Ironskin (2 page)

“Leave it,” he said. “You won’t be veiled here.” He gestured for her to precede him out of the room. His hand dropped as if it were going to guide the small of her back, but then it did not. It would be too forward of him, but perversely, she was hurt.

In five years she could list on one hand the people who had intentionally touched her.

Jane emerged into the round blue-lit foyer, half-thinking he was going to ask her to leave and not return. Despite her desperation—perhaps it would be for the best. To be stranded here in this house that reeked of fey, with this man who ripped down her barriers, who loomed over her with unreadable eyes … perhaps it would be easier if he dismissed her now.

But he pointed her up the wide stairs. “Come meet Dorie,” he said.

The wide stairs led, logically enough, to the second floor, though Jane knew that “logical” was not a given with fey architecture. Not human logic, anyway. She followed his lead, unpinning her hat with its veil from her carefully crimped hair. Her straight dark hair did not hold crimps well, and there was little enough of it to see between the leather straps for the mask and the hat—still, Jane had tried to look her best today.

At the top of the landing was a suite of playroom and bedroom, and there was a small girl sitting on the playroom floor, dancing her doll in a ray of sunshine.

Jane was so distracted by the sudden appearance of sunshine in the grey house, on the grey moor, that it took her several blinks to notice something that made her stomach lurch.

Dorie was not touching the doll.

Jane willed her feet to stay where they were, though every inch of her screamed to run.

How could this little girl be doing something only the fey could do? Was this child no human, but a fey in disguise, ready to attack at any second? Panic shrieked inside her, she clutched her hat as if to tear it to shreds—but again she willed herself: Stay.

Mr. Rochart reached down and confiscated the doll. “In this house we use our hands,” he said. The doll’s porcelain hands wrestled with his grip; the porcelain legs kicked his chest. “Dorie!” he said, and the doll flopped over his arm, unmoving.

“Mother,” said Dorie.

He leaned to Jane’s ear. “Calling it Mother is a fancy I can’t shake from her,” he said.

“They do look alike.” Jane would not back away from this girl, though the sharp sense of something fey made her queasy, made her wounded cheek blaze. She had expected a girl with a simple curse, damaged like herself, like the others she had known at the foundry—a girl with red streaks on her arm who leaked despair, a boy with a scarred back who filled everyone who came near with a lust for violence. That child she could’ve helped, in the same way that the foundry had helped her: through acceptance and ironskin.

She did not understand this girl.

“She is not … like me,” Jane said. “She is not cursed?”

“She’s cursed, sure enough,” said Mr. Rochart. “But she is not like you. I had heard that there were people like you, hit by fey shrapnel in the Great War, scarred with a curse that everyone around them feels. But she has no scar. And her curse is not like yours. Merely…,” and he gestured at the doll that had been dancing in the air.

Jane was all at sea. It was all wrong that this tiny mite should wave her hands and have power dance behind them, should be able to make Jane recall the talents of the frightening, relentless fey.

Not to mention the creepiness of calling this doll with its waving porcelain hands “Mother.” True, the strange Mother doll did look like Dorie. They had similarly perfect features: button noses, rosebud mouths, rouged cheeks. The doll had painted crimped yellow hair—Dorie had blond ringlets.

But at least there was life behind Dorie’s blue eyes. And not behind the doll’s glass ones. Both things were a blessing.

“I see,” Jane said. She stood her ground and kept her trembling fingers in her coat pockets.

Dorie studied Jane. “Your face is funny,” she announced, displaying tiny white teeth.

“I have to wear iron on my cheek to keep other people from getting infected,” said Jane, though she knew this explanation would go over the girl’s head. She was sure she had been told that Dorie was five, but even minus the curse, Dorie was unlike any five-year-old she’d met.

Already bored, Dorie turned away. She clacked her tongue rhythmically, sketched the air in time to it. Dots and swirls of blue light flickered behind her fingers.

The last time Jane saw that blue light was on a battlefield with her brother. She breathed, she swayed—she refused to run.

Mr. Rochart’s hand came up as if he would steady her, but then he stepped back, his hands dropping. Twice was not etiquette, twice meant he did not want to touch her, and she was ice-cold inside. “We have tried a dozen governesses over the last year,” he said. “None lasted a week. They all claimed it was not us—”

But Jane knew these words and they softened something inside of her. “It was them,” she finished. “They were summoned home unexpectedly. Something urgent came up—a sickly mother, a dying aunt.”

“You wouldn’t believe the number of dying aunts in this country,” he said. And even—he smiled, and Jane saw laughter light behind his shadowed eyes. Then they closed off again, watching the blue lights flicker.

Jane took a breath. Took the smooth-faced doll from his arms and handed it to Dorie. The floating lights vanished as Dorie grabbed the doll and held it close. “Pretty Mother,” she said, burrowing her face into its cloth body.

“She likes pretty things,” Mr. Rochart said. “Her mother was the same way.” Silently he crossed to the window, looking out into the black-branched forest that crept up the grounds of Silver Birch Hall as if it would swallow the house. In the sunlight she saw that his slacks, though fine once, were worn along the crease and at his knees.

“She is gone, then?” Jane said softly. Unbidden she neared him, him and that wide window onto the choking forest. To live here would mean to live in its dark and tangled grip.

Mr. Rochart nodded. “The last month of the war.” The words landed like carefully placed stones, a heavy message grown no lighter with repetition. “She was killed and taken over by a fey. She was pregnant with Dorie.”

Jane sucked air across her teeth. The mother killed, the daughter still unborn—no wonder this child was different from any she’d ever seen. Her heart went out to the two of them.

Mr. Rochart turned to Jane, looking down, down. In the filtered light through the window she could finally see his eyes. They were amber, clear and ancient, a whole history trapped inside of them just as real amber trapped insects. He reached to take her hand; she knew he wouldn’t—but then he did. “Will you help us?”

She had not been touched like that, not simply like that, since the first year of the war. Unbidden, she recalled the last boy to touch her: a baker’s apprentice she’d loved, with blond hair and a smile of gentle mischief. She was fourteen, and he’d invited her to her first dance, taken her waist, whisked her around the piano and out into the garden, where her stockings had splattered with spring mud. Someone’s mother had stumbled on them laughing together and sternly ordered them back inside.…

A touch and an unwanted memory should not influence her decision, but in truth her decision was already made. It was made from the moment she saw Dorie, from the moment she saw the clipping, perhaps even from the moment almost exactly five years ago when she knelt by her brother’s body on the battlefield, blood dripping from her chin. If this man would take her on, she would bend all her will to the task. She would help this girl. She would help them.

“I will stay,” she said. “I will start now. This morning.”

Relief flooded his eyes—almost too much. He pressed her hand and was gone from the room before Jane could decide what it meant.

Chapter 2

FEY LIGHT

The enormous estate had all of three servants: the butler Poule (who was also in charge of the grounds and the pre-war motorcar), the cook, and one maid. When Jane, aghast, said: “One?” the maid merely nodded.

“How can you clean this whole house by yourself?” said Jane.

“Can’t.”

“Just the laundry alone—”

“Poule built scrub tank. Nice bits hired out.”

The young maid’s name was Martha, and perhaps she was treasured more for her monosyllabic qualities than her desire for cleanliness. She was tall for a girl, rangy, with ginger hair closely braided to her scalp in defiance of any current fashion. Her dark dress and apron had clearly seen better days, though they were clean and neatly patched. She showed Jane an abbreviated tour of the house. All the open rooms were in the south wing, the undamaged wing. The sapphire curtains opened to a hallway that branched off to drawing room, dining room, sitting rooms. The kitchens were beneath them in the cellar. Martha did not take her through the curtains that led to the north wing, but she explained in words of one syllable that forest green eventually led to Mr. Rochart’s studio, and mahogany only to Poule’s quarters and damage.

Jane’s rooms were on the back of the second floor, down the hall and around the corner from Dorie’s room. It was a family room that had been given over to the governess, so it was bigger than Jane had expected, and hung with a threadbare tapestry depicting a maiden taming a dragon. (A fanciful design, Jane thought critically, as the maiden was blonde, pink, and rather buoyant, but dragons had only existed—if ever—in the Faraway East.) A nearby spiral staircase appeared to go all the way up and down the house, but Jane reminded herself to check that to know for sure.

During the tour, Jane pestered Martha with a flurry of questions about the house and its schedules, but the only time the maid offered more than a grunted yes or no was when Jane asked about Dorie.

“All yours now. We told him no more. Had to get
you
to keep
us
.”

“Is she so naughty?” said Jane.

“Not a bad child. It’s what she does when she’s good,” said Martha, and shuddered.

“Can you feel when she’s doing, um … not-quite-human things?”

Martha nodded. “I’m not one to start at naught. Nor Cook. That’s why we’re here when the rest fled. Though some days the blue lights and air dolls make your hair rise.” She gestured at the iron covering Jane’s face. “Could be you’ll fare well. Since you’re a cripple too.”

Jane stiffened at the one word Martha had given two syllables to say, and perhaps the laconic, unimaginative maid saw that, because she fell silent again. More questions brought no more answers, and the only other piece of information Jane could extract was that Dorie’s supper—and thus Jane’s, for today—was at six.

When the maid was gone, Jane unpacked her small pasteboard suitcase. It was not everything she owned, but near enough. Her trunk with her winter woolens and a few books and pictures was still at the boarding house in the rooms she’d shared with her sister—though by the time she returned to the city to retrieve it, it would probably be at Helen’s new home.

As short a time as the other governesses were there, they had left traces of their passing, perhaps due to their hurried departures. A calendar from last year hung on the wall, stopped at November. A scrap of orange wool, a pen nib, a cinema stub firmly wedged between the mirror and frame—that one must be an abandoned souvenir; the films had stopped running in the first year of the war. Hairpins everywhere.

Yet someone had put a snowdrop, surely the first of them, in a tiny cream pitcher on her dresser. Jane looked at its curved white petals as she thought: Well. Someone expected me to stay.

She hung up her best dress and changed into a shapeless dropped-waist dress of dark wool, a pre-war hand-me-down a decade out of date and never in fashion to begin with. Changed her good stockings for a woolen pair she’d knit that winter while listening to the Norwood School girls recite poetry they didn’t understand or care to. The ribbed stockings were far too thick to be fashionable, but they were warm, a necessity in this house where the fires seemed few and far between. She put her few things in the drawers, checked her hair. The crimping had completely fallen out, of course. The white lock of hair was loose, torn free by
him
. She grabbed one of her predecessors’ hairpins and shoved it ruthlessly in place within the dark brown hair, the pin digging into her scalp. She nudged the leather straps that held her mask higher on her head, where they would start the long process of slowly dropping again.

Jane was used to adjusting the alignment of the mask without really looking at herself. It was not her disfigured side that made her throat clutch and her anger rise; it was her good side. The reminder of how she should look. If she turned her profile to the mirror she could imagine her face whole again, as she hadn’t seen it since sixteen, when her life was normal and full of possibility. But that luxury was too costly. The times she gave into those imaginings, she wept, after, and was unsettled and resentful for days.

So Jane glanced just enough to see that every bit of the scarring was hidden by the cold iron. Rage, she had told Mr. Rochart. Rage was her curse, and it coiled on her cheek, suffused her soul. But at least the iron stopped it from leaking to other people. She had not known that she was cursed, at first. There were so few survivors, and each of them stranded at different understaffed city hospitals, far from their country homes. Besides, when everyone was angry, afraid, miserable—who knew that the effects were emanating from these scarred people who refused to heal? So she hadn’t known, until an ironskin came through the hospitals, searching for people like her, and sent her to the foundry.

But she knew how she looked. She’d known that since the moment it happened.

Jane turned from the mirror and set off to find Dorie.

*   *   *

Jane found Dorie sitting on the kitchen floor. Oddly, there seemed to be more sunlight down here than in some of the upstairs rooms. In the edges of the ceiling there were skylights that let light in somehow—perhaps with mirrors? Jane seemed to recall that as a feature of fey building. Regardless, the thin sunlight was an improvement over blue-tinged chandeliers and sconces.