Ironskin (20 page)

Dorie neared the girls, who didn’t notice her immediately. Jane clutched the folds of the golden dress—Dorie wouldn’t act out, would she? Wouldn’t show off, to get noticed?

But then the elder Miss Davenport turned and saw the little girl, and the wheels plainly moved in her head. “Ah, what a pet!” she cried, and she began fussing over Dorie.

“What do you have there?” said one of the gentlemen, and the piano broke off as the younger Miss Davenport turned, pouting, to see.

“What’s your name, sweet child?” cooed the older Miss Davenport.

“Dorie,” said Dorie, and curtseyed, which sent the older girl into raptures.

Jane saw the amused look on the gentleman’s face—the cooing over Dorie was likely to be of little interest except to the father, and where was he?

“Just look at these golden curls! Nearly as bright as mine.”

Come to think of that, where were the other guests? Where was Nina, and hadn’t she seen a redhead earlier, from above?

A gentle laugh by the door, and Jane turned to see her question answered. Mr. Rochart. And the redhead … of course.

That’s where he had been.

Blanche Ingel slipped her arm under Mr. Rochart’s, laughing. “I won’t melt, will I?” she said, and she turned her perfectly chiseled face up to his. Mr. Rochart leaned closer, and Jane couldn’t catch what he said, but she saw his lips move with his reply. The tall dark man swept the redhead with the unearthly beauty into the drawing room; the younger Miss Davenport struck up a waltz, and they danced.

The well-dusted curtains sagged overhead, creased and worn as if they’d not been touched for two centuries. The boarded windows were made gayer for the evening, tacked over with cloth cut from remnants of upstairs curtains. Only one of the paned windows was still whole, and it showcased the dusky moor.

Jane held her side as if it had a stitch. Her ribs were too broad for her dress, suddenly, and they labored against the golden panels. What was it to her if he danced with his clients? That was what he was supposed to do—what he had
told
her he would do. It wasn’t his fault that she couldn’t understand how he could say he hated parties, hated smiling, hated the dance—and now could whisk away the redhead in the slinky green silk with an air of absolute charm, smile at her as if she were the only person in the room, whirl her around as if he loved every minute of this gathering.

He wasn’t supposed to dance with Jane, not in this life or any other. Even the imaginary whole-faced Jane was nothing compared to this woman’s sculpted perfection (the perfection
he
had created, oh, why wouldn’t he adore his living artwork), and it wasn’t just her. More women were in the room now, including Nina, and the Misses Davenport’s cousin, who was nearly as striking as Blanche. She was shorter, and her figure not nearly so fine, but her face was a tiny cornered thing of heartbreaking beauty, and the few men flocked around her, to the dismay of both Misses Davenport. Had the cousin, then, already been under his knife?

It mattered little if she had or not—the women’s beauty was still from money, whether bred or bought. These were the people of this world, and she was a fool to believe that Mr. Rochart’s seemingly unguarded moments with her could mean anything more than that she happened to be standing nearby when he spoke. A man who could swear that he despised parties and then charm a roomful of women—no, she didn’t understand him, she couldn’t understand him, and the familiar claws of cold humiliation tore her up inside.

The waltz rang to a bright finish, and Mr. Rochart twirled Blanche into his arms and against the piano. They stopped, breathing with the effort of the dance, and Mr. Rochart took a long time to draw away from his lovely partner in green, to let her escape his arms. Jane’s shoulder blades prickled under her filmy dress, recalling how that touch felt.

The elder Miss Davenport also watched this interaction carefully, her eyes flicking from Mr. Rochart and Blanche to her younger sister and the moon-eyed boy gazing at her. Weighing options, but good luck to her, thought Jane. As if anyone in the room could surpass Blanche Ingel.

“Da!” said Dorie, and she ran to hug his knees.

Edward bent to caress the blond head. “Are you behaving yourself, my little terror?”

“Oh, you ogre!” butted in the elder Miss Davenport. “This sweet thing is an angel, a bunnykin, a darling moppet. I just adore her, and she adores me already, don’t you, precious? Look at her sweet pink frock. Can you give us a curtsey, pet?”

Jane’s hand crept down to the radiator to rap on iron as Dorie smiled and curtseyed prettily at the crowd. “Oh, what a doll!” she heard Miss Davenport exclaim, and then the other girls pressed in until Jane couldn’t see Dorie at all. She stood, unwilling to either leave her dark corner or risk Dorie getting out of her sight.

Too much attention might be a balm, might make Dorie sufficiently happy that she would not be tempted to destroy her father’s reputation in a single flash of blue light. On the other hand, Jane had seen more than once what excessive adoration could do to a child. She did not know Dorie’s measure in this situation, and she took a step in, nerving herself to fight her way into that flock.

But luckily Mrs. Davenport’s broad figure moved, and Dorie came back into view. She was smiling and laughing with the pretty ladies, twirling to show her skirts. Dorie did not pick up her skirts as another girl might do, or coyly twirl one of her golden curls, but for all that she did not look strange.

Jane sank to her chair, heartbeat slowing. As long as no one asked Dorie to demonstrate perfect penmanship, perhaps they would make it through the night.

A woman in a deep turquoise silk with black net overlay claimed the next chair over. Nina. “Famished!” she said. “Dieting really takes it out of one. Enough to make you want the old fashions like you’ve got on.” She gestured at the loose panels of Jane’s dress. “You could eat a cow in that frock and no one would know.”

“Don’t you have other girls to bother?” said Jane.

Nina laughed and settled into her chair. “But I find you the most entertaining. There’s no use sharpening my wit on those feather bolsters. Look at them, all hovering around poor Edward.”

Jane hated the possessive way that Nina spoke of him. “They don’t have a chance against Miss Ingel,” Jane said. “Look at the way she moves.”

“Like a confection of marzipan and rainbows,” Nina said dryly. “She’d better enjoy the attention now, because next week this party will be mine, all mine.” Jane raised her eyebrows, but Nina just laughed and dismissed her comment with a wave. Went back to assessing the chances of the women. “Well, old Ingy’s a duckling imprinting on her ‘savior’—you did see her
before,
yes? Men love ducklings, no matter what they might say. Then there’s the bolster Davenports—two can be twice as nice—but their mother will whisk them away soon enough when she realizes he’s flat broke. Makes you wonder where the money goes, doesn’t it?”

“Not particularly,” said Jane.

Her curt answer seemed to amuse Nina, who leaned forward. “Not even the Varee
chirurgiens
charge what he does, because they can’t compare to him and they know it. And now with this jump in skill he’s made, I’ve told him it’s imperative he double his prices—after me, of course.” She flapped a hand at the drawing room. “They’ll all pay it, those bolsters. So where does it all go?” She tipped back her champagne. “I think he’s got a secret child somewhere he’s paying off.”

“The Prime Minister’s wife,” Jane said without thinking.

“So you do have ears,” said Nina. “I like a girl who listens at dumbwaiters. Not her, though. She’s completely obsessed with their five drippy children and that doughy husband of hers. I think she just spent extra time with Edward trying to get those children done. At their age.” Her eyebrows were expressive. “No, I think there’s someone from the past. He grew up abroad, you know. Never came to Silver Birch until almost the end of the war.” She clacked polished nails against jet beads. “There’s something leftover from his past he’s taking care of.”

Jane’s memory flicked back to the old man with the cane at the carriage house that one day, the old man who was not Martha’s father.

Dorie ran across the drawing room floor, giggling as the elder Miss Davenport pretended to try and catch her. Miss Davenport might have had more success if she hadn’t interrupted the chase to arrange her body in artful poses.

“Good to see the child acting like a child,” said Nina. “That’ll go a long way to making the bolsters feel secure.”

“Secure?”

“Hard to entrust yourself and all your money to a man who
everyone knows
has a damaged child locked in an attic.” Nina rose from her seat. “But you might not be all bad for her,” she conceded.

Reflexively, Jane rose with her, watching Dorie giggle and slide.

“No, I never saw such a change in a child,” said Nina. She smoothed her turquoise silk around her hips, readying to sweep back into the fray. “Very odd. It’s as though she were released from chains.”

Chains, thought Jane.
Iron chains,
and the image hit her like a blow.

She and Dorie, encased in iron, bound by it, enclosed by it. A sarcophagus, an iron maiden—the ironskin not armor but an airtight coffin.

She sat down hard on the chair, her legs suddenly wobbly and useless.

The iron was supposed to keep the fey curse from hurting others. From leaking out.

But what did it do to keep it in? What was it doing to Dorie?

And what had it already done to Jane?

Her fingers trembled on the folds of her dress. So she took the mask off for sleep. That was nothing compared to sixteen hours a day of steeping in the poison, year after year. She had stopped those she met from feeling transitory rage—and in return she had taken it all, until her soul was eaten away with self-loathing.

She watched the tiny blond girl smile up at the pretty ladies, her curls light and bouncing, and Jane felt sick. It had taken Nina to point out what Jane should’ve known immediately. It wasn’t that Dorie was being stubborn and resistant, though she was. It was the iron making her ill by forcing her to bottle up her true self.

Jane rose, unsteady on her feet, fingers clutching her golden skirts to hold onto something, anything. Across the room she saw Edward’s eyes go to her, saw him look worried at her distress, but she couldn’t, she just couldn’t, be there one more minute. She lurched from the drawing room, climbed the side stairs with nerveless feet, flung herself into the safety of her room.

The moonlight laid a square of white on the wooden floor and she stood on its edge till the light lapped her toes, glittered the hem of her dress. Breathing, breathing.

If she were right about this, then everything she had thought was wrong. The good she had attempted was bad, and not just for her.

And now it wasn’t just that she would have to start working to undo years of damage.

She would have to reveal herself to the world.

Oh, say she was wrong, say it! She must be overreacting, must be mistaken. Anything so the answer was not inevitably: The mask comes off.

Jane spun to face the mirror. It was a good mirror, clear, unwavy. Unrepentant. Her iron mask looked back at her, her companion and protector, hiding the half-destruction. Skin on one side, iron on the other. Skin and iron, and her gauzy golden dress moonlit around her like fey light.

An explosion.

Through the mirror she looked until she saw, not Jane, but her past, the battlefield, plain as daylight and as immediate.

There was no sheltering past, no curtain of sleep to filter the nightmare, no, there it was, freed from its nightly confines to attack her in the day. There was her past, coming for her.

“Jane!” Mother shouts, but she does not turn. She won’t embarrass Charlie by taking his hand or squeezing his shoulder, but she nods at him, and he nods back. There are no soldiers, no King’s Men to come to their aid. They are all elsewhere, or dead. There is just them, clumped together on the white-grey moor, iron raised against an enemy.

Grim and white-faced they march across the moor.

That dawn Jane thought she saw no signal, no sign that the day was beginning. But she did, or perhaps she only sees it now, now in this living memory, this waking dream. An orange-blue flash like a comforting candle flame.

Then Sam—the baker’s apprentice, the lighthearted boy she danced with once—explodes next to Charlie.

A cry goes up. “There! The fey! The fey!”

Bombs are costly for the fey, she knows. But fey have no body in their natural state, no way to touch humans. Their strategy is to kill the strongest humans and take over their bodies. Then in their borrowed human forms, they can fight. It is why they have been harrying the village before the battle. We knew it, Jane thinks, and yet our hearts lurch when our dead stagger out of the forest, swinging sharpened wooden picks at us.

“Stab them with the iron,” she shouts to her little brother. “It’s the only way to drive the fey out.”

Charlie knows. And they advance, iron staves at the ready. It is gruesome work, and not all the villagers are up to the task. A man runs, retching. Jane’s nerves are strung so tight that every fey she studies seems to be at the end of a long tunnel of fog. Or perhaps that is the actual fog, insistent and cruel, hiding their attackers until they are too near. A farmer she knows by sight runs at her with a sharpened wooden pole and she thinks it is all up. But Charlie trips him, and his clumsy dead feet fall over her. Jane rolls and stabs the dead farmer with the iron. Tentatively, then harder, reminding herself that war is not a time for politeness, reminding herself that this friendly farmer is now a mask worn by the fey.

As the iron goes in, the fey dies. A fey in a human body is vulnerable; the state in which they have bodies to kill is the state in which they can be killed. Blue light ripples around the stave and turns stark white, crackles, keens—is gone. For good. The farmer slumps into the dirt.

“Good work,” Jane says to Charlie, who is ten feet off holding his iron bar. He smiles, that happy-boy smile she knows so well, and then a ball of orange-blue light and rock and glass falls behind him at his feet.