Copperhead

Chapter 3 BAREFACED

She had no time to do more than register the danger and suddenly the man was gone, shoved away. The lithe man stood between them, his back to her. He was wearing some sort of dark leather jacket over slim trousers, made from a tough woven material. It was all very close-fitting, and free of loops and pockets and things that would catch. It was an outfit made for getting away from something. “Here now,” he said softly, dangerously, and then his voice dropped even lower, and despite the absolute stillness of the fascinated trolley car Helen could not hear what he said into the man’s ear. It was something, though, for Helen could see one of the boor’s outstretched hands, and it shook, and then he drunkenly backed up a pace, then another, then another, then turned and pushed his way through protesting bodies toward the other end of the trolley.

Despite her relief, she had had experience with rescuers. Rescuing a woman was helpful, kind—but generally also an excuse on the rescuer’s part to talk to her. She appreciated his audacity, but that sort of fellow was always harder to tactfully get rid of. Telling them you were married didn’t always stop them.

And she worried that this one had followed her. How could they have coincidentally ended up on the same trolley? Was he interested in her, or did he have another, more dangerous motive for turning up twice in her life tonight?

Helen turned back from watching the boor go, pasting a pleasant smile of thanks on her face, ready to parse the man’s motives, feel him out.

But he was gone. The folks around her were watching the drunkard leave. The dwarvven grandmother had her knitting needles thrust outward, watching the boor leave with a fierce expression on her face. The mysterious man must have taken the opportunity to vanish in the other direction, into the crush of bodies. Helen felt oddly put out.

Attention started to shift back her way, and Helen quickly turned her gaze back to the bag, shutting out the curious stares. Focus, she told herself. Be smart for Jane. She needs you now. There’s something in here that will tell you exactly where she lives, more than vaguely by the wharf. There must be something in here that will help. The ironcloth, perhaps. Make a veil out of that, like Jane used to wear. That would give you some protection.

No, not you. Focus. What would help Jane?

The leather book had a ribbon bookmark in it. Helen opened it to that page and saw a list of names. Then suddenly, thinking, she turned the leather-bound book upside down and flapped its pages, wanting something to fall out. But there was nothing. She looked on the outside of the carpetbag to see if she could find an address, but she was not surprised not to. Jane had always been secretive. She had vanished to the city after their little brother, Charlie, died, and Helen hadn’t known where she’d gone till much later, till long after Mother died, long after Helen had given up standing by the door every night, wishing her last remaining family member would walk in.

Vanished. To the city.

To a place where she had gone for sanctuary.

Abruptly Helen stood. There was one person who might be able to direct her to her sister’s whereabouts.

The night was cold and Helen was tired of walking by the time she neared the foundry on the river. The factories were more here—the smell and smoke greater. But the bits of fey were fewer. Helen saw hardly any as she picked her way down the river-splashed streets, across cobblestoned patches of street as well as rutted packed dirt, hard and frosted with ice crystals. Slush patterned her stockinged legs, the tops of her feet, slid into her bronze heels. Even in the frozen air there was a thin smell of river and sewage and fish.

A form lurched up to her in the dark. Helen gasped and jumped away as its arms swung toward her like a dead thing. In a moment of stark memory she saw a battlefield long ago, saw a familiar farmer fall to the fey, then rise up just like this as a fey took over his dead body. Lurching with stiff arms, trying to make the limbs obey the new mind.

“What’s going, pretty?” said the man drunkenly. “How much then?”

Helen’s heart kept up its mad pounding rush. She did not have a jar of bugs, she did not have a rescuer, but she was not going to be helpless. In the moonlight she turned square to the man and said with all her will, “Go home. Go home.”

He wavered. “Don’t wanna go home. Wanna drink and a pretty.”

“Drink yourself into oblivion for all I care,” Helen told him. “But not with me.” She glared at him until he finally backed down, staggered away.

She breathed carefully, making her heart slow. Her silk dress and stockings were too thin for the cold air. She wrapped her wool coat more tightly, tucked her gloved fingers under her arms. She should be wearing her furs, as ridiculous as that would be in this part of town. Where was that damn foundry?

The square, redbrick building opposite looked vaguely familiar. It had certainly not been papered with that line of identical posters five years ago, though. Yellow posters with a red seven-headed snake, and the words ONE PEOPLE! ONE RACE! repeated twenty times on the wall in case you missed the first one.

She touched the curling edges of the very last poster and closed her eyes, trying to visualize the twists and turns she had taken. She had visited Jane once at the foundry, five years ago now. If she thought about it the right way she could almost see it; she was so close.… Eyes half-shut, she moved quickly and with purpose, down another block, around some stairs, and suddenly there it was, the iron fence sharp and forbidding. Her eyes opened against the black night and she stared at it, uncertain now how she had gotten there.

Or was it simply that she didn’t know what to do now that she had arrived?

There was an iron hydra coiled on the gate. That was a new feature.

Helen shuddered as she touched it, the iron cold and firm through her lilac gloves. What was she getting herself into here? She had thought of this as a safe place, because Jane had always spoken of it as her haven. But zealotry could override logic.

She waited, shivering. Then behind the gate, as if he had always been standing in the shadows, she saw him. The man who ran the foundry; what was his name? Niklas. Tall and broad, wrapped in warm leathers against the night.

“What’s a fey groupie want here?” he said. “Couldn’t wait till morning to get a new mask?”

Of course. The iron masks came from here. She had forgotten. Oh, wouldn’t Jane have had a biting remark for her about that? The careless rich, who don’t even know where their salvation comes from. “No,” Helen said. “I mean, yes, I need one badly. I can pay.…”

“Of course you can. And extra for interrupting my dinner. Wait.” He melted away into the night, leaving Helen straining her eyes to see into the tangle of iron and machinery behind the bars. The yard was more crowded than she had remembered it, more filled with hulking boxes with gears and spokes and arms, machines that seemed half-alive under the blue moonlight. She remembered it as a yard of dirt and seagulls and rusting scrap metal, but now it was thick and dense. An enormous metal tower built in front of the old shop building blocked out part of the sky. It was chained with long loops of thick iron links. Everything smelled of soot and hot metal.

“Here it is,” he said, for he was back again. Niklas held the mask up for her inspection. A plain solid iron mask with mesh wires over the airholes. Identical to the one she had had, to the one all the women had. As if they were anonymous, all these wives, a mass of interchangeable women. A funereal army. “Now pay up.” He named a price and Helen fumbled through her coat pockets as if she would have money inside, but she didn’t, she never did, because you didn’t do that, you simply received credit at all the shops. The change the chauffeur had given her was gone for the trolley; there was nothing that would approach the cost of a full mask.

“Bother,” she said. Lying, said, “I’m sure I have something here,” because you did that sort of thing to stall for time, and she didn’t want him to disappear with her mask and leave her there in the cold on the street at the gate of a foundry she wasn’t sure how she found or if she could find again. She pulled up Jane’s carpetbag and rifled through it. Nothing … nothing …

“Why do you have that?” Niklas said in a low voice.

“Oh!” said Helen. “You recognize it? I’m trying to find her. I’m her sister. And she—I’m trying to find her flat, but I don’t know the address. That’s actually why I came here. To see if you knew.” She smiled up at him, trying to be her winsomest self, but she sensed it was going to have little effect on this big barrel of a man.

“Why should I give her address to you if she doesn’t want to be found?” said Niklas.

Helen stopped short. “That’s not the question I was hoping you’d ask,” she admitted.

“Which is?”

“How can you prove you’re her sister? Because that I’ve thought over and I came up with three different ways on the trolley here. One. We’re exactly the same size. Two—”

He grunted, interrupting her. “How’s the trolley running these days?”

“Slow,” she said. “It stopped twice tonight, and everyone was complaining that they’re always late to work.” It seemed as though she went up in his estimation for riding the trolley. Perhaps Niklas had an affinity for all that machinery; perhaps he liked its populist nature.

Perhaps he understood that it meant she was serious about finding Jane.

Silence, during which Helen felt the cold sinking further, creeping into her marrow. “There are an incredible number of boors on the trolley,” she added, knowing as she said it that his estimation of her would go back down. But she hated silence; it made her mouth say things. She stamped her feet in place, wishing he’d invite her inside if he was going to stand here and interrogate her. She opened her mouth to say so when the giant spoke again.

“Again,” said Niklas. “Why should I help you find her if she doesn’t want to be found?”

“Because she’s in trouble,” Helen said gently. “She was doing a facelift. It was going fine and then I went downstairs and Mr. Grimsby—of Copperhead, you know—turned on this machine and then everything went to pieces. The air went blue and roaring and the lights went out. And when I went upstairs Jane was gone. She must have run.…” She shook her head helplessly. “I just don’t know. And now—”

“And now?…” There was a dangerous rumble in his voice. “There’s worse?”

“Jane said Millicent said the fey are rising up,” she said in a hushed voice, watching his fingers tighten on the mask. “Led by … well, no, they didn’t know. Some follower of the Fey Queen, they thought.”

“The Fey King,” he breathed. Helen turned big eyes on him. “Trumped-up, self-proclaimed, of course. Ordinary fey are indolent and leaderless. But every so often, one comes along with the willpower to bring them all to heel. That one is here in the city now.”

Helen swallowed. “How do you know?”

“Been studying how to capture the blue demons,” he said calmly. “But then you’ve seen that, you said. Since I turned one of the machines over to our leader for further use and investigation.”

“To … to Mr. Grimsby?” She could hardly hear him say “our leader” without shuddering.

“He’s continuing to make improvements to best capture and destroy the blue demons. For my part, I have found interrogation with cold iron to be useful.”

Helen’s eyes traveled to the iron building by his forge. Her heart thumped in her chest. How could Jane have such a fondness for this man? He chilled her marrow. “So I have to find Jane,” she said faintly, “before it’s too late.”

There was more silence, which she barely stopped herself from filling with a variety of pleas.

At last he spoke. “Three blocks north, two blocks east. Over the pawnshop there.”

“Thank you,” said Helen. “Thank—”

“There’s something broken in this city,” he said. “Blue scum all over it. Something’s broken and it started with Jane and that havlen woman and whatever happened six months ago. Jane told me she’d received a nasty letter this summer. A death threat.”

Havlen was a derogatory dwarvven term for mixed-race human and dwarvven—Helen vaguely knew the woman Niklas referred to, someone who worked for Edward Rochart. But a death threat? “Oh no,” said Helen.

He steamrollered through her worry. “Jane didn’t say more. And she shouldn’t be mixing herself up with these facelifts—she was getting herself in over her head, I told her. Messing with power she couldn’t control. They should all just be shot, the lot of them. That would take care of that nonsense. We fought.” He exhaled. “Well. I guess I was right. Don’t take any pride in that.” Suddenly a hand was squeezing her shoulder—he had pushed it through a gap in the gate, and was standing right there, huge and frightening. “You find her,” he said. “You find her and make her stop.”

Helen hurried down the route Niklas had instructed. The night air was bitter on her bare face. She felt around in the carpetbag, pulled out the ironcloth, pressed it to her skin. Perhaps it made her feel safer, but it made it impossible to see in the black night. There weren’t as many gaslights down here, but there were orange-yellow rectangles where taverns let out patrons, spilling into the cold night. And bits of blue. She put the ironcloth away and hurried faster.

Niklas’s words rang through her head. “They should all just be shot, the lot of them.” The Hundred, he meant. And yet Niklas himself was ironskin, cursed just as Jane had been with fey that scarred his skin and emitted a slow stream of poisonous emotion. Helen felt nothing but compassion for The Hundred, the women who had only wanted to be prettier. But perhaps she was alone in that.

Helen had to circle the block before she found the grungy brick building with the three iron balls denoting pawnshop. There was an iron staircase on the outside. Yes, this was the sort of nasty place Jane would run to, something surrounded by iron. Wearily Helen climbed the stairs—and found a locked and no doubt iron-chained door. She banged on it, calling “Jane, Jane.” But no one came.

Helen jiggled the door handle helplessly, thinking of the long, hopeless walk home. She did not realize how thoroughly she had longed to find Jane here until she wasn’t. The frigid iron of the staircase seeped up through the soles of her shoes to her already numb toes; her fingers were curled stiff against the cold.

And then the door was opened from the inside.

Helen looked up, startled, at a figure wearing an iron mask. A lump of disappointment formed in her belly. This person was too tall.

“Oh, hurry in out of that nasty cold stuff,” the person said, quite heedless of the safety protocol that dictated one should spout clever greetings to make sure the fey were not invited over the threshold, lines ranging from the formal “An’ ye be human, enter,” to the cheeky lower-class admonition: “Stay out.” Helen realized after she spoke that it was a woman, despite the fact that she was wearing slacks. Her heavy, dark brown hair was cut in an asymmetric bob that fell across one of the mask’s eyeholes, and the thick scent of jasmine perfume lingered around her. “You must be looking for Jane,” the woman said as Helen entered, stripping off her lilac gloves and blowing on her hands.

“Yes,” said Helen. “I’m her sister. But—”

“Helen!” she said. “How delightful. And so fashionably brave, too.” Her finger inscribed a circle around her own mask, indicating Helen’s lack of one. “I think someone beat us here. Do you know if Jane’s safe?”

“I don’t know where she is,” said Helen, swallowing the crushing disaster down, willing herself to find hope. “But she probably wasn’t here when this happened. I hope.” Her sister was tidy; Helen could not imagine the room being the way it was on Jane’s account. It was unheated and tiny; cot and table and woodstove all in one room, with a single door leading to what she supposed might be the rest of the house, possibly a shared bath. The woman had turned on an oil lamp, and it cast an orange glow around the wreckage of the room.

The room had been ransacked.

“Perhaps she’s out being brave and bold and doing good works,” said the woman.

“Maybe,” temporized Helen. She could not think. If Jane had not gone here, then where would she have gone? Helen and Alistair’s home? It seemed unlikely. What had she said? I have my own plans.…

Helen sent tentative feelers out, wondering what the woman’s purpose was—and if anything could be deduced from her about Jane’s whereabouts. “I suppose you were here to see Jane? She’s trying to explain to you her—our noble goals? Talk you into letting her … you know. Work on your face?” she said. It was as tactful as she could manage around the frostbitten fingers and the tangled knots of worry.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” the woman said. “I’m dying to have my old face back. Let’s rip it off.”

“Really?” said Helen. “Most women have been very resistant. So far only—,” but she thought belatedly that perhaps she shouldn’t mention poor Mrs. Grimsby.

“Well, I don’t care what anyone else thinks,” the woman said decidedly. “I wouldn’t have done it except it seemed good for my career. But then the visions!”

“Did you have nightmares, too?” said Helen.

“Oh, my goodness. Did you have dreams where a bunch of beautifully creepy men and women stood around you in a circle and then it turned out they were all wearing your face?”

“Um. No,” said Helen.

The woman paced around the overturned chairs, setting them up straight for something to do. Her face went in and out of the shadows flung by the oil lamp. “I’m an actor, you see. But I always got the odd roles. The wacky maiden aunt. The cryptic fortune-teller. And then I heard about this man who would make you beautiful, and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to be the ingénue for once?” Her brusque voice momentarily went wistful. “You see what I mean, don’t you?” She pulled off her iron mask to reveal an exquisitely strong, purposeful face. Striking and glamorous with the fey, and yet Helen could imagine the face as it must have been before—the sort of woman you might call handsome if you wanted a way to describe how her face made you feel—a woman with purpose and character in spades, but not a beauty.

“But it turned out you were the same inside as you were before,” Helen murmured.

The woman heard her and laughed, a strong laugh like a ship breaking through the sea. It displayed a nice white set of teeth, even except for a gap in front. “Well, I expected that, you know. I’m no fool. But I didn’t expect the voices in my head. The wallpaper swimming in. And that is not worth it in the slightest, and I’m ready to take my old face back and enjoy being the wacky maiden aunt again. Besides, between you and me, being the ingénue isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Drippy girls pining over young men who aren’t worth it. I had my fun—my rabid fans, my scandalous love affairs. Sat as an artist’s model for the bronze outside the ballet, you know the one—?”

“Intimately,” said Helen dryly.

The woman laughed again and put out a hand, strong and bold like a man’s. “I like you,” she said. “There’s more in you than one would suspect.”

Helen thought that might be sort of an insult, but it was said so forthrightly she couldn’t possibly take offense. She shook the woman’s hand heartily in her own. “Helen Huntingdon,” she said.

“Eglantine Frye,” the woman said. “But please, call me Frye.”

“All right,” said Helen. She had never met someone like this; she knew how to make bright and brittle small talk with men and women of all sorts but not hold a real conversation with this strong-willed woman in slacks who stood in her sister’s destroyed flat, joking about ripping off her face. “Frye it is.”

“Great,” said Frye. “So tell me. How soon can you replace my face?”

Helen looked at the woman in shock.

“I’m serious,” said Frye. “Jane’s not here but you are. She wanted to do me last week. I shouldn’t have beat around the metaphorical bush, but I wanted one last good carouse before going back to my old life. So here I am, high on courage and gin and no Jane.”

“You don’t want me to do that,” said Helen.

“I don’t want this face anymore,” Frye said adamantly. “I’m in danger with it.”

“You’re in danger if I try,” said Helen. “Beyond the fact that I don’t know how—that’s how Jane disappeared tonight. She was doing a facelift and something went wrong. Besides, you wouldn’t want me even if I thought I could do it. I’m…” I’m silly, she wanted to say. I’m not sensible. And when I make big decisions, like marrying Alistair, I think maybe I ruin everything. How could you trust me to do something big like this, something important? “I’m not Jane,” she finished lamely.

“Hold everything,” Frye said. “You’re saying Jane actually disappeared?” She whistled like a boy as she surveyed the wrecked flat. “This is looking grimmer by the moment.” Frye seemed to do nothing by economy. She swung back around to look at Helen and her whole frame followed the motion of her glance. “But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To find Jane. No! To find clues—to track her down. She must have gone underground, gone into hiding. Say no more. I’ll help you search.”

Frye fell to with a will, sorting the small room to rights. Helen fell in beside her, sorting through the shadows. Gone into hiding, she thought. Yes. That’s all. Jane has gone into hiding—I have my own plans—and Helen would find a clue here to where that hiding place was. She was not sure exactly what that clue would be, but surely something would turn up if she just kept standing up chairs and hanging up clothes. Not that there were many clothes to hang up. Two dresses, both dark—and probably only that many so Jane wouldn’t have to stand in her slip and wash her only change of clothes in the communal sink. None of the pretty things she had given Jane. No, this was sensible Jane from head to toe, and Helen thought again how useful she could have been—would still be—to Jane in her quest. Those women didn’t want their savior to be sensible and plain. Nobody trusted sensible and plain. They trusted smart. Turned out. Fashionable.

“Whoever wrecked this was looking for something,” mused Frye, her penciled eyebrows knitting together. “But what could you hide in a room this small?”

“Or maybe they wanted to disguise whatever it was they were doing,” said Helen.

“Mmm, like in The Ruby Dagger of Deidre,” said Frye. “You come back after the second act to find the heroine’s place ransacked—but it was all so the bad guy could plant the murder weapon on her.”

“And if the murder weapon’s a face?” Helen said. There were lots of meanings to that, and Frye didn’t even know about Millicent, but she laughed anyway.

“Yes, I like your style,” Frye said. “You can work on my face. I’ll be your first victim.”

“You don’t know a thing about me,” protested Helen as she tried to wedge a broken chair leg back in place.

Frye shrugged. “I’m a good judge of character. And my mind’s made up. Even Jane had to start somewhere. You have all her stuff, don’t you?” She pointed dramatically at the carpetbag. “I always saw her carrying that.”

Helen nodded. “But I couldn’t possibly make the fey power work. Jane studied all summer to learn how to do it. And … she’s just good at that kind of thing.”

Frye swung around and stood there casually studying her, hands slouched in pockets as if they were discussing where to eat lunch and not how to replace her face. “Jane said you were cleverer than you knew,” she said.

Helen felt suddenly, strangely, lighter. Buoyed up. “I … I could try,” she said at last. “I make no promises. But I could put the clay on my hands and see how it feels. If I think I could do what she could.”

“Excellent,” said Frye. “Shall we find a bed then?” She gestured at Jane’s slashed cot.

“Gah, no!” said Helen. More calmly: “I mean, no. Not tonight. I have to rest.” And the memory of that botched operation was so fresh, so cutting. What was this woman thinking, trying to entrust this to her?

“Tomorrow, then. You can come to my place.”

“I can’t,” said Helen. “I’m not supposed to—”

Frye looked at her curiously.

“I mean. It’s dangerous on the streets for us without the masks. And I’ve … misplaced mine. You’ll have to come to me. Some early morning would be the best time to sneak in.”

“Fine,” said Frye, who was apparently willing to let Helen win some of the arguments, as long as she got the main point she wanted. “Next Monday, perhaps—no shows on Monday. Can I wear slacks? Or is your neighborhood too stuffy?”

“Well…,” said Helen.

“Your face says it all,” said Frye. “I have a dress, don’t worry. I’m an actor, darling. I’ll blend in so I can sneak in.” She paused, studying Helen curiously. “Why are we sneaking me in?”

“Well,” said Helen, again, but this woman threw her off balance. “That is. My husband doesn’t know I’m carrying on Jane’s work.” The words, slipping out, startled her. She was carrying on Jane’s work. She was going to convince The Hundred. She was.

“Say no more,” said Frye. “Your marital affairs are absolutely your business and I am not going to pry. You find a good time next week and I will sneak in wearing a perfectly acceptable dress to see you.”

“And I will only try the clay,” put in Helen. “I’m not promising anything beyond that.”

“Yes, yes. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Helen, and for the first time that day a genuine smile broke through the worries and fears.

“You’re much prettier when you smile,” said Frye.

“I thought I was pretty already,” said Helen cynically.

“It’s not about the face, you know? I have learned that. Should’ve learned it sooner, but we all have our upbringings to contend with. When you entered the door you looked grim, but just now you look as though you could move mountains.”

“Maybe I can,” said Helen. This woman thought she could do things. And she didn’t even have the excuse of being family, who maybe only thought it was good for you if they said they believed in you. Maybe she could move mountains. Maybe she could try.

“So tell me,” said Frye. “What can I do for you in return?”

Helen looked down at the piece of furniture she had been trying vainly to lift. “Help me move this trunk,” she said.

With Frye’s help the trunk slid scratchily over the dusty floor to reveal a small trapdoor. “This is it,” crowed Frye. She brought the oil lamp closer, wafting the cloud of oil stink along with it.

Helen levered the trapdoor up to reveal several rafters’ worth of storage space under the floor.

Empty.

Helen tugged the corner of her coat under her stockinged knees and carefully knelt there, feeling around under the floorboards. Dust. Grit. Things she didn’t want to touch, but Tam would probably appreciate. Her fingers closed on a bit of splintery wood and she pulled it out, examining it. It was roughly made and yet lined with velvet.

“What’s down there?” said Frye, kneeling next to her with the oil lamp, heedless of her slacks. “The murder weapon? The face?”

“The face,” Helen repeated in slow realization. “Yes. That’s what this held. A face. One of our old faces.” There had been one just like it in the carpetbag—it must have held Millicent’s old face—perhaps it still did.

Carefully Frye took the box from Helen and held it up to her own face, checking the measure. “It would fit,” she agreed, cradling the box in long fingers. “Do you think they were all here?”

“I do,” said Helen. “All the ones she hadn’t done yet. All of us.” She looked at Frye, her stomach clenching in knots. “Who would want our old faces?”

Frye shook her head. “Looks as though I’ll be waiting a while longer for my facelift then. I suppose you’re off the hook, unless you want me to sneak in for the sheer fun of it.” She exhaled, rocking back on her heels. “Oh, Jane, Jane, Jane. I told you I had a spare bedroom.”

Helen’s fingers swept the interior one last time. There was paper or something lodged into that crack in the board, tucked there for safekeeping. She teased it from the board, pulled it forth and into the glow of the lamp.

A message. A note.

Cold sliced up Helen’s spine as she studied the words cut and pieced together, letter by letter.

LEAVE THE CITY NOW BEFORE YOU GET HURT.