Ironskin (11 page)

“Ah. Here,” he said. He picked up a small, greasy looking jar containing a brown-and-black substance.

“What is that?”

“Tar,” he said. “Tar with flecks of iron. I’ve tried it out and it works almost as well as the ironskin itself. It’s horrible stuff and gets on everything, but you might find you can use it to find her weakness. The fey point of entry.”

“Maybe I could,” agreed Jane, awed by the possibility. She turned the jar around in her hands. Even the outside was tacky to the touch, smeared with bits of iron-flecked tar Niklas hadn’t managed to scoop into the jar. “I remember you had a theory that the location of the curse might influence the type of curse—that similar curses cluster on similar parts of the body. I know you haven’t encountered one like hers … but do you have a suggestion of where to put the tar?”

Niklas closed his fingers around iron, his expression closed off. “Say again what she does,” he said.

He listened attentively as Jane told him everything she could remember. “You say she often waves her hands when she’s making things happen. Or looks in that direction, which sounds like her eyes or her mind. I’d try one of those three.”

Jane shuddered. “Tar in her eyes?”

Niklas shrugged. “If she is fey, maybe it’ll kill her off for you.”

“If the witch drowns, she wasn’t a witch,” Jane said wryly. She slipped the jar into the pocket of her dress. Took the few bills she’d brought inside and stuffed them into the iron cauldron Niklas used as a bank.

He watched her out of the corner of his eye, while saying gruffly, “I guess you have a job now and that’s only right.”

“And I didn’t when I came, and you helped me anyway,” she said. “You don’t know how much that meant to me.”

Niklas shrugged, picked up a hammer, started pounding on an iron bar that didn’t look like it needed pounding.

She knew that the gruffness, the dismissal, was only his manner. A side effect, perhaps, of the howling depression he’d once confessed to her was his curse. The outline of his shirt caught on the iron underneath, the tough cotton snagging on the metal ridges, the hang of the leather jacket deformed by the iron chest that squeezed him like a vise, as if a tighter cinching could drive out the poison. She remembered the shape of that rigid corset from when she’d tried to hug him goodbye. Old Ironsides, one of the boys had called him, trying to make an affectionate nickname for the man they worshiped.

But Niklas didn’t take to affectionate nicknames. And the name was never mentioned in his presence again.

The boy appeared in the doorway. “Hey miss, there’s a man says you’re gonna miss your train.” He shouted around Niklas’s banging, slipping his words in with the familiarity of practice. “He says if you don’t come quick there may not be a car when you get there, as some hoodlums looked int’rested in dismantlin’ it.” A grin showed what he thought of the driver’s worries.

Niklas did not stop pounding the iron bar with his hammer, though Jane turned again, said, “Thank you, Niklas. Thank you.”

There was maybe a half-nod in return.

“All right,” she said to the boy, pressing a coin into his hand. “You take care of him, right?” The boy nodded, his sharp chin bobbing, his knobbly fingers shutting tight around the coin.

Jane clutched the jar in her pocket. She hurried through the door of the workshop and out the gate, hurried into the impatient orbit of the worried driver, leaving the foundry of the ironskin behind.

*   *   *

Jane’s thoughts flew back and forth as the train clattered into the country station. First Helen and her new, utterly foreign society. The cruel rumors about Mr. Rochart and Dorie. Then—the paste might work, the paste might work. She could try it on Dorie the very next morning—starting with her hands.

As long as Dorie could touch iron without injury.

Iron was the only thing that stopped the fey. The rules had been hard to pin down—still were inconclusive—because the fey didn’t take well to capture, after all. Besides, the war had gotten so tied up with superstition, as soldiers draped themselves in lucky iron charms—it was hard to tell what did and didn’t work.

But one thing seemed pretty firm.

If a fey took over a dead body, that fey could be killed. An iron spike—a feyjabber—directly into an artery destroyed that fey forever.

Iron weakened fey, barred fey, wounded fey—it was why the iron mask on her cheek kept the fey curse from crossing the barrier and spilling out into the air, infecting others. If Dorie’s talent was similarly a foreign part of her, a fey parasite on a human host, so to speak—then it should work. But was Dorie more human … or more fey?

The train jerked to a stop and Jane disembarked, thinking of the exercises she would have Dorie try. With the tar in her bag, suddenly all the frustrations with Dorie seemed possible to overcome. New ideas, new methods, spilled through her mind, firing her with new energy. She was startled to see a tall shadow spill over her, to hear a voice near her ear.

“Ah, my little soldier is returned to fight by my side,” said Mr. Rochart. “Miss Eliot.”

“Sir,” she said, and she composed her suddenly trembling fingers by dint of shoving them in the wool coat’s patch pockets. Her heart seemed to leap at seeing him, but she reminded herself that that was merely her excitement over Dorie’s paste. The man was aggravating, with his hideous masks, his disappearing act, his Prime Ministers’ wives.

Even if his conversation was more intelligent and entertaining than anything she’d heard the whole week in the city.

He loomed over her, a tall figure in a coat just as worn as hers, she suddenly saw, powdered with more of that white dust that followed him in a fog. A button was loose—didn’t he have anyone to mend it? She was cross at herself for wanting to put it right. She was not allowed to be this relieved at returning home. Home? No. Returning to her job.

“You forget us for an entire week,” he said in a low, mocking voice. “I myself brave the moor and damn the last bluepack to fetch you at the station, and I merely rate a respectful ‘Sir?’ Oh, Jane, Jane.”

“In that you have the advantage of me,” she said demurely.

He laughed—a sharp bark at odds with his foreboding appearance. “So I do. Well, Jane, my given name is Edward and you must call me it from now on. I am tired of this ‘Rochart’ nonsense.” His black brows lifted, knit. “I believe you should have a trunk, little one.”

“Indeed I do,” said Jane. “But you mustn’t carry it yourself; you will throw your back out.”

He looked at her sharply, as if trying to decide if she had really called him old. Jane smiled politely, feeling that in some obscure way she was staying level with him; that two could play the game of aggravation, and that by being sticky she was staying more truly
Jane
. It was a brief thought, with little time to untangle it, for he was speaking again, moving, his eyes searching her face.

“As soon as we are in the black beast,” he said, gesturing to the motorcar, “you shall take off that veil. I dislike it when I cannot see your eyes. I am certain they are laughing at me now.”

The sparring was a stimulant to her train-deadened wits, and Jane’s spirit rose. The contrast between his sense of humor and Alistair’s could not have been sharper. He did carry her trunk, and he hefted it into the old car, ushered her in, and closed the door.

“There’s no top,” he said, though that much was obvious. “We are both ancient—there, I will say it so you do not have to.” The car was indeed so ancient Jane wondered it didn’t need cranking. It clearly had been old even before the end of trade almost a decade ago. “We’ll drive slowly so you don’t get mussed.”

“Not for my sake,” said Jane. There was an undercurrent of warmth to the spring air tonight; it caressed her fingers clinging to the metal ridge of the door, promised summer ahead. The car lurched forward and the wind blew her veil back, and she let it.

“What’s on your mind?” he said, and she felt him looking sideways at her.

A million things, but one the most pressing to tell him. “I have an idea for Dorie,” Jane said. “I don’t know if it will work, so I don’t want you to get your hopes up. But I need to ask you something before I try it.”

“Of course.”

“Can Dorie safely touch iron?” Jane thought the answer must be yes, or he would’ve warned her about it the moment she entered the house. She tapped on the rim of her iron mask anyway, for luck.

He nodded. “Certainly. She may have difficulties, but she is still human.”

“Good,” said Jane. “I’d like permission to try an experiment with iron and Dorie, then.”

“I will support anything you do that is trying to get her to be more human,” he said. “You’ve found that slow going, haven’t you?”

His kind words made her admit in a rush: “Truthfully, yes. How do you get that child to
mind
?” And then she reddened at how exasperated she sounded with his offspring.

“Very poorly,” he replied. He sighed. “I love her greatly, but I confess every fey-touched thing she does pains me, makes me remember—” He bit off that thought and with an effort raised his spirits again. “But though I am wretchedly busy, shut away in my studio, you mustn’t be afraid to come to me. Seek me out,
make
me listen. Anytime you have trouble with her.”

“I have trouble,” Jane said dryly. “But I have a feeling the iron might help.”

“You have my full support in anything you do to rid her of those fey traits,” he repeated. “It’s why you are here. You have my trust.” He was driving, so he did not look meaningfully at her when he said it, but all the same Jane felt her breath catch in her throat. It closed off any words she might have said about her experiment, or about Dorie’s behavior.

When no more information was forthcoming, he said: “Well, keep your secret for now, but report to me within the week.”

“I will,” said Jane.

“Did you enjoy your sister’s wedding? I let you off the leash for it, so I propose the answer should be yes. Though on second thought, I don’t wish you to have enjoyed it so much that you will leave us for another wedding in a week.”

“That is my only sister, sir.”

“Carefully avoiding a real answer. I suppose there were a good many fine ladies and gentlemen there?”

Before Jane could stop her tongue, it leaped forth with “Do you know the Prime Minister and his wife?”

“Your sister travels in fine circles,” said Mr. Rochart. “Yes, I do. She was a client of mine last summer.”

“A client,” said Jane. Surely he couldn’t mention her so casually unless “client” was the entire truth.

“She sat to have a mask painted,” he said in answer to her implicit question.

“It must have been a beautiful mask,” said Jane. She could not imagine that woman wanting a hideous one, to wear or to hang on the wall.

“It was,” said Mr. Rochart. “Do you know they have five children? She told me at length about all of them. I was tempted to make the mask with a permanently open mouth.”

Jane looked up at him, startled—then laughed.

“So you can laugh,” he said. “I was worried that our gloomy house would wear you down. That the black moor would swallow you whole. Or perhaps your week in the city has refreshed you, and you shall be hungering to return soon for more of its lavish pleasures.”

“Not a chance, sir,” said Jane.

“I am selfishly pleased,” said Mr. Rochart, and then they were both silent. Silent—but the air seemed charged. Small tendrils of happiness curled off the spring air, coiled around Jane’s skin.

The sun was setting now. For a rarity the clouds were thinned enough that the sunset could be seen, and its pink and orange rays lit the underside of the white-grey sky. The moor was transformed, each blade of grass clarified, each clump of heather gilded with pink. Here and there daffodils ran along in drifts, bending in the evening breeze.

It was an odd happiness, and Jane couldn’t tell where it came from, only that it danced through the golden light, the air, thrummed in the quality of the silence between the two of them. She could not break that silence for anything, and when he did, it was half pleasure, half pain as she leaned into his voice, cupping each word to see what would be revealed there.

“When I was young I painted the moor,” he said. “When I was your age. No—younger, even.” Her heart shattered and swelled at the same time, his words both worse and better than they could be, even if she could not have said for the life of her what worse and better would have been in that moment.

The house was in sight now, the ancient car nearing its drive. The black walls soared overhead, and now she had to speak, and her words would undoubtedly fail him—supposing that he even cared what her words were. But she knew nothing about art—no, worse than nothing, for as Gertrude had pointedly reminded her she had had no money for tutors, for training, and so she was treading on a subject she would love not to be ignorant in, and yet, could not help but be. She remembered a series of grainstacks she had seen at a museum once, the same grainstack in shifting lights, seasons. “Did you paint it frequently?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, and stopped the car at the front door. “But my travails are a story for another time. Come Jane, you are home again, so take up your coat and come see what Cook has prepared for us. Why, what about this black fortress has brought a smile to your face?”

Home, thought Jane, stepping from the car. Home.

Chapter 7

HANDS OF IRON

Jane woke the next morning with renewed purpose. She was almost joyful as she jumped from bed. The white walls of her room seemed fresh rather than sterile; the dark-paneled halls were warm and inviting. She munched the toast and tea that Martha left outside her door while she dressed and settled the iron mask and fresh padding on her face.

If this worked, she would have a way in. A way to reach Dorie, a way to convince the girl to learn things before she was hopelessly behind. Stubborn Dorie might be, but if her fey skills were taken from her, she would have few options. Jane ran scenarios of Dorie’s stubbornness in her head while she coiled and pinned her hair, looping locks of it over the leather straps of her mask. The one white lock outlined her skull, twisted a pattern in her coiled bun.