She blinked at him, and she thought then that perhaps her face would calm him, that he would turn and see how lovely she was, and give in. Maybe smile and call her his pet, like he used to do.

But he thrust his fingers through the eyehole of the mask he held and said, “Yes, this is much better, isn’t it? Much better for us both.” He patted her silk-skirted leg and then hurried from the car, her iron mask dangling from his canary-gloved fingertips as he hurried back into the house.

Silence passed, and at length Adam said, “Home, miss?”

As if she had a choice.

“Yes,” Helen managed, and turned her trembling lips away from his sightline, looked out the window into the icy night.

Adam turned out of the drive. She could feel his worry like a palpable presence. That was the way it was since Rochart replaced her old face with the fey version—she seemed to have a sixth sense of what people wanted, what they felt. Now Adam was trying to help her make things better, help her show a stiff upper lip. “Those oranges cheered my mum right up, I’ll tell you.”

“Good,” said Helen. The gaslights cast strange shadows through the mists of fey. “I’ll send over some more.”

Her eyes closed against the fey, against the night, thinking about poor Millicent. Without Jane’s fey power keeping Millicent protected and under thrall, no one could survive a process like the facelift. How long would Millicent stay in the fey sleep? Jane herself was no fey—her power was not that vast. If Helen did not find Jane soon … she was very afraid Millicent would waste away and die, as Mr. Grimsby seemed to want to believe already. Millicent was on death’s door because of what Jane had done, but it wasn’t Jane’s fault, it was that horrid Mr. Grimsby and his machine. How would she make those men believe that?

And what would they do to Jane once they found her? It would be Jane against Copperhead, and Helen didn’t give a fig for those chances. She had to find her sister before they did. She closed her eyes, in that moment hating herself for the blithe way she had seen Millicent’s escape, for the casual way she had set up Jane to help Millicent. As if it were all a game. “I didn’t mean it,” she whispered fiercely. “Jane, come home.”

“What’s that, ma’am?”

“Stop here,” she said, before she knew what she was saying.

Adam pulled to the side, looking dubiously at the strip of storefronts lining the wide thoroughfare. “Probably all closed, ma’am.” She heard in the cautious sentence all the things he couldn’t say, both: Don’t get yourself into trouble, and, equally, Don’t make me lose my position.

She seized Jane’s carpetbag. “I’ve got to find my sister,” she said. “She’s my family.”

He nodded slowly, thinking this over.

“Please don’t tell my husband when you pick him up,” she said. “I’ll—I don’t know. Take a cab or the trolley or something. If he finds out … I’ll swear to him I left from home and you know nothing about it.”

“Do you have money?”

Of course she didn’t. “Oh, Adam, why am I such a wreck?”

“You’re not a wreck, ma’am,” he said in his stoic way, and handed her some coins from his pocket. “I’d watch out for the trolley, though. Full of malcontent dwarvven causing trouble, they say.”

“I’ll be careful,” Helen said, and promised, “I’ll pay you back tomorrow morning.”

“I know you will, ma’am.” He opened the door for her and looked dubiously down at her unprotected face.

No mask. No iron.

She almost flung herself back in the safety of his car. But she had to find Jane. She had to save Millicent.

Adam’s grey-black eyebrows knitted. “You’re sure you’ll be fine?”

He couldn’t order her to stay home and be safe the way Alistair could. It was as close as he could come to asking if she was certain she wasn’t mad. She supposed she was mad. She pressed his arm and said, “Not a word to Alistair. Not a word!”

He nodded solemnly, and she turned and set off as if she was full of purpose, hurrying off before she could change her mind.

It was pitch dark now, except for the faint glow of the eerie blue mist. Helen strode down the cold empty street, intensely aware of her bare face. She started every time she thought she saw a quiver from the mist.

Where was Jane living now?

Jane had lived with them for a couple months earlier in the year, helping Helen to convalesce from the fey attack. Jane had often taken the train down to the country to see her fiancé, Edward Rochart, and his daughter, Dorie. But as the grey summer continued, the blue bits of fey started appearing—little by little, settling over the city. Alistair’s gang turned from horses and dice to secret meetings where they plotted to rid the world of anything inhuman—dwarvven and fey.

Helen had not paid it much attention at first, assuming there was more drinking than politicking going on. But Jane did, and Jane was becoming more and more visible, agitating to fix the faces of the beautiful women. Beautiful women who refused to give up their dangerous beauty. Husbands who, though supposedly anti-fey, were not quite as quick to sign off on their wives returning to their old faces. It sometimes reminded Helen of that old fey story about the knight told to choose whether his wife should be beautiful at day and ugly at night, or vice versa. It was clear what these men were choosing.

To be fair, it wasn’t just the men. Helen had actually heard that fake masks were popping up at dances around the city. Not at the very best houses, mind you, but down a rung or two. For the price of some iron, you could pretend that you were a dazzling beauty underneath. Tempt some bachelor with the promise of what he might find, safe inside his home, once he carried you over that iron threshold …

Oh, Jane would never believe that one. Helen could just imagine her vitriol now. She sighed. Stubborn Jane did not see that you simply had to let these men, men like Alistair and Grimsby, have their own way. There was no arguing with obstinate fools. Not to mention that Jane’s temper (never good in the old days) had gotten on edge after her fiancé had gone into the woods with his fey-touched daughter—Helen didn’t know exactly why, as Jane called the decision foolish and pigheaded and refused to discuss it. Jane stopped returning to the country, and therefore spent more and more time at Helen and Alistair’s house. Which resulted in a violent quarrel between Jane and Alistair that ended with Jane stalking out to find some terrible shack to live in and Alistair threatening to hurl her ironskin self from the door if she came through it again.

Helen realized she was paused on the street corner close to the trolley stop, staring at a shop completely covered in blue. Early on, the city had tried paying poor folks to scrape blue off of walls and streets. But the fey had seemed to organize and retaliate—targeting only the cleaners, until at last the mounting number of deaths had caused the city to abandon that plan. Her fingers clenched around the handles of Jane’s carpetbag as she stood there in the biting cold. There had been a bakery there, before. But the bits of fey kept coming and coming, like ivy climbing the walls, choking the windows and doors. The owners had tried everything. Finally they moved out. She thought she had heard they decamped to some relatives in the country—ironic, when all the fey once came from there.

After the owners left, the mists of fey just got worse and worse, till no one would walk up to that shop for love or money. The mist thickened. Bulged.

But she had never realized that it sort of thrummed before.

Or that the tendrils coming off the house came so close to the sidewalk.

Helen’s heart jolted, beat a wild rhythm, flooded her body with the command to run.

No, the house had not been like that before.

The mists were moving. Toward her.

The interwoven bits of fey flowed from the store, creeping toward her across the front walk, all of that thick deadly blue coming at her like a slow-building wave.

Helen ran.

She pelted down the street, breath white in the cold, eyes watering from the November wind. The carpetbag beat a lumpy rhythm against her side and still she ran, not looking back, down and around the corner until she got to the trolley station where, wonder of wonders, a trolley was just preparing to depart. She flung herself through the closing doors and it pulled away.

She moved to the window, looked out between the pasted-up notices and garish advertisements to see if she saw a blue wave tearing down the street after them. But she saw nothing more than the familiar thin scarves of blue that dotted the houses and shops and streets.

Her breath fogged the glass and her face came back into focus, white and strained, mouth dark and breathing fast.

Good night, she looked a mess.

Helen sat down in an empty seat with the carpetbag firmly on her knees, still breathing hard, and attempted to smooth her hair. Slowly she adjusted her skirts, straightened the silk jacket of her dress where it had twisted around her waist, felt her heartbeat slow. A weary ticket-taker moved down the aisle, stuck a hand out for her pence without inquiring into her distress.

She had only rarely been on the trolley, and never this late at night before. It had been down for most of the war—all the fey trade had ceased at the beginning of the war, and everyone had quickly run out of those fey bluepacks that used to power everything so cleanly. Tech had come lurching back in a number of different directions at once, as humans tried to make up for the missing energy. The electric trolley had been one of the big civic pushes to get going again—but that did not mean that everyone rode it equally. Men outnumbered women, but a few women did ride it. The working poor, in old-fashioned layers of skirts, headed home to the factory slums from some slightly better position elsewhere. Reformers like Jane, in trim suits or even slacks, working for their pet causes: women’s votes or dwarvven accessibility or some equally tedious thing. Women in silk dresses, no matter how civic-minded they were, did not ride the trolley. Helen wrapped her dark coat more tightly around the plum silk, as if that would help her blend in.

The passengers were the one thing Helen liked about the trolley. Despite the fact that they made it cramped and smelly, they were also interesting, because people were interesting. She had always liked people—but now with the fey mask her interest in people seemed even more pronounced.

People …

Helen realized with a jolt that all the men in the trolley were staring at her, whether openly or surreptitiously.

She had no iron mask.

She suddenly felt naked. The iron mask was not just protection from the fey. It was protection from herself. It was protection from her own fey charm affecting everyone around her. She had gotten used to the mask turning it off, but now it was on in full force.

Now she was vulnerable.

“Do you have the time, miss?” It was a young man, fishing for an opportunity to speak to her. You should never engage any of them, she knew, but she always felt a sort of kinship for the young ones. She knew what it was to want.

“I’m sorry, no,” said Helen. In the old days it had taken more than a smile to make a man blush, but now with the fey glamour every moment of charisma was magnified, and he went bright red to the ears, though he pretended not to.

“Does she look like she’d carry a watch?” said another man, rougher. “No place to keep it in that getup.”

Her coat was hardly revealing, unless he meant her legs. She was not going to inquire what he meant.

With effort she pulled the carpetbag onto her lap and started to go through it for something to do, some way to pointedly ignore the riders around her.

Surely among everything else the ever-alert Jane had some iron in here, something Helen could use to defend herself from fey. She opened the clasp and peered into the bag’s dark contents.

The trolley was dim and the inside of the carpetbag grey-black. Helen poked around the rough interior, trying to feel things out without exposing them to the gaze of the other passengers. That tied-up roll of felt, there—those were the tools Jane used for the facelift. Helen did not remember putting them in the bag, but she must have done it in her shock.

In a pocket compartment was a sloshy bag of clay in water. A larger compartment held a rough wooden box, secured in place. She would have to pull it out to discover what was inside. She rummaged around the main compartment, found a scarf and hairpins. A small leather-bound book. Train-ticket stubs.

Apparently not everything in here pertained to Jane’s secret work.

At the very bottom Helen found some of that ironcloth that Jane used to help her focus the fey power. Helen had tried it, but so far she had not gotten the hang of it. Jane used the combination of the iron plus the fey to direct the bit of fey she still wore on her face—give her the power to put Millicent into the fey trance, for example. Late one night Jane had confided to Helen that she had actually used the fey power to make someone do her bidding once—but that it had scared her enough that she never intended to do it again.

Perhaps the cloth would substitute for the iron mask that Alistair had taken; perhaps Helen could use it as protection. She pulled the cloth out to examine it, and her hand knocked against a small glass jar. Tam’s bugs. She must have put them in the carpetbag as she left the house.

Helen did not particularly like bugs, but her hand closed on the jar and she smiled wistfully, remembering Tam. The poor boy—mother gone, now stepmamma, left alone with that horrible man and his horrible friends. Should she have tried to take him with her? But how could she, when his father was right there? She did not know what you could do for a case like that.

Just then the trolley came to a jerking stop, throwing folks who were standing off balance. A very short elderly woman stumbled near Helen, her bag tumbling to the ground. Helen jumped to retrieve it and helped the woman to sit on the bench next to her, half-listening to the litany of complaints rising from all sides.

“How can I keep my night shift when—”

“Boss makes me punch in—”

“Docked pay—”

“Fey on the tracks,” one said knowledgeably, though that didn’t seem likely. The blue mist shied away from iron.

“Are you all right?” said Helen. The old woman had not quite let go of her arm, though it was likely she was finding the bench difficult as her feet did not touch the floor.

The woman’s fingers tightened and Helen looked up to find the bored ticket-taker staring down at them, his face now purple with indignation.

“Your kind isn’t to be here,” he spat at the old woman. “Back of the trolley.”

Helen looked to the very back of the trolley. She saw a cluster of very short men and women there, bracing themselves against the wall for balance. The trolley straps dangled high over their heads.

The dwarvven.

The woman’s wrinkled chin jutted out. No one from the back was running to her aid—though the dwarvven were said to be stubborn, fighting folk, these men and women looked tired and worn-out. Ready to be home.

“C’mon, dwarf,” the ticket-taker said. Dwarf had not been a slur once, but it was quickly becoming one under Copperhead’s influence. It was the way they said it. The way they refused to attempt the word the dwarvven themselves used.

Helen placed her hand on top of the woman’s wrinkled one. “This is my grandmother,” she said pleasantly to the ticket-taker. Confidentially, leaning forward, “Poor nutrition in her youth, poor thing, combined with a bad case of scoliosis. Oh, I expect by the time I’m her age I’ll be no higher than my knees are now.” She ran her fingers up her stockings to her knees, pushing aside the plum silk, and gave him a nice view of her legs in their bronze heels. “Can’t you just imagine?”

The ticket-taker looked a little glazed by the flow of words and by the legs.

Helen dropped her skirt and said, “Thank you so kindly for checking up on us. I feel so much safer now. We won’t take up any more of your time.”

With a lurch the trolley started again. Dazed, the ticket-taker stumbled on, and the dwarvven woman’s fingers relaxed on Helen’s arm. She pulled her knitting from her bag and began to focus on the flying needles. But under her breath the woman said softly, “I owe you,” to Helen.

Helen patted the woman’s arm, watching the wicked points of the needles fly. “Don’t be silly, Grandmother.”

Helen turned back to Jane’s carpetbag, grinning inwardly. She rather thought the dwarvven woman would be just fine on her own, now that she had those weapons in her hand again.

But the flash of legs had attracted the attention she’d been trying to avoid.

The boor nudged the young man who had asked about the time. “Ask her to the dance hall with ya. Pretty silky thing like that, even if she is stuck up.”

Helen flicked a glance over at the two men, assessing the need to be wary. She had encountered rough characters at the tenpence dance hall back in the day. But she had always had a knack for finding protectors. Their loose, dark button-shirts and slacks said working men—the young man, at least, was well-groomed and nicely buttoned, which spoke better for his intentions. She smiled kindly at the young man and had the satisfaction of watching him scoot away from the drunkard, trying to stay in her good graces.

“Too good for us, she thinks,” said the boor. “I could tell her a thing or two about that.”

Several seats down she caught an amused expression. A man had carved out a spot for himself on the crowded trolley by crouching lightly on the back of one of the seats, hovering over rougher, sturdier looking fellows. A fresh notice pasted behind him read: YOUR EYES ARE OUR EYES! ALERT THE CONDUCTOR TO SUSPICIOUS PERSONS. His face looked familiar, but she could not think why at first. He had a lean, graceful look, like the dancers she and Alistair had seen at the theatre last spring, before he started spending all his evenings with those terrible friends of his. Helen thought she had seen this man recently, exchanged a smile with him—that was it, wasn’t it? He looked like—or was—the man from the meeting tonight, who had perched on the windowsill during the demonstration. Everything prior to the disaster seemed to have vanished from her head. She looked more closely. The man was on the slight side, but all slim muscle and amused mouth. Amused at her expense—watching her try to cope with the boor. Helen was perfectly capable of defending herself through wit at a party—but what good would wit do you with a sloshed village idiot like this?

Well, she’d have to say something, or be on edge for the rest of the trip. Helen turned to face the boor, who was still making comments under his breath. Her mind raced through what she could say to tactfully make him stop. Was there anything?

“Like the story a sweet Moll Abalone,” said the boor, “who thought she was a lady fine, but when she found she could make her way by not being a lady … whoo boy! Just think on that, girlie. Oh cockles and mussels alive, alive-o…”

The lithe man raised amused eyebrows at Helen and Helen’s temper lit like a match touched to dry kindling. She unscrewed the bug jar she held and dumped the entire contents on the drunken boor’s head. Bugs and grass rained down around him, and his jaw fell slack in shock.

So did Helen’s, for she had not entirely meant to do that. What on earth came over her sometimes? It was as if she had no willpower at all.

The young man opposite laughed delightedly. “You show him, miss,” he said. “More than a pretty face, aren’t you?” and several others clapped.

Helen’s grin faded as quickly as it had come, as the drunken boor lurched from his seat, more quickly than she would have guessed. Crickets fell from his shoulders and suddenly the hot blast of whiskey was in her face, the rough red-pored face close and hot. In his hand was a knife.