Ironskin (8 page)

A knock on the door was followed by a maid backing in with a tea tray.

Helen jumped up. “It’s not time for my dress,” she said. “First there’s morning tea, and then there’s you to get dressed and brushed and curled, because like it or not, I intend for you to be stunning. Two sisters, each more ravishing than the next! Men dropping dead at their feet!” She staggered dramatically to Jane, sank to her knees, and laid her head in Jane’s lap. “Now come eat something.”

The tea was delectable—little cream-filled cakes, slices of crisp hothouse cucumbers, chocolates and sugared almonds piled in silver bowls. Helen replenished Jane’s plate faster than Jane could empty it. She cradled a warm cup of black tea and tried not to think of Mr. Rochart’s past affairs. Of course men had them. Eyeing her sister’s frothy nightclothes—of course
people
had them.

Helen caught Jane’s eye. “Are you still thinking about me living here? I was perfectly well chaperoned, I promise you. Everyone knows I have no family. Where was I supposed to live?”

“By yourself, in our flat,” said Jane. “I would’ve sent you money.” Most governesses lived with their families, of course. But Jane’s school had refused to let an ironskin board there with the pupils. Helen’s family had agreed to let her share a flat with her sister so Jane wouldn’t have to live alone. But they had insisted it be a
nearby
flat, and in that part of town it had taken both girls’ scanty salaries to barely cover the rent. Though Jane could be cross, she suspected that deep down Helen was grateful not to have to live with her charges. Helen was never the mothering type.

“In our
empty
flat I wouldn’t be chaperoned,” said Helen. “Positively much more scandalous, I assure you. Not to mention dull as dirt. No Jane to fuss over me and keep me from spending all my earnings on shoe buckles and fizzy wine. Why does it bother you?”

“It doesn’t,” said Jane. If she probed deeply, it was probably because she felt guilty at leaving Helen to make her own decisions, manage her own life. Which was ridiculous. She’d only left Helen because Helen was leaving her. Well, that and the no-job thing. She’d been fired from the Norwood School over winter holidays, and hadn’t that just made them pleasant. “Forget I said anything.”

Helen carefully took apart a cream cake and licked the insides out. “Can you remember when we used to have this sort of thing at home?”

“Just,” said Jane. “Never every day though.” Father had died in the Indis of brain fever when Jane was eleven. Though the estate went to Charlie, there had been no family money left, except what Father had earned by his wits. After the dust and the debts had been settled, they were left with Mother’s tiny annuity. Still, even those times had had joy in them. Jane had seen the terrible conditions at the Norwood School, and that had just been as a teacher. If both her parents had died when Jane was eleven, she and Helen might have ended up as charity pupils at a school just like that, cold and hungry and at the mercy of typhus or polio. She could scarcely imagine how that Jane would have turned out—equally scarred, perhaps, equally angry.

But when Jane was thirteen, the war started, and the poor-but-happy time grew fainter, thinner as the terror dragged on and on. Until one day on a battlefield her brother was gone and it was all over, all of it.

After the war, after
no Charlie,
the estate went to the cousins, and Jane could not even keep Mother in her own home while she wasted away. All she could manage was huddling in Niklas’s foundry, lost and confused and trying to recover from a wound that would never heal.

But down that road lay guilt and rage. Jane blinked back the orange fire that warmed her mask, doused it with thoughts of lakes and streams and pure cooling rain. She refused to be angry today.

“No, not cream cakes every day,” Helen was saying, “unless Father sailed home with a windfall. But better than never. Better than grubbing in the gardens, and depending on neighbors’ charity, better than watching Mother take in tatwork and ruin her eyes by hoarded candlelight. Tatwork! Do you hear how old-fashioned that sounds? No one wears lace now. Mother wouldn’t know what to make of it, if she were here.” Her voice faltered on the final word.

Jane touched Helen’s arm. “I know you miss her.”

“And I’m sure you missed her in the city, after you left us,” said Helen, brightly, sharply, and Jane’s hand fell away. “But we’re not digging up unpleasant pasts today. Not for my wedding.” She dropped the decreamed cake sections to her saucer and smiled at Jane as if willing things to be all right. “Go on, eat, before I clean off this entire tray.” Helen’s fingers hovered over another slice. “But everyone says Silver Birch is enormous, one of those grand old fey-built estates. They probably have cream cakes out the ears. I suppose if he doesn’t chop you into bits, you can sneak me into some brilliant party there and we’ll make off with a bottle of sherry and an entire cake and go looking for all those slaughtered ex-wives.”

“I don’t think he has parties,” said Jane. “They live simply.” In truth she suspected that money was tight, but she didn’t like the idea of gossiping about her employer. To assuage Helen she picked up a small triangle of rose-scented cake and tried to turn the subject away from Helen’s gruesome imaginings. “Won’t there be lots of food today? Were there problems with rations?”

“Bosh,” said Helen, separating another cake slice. “The Great War is
over,
Jane, no matter what your country friends think. Rations simply don’t apply to someone like Alistair. Why do you think I picked him? Not just for his charm. People with money can
save
you, Jane—if they want to. But you take the bad with the good—you see how practical I have become, on my own—and today that means excess. He has the staff making mountains of cakes, chilling waterfalls of champagne. And really, it will be glorious, won’t it? But I can’t do this while people are watching.” She demonstrated what she couldn’t do by sucking pink cream filling from the sponge. “Anyway, that’s ages away. I still have an entire ceremony to get through without fainting, and so do you. Did you bring something nice to wear?”

“My best,” said Jane, referring to the navy frock with short sleeves. “You’ve seen it.”

Helen made a face. “You’ll wear something of mine.” She raised a cream-smeared finger, forestalling Jane’s protests. “You will. We’re the same size in everything but shoes. If you had a blond wig then from behind we’d look the same. Not even Alistair could tell us apart, I’m sure of it. You could take my place today, and wouldn’t that be a laugh? I wonder what he’d say when he found out.”

Jane’s protest subsided under this flight of fancy. Even knowing Helen’s sartorial tastes, the dress was a small battle, and the next point was a bigger one. “All right,” she said. “As long as I can wear my veil.”

*   *   *

The wedding was beautiful, the reception long. There were plenty of the little cream-filled cakes, but Jane didn’t see Helen eat anything at all. She moved through the party in her slim white frock like a ghost, her honey-hued hair in coiled curls contained by the pearl combs. “Fey beauty,” croaked an old auntie next to Jane, and then she was rewarded by hostile stares from the ladies around her. That was a saying from long ago. Not today.

Jane herself felt quite odd and otherworldly. Helen had insisted on fixing her veil so it was short and gauzy, not the long swathes of fabric Jane normally used. If Jane had had her normal veil she would have adjusted the layers to cover the front of her borrowed dress. Helen’s dressmakers had been busy providing her with a whole new wardrobe, and this was one of those dresses.

“But I can’t stand it,” Helen had said. “I don’t care how chic the color is, it washes me out. I wore it to Mrs. Wilmot’s tea party last week and her daughter Annabella just bumped right into me, in front of everyone. And then drawled, ‘Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t see you; you blended into the wallpaper.’ When their wallpaper is clearly pewter and not dark silver. Of course she’s just jealous because she wanted Alistair, not that that makes it any easier. Alistair assured me I was more beautiful than anyone except the Prime Minister’s wife. But I’m never wearing this again.”

The dress was a silvery grey silk, shot through with silver and jet threads that shimmered in the light. It very nearly matched her iron mask, though Jane could not decide if this was a good thing or not. The dress was in the very newest style—slinky and close-fitting, gathered at one hip and falling in a swish to the tops of Jane’s T-strap shoes. The décolletage was low—not as indecent as some of Helen’s dresses, but quite low enough for Jane. Helen had had to lend her a tight and low-cut slip that would work underneath.

The dress might have not worked well with Helen’s coloring, but it worked splendidly with Jane’s. Helen curled Jane’s dark brown hair with the tongs, then made her leave it down around her shoulders, tucking only the white fey-blighted lock up into the combs and veil. The dark silver transformed her pale, peaked look into something luminous, into a creature who was marble-skinned and elegant. It was the most beautiful dress Jane had ever worn, and she was very nearly in love with it, even if she felt an utter fraud.

As she came downstairs and found a seat outside under the erected tents, she noticed people looking at her. Relatives, servants—people who had seen her around the house all week suddenly stared at her as if for the first time. There was a brief moment where men looked at her as if she were a
girl
.

And then one by one they looked closer at her veiled face and remembered, or saw, the ironskin beneath. They discerned who she was, and they dismissed her.

But not all of them figured it out immediately. And not all of the men stopped looking at the silver lines of her dress.

Jane felt quite light-headed as she watched the wedding, struck by the idea that this might be how it was supposed to be. How even now she might wake up from her terrible dreams of the war and be happily sitting here whole and unveiled, watching her younger sister marry. Mother would be next to her, Charlie on the other side, the tall strong man she had never gotten to meet. Even in her imagination, the clock would not turn back far enough to put her father on the bench with them.

But it would turn back to that dreadful morning in the last month of the war. It would turn back to that dawn, and somehow she and Charlie were the lucky ones who made it home, who made it out of that war alive, until now they sit here on the bench as the minister recites Helen’s vows, and Charlie nudges her and whisper-recites the tale of Helen writing a love letter to their old clergyman in her ear, and they try not to giggle. For now Helen is saying the final words, and then it is all over, and Alistair is kissing the bride, and Mother clutches her hand, because she has promised Helen she will not cry.

They are done, they are smiling. And Jane turns to watch Alistair and Helen go solemnly down the aisle, and she should be looking over Charlie’s shoulder, her chin should be touching his arm.

But there was no Charlie, and her light-headedness popped, and then she was standing on her feet clapping with all the other men and women she didn’t know, who didn’t know her, who looked at her and looked away, again and again and again.

Jane sat down with a rush as the crowd swarmed after Helen and Alistair, cheering their names and congratulating them for this wonderful, glorious day.

*   *   *

There was dancing, but Jane deliberately found another room to sit in, where it wouldn’t look like she was wanting to dance and not able to find a partner. She ended up sitting next to the old woman who had called Helen fey earlier, and two other old women who loosened their shoes and watched the girls on display flit back and forth from the crammed ballroom to the room where the cakes and tidbits were laid out. A smaller dance with some of the youngsters was going on in this room, and an old man with a fiddle played for the kids and competed with the string quartet’s sound emanating from the larger dance floor.

The sea of slinky gowns sliding back and forth between the rooms was arresting. Décolletage was low, T-strapped heels were high. Desperation was on more than one dewy cheek, plainly mixed with the waxy lipstick, the false eyelashes, the tight waves of curls. Single men were few—a lost generation.

But one beauty slinking past in an apricot gown needed no such ornamentation.

“Ah, the Prime Minister’s wife,” said one of the shoe-loosened women.

“The lecheress,” said the other, fluttering her handkerchief, and they cackled.

The woman’s face, elegant and porcelain-smooth, gave no sign that she had heard.

“She’s beautiful,” whispered Jane under her breath. Her face was peaches and cream, symmetrical, classic. Her apricot frock with its beaded net overlay clung softly to her lines, an elegant column. So this was the woman Mr. Rochart might have loved. An idle summer fling? Or passion, loved and lost, a tragedy bound by the rules of society?

“Fey beauty,” croaked the woman who had said it before. “It’s not smart to be that beautiful.” The other old women were in dresses thirty years out of date: full dark skirts and corsets, kidskin boots, and rows of tight buttons everywhere. But this one was modern. She wore a silk dress in sea-foam green with net flowers at the shoulder and waist. It draped oddly on her hunched and sagging form, and the leather heels slipped from her thin feet. She had a tiny pair of jeweled pince-nez that she studied the Prime Minister’s wife through. “Not smart at all.”

“Why not?” said Jane.

The women bent in, free of the restrictions the younger generations placed on their words. “They used to say the fey were drawn to the exceptionally beautiful,” said Pince-Nez.

“Or exceptionally talented,” said Shoes.

“May you be blessed with ordinary children,” contributed Handkerchief. “May you be born plain.”

“Why? What did they do with extraordinary children?” said Jane. She knew one of those, though surely the women meant a different kind of extraordinary.

“Steal them. Take them back to the forest,” said Pince-Nez.