Copperhead

Chapter 7 SECRETS IN THE NIGHT

“You,” she said, and stared, agape.

“You,” he agreed, studying her in return.

He was indeed just her height—and she was not tall—but lithe, as if he were a professional dancer or acrobat. His clothes were similar to yesterday’s—fitted, trim, nondescript—the sort of clothes she had identified as being for a quick getaway. His hair was ruddy-brown and his eyes flashed with light. Even in the gay room of actors and singers in bright colors he seemed like something wilder, something more real and alive. “Who on earth are you?”

“Who wants to know?”

A bit of temper flashed at his evasions. “After that uninvited dance, I think I have the right to know.”

“You didn’t seem to mind the dance while dancing.”

“My husband might mind,” she said, trying to squash him.

“There’s always a husband,” he said, unsquashable.

She glared at him, but his grin was unrepentant.

“There’s someone looking for you,” he said, and pointed over her shoulder.

“I’m not falling for that—,” said Helen, but then Frye swooped in and enveloped her in a one-armed embrace that knocked her off balance.

“Helen, darling!” shouted Frye over the clamor of the party. “You made it. Have you met the girls?”

“Alberta, Betty, and Desirée?” guessed Helen.

“The same.”

“No,” said Helen, “but I did meet—”

But of course he was gone.

“Bah,” Helen said, and turned back to Frye, who looped a companionable arm around her shoulders and led her off to the open bar.

“Now I will tell you all about them so you can bring them over to the side of good and light.” Frye gestured to the bartender, who seemed as though he might be a fellow actor she’d roped in for the night. “Two martinis, very dirty.” She turned back to Helen. “Desirée is divine. She has the most glorious voice. And this rubbish little old husband, but we don’t talk about him.”

The bartender had a striped shirt rolled up over olive-skinned muscles and a lopsided, winsome grin that he employed to great effect on the pair of them. “Very dirty,” he repeated.

“None of your lip, and put in more olives,” said Frye. She had a long purple caftan embroidered with a dragon that billowed around filmy green slacks, and dark red heels that made her even taller. “Now, it turns out Desirée is allergic to iron. Can’t wear one of the face masks without going a funny shade of green. So she’ll be no problem at all. Just scheduling conflicts with her; she’s got engagements all over the place, and next week she’s going to—”

“Is she here?” cut in Helen.

“Yes, and she’s wearing the most atrocious peppermint-striped dress; you can’t miss it. She lets that ancient husband pick out her clothing. I can’t imagine why.”

“Maybe she actually likes him,” said Helen.

Frye dismissed this with a wave. “Oh, what glorious martinis, Cosmo. Helen, yours,” and she passed it across.

Cosmo grinned his lopsided grin at her and went to the next order. Helen rather liked that he seemed to be immune to her fey charm, perhaps through so much saturation in association with the charming actors around them, including the three enhanced women. That man she had danced with had seemed to be immune, too, although that hadn’t left her with exactly the same positive feeling.

“What about the other two?” Helen said to Frye, who had gone into an explanation of a perfectly terrible martini she had had last week while Helen hadn’t been listening.

“Oh, yes,” said Frye. “Just keep me focused. And Cosmo, one for the road if you would—?”—this while tapping the martini glass. “So little Betty’s here somewhere, in this dreadful purple fur thing she made herself, but she is an absolute lamb, you will love her.”

Helen noted for future reference that Frye didn’t seem to think much of anyone else’s personal taste. Of course, if that peppermint dress over there by the punch bowl was Desirée … perhaps Frye was just speaking truth. “I think I found Betty,” she said. “Did Jane mention talking with her?”

“Oh, Jane,” said Frye. “Now of course we both love Jane, but between you and me and the hall tree she went about it all wrong. Betty just needs to be told what to do, but not in a schoolmistressy way, you know? She’s an utter lamb, and you need to sit her down and hold her hand and tell her it will be all right and she can stop being afraid once she changes back. She’s going to get fired if she’s too afraid to get to performances, which she currently is, so you sit her down and explain that very nicely to her and she’ll come along.”

“Like a little lamb,” agreed Helen, satisfied that Frye’s estimate dovetailed so nicely with Helen’s accomplishment. She saw the mysterious fellow over by the window and turned to Frye. “Say, do you know who that man is—?” she started to say, but just then a tall lady in yellow ran up and air-kissed Frye and started talking a mile a minute about some performance that had been disastrous, didn’t Frye know. Helen waited patiently a few moments, as Frye turned half back to Helen and said “oh dear” and “just a minute,” but Helen perfectly well knew the signs of a busy hostess with three hundred people who wanted to talk to her, so she slipped away and tried to find the girl in the orange dress who had been singing at the piano.

The pianist was still banging away, and had been joined by a plump brown man in disheveled tie and specs. They were having too good a time at their duet to be interrupted.

You would think it wouldn’t be that hard to spot someone in orange, Helen thought, but here it was. The whole room was alive with color and fashion, and she was rather amused to note that everything she knew about fashion (and she knew rather a lot; on a good day she could pin you to an income and street just by the cut of the coat you wore) went out the window here, where it was apparently not only acceptable, but celebrated, to cross-dress in slacks or a bow tie, or to make a dress out of a slip with feathers stitched on, or to combine pink and orange, crimson and aqua, silver and gold.

The whole gaiety and life of the small house made her quite happy and giddy, as though she’d finally found a place to relax and just be. It was strange how sometimes you could feel that in a crowd, particularly as sometimes you couldn’t.

“Frye said you wanted to see me?”

Helen turned to see the perfect face of the dark-skinned girl in orange who’d been sitting on top of the piano. Hard to judge age with The Hundred, but Helen would guess mid-twenties. “Alberta?” she said.

The young woman nodded, eyeing her warily. Helen wished Frye had prepped her so she knew what this one was about. Jane’s only notes had been: Met. Dismal.

“I’m Helen,” she said. “I just met Frye last night and she dragged me over here. Are you in the show with her?” She began feeling out what the girl did for a living. It seemed as though most of the women at the party had jobs, even if they were exciting artistic ones.

Alberta shook her head. “Nightclubs,” she said.

“Oh, a singer,” said Helen. She was realizing that for the women she had met through Frye, a more beautiful face was not just vanity—it was part of their livelihood. Where did that fall on Jane’s line of who should and shouldn’t make themselves more beautiful? People would always rather go hear a beautiful chanteuse than a plain one, even if they had the exact same voice.

But Alberta shook her head. “Saxophone,” she said.

Helen’s face crinkled in puzzlement.

A tiny smile broke through on Alberta’s sullen beautiful face. “I know. There aren’t too many of us. I can sing well enough, but … no. I play sax in a cabaret band called Sturm und Drang. You might have heard of us.”

“I have,” said Helen, though admittedly the “heard of” amounted to Alistair grinching about the terrible modern music that was becoming popular for no discernible reason that he, Alistair, could see. She looked at Alberta with new respect. “But then why.…”

Alberta looked wary. “Frye mentioned you. You’re Jane’s sister, aren’t you? You’re wasting your time.”

“To convince you to do the facelift? It really is safer.”

Alberta rolled her eyes. “Spare me. I’m not like all of you rich ladies who just wanted to be prettier.”

Helen tried not to be offended by the venom in her tone. Or at least, reminded herself that it didn’t matter if she was offended. “Why then?” she said, as neutrally as she could manage.

Alberta looked at her coldly. “Abusive husband,” she said. The words were sharp and blunt. “Wouldn’t grant me a divorce. Thought he could beat me and I wouldn’t mind.” She showed teeth. “Turns out I did.” At Helen’s horrified expression her face relaxed and she laughed again. “I didn’t smash his face in with a frying pan or anything, don’t worry. Just ran away. A … friend … helped me scrape up the money to change my face.”

Helen could tell from her pursed lips she was not going to say any more about the friend, so instead she asked, “So you’re not just a more beautiful version of before?”

“No,” said Alberta. “It’s nice to be beautiful; I don’t mind that. As long as I was getting it done, why not go all the way, you know? But the point is that I’m not the same. And he can’t recognize me.”

Helen thought of all the folks she’d met, that this woman was the hardest to want to convince. Who was she to tell this woman to go back in living in fear for her life?

And yet, Alberta was in danger now, too, and the facelifts needed to be done. The wistfulness in Alberta’s voice when she said “I’m not the same” was Helen’s necessary clue. “You miss your old face?” she said.

“Sure, who wouldn’t?” said Alberta, but her tone was brash over loss.

Helen touched her arm. “I won’t try to convince you to change back,” she said, “because honestly, I’m not sure you should.”

“Oh. Good,” said Alberta with surprise.

“I miss my old face, and it was pretty much the same,” Helen said. “Although it had freckles, and this one doesn’t. Turns out for all my time spent trying to get rid of freckles … I miss them once they’re gone. Silly, I suppose. Well, Alistair never liked them.”

Alberta nodded. “So you changed for your husband, too.”

It was true, though Helen hadn’t thought about it in those terms. Alistair had said it would erase the freckles—fix the imperceptible bump on her nose—et cetera. That she needed to be as beautiful as the Prime Minister’s wife to make all those people who laughed at her when she used the wrong fork respect her.

“And it’s not right, is it?” Helen said. “It’s as if they took something that was yours. You can leave … but you’re still changed by them. They still have power over that piece of you. You’re never really free.”

“True,” said Alberta. She looked thoughtful and Helen judged the moment right to excuse herself for another martini. She had started out just exercising her wits to find arguments to work, but the conversation had dredged up things she hadn’t really thought about, and wasn’t sure she wanted to. A little shaken, she looked at herself for a long time in the window into the night, running pale fingers over the missing freckles, and thinking.

After Alberta, the third one was a piece of cake. Fortified with another gin from the winsome bartender, Helen met with Desirée, and armed with Frye’s information about the iron allergy, had no trouble extracting a promise to meet with Jane as soon as she was found. Indeed, Desirée sounded eager, and she pulled back the locks of her hair to show Helen where her cheek was blistered around the edge of the iron mask. It reminded Helen of the bloodred line around Millicent’s face, and she shuddered.

At last some rather languid-looking actors vacated one of Frye’s striped divans, and Helen seized it gladly. Her legs were protesting yesterday’s exercise, and she was starting to get tired. Also, it had just occurred to her that she had come here on the trolley, and just like last night, the trolley was certainly done running for the day. Zero foresight. Zip. She drained the last of her gin, postponing the problem of getting home for a bit longer. She could flag down a cab … if she had her purse … if she begged Frye for a loan.… Of course, Frye might try to get Helen to stay, and attempt that facelift all by herself.…

Helen crossed her ankles on a carved elephant that was doubling as a coffee table and tried to imagine following through on Frye’s demand that she take over Jane’s line of work. Perhaps Frye thought through consequences even less than she, Helen did. She wondered how that worked out for Frye. It seemed to, but then Frye seemed to be all alone in the world. Maybe if your muddles only muddled you, you could make your way better. You wouldn’t be always trying to atone for past muddles, and muddling more.

As if summoned by Helen’s thoughts, the purple caftan ballooned into her sight and Frye stood in front of her and the carved elephant. “I don’t want this face,” Frye said. She had a martini in each hand and a peculiarly desperate expression on her face.

“I know,” said Helen, with a twinge of exasperation and a good deal of sympathy. “But even if I could do it I couldn’t do it tonight. One, we don’t know where your real face is, and two, I’ve had three gins.”

Frye’s fingers tensed on the martini glasses. Up close Helen could see that her fingernails were jade green. “You don’t know, do you?” said Frye. “You can do things with it.”

Helen’s heart beat faster. Jane had hinted at something like this. Something more than the natural fey glamour that simply made people want to please her. “What things?”

Frye slumped next to Helen on the striped divan in a cloud of jasmine. Her eyes were feverish and Helen thought that although Frye seemed to hold her liquor quite well, she was also possibly at the point where she was not going to remember any of this tomorrow.

“You have to be focused,” Frye said. “Remember that.”

“I will,” said Helen, humoring her.

“Did you have a good time? Did you take the trolley again and need a ride? I bet you did, since it sounds like you have to sneak away from some dreary old husband.”

“Focused,” pointed out Helen, for Frye seemed to be evading her own story.

“I met this … artist,” said Frye at last. She cradled the two martini glasses in one hand so she could gesture with the other. “I was desperately in love. It didn’t matter how many other folks brought me flowers, you know? There was only one person I wanted. But even with all my fey glamour … No. Just not interested in someone like me. Heart of stone.”

“It’s the worst,” agreed Helen.

Frye looked up and into Helen’s face. “I changed all that,” she whispered. “I changed it. With the fey power in the mask.” Misery glittered in her eyes. “Where there was indifference I made love. I made someone love me.” Haltingly, the words slipped out: “And you see I didn’t deserve it. Anyone who could do what I did doesn’t deserve to be loved.”

Helen didn’t know what to say, and Frye seemed to interpret her silence as disgust, for she looked away, shoulders crumpling. “Don’t worry, I undid the changes. We’ve stopped speaking—they think it was a temporary lapse in judgment, I’m sure.” Her free hand traced the stripes on the divan. “So you see I can’t be trusted. I need the mask gone before I do it again.”

Compassion riddled Helen’s heart in response. “Love is not the worst thing in the world,” she said gently, and put a warm hand on Frye’s own.

Frye pressed Helen’s fingers, then let them go. “Love is perhaps the best thing,” she said, and she laced her fingers tightly around her martini glasses. “But forcing someone into it is perhaps the worst. Those Copperhead people have a term for it, what the fey did to the ones they took over. Brainwiping.”

The party was thinning out at this hour of the night as actors slumped to divans or left for home. Frye’s confession thinned out and died away, and Helen thought what a slippery slope this fey power was. Even before the power, she had employed her beauty and charm as tools; how could you not? They were her own, and she had sharpened them like razors. It seemed like all one could do, in this world where others had wealth and status at their disposal, and all she had were a couple of pretty little knives that would crack with age.

Across the room Helen saw her mysterious dance partner, chatting animatedly to a brunette woman with a curvy figure. If I were her I would not wear that horizontal panel at my waist, Helen mused.

Frye followed Helen’s gaze. “Did you meet Roxanne?”

“That man,” said Helen. It suddenly occurred to her that he could be a spy for Copperhead, here for some sinister purpose. “Do you know him?”

“Oh, you,” said Frye. “Of course.” She stood up, mussing Helen’s perch on the cushions, and gestured imperiously, the two glasses she held clinking together. “Rook!” she said. “Rook!” He grinned impudently at Frye, excused himself from the brunette, and came loping over, sliding through the tangle of sitting-down bodies.

“You. Meet this young woman named Helen,” said Frye. “Now, if I understand the situation correctly, she’s going to need an escort home tonight.” To Helen she said, “I would invite you to stay, but you’re going to tell me no, and I don’t do well when people tell me no.” She turned back to Rook. “Now I know you’re ridiculously charming and everything, but she has a husband so no funny business.”

“No funny business,” said Rook, shaking Helen’s hand as soberly as if they were now meeting for the first time. That warm sandalwood scent lingered around her fingertips.

“Does everyone just do what she says?” said Helen, and then immediately bit her tongue, for she hadn’t meant it like that, not like she was betraying the confidence Frye had just shared.

Frye just laughed at her discomfort. “If they’re smart they do,” she said. She waved a pair of now-empty martini glasses at Helen. “I’ll see you later this week.”

Frye left and then they were alone in the crowd. All sorts of things to say whirled through her mind as she studied him, this man. Rook. He had no hydra pin—but if he were a spy, he wouldn’t, would he? What did he want from her?

A hint of a smile played over Rook’s features as he watched her studying him. Languidly he offered an arm and said, “Shall we?”

Helen settled on saying airily: “Kind of you to offer. But I’m afraid I find your suspicious ways suspicious. I don’t need an escort who’s going to trail ten feet behind me like a sneak.”

“No, that’s too far,” he agreed. “I plan to be within … oh, about six inches.”

His grin was irresistible, but she tried valiantly to be firm, to not let his charm trump her sensible suspicions. He had been at the Grimsbys’, after all. For all she knew he was a spy for Copperhead, sent to keep an eye on her. “Really, you needn’t,” said Helen. “You have a whole party to amuse you. I’ll be fine.”

“As fine as when you dumped the bugs on that idiot on the trolley? And he turned into a raving lunatic?”

Helen couldn’t think of a response to this. She tried, but by the time she’d come up with anything barely usable, she seemed to have her coat on and be at the door with him.

“Some people need to have bugs dumped on them,” she said brightly as she put on her lilac gloves. She tried to make it sound as though it was just good common sense.

“I quite agree,” Rook said. “In fact, I found it quite admirable.”

“Thank you,” said Helen.

“And yet, if you can’t promise me that you will incite no more men by throwing bugs on them, I think you’d better have an escort. You know. For their safety.”

“There is that,” said Helen. She muffled her scarf tightly around her chin and neck. It was no iron mask, but it made her feel better.

They stepped out into the cold.

Rook moved silently along beside her as they passed through the theatre district, crossed the empty trolley tracks, headed through the neighborhoods that would eventually take them up to Helen’s own. If he stopped talking he could blend into the night and she would not see him again. It was odd—he was neither as tall nor as stout as Alistair, and yet Helen felt safer walking beside him in the night than she would have with her husband. It was a peculiar feeling to have in her gut about someone that her intellect told her to mistrust. Perhaps it was the way she had seen him interact with the drunkard on the trolley—sleek and swift, perfectly calm—and yet the man had immediately backed down. Yet even if she had not witnessed that moment she thought she would feel just as safe. Safe from others—but safe from him, too—despite his joke about staying close, if she told him to keep five feet away the whole journey home, she rather thought he would do that.

But how smart was it to trust him?

“You followed me last night, didn’t you?” she said suddenly. “After the Copperhead meeting.”

“I saw him take your iron mask,” he said. Alistair, he meant. Your husband, he meant, but did not say it. “You were in danger.”

“I was in a car,” she said dryly. “You, what, ran along beside us because of a mask?”

“Stole a bike,” Rook said cheerfully. “Borrowed if you’re feeling generous. I did return it.”

“It’s certainly very flattering,” said Helen, “I’ll give you that.” She looked sideways at him, trying to puzzle him out. Even if she believed that he had just followed her due to concern for her welfare, there was still the point that he was at a Copperhead meeting last night, and here in what might as well be the enemy camp tonight. Somehow she had ended up with a foot in both worlds—but how had he? “Where’s your lapel pin?” she said. “Don’t you walk the party line?”

His grin faded. “I had other business there last night. I am not a member of Copperhead.”

“Other business,” repeated Helen. “So now it really gets interesting. I doubt you were in charge of the catering.” She stopped on the sidewalk. “And come to that, why were you near the trolley stop today? Did you know that was going to happen to that poor man?”

Rook looked sober at the reminder of the trolley stop incident. “Did you see what happened? Did he provoke those Copperhead men?”

“They started it,” Helen protested, then admitted, “but he wouldn’t back down.”

“Moug always was a hothead.”

“You knew him. I’m sorry.”

He nodded, and added, “Look, I wasn’t near you; we were simply both near the Grimsbys’. Now can you take that suspicious look off your face? My intentions toward you are entirely honorable, I swear.”

Helen noticed that he did not claim that all his intentions were honorable, but she let her shoulders loosen. Perhaps she had been too blunt. Normally she was better at keeping her conversation partner soothed, flattered, well bantered. But apart from not entirely trusting this man, the storm of worries in her chest swirled round and round, leaving her adrift. What on earth would she do without Jane? The lights from the theatre district faded behind them as they walked on, leaving them in a darker neighborhood of old row houses and shaggy bits of garden. They cut through a stretch of park, winding their way up into the hills.

“Things on your mind?” Rook said softly.

Helen laughed and tossed her hair, building up her wall again. “Just thinking how divine your Miss Frye looked in her dragon and slacks. I’m positive I could never pull off such a thing. Yet I think I should try to go to her little musicale, what’s it called again? You tell me, do you think it would be worth seeing?”

The flow of chatter seemed to break and crash over him, leaving him unaffected. “I think it is likely ridiculous. Frye is better than her material.”

It was so easy to pretend there was nothing more on her mind than flirting with a handsome stranger. So easy to fall into the role of frivolous, laughing Helen. “Ah, the sort of thing where you grab your date and waltz out at intermission for cocktails. Then you sneak back in, half-sloshed, and afterward…” But there her imagination failed her, never having known anyone in a play. “And what do you do then?”

“The curtain falls. Rises. The actors come out and the audience breaks into a completely unwarranted sea of applause, mostly based on the number of cocktails they have had. When they are done, we slip through the pass door and find Frye’s dressing room. The biggest one, with the star. Which is probably the size of a shoebox and tucked under some stairs. We bring her flowers—”

“—oh, dear, I would have forgotten that—”

“—and she kisses our cheeks and we tell her how wonderful she was.”

“We lie?”

“Like rugs,” Rook said cheerfully. “Or, if you like, you tell her that the scenery was very beautiful, and you could hear all of the actors surprisingly well.”

“Ohhh,” she said, and then, “Oh,” with the bump of reality.

He raised eyebrows at her.

“You make it sound so lovely, I can practically see it,” Helen said. “It makes me wish we could go.”

“Your Mr. Huntingdon could take you.”

“No, he won’t let me go out for the danger, and I owe him not to go for something frivolous.”

Rook stopped then, and looked at her. “Helen,” he said.

“What?” She was startled to hear her name on his lips.

He turned and walked faster. “You’re cold, we should hurry.”

She was confused. “What did I say?”

Rook wheeled back again, took her elbow. “Now look,” he said. “What do you mean you can’t go out? You’re here now.”

“I snuck,” Helen said. “Or is it sneaked?” She thought she could lighten the sudden tension, for she could not understand why he seemed to be angry.

“For Frye’s party?”

“To talk to those women. Alberta and Betty and Desirée. To convince them to let Jane restore their old faces.”

“Ah,” Rook said, but the thing that looked fierce in him did not go, and he said, “Now look, Helen. What do you mean, you owe him?”

“Oh,” said Helen. She did not know why, but she suddenly wanted to tell him, tell him more than she had ever told Jane, more than: I’m so desperately tired of being poor.

That was maybe half of the story. Maybe a tenth.

She turned away from his fierce gaze and started walking into the wind, opening her mouth before she lost her nerve. “My mother fell sick before she died,” Helen said. It was strange how hard the words were to get out, even as something inside said you can trust him with this. She had never told the story, not to anyone. She was very good at changing the subject. “We tried a lot of doctors. A lot of medicine.”

“Your family?” Rook said. He kept pace with her as they walked up the street, letting her manage the words in her own way. The houses were bigger here on the other side of the park, more porches and columns and windows … but still that blue, all that blue.

“Me,” Helen said. “My father died several years before the war. My brother, Charlie … near the end of it. Jane was in the city, trying to heal herself. I wasn’t very nice to her at the time, I’m afraid. It felt as though she’d abandoned me.” Helen hadn’t thought through this in years. At least, not while awake—sometimes the dreams slipped her back through time and she woke aching with regret for a vanished past. It didn’t matter if she thought about it or consciously didn’t think about it, it was all still there. That lost feeling of being thirteen and alone in the house with Mother, who was slipping further away each day despite all of Helen’s efforts to bring her back.

“By the end, there was nothing left. Everything was mortgaged to the hilt or sold off. But I heard about a new doctor in the city. I went to him and begged. Well, he agreed to payment in installments.…” Helen trailed off. The night was cold and wet. The cloud cover blocked out the stars. Perhaps it was not clouds but smoke from the factories at the river, she thought, choking the sky.…

And these few sentences were more than she had said in years. She could not do any more, not just yet. “I don’t want to talk about this,” she said.

There was silence for a time. Then Rook said, “I grew up not knowing my father. Of course I was taller than everyone else. But havlen is an insult. Half-thing.”

Helen looked at him, shocked. How had she seen him and not known? She had to recalibrate. This man was only half-human. And half-dwarvven. Alistair would never approve. Copperhead would never approve. He couldn’t possibly be a member, then, unless he was a dwarvven spy, and in that case he had just carelessly handed a big secret to the wife of one of the top party members.

“I started out by punching everyone who called my mother a vile name. After a while I got a name for it.”

“I would have figured you for the class clown type.”

“When they finally threatened to throw me out of school for good I became the class clown instead. At least it’s a time-honored position, in dwarvven society. Like being a writer. Being a joker. It gave me a tenuous place.”

“It’s so much easier to talk of fun things,” Helen said. The way was getting steeper and it was hard to laugh. “If you talk silly then no one asks prying questions.”

“So let’s talk of terrible theatre some more,” Rook said, but Helen heard a bite in his voice that made her ask, “You didn’t stay the class clown?”

“Who does,” he said, “when war comes?” There was a moment when the moon caught his eyes and she looked right into him and saw that there was a thing, a some-thing, a black dark thing. But then his eyes glinted with a grin once more and he said, “Now, you may talk of cabbages and sealing wax and everything else Dodgson wrote of, but we are done with secrets.” He suddenly seized her arm and pointed to the footbridge they were nearing. “Have you ever climbed on a bridge rail in the middle of the night in November?”

“No!” Helen said, suddenly laughing, and Rook seized her arm, calling, “Race you,” and pulled her up the street, as if the race were the two of them together, against some other, unknown opponent. The cold night was sharp in her throat and her heels skidded on the wet pavement, but she laughed, fast and fierce, giddy with the run.

The bridge railings turned out to be stone ledges, and there was a fair amount of blue fey draped over them.

“Mm,” said Rook. “Perhaps we won’t climb these railings.” He looked at the blue. “No, I wanted to climb something.” He reached down and peeled away a large swath of blue with his gloved hands.

“Rook!” she cried, hurrying toward him—then stopped, for her face was still bare.

He let the blue fall over the edge of the bridge. “Go home, little fey,” he said. “Shoo.” The blue glow slid down into the black night and vanished.

“Rook,” she said again, shocked. “Do you have iron in your gloves?”

“No,” he said, and peeled another piece away. “It’ll be safe for you in a minute. Hang on.”

“But … you’re touching them. You saw what happened today, to that man.…”

“Yes,” he said. “And yet the odds are very much against that. Or perhaps I like to live dangerously.” He saw her expression and said, “Look, as much as I dislike the fey, a little piece isn’t going to harm me. You do know what the old fey tech that you humans used to trade for was made from, don’t you?”

Helen shook her head.

“Pieces of fey,” he said. “All your bluepacks that used to power things. Bits of split-apart fey. It was a punishment for them. They don’t like being torn apart like this.” He gestured around the city at the swathes of blue. “Whoever their new leader is, they’re strong enough to make it stick.” He dropped another piece over the edge. “Anyway, the small bits aren’t aware of much. It’s not till you have a whole fey that you have problems.”

“Well, I do know that much,” Helen said. “But aren’t you afraid there could be a big one hiding among these little bits?”

“I know,” Rook said, peeling off another piece. “But I am watching, and I am quick on my feet.” He dropped the bit of fey over the edge. She could see that they did not fall all the way into the water, but lazily drifted along just over it, looking for a new spot to rest. He looked over the edge, watching it go. “It doesn’t matter what I saw today. They are still not the race I fear.”

Helen did not say anything to that, because she knew which race he meant.

Humans.

Rook was havlen, so he was part-dwarvven. And Copperhead hated the dwarvven nearly as much as the fey, though she never could figure out why. Humans and dwarvven had been allies, once. The dwarvven did not like the fey, either.

“Well,” said Rook. “If they knew what we’ve planned for them…”

“Humans?” Helen said sharply.

But Rook just waggled his eyebrows and grinned. “Gallows humor, that’s all,” he said. “If we knew what they’ve planned for us … we’d be in just as much trouble and misery.” He pointed to a yellow poster, curled around the nearest streetlamp and visible in its golden glow. “Your Copperhead is getting higher in the capital’s ear every day.”

“They’re not my Copperhead.”

“Just married in, eh?”

She looked coldly at him.

He put up his hands. “My tongue always takes me too far,” he said.

“Or not as far as you’d like?” she said, which made him laugh and pulled the moment back into something funnier than perhaps it should be. After all, what did he mean by plans?

They started walking again, off the bridge and into Alistair’s neighborhood proper. There were more streetlamps here, and everything was more neatly maintained, making the bits of blue fey particularly jarring, like mold on bread. Her fingers were quite cold in her gloves.

“So you’re half-dwarvven, and the dwarvven hate you, but you’re working with them,” Helen said, seeing if she could tease any more information out of him.

Rook looked at the night sky. “I’m always making up,” he told it.

Helen did not know what for, but she knew what sort of a voice that was. That voice of always making up for leaving Charlie, leaving Jane, leaving Mother. Did Jane ever use that voice for leaving her? “To whom?”

“To myself.” He closed those laughing hazel eyes and suddenly no part of him looked lighthearted and fun. With his eyes closed she suddenly saw the worry lines around his eyebrows. Saw the tight way his jaw set, as if it could do hard things. “When you have been willing to kill once, you see,” he said, “it is assumed you will be willing to again.”

She could not say something lighthearted to that, so she said nothing. It was a peculiar moment, to go from a man you had talked to about dancing and theatre to thinking: This man has killed. Is he a different man now? He is the same man, but I know something about his past that casts a long shadow over his future. He will always be a man who has killed.

They were walking up the gaslit street and at the cloud-shrouded moon she said: “The payment to the doctor was so huge, the day so far off … I simply couldn’t ever meet it. I became more and more desperate. More skilled at dividing my life into two pieces. No one must know. I had taken it on to be responsible and important and clever, like Mother and Father and Jane, who were all gone, you see, and I was going to solve it in the same way. By myself. Of course I never was going to be able to meet the payment, and I suppose the doctor must have known that all along. As it drew nearer, he sought me out. Dropped hints of other methods of repayment.…

“I had hoped I could make the payments. But at some point you miss one and then the payments start escalating. I would come up with grand plans—there are always grand plans—for paying it off. I would make dresses for wealthy ladies and sell them. Things I could never accomplish because I would have to have money to buy the fabric in the first place. Or somehow—never quite satisfactorily explained how—I would get a second position, filling in for other nannies and governesses on their days off. But the thought of spending even more time with intolerable, spoilt children was … intolerable.

“For all my grand plans, what ended up happening was I would go down to the tenpence dance hall to drown my misery. Women no charge, you know. And the more you promise and flirt, the more men buy you coffee and pastries and bring you little tokens like scarves and so on. I became very good at promising and flirting. I mean, it’s my natural bent anyway, I suppose. We can’t all have high-minded skills.

“And there I was in a white dress with a green sash and I met Alistair.” She smoothed her lilac gloves over each finger, feeling the outline of the manicured nails below. “I’m always making up for not going into battle,” she said. “For not helping to kill the fey before they killed Charlie, and through him Mother, and nearly destroyed Jane.”

Rook stopped there on the sidewalk. They were half a block from the house, Alistair’s house. The gaslight flickered in the wind. She was watching the unreadable words on his face, so she didn’t notice his hand move until it was there, brushing one copper curl off of her cheek. Then it was gone, leaving her stomach with a funny bottomed-out feeling and the thought that perhaps she had just imagined his hand moving and it was only the wind.

“Never be sorry that you could not kill,” Rook said.

Ice formed on her breath as she stood there, until gold light came on in the windows of her house, and panic rose up. Helen turned from him then, and walked, faster and faster till she was racing up the stairs to her door, wind pulling water from her eyes. She tugged open the front door and hurried in but she had to look back. Rook was still there, a slim black outline in the cold.

Rook. Rook.

And she turned.

Alistair. Alistair.

The foyer was faintly lit with the light from the open door to the games room; the smell of a wood fire drifted down the hall. She closed the front door silently behind her. The air in the tiled foyer was chill and damp. She could try to make it to her room. She could confront him now and get the lecture over with.

Or perhaps she could brazen it out, though her cheeks were red-pink with cold, though the cold rose off her in waves. Still. Why not? She stripped off her coat and outer things, shoved them under the hall table, and glided on stockinged feet down the cherrywood floors of the hall to peek inside his games room.

Alistair was drunk.

He was by the fire, which glinted off his curls. His long legs were propped on the table on a pile of newspapers; his hand hung loose over the leather club chair with a partial glass of whiskey in it.

Just as quietly, Helen began to tiptoe away. But not quietly enough.

“That you, doll?” said Alistair.

Helen crept back in. She was going to brazen it out, wasn’t she? Be a good liar, like Tam had said he was. A lump caught in her throat as she thought of the boy stuck with Grimsby and the men tonight. Was his father even now filling that small head with tales of rage and revenge?

“I wondered if you were still up,” Helen said.

He stared moodily over his glass into the fire. “All white she was. Is. Still,” he said. Yes, very drunk. “But we dragged Grimsby away from there.”

“To get drunk?” she said. The words just slipped out.

Alistair sloshed to his feet, arm over the top of the chair to look at her. “Yes, to get drunk,” he said, making his point with a waving finger. “You wouldn’t deny him that, would you? Course you would, coldhearted witch, no fun at all…”

Helen was stung by this sudden attack. “Don’t I go to all the parties with you?”

Alistair waved this away. “Not what I mean. Your sister, always looking at me as though I weren’t fit to black your shoes. As if I hadn’t rescued you.” He cupped his hands and opened them in an expansive gesture, spilling the rest of the whiskey onto the shining floor. Bitter alcohol scented the fire-warmed air.

Helen did not care to talk about this, and particularly not with this version of Alistair. “You should go to bed,” she said. “I’ll send George in to clean.”

“Bed?” he said. “You don’t tell me when to go to bed. Unless you’re coming.”

“No, thank you,” said Helen. She prepared to make her escape, but his voice rose a level and stopped her.

“You don’t tell me what to clean,” he said, and opened his hand, letting the whiskey glass smash to the floor.

Now Helen did back up a step.

“You should have heard them all last night,” hissed Alistair. “Talking about your sister. My fault for taking her in. My fault for not throwing her on the street immediately. Your connections. Dragging us down.” He advanced. “Insinuating I can’t run my own household.”

Helen’s heart beat wildly. Social drinking she could understand; everyone did it. Sometimes you accidentally drank too much and regretted it the next day. But not these frightening rages—and they had been coming more and more frequently. Her hand felt along the doorframe for something to shield herself, but there was nothing, and she was exposed in his glare as he advanced.

“Stop it,” she said, but Alistair reeled on her, flush with drink.

“Where have you been?” he said, and there was a keen edge to his words.

“Out,” Helen said. Her hands trembled as she turned, but she would not cower in front of him. She had made her choice. He had been charming and handsome and sure and she had thought she must very probably love him. And it had made so much sense … hadn’t it? Jane had her career, her plans, but Helen had nothing except her face, and that face was supposed to land her her fortune. Which was Alistair Huntingdon, her charming white knight coming to save her.

His face reddened further as she turned away. “Out with that man on the street? That … dwarf?”

Helen froze, the ugly slur ringing in her ears. He had seen them.

Alistair’s smile was cruel. He had her. “Yes, I saw you. Barefaced and brazen, out walking with Grimsby’s pet dwarf,” he said. “Did he tell you he’s an informant for us? Where’d you find him—when you sneaked off to find Jane? Or were you slumming with the dwarves? Mixing, mingling, rutting?…”

“Don’t suppose it’s any of your business,” she said, and felt the country drawl that irritated him slip out.

She was cold and he was hot. He grabbed her wrist and sleeve, stumbled as she jerked. A button tore off as she pulled away, as she slipped and fell on the polished floor. Her hand skidded on the broken whiskey glass.

“I paid for you,” Alistair spat. “Paid for your face.”

Helen closed her eyes, clutching her injured hand to her chest, wishing she could close her ears against the torrent of abuse that flowed from his lips. Accusations, true and fair, she knew like a knifepoint in the ribs. Her eyes opened on that thought, that even if they were true and fair it hurt, it hurt, and she could not stand it. She clutched the copper necklace he had given her so tightly, her cut palm painful against the cold snake heads.

He was ranting and everything Frye had confessed to poured into her thoughts. Helen stared at Alistair and thought, You will apologize now. You will tell me you still love me. That things will be all right.

She did it more on a miserable whim than anything. More on a fragile wish that things could be as they were. As she had seen him when she first met him, that shining white knight. Wielding the fey power to change someone was hard; Jane had said so frequently. Frye had said she studied for a long time.

She did not expect Alistair’s eyes to go glassy as she clutched her necklace, willing him to change. For him to turn and say, “Forgive me, Helen.”