Ironskin

Chapter 9 The Misses Ingel

Even as she saw it, it vanished, and then there was only pre-dawn blackness, leavened by thin moonlight. Jane stared into the forest, her eyes wide open and scanning. Had she really seen that? Surely it was just a trick of her nightmare carrying over, showing her fey where none existed.

Jane put a hand to her chest, uselessly trying to slow her heart through the touch of her fingers. She reasoned with herself. The fey had not been seen for five years. Why would one appear only when she was sleepless in the dead of the night? It was ridiculous. She had only imagined it. Wound up from her nightmares, her eyes insisted on seeing danger where there was none, lights where only blackness reigned. She turned off the fey-tech light, watching.

There.

No. Yes?

Jane grabbed her dressing gown and hurried down the side stairs by her room, out the side door. Well before she got to the back of the estate she was wondering what she hoped to accomplish by running outside without shoes or clothes or even a feyjabber. But that didn’t stop her feet from flying.

She stood twenty feet from the forest, panting and searching the woods for more blue light. She didn’t dare take a step closer into the darkness than that. She studied the edges of her vision as the moonlight glimmered off leaves and dew and played havoc with her sight and nerves. Had she really seen anything? And what about the last time she was out at dusk—had she really heard the sharp bzzzt of fey then, or was this house just getting to her?

“What are you doing out here?”

Jane spun to see Poule standing there, her sturdy form solid and black in the night. Moonlight lit her grey hair silver, spun itself along the length of the dingy red quilted dressing gown the woman wore. Picked out the glints of metal at her wrists, and a lump in an inside breast pocket such as Jane had seen the first day, and taken for a blackjack.

Jane backed up, as if she expected the odd butler to kneecap her and haul her back. “I thought I saw a fey,” she said. The grass was wet and cool on her hot feet.

Poule’s grey eyebrows disappeared into her hair. She went toward the forest line, closer than Jane, leaned forward as if scenting the air. The night was quiet around them. Then she shook her head and returned to Jane. “They’re not there now.”

Jane’s heart thumped at the turn of phrase. “But you think they were? It’s not just my imagination? They’re supposed to be gone.”

Poule’s eyes held no comfort. “The fey won’t ever be completely gone, and you know that deep inside, don’t you? Know it as well as we do.”

We? “I guess I do,” Jane said reluctantly. She felt exposed by Poule’s assessment of her, and questions wrote themselves in the furrows of her brow.

“You don’t have your mask on,” the short woman said.

Jane realized that just as Poule said it, automatically tilted her head forward to let her hair swing over her cursed cheek.

“You’re leaking, I think,” Poule continued. “It’s odd, feeling it from you. Usually it’s just around the fey that you become bombarded by feelings not your own. Feelings you don’t want. At least for dwarves—humans certainly aren’t that perceptive, or you’d have been able to spot all those humans taken over by fey long before the bodies rotted and gave it away by the stink.” She gestured back at the forest. “I can’t swear if the blasted blue-things were there before or not, but I don’t scent them now.”

Jane wasn’t sure how to interpret this barrage of information, but her tongue found tactless words before her brain had caught up and said: “A dwarf? You’re a dwarf?” Immediately she realized how rude it was to ask, as rude as asking someone what their curse was.

It was the first wry grin Jane had seen on the old woman, and it made her seem less threatening. “Half,” she said. “I’m havlen, which translates as a half-thing. We aren’t very kind to those who stray from the mountains, you see.”

Now that Jane knew the woman’s lineage, she wondered how she could have missed it. It also explained the glints of metal she’d seen at Poule’s wrists. “Do dwarves really wear their mail all the time?” she said. “Doesn’t that get uncomfortable?”

“Well, not all our mail,” said Poule. She slid up the arm of her dressing gown to show that the chain mail wristlets only covered her forearms. “You can make a concession to fashion without going whole hog. But tell me what you need for Dorie’s gloves.”

“What?” said Jane. The prying made her tongue rude. “How do you know about the gloves?” She turned back to the forest, watching the black branches sway in the wind.

Poule shrugged. “There are eyes in the walls. A little bird told me. Pick one.”

Jane cringed against the being-watched feeling that she hated. How could she trust anybody when they refused to trust her?

Poule rubbed the back of her neck beneath the iron grey hair and stared wordlessly into the forest. Finally she said, “Have you seen him go in there?”

Jane thought she had seen—but she had no proof. Stubbornly she matched Poule question for question. “Why would he do that?”

Poule looked at Jane with a fierce black eye. Her gaze seemed to effortlessly pierce the veil of hair to the scarred flesh beneath. “If you see him go in, tell me immediately. Promise.”

“I can’t promise anything,” said Jane stubbornly. She didn’t know if Mr. Rochart really went into the forest, but she wasn’t sure she trusted Poule any more than anybody else in the house. Her duty was to herself, then Dorie, then Mr. Rochart, in that order, and she wasn’t about to make any promises she didn’t know the meaning of.

The dwarf looked at her as if she knew what was passing through Jane’s head. Snorted. Then turned and tromped back into the house, her loose grey hair swinging silver behind her, her slippers leaving darker impressions in the dewy grass. Behind her she called, “Do you want linseed oil or not? Come and get it, if you’re getting it.”

The night was empty when you were alone. Jane hurried after before she could be left at the boundary of the woods. The last ray of sunlight didn’t mean very much when there was no sunlight at all.

Jane followed Poule on another winding route, an echo of following Martha into the attic. Except this way led to a small white door, partway into the abandoned wing. It was all quite dark, but Poule flicked open a small electric torch that was not the blue of fey technology, but rather a warm yellow light. Jane kept thinking she should really go get her shoes, but it seemed like if she left now she would never see Poule again, and this opportunity would vanish like the master of the house.

The white door opened to a descending circular staircase. Poule’s voice floated back as they picked their way down. “The iron paste for Dorie’s hands is clever,” she said.

“It’s not that clever,” demurred Jane. “A man in the city gave me the paste. I didn’t think of it.”

“Yes, but you tried it on her hands. Why her hands? I mean, Dorie’s curse isn’t exactly the same as yours, is it?”

“I don’t know,” Jane said, thinking about the first question. “It felt right, I guess. But her curse isn’t the same at all.” She shook her head, recalling what she had told Niklas. “No visible scar, no obvious drawback … Is it because it happened before birth? Because she was unborn when her mother was taken over by the fey?”

But the staircase stopped there, opened up on a hallway. The walls turned to living rock that oozed water into channels on the floor, and so Poule’s only response was, “Mind the mushrooms.”

Several steps down the quiet stone passageway was a wide, red-painted door, the bottom two inches painted with a thick off-white paint that Jane guessed to be some sort of water repellent, for when the floor flooded.

As Poule opened the door Jane heard a mechanical whirring inside, like the sounds heard around Niklas’s foundry. A familiar sound, a homey sound. The large set of rooms on the other side of the door was a studio like Mr. Rochart had, except here in the cellar, down in the damp and dark. Poule pulled on a cord and switched on a glass light that burned with the same warm yellow of her torch.

“Is that fey technology?” said Jane, surprised.

“Of course not,” said Poule, but she didn’t look offended. “Pure electricity; runs off a generator that’s the pinnacle of dwarven achievement. Or at least the pinnacle of my achievement. I do a sweat-ton to keep this old house moving, you know.”

The swinging yellow light picked out odds and ends of tools and machinery that littered the room: pipes and glass jars, and in the corner a bed and dresser on a metal platform that lifted them clear of possible floods or spills.

Jane stood, not knowing where to go, but Poule motioned her to a beautiful little table made of twisting metal and wavery green glass. Jane stared at it as she sat down. Dwarf trade had been at its height two hundred years earlier, when Queen Maud favored the dwarves and kept them around her court. On her sudden death, her nephew, King Philip, declared the dwarves immoral and possibly regicidal, and they’d packed up from the court and gone home. Trade for the durable, beautiful dwarven craftsmanship had crawled to a halt.

But the dwarves had still been inventing and designing. The table was clearly made by dwarves, and just as clearly it was no style that she had ever seen before. In human terms, it was priceless.

And it was laden with the crumby remains of teatime, a small oil can, and two screwdrivers.

Poule cleared these away, wiped down the table with the hem of her dressing gown. She sat down on the other chair, and Jane realized then how large she felt on her own seat. Poule was perhaps halfway between average human-sized and average dwarf-sized, which was why she could pass for simply a very short woman. The chairs and table were clearly made precisely for her—precisely by her, possibly—and it was just enough of a height difference to raise Jane’s knees above her hips and put her off-balance.

“If this were full-sized you could sell it for a fortune,” Jane said. “Er. Human-sized.” She bit her tongue.

Poule snorted. “Haven’t you humans learned to stop buying from ‘the other’? That’s what got you into this mess in the first place. Buying all that blasted fey technology instead of continuing to develop your own.”

“Oh, you don’t have to tell me,” said Jane. “You should have seen the terrible state of the trolleys when I started looking for a job. It was about six months after the war, so just when the rationing of the biggest bluepacks had finally run out. Practically nothing was running.” This was a good topic for an enjoyable rant, and clearly Poule agreed. “I’d grown up hearing about the incredible culture and technology in the city, you know, but by the time I got there, it had practically ground to a halt as the bluepacks all died, one by one. The factories, the trolleys, the cinemas—no one could run anything.”

“You’d sat on your arses and let the fey run your lives,” said Poule. “And now you have to start from square one. That’s why the dwarves never went down that road.”

“We’re not all as smart as the dwarves,” said Jane. She felt a moment of kinship with the short woman as Poule laughed in appreciation. Here they were in the black cold basement of Silver Birch, dank and damp under the damaged wing, and yet … perhaps this woman could be a friend. Or at least … an ally?

But Poule turned the force of her attention back to Jane. “I feel your rage,” she said.

“I know,” said Jane shortly. She swung her hair to cover her cheek again. “It’s why I wear the mask.”

“I mean I feel it extra now,” said Poule. “You got angrier when I talked about the fey.”

“Yes,” said Jane, annoyed. She had a strong urge to wriggle away from the examination.

“So you were less angry before,” Poule said patiently. “Not enough that humans would notice the difference in how they feel around you. Sometimes they feel cranky—sometimes crankier. They don’t know how to put it aside regardless. But like I said, dwarves are more perceptive. I feel the shifts.”

“You can put it aside?” said Jane.

Poule nodded. “Not all of it. But it’s a matter of thinking about what you’re feeling and separating it out from what you should be feeling, if you take my meaning. Get rid of the feelings that aren’t yours. Find your composure. Dwarves can do that a little—it’s bloody hard, but it’s something we practice, for dealing with the fey.” A short, hard laugh. “Some of us have had a lot of practice.…” She trailed off. “Well. If sometimes you are just a little shirty and sometimes you are flying-off-the-handle, rip-roaring mad—then you do have some control over it, don’t you?”

Jane thought back. “Sometimes,” she said slowly, “when the fire rages up against my mask I feel it. Like a hot orange flame. And then … and then I try to make it go away. Imagine the fire going out. Like it’s being dowsed with water or something. Or Helen used to stroke my arm and I would imagine it rubbing out the fire.” She looked up at Poule. “But I didn’t think it was really doing any good.”

Poule nodded thoughtfully. “You might continue trying it,” she said. Her calm assurance made Jane think she should take this woman seriously. Poule leaned back in her chair. “Now, tell me. What do you want for Dorie?”

“Ironskin,” said Jane, unconsciously touching her bare cheek.

“What you have wouldn’t work on hands.”

“I know,” Jane said. “I’m going to make some gloves that have the iron tar inside. I found some linen in the attic. Now I need the linseed oil to paint the linen and turn it into an oilcloth, so I can make a sandwich of the fabric that has the tar inside it.” She sighed. “Hopefully that will stop the tar from leaking out, because tar’s been getting on everything and I’m sure it’s frustrating Martha no end, though she only looks at us and shakes her head.”

Poule drummed her fingers on the table. In the swaying yellow light she had a funny self-satisfied look, like she was bursting to tell Jane something. “What about a fabric that has iron wires woven through it? A sort of mesh.”

“That might work,” Jane said slowly. “I had thought of chain mail, but it would be too bulky. But can you make wires thin enough?”

“We do back home,” said Poule. “We draw the wires thin enough to crochet. Some people use them to make jewelry—a different take on iron charms. Which—who knows if they work—bloody superstition if you ask me. Well. I’ve been experimenting with these iron threads to see what applications they might have against those blue brutes. The iron mesh cloth has potential.”

“It might work,” agreed Jane. “It might be even better than my idea—no tar to leak through. Do you have a sample of the cloth?”

By way of answer, Poule reached under her chair and pulled out a cotton bag. “A cloth and a bit of spare time on my hands,” she said. From the bag she pulled a small pair of long mesh gloves and slid them across the green glass tabletop to Jane.

“Oh, how perfect…,” breathed Jane. She touched the metal-threaded cloth. It was supple enough to move with fingers, like a second skin. Yet it seemed like the iron was woven closely enough to keep Dorie’s talents suppressed. The gloves fastened up the side with little iron clasps, so it would be possible to wriggle Dorie’s hands in.

Poule pulled the gloves away from Jane’s touch. Leaned back in her chair, flicking her grey hair behind her. “The question is: what do you want to pay for them?”

Jane fumbled. “I’m sure Mr. Rochart will pay you what you need, when I tell him.…”

Poule’s eyes were friendly but firm, the creases set in a way that recalled stone. “I don’t make the rules,” she said. “That’s the one thing about both the fey and the dwarvven”—and Jane clearly heard the foreign tongue as Poule pronounced the word in her own language—“there’s certain rules. And one is that everything has a price. Everything between your world and ours has to be fairly bought and paid for.” She flipped the screwdriver between nimble fingers like a worry stone. “And it doesn’t seem to matter that I’m havlen, a half-thing. Some things still apply.”

Jane said nothing, thinking through her history, attempting to come up with a suitable answer before she let her tongue say something foolish or insulting. The fey drove dreadful bargains, seeking your talent and life and anything that truly mattered to you that they could get; they sealed deals you didn’t know existed.

Whereas no such reputation existed for the dwarves, though they were sometimes said to be cold and miserly. “Wouldn’t give you a smile you hadn’t paid for,” was a common saying about the oft-surly folk. They traded their fine engineering and design for things of the surface: fruits and wheat and wool. Jane had none of these things.

The dwarf leaned back in her chair. Her dressing gown shifted just enough to show that whatever she always carried in her breast pocket had a hard rectangular outline, and like a flash Jane knew what it was.

The one surface culture dwarves shared with humans, that the dwarves were known to love with all their fierce, passionately intellectual hearts. Wasn’t that why so many of the court poets had been dwarves, until Queen Maud’s death put an end to the days of civil friendship?

Books.

The dwarves loved books. They read them in vast, devouring quantities, and they wrote them, too—in their electric-lit caves alongside their molten metal and their turning gears the dwarvven scribbled out great gothic tragedies, pouring out their hidden romantic souls into tales of forbidden love and secret temptation, blood-soaked mysteries and swashbuckling pirates.

A Child’s Vase of Cursing Verses was unlikely to be of interest. Poule had surely read Kind Hearts and Iron Crowns—Jane only hung onto it for the personal inscription on the flyleaf. But the third …

“I will lend you a book,” said Jane. “A glorious adventure novel.”

Poule’s eyebrows raised. Her hand went unconsciously to the book she was currently reading, tucked inside her dressing gown. “You think you have something I haven’t read?”

“Maybe,” said Jane. “I mean, it is a dwarf author.”

“Probably read it, then,” said Poule. “You’ll have to think of something else.”

“The Pirate Who Loved Queen Maud.”

Poule dropped her screwdriver to the table with a clatter. “Not the one her son banned, and ordered all copies burned on sight?”

Jane nodded, and she mentally thanked the several-greats-grandmother who had decided she’d rather risk royal displeasure than give up a book. She leaned across the table toward those bright, eager eyes. “On page twelve he carries off a girl who looks like the queen, but he doesn’t find out she’s actually the court alchemist’s daughter till they’re halfway across the ocean, with a fleet of navy ships in hot pursuit and a nest of sea dragons just off starboard, ready to ravage the ship for its gold and tear the pirate to bits.”

Poule gulped. “Done,” she said hoarsely.

After the bargain was sealed, Jane slowly retraced her path back to the foyer, went up the stairs to her bedroom on the second floor. She stared out the window into the night for another hour, drifting in and out of semisleep.

But no more lights appeared.

Jane was the one with the midnight adventure, but Dorie seemed just as tired as she the next morning.

But thinking back, Dorie had been slower and slower to get out of bed each morning since they’d started the tar. It was not the stubborn revolt of the first day, but a strange passive resistance, as if she had decided she’d rather sleep than do anything that Jane wanted. Listless—slumped. It was an unusual strike for a healthy child.

A very tired Jane knelt by the bed. She was heavy on her feet and her iron mask seemed to weigh her head down. “We’re not going to do the tar today,” she said.

Dorie slowly lifted her head. “No?” she said.

“No. We’re going to try these interesting gloves,” said Jane. “See how pretty they are?” Jane produced the mesh gloves that Poule had made. As a concession to Dorie, she’d gotten up early and stitched red and silver sequins on the backs of the hands.

Dorie looked blankly at the sequins.

“Your friend Poule made them for you,” said Jane, deftly wriggling Dorie’s passive fingers in and fastening the catches up the side of the arm. She hoped she could get them on before the tantrum, as the reverse seemed highly unlikely. “Now the other pretty glove,” said Jane, and in went the other hand before Dorie could discover that these gloves had the same effect as the tar. “Pretty, yes?”

The blank in her eyes faded, and Dorie stared at the gloves with the same intent look she used to wear when she was trying to make something move. Jane readied herself for a full-on tantrum.

But all that happened was that the intent look in the girl’s eyes slowly died.

Her gloved hands fell to her lap and she stared off into nothing, through the papered wall. Jane felt suddenly alone in that white-and-silver room. The air vibrated with emptiness around that little girl who sat there, saying nothing, doing nothing, slumped like a forgotten porcelain doll.

The nightmares increased.

They grew more focused, more detailed, until Jane was seeing the same scene, night after night. A terrible, familiar scene, one she had tried to block out for five years.

She sees the blackened moor, bare rubble separating her town from the terrifying forest. She played in that forest once; they all did. Yet now she and her childhood friends take their places with jagged scraps of iron, watching the menace pour from the forest. This is how the Great War is fought, for soldiers are spread too thin when the enemy is not a human enemy, with one home base, with needs of food and water and horseshoes. This is an enemy that materializes out of every forest in the land, first here, then there, an inhuman pattern not easily deciphered.

Their misfortune, to live so close to the trees.

It is the dawn of early spring, and the moor is dense and roiling with fog. Daily there have been reports that the Great War is being won, that they are drawing ahead. This may well be propaganda, for they have not seen it. For almost four years some trick of circumstance kept them safe here in Harbrook, untouched by the ravaging, decimating war. But after the winter solstice something turned, and the enemy began appearing. Perhaps they were driven here, or perhaps it was next in their plan. They have been attacking night after night, gnawing the town’s defenses one by one. Harrying the town, taking one child here, one woman there. Till at last they have been seen, blue-orange lights gathered just inside the perimeter of the barren forest, and the ragged army of Jane’s friends takes their desperate stand against them.

Charlie steps in front of Mother and Helen, pushes them back with a pale, dirty hand. Helen is thirteen and useless when faced with this terror. She wrings her hands in her dirty apron and holds Mother tight. Mother is brave, brave enough to let Charlie go forth with the men, even though he is all of twelve.

I am not as brave as Mother, Jane thinks. Not brave enough to stay behind. She picks up her stave of iron and follows her baby brother onto the field where the yellow cowslips poke through the black turf.

“Jane!” Mother shouts, but she does not turn. “Jane!”

Jane thrashed herself awake. It was cold pale dawn, and Jane’s buoyant hopes for Dorie were fading to despair. The days were all the same now, and Jane went through the morning rituals by rote: locking Dorie into the gloves, helping the listless girl dress and eat and play with her toys.

It felt ridiculous to complain about no tantrums … but Dorie wasn’t doing anything at all. Jane had expected the girl’s stubbornness and energy to sustain her through learning this new skill, but now?

Jane watched Dorie color on a picture of a rabbit with blue chalk. The girl lay on her stomach, her cheek on her left arm as if she were too tired to lift her head. Her right arm scribbled randomly over the rabbit, but she was using her hand, so though Jane despaired, she did not say a word. Just sat and tried to quench the impotent rage inside her that wanted to jump on Dorie for the tiniest infraction.

She tried to turn her thoughts aside from her failure, but that just turned them back to Mr. Rochart, and the frustration of not seeing someone when you wanted to change what you said, wanted to rewrite the whole scene. No, that change of subject didn’t help one bit.

Jane breathed in and out on counts of three as she watched Dorie’s gloved hand creep back and forth across the page in short jerks. It was a good thing Jane had the mask on, or Dorie would feel her rage no matter how hard she tried to pack it down inside her where it belonged. What was it that Poule had said? Maybe the calming thoughts really did help? Jane breathed deeply, imagining water filling the mask, the rage steaming off and dissipating.

Dorie’s hand moved slower and slower and Jane reached out and gently touched her elbow. “Why don’t you sit up and try a new color?” she said. “Or a new page?”

Dorie’s fist opened and dropped the blue chalk. Jane placed a piece of yellow chalk on her mesh-gloved palm. Dorie did not look at the chalk, but just started scribbling on the page again.

“Do you want to color the ears yellow?” suggested Jane.

Dorie looked at the picture, moved her hand over the ears, and started her slow scribbles again. Her eyes closed as if they were too heavy to keep open.

Jane sighed, not understanding why Dorie wouldn’t at least want to do a good job. She liked pretty things—surely that would be a motivator for making the page pretty. Girls this age usually didn’t have to be enticed to attempt to stay in the lines, even if they didn’t always make it.

Of course, Dorie wasn’t like any other girls. Jane knew that.

But she watched Dorie’s limp curls and slow-moving gloved hand and wondered if they were making any progress at all.

“The old servants’ entrance got blown off with the north wing,” Cook said. “Like as not we’ll get the temporary staff wandering in at the front door today. You’ll be knowing where the side door is to show them if you see them? And the passageway to the kitchen? Little matter for today, but there’ll be none of this front door waltzing-in when the guests are here, I can tell you. Sure and I’m the closest thing Rochart has to a housekeeper, but I won’t see him humiliated for all of that.”

Jane sat huddled in the painted white chair in the kitchen, absorbing the unwanted news that there was going to be a house party in two days. “Extra staff,” she repeated.

“Yes, to whip this house into something not an embarrassment and to be serving the guests. We’ll be having to open up at least two bedrooms in the damaged wing and maybe three. As well as extra rooms belowstairs for those we’re hiring and the staff of the guests. Still, better pence coming in than pence going out, though why potential clients have to be romanced for a week and not just an eve, I’ll never know. Especially when that puts them here over May Day, and won’t they just be expecting a grand celebration, as if those city folk had anything to do with the ending of the war.…”

Dorie had just gone down for her nap, and her naps were longer these days, lasting from just after lunch to near dinner. Jane was torn between worry for the girl and the thought that Dorie was merely tired from the extra physical and mental exertion. Still, if this strange listlessness continued, she would have to go back up to the studio and confess that she was failing. The thought was not appealing.

“Is Mr. Rochart busy this afternoon, do you know?” she said.

“Rochart?” Cook dumped a bin of fresh new potatoes into the sink and ran an inch of water to loosen their dirt. “He hasn’t been here for a fortnight. He’ll be meeting with a wealthy client in the city. Left for town just after he finished with Miss Ingel. Were you not knowing?”

“Oh,” said Jane. “No.” So he hadn’t been avoiding her. Unless he’d been avoiding her by fleeing the house altogether, but that seemed unnecessarily silly for the owner of the house to do. No, he hadn’t even noticed her ridiculous advances in his study, and maybe that was more humiliating. She didn’t figure into his travel plans one way or another. He didn’t think of her at all. Breathe, she told herself, and let it go. Think about anything else—water, tar, potatoes.

“Sure and I don’t see why you would know,” Cook said. “Keeps to himself, don’t he, and why a young lass like you would care about the doings of a moody widower, even if he is your employer.”

Jane did not want to respond to that, so she turned the conversation back to Creirwy’s earlier speech and replayed her instructions, to fix on what might actually be expected of her. “The side door on the south, you said?” said Jane. “That’s where I should direct them?” She wondered what the temporary staff would be like—these local wives and daughters pitching in to pick up an extra bit of money and a hamper of leftover party food. Did they normally ward themselves when they went by Edward’s crumbling house? Did they rap on iron to come today, and did they come only because they were desperate, as desperate as she?

Cook nodded at the side door question, her nimble fingers rubbing the tender skin from the newest spring potatoes. Sloughed skin fell to the countertop in flaking bits of red-brown. “Some of the temporary staff were here at the last party two years ago,” Cook said. “The rest said they wouldn’t come back for love nor pence. Silly girls probably got themselves with babes by now. The old ones return, you’ll see. Ones with heads on their shoulders, with sense enough not to let their bellies turn at the sight of Dorie’s tricks. You have to be thirty before you have any sense at all.”

“I’m twenty-one,” said Jane.

“Sure and you don’t act it. You’ll be having an old heart, you will. My grandmam used to say that was the only thing that might save you.”

“Save me from what?” Jane prompted. Anything to derail her thoughts. She hooked her feet on the rung of the wooden chair, watched Cook’s fingers fly.

Cook stared off over the steam rising from the soup pot. The flames licked around its copper edges. “A cousin of mine was taken by the fey,” she said. “Well, her parents thought she fell off a cliff, but my grandmam said Eirwen was too clever to go tumbling off cliffs. Eirwen was that pretty and clever, and she had a little wooden recorder painted all blue that she played as well as the birds. She and I would go roaming, we would, through the woods and cliffs around the sea, where we lived then. But one day we separated and she never came back. The only thing we found of her was the blue recorder, half-buried in the mud of the path. Grandmam was certain the fey took her for their own.”

Jane realized she was holding her breath, that her elbows hurt from leaning on the side table. “But the fey didn’t take you? Was it because you had the old heart?”

Cook came back to herself with a laugh. “No, that was because I wasn’t pretty nor clever nor talented. May you be born plain, that’s the way of it. Grandmam said to me: ‘Creirwy, you’ll be thanking your lucky stars you’re ordinary, ’cause that’s why your mum isn’t bawling her eyes out right now.’ And you know, I did.” She slid the delicate potatoes into their own pot of cool water. “I suppose I’m too practical for my own good.”

“Did you ever see her again?” said Jane. It seemed like the worst way to lose a child—no clean break, but the agony of waiting day after day, holding out hope against the inevitable. She imagined Cook’s aunt turning the muddy blue recorder around in her hands day after day, watching it age as the years rolled by. First the dirt would flake off, then the blue paint. Then the wood would smooth under her hands until the recorder was merely a lump of wood with holes, out of tune and unusable. And still no child.

“No, that we never did,” said Cook. “And they say the fey let their captives go with a gift after a certain number of years—decades—have passed. So who knows—maybe she did fall off a cliff, for aught I know. Except that was just a bit easier to believe before the war. Nowadays I reckon even Aunt and Uncle accept that the fey took her.” The water roiled under the stirring of her wooden spoon. “Sure and the fey aren’t just tales anymore.”

Jane volunteered to steam the curtains in the foyer and direct traffic. There wasn’t time to wash everything (“A party only every two years, and he can’t be giving us more notice than two days?” moaned Cook), but there were plenty of ways to freshen with dusting and carpet beating and steaming.

The steamer was one of Poule’s inventions: a copper and iron contraption on spoke wheels. Jane dragged the awkward machine into the foyer and poured her full kettle into it. The heavy velvet drapes were nearly wrinkle-free, but she felt oddly satisfied as she freshened the plush, uncrushed the nap of the velvet. Maybe it was because this was a simple task, she thought, not like her open-ended struggle to turn Dorie into something she was not. Steaming the curtains fixed the curtains, and that was satisfying.

She directed several men and women to the side door to apply to Creirwy for the temporary work. Most often the villagers arrived in pairs—unwilling to brave Silver Birch Hall without a friendly face in tow, she thought. They peered in cautiously or stoically, wiping damp palms on their cleanest black-and-whites, fingering iron charms fastened over their pulse points. Jane smiled at them, but she knew her unveiled face with its contoured iron wasn’t likely to set them at ease.

She was nearly done with the last set of curtains when the twisted doorknocker sounded again. Jane opened the door. “Side door on the south,” she said automatically, but then she looked more closely at the visitor. “I’m sorry,” she said, for the woman at the door was clearly no servant. Jane wasn’t embarrassed for herself, but she didn’t want her employer to lose a client because she’d been too informal to her. So she bobbed an unfamiliar curtsey by way of apology. “An’ ye be human—oh, just come in, please, with my apologies.”

The woman laughed, her head thrown back till her throat caught the muted morning light. “I’ll have you horsewhipped,” she said, and she swept past Jane and into the house.

Jane looked at her sharply, uncertain as to whether the woman seriously thought that was a possibility, or if she merely had an odd sense of humor. Oddly cruel, perhaps. She wished she could take back the curtsey.

The woman was amused by Jane, judging from the expression in her snapping black eyes. She was not attractive, but Jane had to look twice to see that. The woman was tremendously distinctive, due to the fire in her face, the light in her eyes. She had clear olive skin and masses of black hair, and she knew how to dress to her advantage—she was clad in folds of black satin that slashed dramatically past her shoulders and clung to her hips, accentuated at the waist by a sunburst diamanté pin. She took the plum silk wrap from her shoulders in one fluid motion and tossed it to Jane, who fumbled for it. “You may tell Edward that Nina is here.” As if there was only one Nina in the world.

“Oh, I’m not the—,” said Jane, but Nina looked her up and down in a way that said she couldn’t possibly be interested in what Jane was or wasn’t.

Her attitude got under Jane’s skin. “Is he expecting you?”

“Oh yes,” Nina said, with a significant smile. “He’s expecting me.”

“And yet I regret to inform you,” Jane said coolly, “that he’s not here.” Score one for the governess.

Nina’s eyebrows raised, but her retort was forestalled by a movement behind the second floor railing. She elegantly inclined her head to study the small figure above.

Jane knew her words would have no effect when confronted with one of the “pretty ladies,” but still she said to the small figure: “Go finish your nap, Dorie. I’ll be right there.”

Dorie didn’t obey. Her legs pushed through the banister railings and her head leaned against the rail as she stared down at them. Her curls were limp and matted; her iron-gloved hands hung loosely at her side in a now-familiar gesture of tired defeat. Even her eyes seemed dull.

“That child needs castor oil,” said Nina. “Or a pony.”

Temper rose and with it sarcasm. “I’ll make a note on her charts,” Jane said. “Mr. Rochart will be back the day after next. Would you like to leave him your card?”

Nina’s eyebrows met along her low forehead. “I would,” she said. “With a note. You wouldn’t have an ink pen, would you?” Something about her tone implied that Jane would be unlikely to have anything related to literacy.

“In here,” said Jane. She drew aside the freshly steamed garnet curtains and ushered Nina into the small red room.

Nina’s gaze immediately snapped to the rows of masks and she studied them, touching jutting chins and hooked noses. “The Varee chirurgiens can’t compare to him,” she said in a low voice.

Jane was apparently dismissed, though she wondered if she should stay planted and wait to take Nina’s message—as well as ensure that Nina did not go wandering through the house in order to find out if Jane’s information was true. Of course, if she stayed for the message she’d have to make sure that Mr. Rochart got the message, and she did not wish to seem that she’d been seeking him out in his studio.

Nina’s stiff posture, white-gloved fingers frozen on one misshapen mask, seemed to imply that she couldn’t possibly do anything as personal as write a note without the privacy of Jane being gone. So Jane turned, but as she did, her eye fell on a new mask hanging by the door. Her gaze caught and held, and she could not look away from the glistening skin, the bags and folds that caricatured a human.

But not just any human.

It was obscenely taken to extremes, true. But surely Jane recognized the model for those pouched eyes, that prizefighter nose, though she’d only seen them the once?

It was the leering face of the first Miss Ingel.