Copperhead

Chapter 4 THE HUNDRED

Helen held the threat out with nerveless fingers for Frye, who read it and then put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Them as talk big don’t do nuthin’,” Frye declaimed, no doubt quoting some line in a play. “You’ll find her.” She peered at the note. “That L looks like the L on the Lovage’s Gin bottle.”

“Great!” Helen said cynically. “We can narrow it down to everyone who drinks gin.” She wavered to her feet, folded the note, and tucked it inside Jane’s carpetbag where she wouldn’t have to see it anymore. She rubbed the backs of her hands against her eyes, which were stinging from the stirred-up dust. “Did you find anything else?”

“A photo,” said Frye. “Jane and some man with rumpled hair.”

“That’s her fiancé,” said Helen, studying the small blue-and-white fey tech photo that Frye held out. “She looks … happy there,” she said, and the world came crashing down on her silk shoulders again. She had to make everything right. She had to let Jane’s fiancé know what had happened. No, he was gone himself, into the dangerous forests with his daughter. But she should wire the housekeeper at Silver Birch Hall.

Helen stumbled to her feet, away from Frye’s kind touch. Numbly she wrapped her coat more tightly, hunched her shoulders against the cold. So much to do, and no assurance that anything she did would make it right. It seemed just as likely that she would get herself in over her head again, and need rescuing herself, when there was no one left to rescue her.…

“Why are you leaving me?” said Frye, as Helen put her hand to the doorknob.

“The trolley,” said Helen, and Frye laughed a loud bellow.

“Doesn’t run much past dark, what do you think? You probably caught the last one getting here.”

Helen’s eyes were wide with despair at this last blow. All sense fled and silly words tumbled from the depths of her heart. “You mean—so I’ll never get home and I’ve already walked miles and the calluses are blisters, why didn’t I break the heels in, of course I never wear the sensible shoes because sensible means hideous, and he’ll be so angry if he happened to check on me and I’m tired, so very tired.…”

Frye handed Helen a handkerchief. “I drive a car, love. I’ll take you home.”

Helen drifted under a pile of lap robes, semi-awake. Frye hummed some mournful-sounding musical number to herself, but otherwise kept quiet. The grey mist smeared with blue drifted by and Helen thought how it seemed that you jumped ship from person to person, always seeking a new one to be your rock. But they sank. She could leap into this spot where she was in Frye’s motorcar; a protected island, just drive on till morning. But it would sink, too. They all did, in the end.

Frye turned into the street Helen had told her, and Helen pointed out their house. The square windows in the games room—Alistair’s room—were golden. He was home. He was awake.

She was so very, very tired.

“She’s just lying low, out of danger,” said Frye as she pulled to a stop. “It’s what anyone would do. She’ll come home.”

“Thank you,” Helen said, stumbling out of the motorcar. Her blistered feet landed in a puddle, splashing ice up her legs. She fumbled in her inner coat pocket for a card. “Look, here’s my address. Send me word if anything turns up.”

Frye’s face held concern as she took the card. “You’re all right?”

Weak grin, game face. “Nothing two olives and a little Lovage’s Gin won’t cure,” Helen said jauntily to Frye, and waited for the woman’s answering grin before turning away and striding into the house as if she had every right to return to it at two in the morning.

Helen closed the front door softly behind her, running through excuses in her head, ones that didn’t involve getting Adam in trouble. None of them were very good, or believable.

The thin electric light spilled out of the games room into a triangle in the hallway. She had never thought much of the idea that one should face the music. In fact she thought she’d rather go hide in bed now, and let him yell at her in the morning, if he must. Maybe Jane would be home by then and everything would be fine, fine.

But she heard a scratchy melody drifting out, and she stepped out of her ruined shoes and crept down the hall on stocking feet to see.

The gramophone was on. Even the rich had long ago run out of the fey bluepacks that used to power everything, but Alistair’s circle were trying out the newest inventions as soon as they were relatively safe, and Alistair had recently had the house wired for electricity. He had purchased an electric gramophone five times the size of the old one that ran on bluepacks. It was a massive cabinet, and it smelled funny when it ran. But it did run, and right now it was playing through an old waltz that made Helen want to lift her arms to a partner and turn around the floor.

The music fell to a quiet moment, and under that she heard snoring.

Helen dared to peek around the door, then. Alistair was stretched out in the armchair in front of the fireplace, emptied whiskey glass on the table next to him, fast asleep. The contents of his pockets were on the end table, wallet among them, and Helen remembered that she had to pay back Adam. On noiseless feet she went in, heady with the up and down of the night, feeling in a strange way that surely he couldn’t wake up right this second if he hadn’t already.

Helen extracted the notes from the leather wallet, watching him, thinking, I loved you once. She had gone into the marriage expecting to make it work. To be good to him. To repay him. To care for him and run his household and generally do all the things a wife should—wasn’t that enough to make a partnership last? Love didn’t have to be thrilling, fascinating, throw-yourself-off-a-cliff sort of love. They could care for each other in a friendly fashion, bring their charm and her beauty and his wealth to the table, bounty to share. They had cared for each other. And yet, everything had become so unequal.

No options, she thought to herself.

That was where she had been a year ago, why she had signed up with Alistair. It seemed the best way out of the abysmal hole she’d gotten herself into, and he had been so kind, she thought then. So charming. They had danced every night at the tenpence dance hall, the wildest, gayest dances, him in black and she all in white with a grass green sash.… Marrying him had been a sensible, calculated decision.

Perhaps she wasn’t a very skilled mathematician.

She turned to leave the room, and he stirred, and she stopped, one hand on the wood corner of the gramophone, heart in throat.

“Another round,” he murmured. “Another.”

She wondered if the men had been over, after that terrible meeting at the Grimsbys’. She had loved his parties at first—she loved parties, after all. But more and more they just seemed an excuse for drunken behavior, not chat and wit and dancing. And then afterward those men would all stay over, for days on end, wheeling about the parlor and the library and everywhere else, sucking down port.

And that horrid Mr. Grimsby with them. Oh, he was abstemious enough. His method of entertaining himself was worse—all that “One People One Race” business that Alistair had at first scoffed at, but now seemed more and more fervent about. Alistair had avoided the Great War—paid a young factory worker to take his place. Most of the wealthy men left had done the same. The ones that hadn’t … well. They weren’t here. In some strange way, the men of Alistair’s set seemed to be making up for their dereliction then by cleaving to Grimsby’s racial purity fanaticism now. Alistair had had a dwarvven chambermaid when she married him seven months ago. Boarham had had a dwarvven groundskeeper, Morse a dwarvven cook. All since dismissed.

Helen stared at her sleeping husband for a long time. But all she really saw was an image in her head, stark like the old blue-and-white fey-tech cameras: Millicent Grimsby, stone-still on the cold white daybed, a red line tracing the outline of her perfect face.

She dreams that she is ten again, playing on the field that will one day be a battlefield, that will one day kill her little brother, Charlie. But that is still three years away. The war rages on, but it has not touched Harbrook, and the only foretelling of the battlefield is the yellow cowslips that carpet the field. They will be there on the day that Charlie dies and Jane marches in with him and Helen stays behind with Mother, who would dissolve without them.

It is hard to stay behind. It is hard to be the one who says, Mother, I will not leave you, and watch your brother and sister march into war without you. To tell yourself, you are a coward for staying, and to yet feel you would be a coward to go. It is hard to watch the wounded come home, and the dead never, and to be there. Just be there.

But that is not yet, Helen says fiercely, and the dream pulls back and she is ten, still ten, and she is playing with Charlie in a field of cowslips. She has plaited them into her hair, and Charlie, who is nine, is whacking their heads off with a stick. It is a rare holiday from school and work and Jane has promised to help her paint a picture but instead, restless Jane is at the edge of the forest, poking the undergrowth as if to uncover a lurking fey.

She can’t remember how it happened on that day, but here in the dream she calls to Jane and Jane does not answer. Helen runs to the edge of the forest, calling her name, but Jane goes in, away from her, deeper and deeper, well past the first ray of light, till she is dissolved, vanished in the black woods. Helen whirls around, but Charlie is vanished. Jane is gone. And all there is is Helen, clutching the last tree at the edge of the forest, shouting Jane, Jane, Jane.…

The next morning Helen woke curled in her bed, sore in every limb. She, Helen, whose idea of a long walk was meandering beautifully twice around the garden, had walked more than she’d walked in a month of Sundays, and in the freezing cold to boot. Her thighs ached and when she dared to stand they felt like jelly.

She tugged off her sleeping mask, hobbled to her wardrobe, and pulled out her softest, most shapeless wool dress to wear; wriggled into a big cardigan over that. Her head was groggy and her bare legs still cold and sore under the dress. She hobbled to her vanity and dabbed a touch of lilac scent behind her earlobes, then just stood there, trying to think about springtime and sunshine, and not about missing Jane or the confrontation with Alistair last night in the car.

Then she got back in bed.

The maid brought chocolate and toast and a vivid orange envelope. Helen opened it while Mary chattered through recent gossip. Helen was awfully fond of Mary for just this reason, yet this morning she could not concentrate on anything the maid said. Helen’s head was a brick wall, and Mary’s gossip dashed itself into it and fell back, exhausted. After Mary had repeated the choice bit about Lord Meriwether and his naughty ice statuary for the third time, looking progressively more downcast with each telling, Helen finally said, “I’m sorry, Mary, my head’s a muddle. You’ll have to tell me later.”

“Yes’m,” Mary said dubiously. Helen could almost hear her thoughts: The mistress must be sick.

The orange envelope was from Frye, Helen found, when she finally got her focus on it. A short, equally orange note inside said, in strong slashing handwriting:

DIVINE to meet you. MUST have just one last carouse with this face. Having a few friends over tonight after the show gets out. Stop by Will Call for Painted Ladies Ahoy!if you want tix. Tell them I sent you and NOT to fob you off with restricted viewing, otherwise you’ll miss my number with the lampshade.

FRYE.

PS: You MUST come to the party as I will have Alberta, Betty, and Desirée there.

PS 2: Don’t worry. We will find Jane.

Helen turned the orange note over, seeking further explanation of the three cryptic ladies, but found nothing but a scribbled black address.

She leaned against her tufted pink headboard and closed her eyes. It would be so comforting to just go back to sleep. To stay in bed all day. Surely Alistair would be over his anger by now. She needn’t talk about it, or even talk to him at all. She could just curl under the covers and no one would expect anything of her. The house would run itself—Alistair had never seen fit to let her take on any responsibilities from the efficient housekeeper. Jane would turn up when she was good and ready, would laugh at Helen for worrying about her. Yes, it would be smart of all of them to not expect anything of her. She, Helen, was not a bit dependable.

She burrowed into her pillow and pulled the covers over her head.

Yet she could not return to sleep. She tossed and turned, wriggled and squirmed—and then found herself sitting back up and dragging the carpetbag over to the bed, all the while admonishing herself that she was undependable, unreliable, and was going back to bed right now.

There was a clue in the carpetbag, the back of her mind told her. There was something she had seen and overlooked, distracted. No, not the train stubs.

The leather book—it was a journal. That handwritten list of names.

Helen pulled the journal out of the rough carpetbag and studied it. It was a faded maroon leather sleeve, soft with long use, that fit over bound paper. The red ribbon bookmark had fallen out when she shook it, but she turned the pages until she found the list of names that she remembered.

She skimmed the list, certain now that she knew what they were. It was The Hundred, as Jane called them. The list of women who were in danger. The Prime Minister’s wife. Lady Dalrymple. Monica Preston-Smythe—ooh, Helen hadn’t known that. A few men were sprinkled through, and a few people were known only by a first name. Other than that, it read like a society page, a who’s who of the most influential women in the city.

The names were written in ink, in Jane’s tiny precise hand. Helen flipped to the end of the names and saw that at the top of a clean page writing followed, a name followed by copious notes. Henrietta Lindcombe. She recognized that as the first facelift Jane had done. “Mrs. Lindcombe is nervous but I think I have talked her into it,” wrote Jane. “After she had that close encounter with a fey in the park she was a much easier catch. Before that it was all ‘I don’t believe the danger is what you say it is.’ I am reminded time and again that the war was fought in the country, and the city folk were never exposed to it. So many of the wealthy men paid others to go in their place. The war is a hundred miles away and five years gone, and the blue in the city are just another obstacle you learn to live with, like pickpockets. You avoid the waterfront for pickpockets; you wear an iron mask for the fey. You pretend that’s enough, and yet … If only all of them could be nearly attacked, they might be more willing to accede to what I know to be true and necessary!”

Helen skimmed the description until she saw the part that said “At last.” And then, a long description of how it had felt to perform her first facelift, on Mrs. Lindcombe. Helen shuddered and turned the page. The next page was also labeled with a name, the second one on the list, but it was blank beneath. Same with the next page, and the next. Helen flipped through several blank pages until she found the next page with writing on it. Millicent Grimsby.

But poor Millicent was not Jane’s second facelift. There were no dates on these, and Jane’s organizational system was meant to keep track of all the interactions Jane had had while trying to convince a particular woman to do the facelift—it wasn’t meant for someone trying to sort out a timeline to find Jane after she had vanished.

Helen flipped through the book. The pages were ordered by the list of women, which was the same list as at the beginning. Each one was numbered. She did not know if that was the order that Mr. Rochart had done their faces, but whatever it was, it was certainly not the order in which Jane was removing them.

Helen sighed. This was why she had married Alistair, among other reasons. She just wasn’t any use at focused concentration like this, sorting through the details. This was a matter for the police—if the police weren’t firmly in Copperhead’s pocket, that was. She didn’t dare expose her sister to the charges of murder. No, it was all up to Helen, but how could she possibly hope to solve this mystery?

She shook her head. That was a ridiculous way to think. She might be a fool and a coward, but she was a stubborn one, and Jane needed her. I have my own plans, Jane had said. You convince The Hundred.

Helen would.

So what did she know? She knew Jane had completed some facelifts. Six, she thought Jane had said. Helen was not sure—but surely this journal knew.

Helen pulled out a pad and pencil, flipped to the beginning of the book, and began writing down every name that had notes under it. The ones that had the additional notes about the facelift she crossed back out.

It turned out that Jane had indeed done a half-dozen facelifts. Helen spent a few minutes trying to decide whether to strike through poor Millicent Grimsby’s name or not and in the end drew a soft wiggly line through it with the lead, whispering an apology under her breath.

That left her with eighteen women with notes underneath. Eighteen women that Jane had tried and failed to impress upon the need for changing their face.

Jane had definitely needed her help.

Helen found the first of those attempted women in the book and glanced at the end of the entry.

“Terrible afternoon,” read the journal. “Agatha Flintwhistle threw me out on my ear and threatened to sic the police upon me if I so much as walked on the other side of the sidewalk from her. I am not entirely certain what I said, but she seems to be convinced that allowing me to help her would lead down ‘the slippery path of sin into suffrage and other such nonsense.’ At that point I flat-out said that I would be very glad to see women get the vote, if for no other reason than that they could think about something other than the cut of their hair for once. (Her bob was set with so much of that smelly fixative nonsense that when she shook her head, not one single piece moved.) That was when the police and the sidewalk, &c, were mentioned. I think I will not be going back for a time.”

Helen laughed an oh dear sort of laugh. Jane had really, really needed her.

She went through all the women who had notes but no record of finishing with facelifts. Many of the entries ended in disaster like the first one. Helen knew most of these women socially—some even more so. When she read about Louisa Mayfew being standoffish to Jane, she muttered under her breath, no, no, Jane! That’s not how you manage her. First you tell her how much you like the piano. Then the parlor. Then that snot rag of a child. Then she’ll be eating out of your hand. You don’t barge in like a schoolteacher and try to tell a Mayfew what to do.

If Jane—no, when Jane made it back safely, Helen was going straight around to all these folks with her and mending fences. They were all ripe for the picking and didn’t even know it.

It seemed as though there were only two entries left that didn’t end in success or disaster. They were Rosemary Higgins and Calendula Smith. Rosemary was noted as “abroad but promised to speak with me upon return,” but what really caught Helen’s eye was at the end of Calendula Smith’s entry, where Jane mentioned “after this encounter, the next woman will be a piece of cake.”

That is, if Helen was reading that right, Calendula Smith was the last woman (except for Millicent) that Jane had tried to convince before her untimely disappearance. And while Frye thought Jane had just gone to ground, Helen couldn’t help but feel that Jane would have tried to contact her by now. Besides, there was that ransacked flat and death threat.

She couldn’t bear to think that something had happened to Jane, so she firmly told herself that Jane was in hiding, exactly as Frye thought. And therefore, she was to follow Jane’s words: You have one purpose for the next week. Convince every last one of them.

All the same, why not kill two birds with one stone? If Helen was going to convince The Hundred for Jane, she had to start somewhere. It didn’t seem too likely that pillar-of-society Calendula Smith would have threatened Jane with a torn-paper note and then had her abducted, merely for the insult of asking Calendula to take her old face back. But Calendula might know something. Jane hadn’t even told Helen about the death threat, but maybe she had let something slip to someone.

Calendula was the perfect place to start.

By now Helen had finished the chocolate and toast, and she felt much less muddled. She felt alive and engaged again, the way she had last night when Frye had told her she could move mountains. She was going to find Jane—going to have The Hundred primed and ready for her—and then everything, surely everything, would be right as rain.

The door opened and Alistair poked his head in.

Helen did not jump, but her fingers on the journal did, tensing up into little mountains. Had he checked in on her bedroom? Did he know she had been out? She slid the journal under the covers as he crept around the door, looking woebegone.

“I’m sorry,” he said immediately, coming up to the foot of the bed and twining his fingers around the iron rails. A cloud of lavender soap and ambergris drifted in with him. “I was in shock last night from that horrible disaster. And then I had some whiskey to soften the blow. I believe I yelled at you in the motorcar?” He looked up at her under his lashes and she softened. She was safe after all. And it was so hard to be mad at him when he put on his penitent little-boy face. Because it wasn’t just a face, she knew. He really did mean it. He truly was sorry.

“You took the one thing that makes me safe,” she said. “As if you didn’t trust me.” Perhaps not the wisest thing to say, but Helen had never been good at holding her tongue. She would never be the sort to charm folks through shy silence. And if you liked using words, well … sometimes you used too many of them.

Alistair rubbed tired eyes in a rather ill-looking face. She didn’t envy him that hangover. “Look, I was upset from being with Grimsby,” he said.

“The man would rile up a saint,” Helen agreed. “Oh, you meant … the other thing.” Millicent.

“And to make it up to you,” Alistair said, cutting across her sentence. His sometimes haughty face broke into a charming grin. “A little gift for my little pet.” He tossed a paper-wrapped packet into her outstretched hands. “Go on. Open it.”

The pink paper was warm and slightly rough in her palms. Helen teased the edge free with her fingernail and tore open the paper to reveal an intricate copper necklace. She hooked one finger under the chain and lifted it, breathing in as it caught the light. “Oh, Alistair,” she said. “How pretty.” The twisted coils of copper spun delicately on the chain.

Alistair did love her. He was sorry. She remembered another fight they had had a few weeks ago—something silly that ended with him throwing her three-legged footstool down the stairs, breaking off a leg. He had brought her a new stool the next day, with a dozen roses on it, crimson-hearted and perfect.

“Put it on,” he said. “I want to see how you look in it.”

Laughing, she started to obey. Curiously, the clasp was worked into the pendant part of the necklace—one of the copper coils curved over as if biting the copper chain. She looked closer. No, not as if biting. “It’s a hydra,” she said flatly.

“A more feminine version,” Alistair said. “Grimsby had them made up specially for all the wives. I was going to wait to give it to you, but then I decided you needed it today.” He took the clasp from her hands and fastened it around her neck, letting it hang down over the high crew-neck of the wool dress. “There you are; a perfect doll,” he declared.

Helen’s fingers ran over the little snake heads. She was not certain she cared to be marked so publicly as the wife of a Copperhead party member. Yet she pasted a smile to her face, reminding herself that Alistair was trying to be kind. He seemed in so much a better humor this morning that she dared press for details about last night.

“Oh, we didn’t stay at Grimsby’s long after I sent you home,” he said, with a dismissive wave. “Frightfully gruesome, what? He dragged some private sleuth out of bed to poke around the place and then set the maids to cleaning. The rest of us dragged him out of there to roulette. We’ve all been through it before when he lost his first wife—gotta keep moving. Continuing the meeting’s all very well but you can’t do that sort of thing when your buddy’s got an eyeful of his girl lying stiff as a plank, can you?” Alistair slouched over to the window and pushed aside her curtains so he could stare out into the grey November morning. “Loses wife one to the dwarves, wife two to the fey—man’s got a rotten string of luck.” He whistled softly and turned back to her. “Made me glad I haven’t let you do anything so foolish, especially after that night in May. No, you’re safe and sound right here, and I’m glad to know that when I’m out with the boys.”

Helen hurried past that before he could directly order her to stay in. “Alistair,” she said to his back. “Why don’t you stay in tonight? Give up the boys for one night. We’ll … I don’t know, have our own dance, right here in the house. Remember when we used to dance?” Things could be like they were, she thought, without the night after night of drinking, the drinking that led to the shouting and the stool-throwing and the glass-smashing.…

He took a step away, making closed-off, disentangling gestures. “Now, lambkin, you know that I can’t very well look as though my wife has me on a string, can I? I have plans with the boys. We need to take Grimsby out and get him rip-roaring drunk.”

“You get that every night, with less excuse,” Helen said before she thought. It was the sort of thing you couldn’t say to Alistair without having him get all cold and ragey and she instantly regretted it. She knew that, goodness knows she knew that; why did she keep doing it?

“I merely do what’s necessary to keep our image up,” Alistair said icily. “One has to be seen socially doing the sort of things a man does. And since only one of us is fit to go out and keep our name active in the minds of our social peers…”

Argh, thought Helen, I want to go out, but she knew like anything that if she went down that road there would be no escape and she would end up in a confrontation about her staying home. She fell back on her usual trick of distraction. “Well, I think it’s just divine the way you all rally around poor Mr. Grimsby. And his darling son, too; poor Tam would be miserable else.”

“Who?” said Alistair. “Oh, Grimsby’s boy. His second time on the roller-coaster, too. Don’t worry, we brought him out to roulette, too. Gave him a drink.”

“Alistair!” she said, and now she really was shocked.

He held up his hands. “Just beer, just beer. Well, I’d better be off.” He closed the curtains, blocking out the thin grey light. “We have a full day planned.”

His eyes roved the room and she leaned to one side, shifting to hide the lump of journal under the covers. The carpetbag, thankfully, was hidden by the hanging folds of the quilt. He smiled at her, thin and tight under his cap of glossy fixed curls. “Don’t wait up, my pet,” he said, and then he was gone.

Helen slumped against the tufted headboard, feeling as if she’d been through a battle. Poor Tam, alone with those terrible men. There had to be something she could do to help him. She was not overly fond of children, no. She was glad to be through with governessing. And yet … roulette and beer? Her fingers rubbed the snake heads of the necklace as she tugged the journal out from under the covers. With one hand she flipped through it one last time to make sure that really nothing was going to fall out of it—no train tickets or death threats.

Her eye fell at the end of the list, at the last two names that she had skimmed over, the last two pages in Jane’s writing, blank except for the name at the top of each page. The women were not a perfect One Hundred after all, despite Jane’s referring to them as such; the last numbered person was 99.

But what gave Helen the shock, despite knowing it must be there, was to see those names etched out in those precise letters, one after the other, just two more women on the fey hit list, their names a record of their mistakes.

98—Helen Huntingdon.

99—Jane Eliot.