Ironskin (26 page)

Surely Edward would be small potatoes then.

The thought was comforting—and then her eye fell on an embroidered chair holding Nina’s wadded-up turquoise dress.

Under the chair were a pair of men’s shoes.

The thought of glamorous Nina entertaining men visitors in her rooms made Jane feel smaller than Poule. The brief victory she and Poule had won over Nina dissipated, and she stood there feeling every inch of her plain day dress and veiled face as if it were Dorie’s iron gloves enclosed around her.

The shoes were enough to rattle her, but—
whose
shoes? They could be anybody’s, of course.

Nina drawled, “Edward looked very handsome today.”

Jane looked up to find Nina innocently gazing at the shoes. “You weren’t outside with us,” Jane said.

Nina raised eyebrows until Jane blushed.

“Oh. When you saw him alone.”

“He has an air so many men lack,” said Nina. She looked happier now that she was skewering Jane, wresting control of the situation. “So poised. So … skillful. We’re going to have a fine, fine time tonight.”

Jane
knew
Nina had been in Edward’s studio just for a consultation … didn’t she? Of course, Nina could know Edward in more than one way. Jane despaired, not wanting Nina’s insinuations to be true. Not when Nina was capable of taking—and keeping—any man that captured her fancy.

Poule stepped past Jane to the next window, feeling it with sensitive fingers. “I suppose you’d want him to be skillful, since he’s going to rip your face off,” she said.

Laughter nearly bubbled out of Jane at this gruesome depiction of surgery. Gallows humor again.

Nina’s expression of fury morphed instantly into calm calculation. She looked the short woman up and down, her eyes lingering on Poule’s homely face. “I’d have thought you’d take advantage of his services,” she said cruelly, and Jane, aghast, pressed a useless hand to the veil covering her lips, as if she could take back Nina’s words.

Poule shouldered her tool bag. Outwardly she did not seem affected, but Jane, heart beating, thought surely the words wounded deep inside where the hurt did not show. “If you think I’d want to look like my enemy, you’re a bigger fool than I gave you credit for.”

*   *   *

Jane descended the spiral staircase by her room, thinking how nice it would be to be as sure of herself as Poule. She wondered if that came with growing up in the
dwarvven
culture, or from the fact that Poule could take care of herself in myriad ways. Perhaps if Jane could
do
something like Poule—weld iron or sniff out fey or cow obnoxious women—she could wrest control of her own life, make the Jane-that-wasn’t-supposed-to-be into a Jane she could be.

She slipped into a back hallway to retrieve her sketchpad from the afternoon—one of the hired servants had brought it in and placed it in her boot cubby. The fear from the forest had dulled with the application of several hours of manual labor on the iron screens, leaving her time to ponder other problems.

Were those shoes really Edward’s?

Jane brushed the dirt off her sketchpad, absentmindedly eyeing the flaws in the sketch of Dorie, the parts where her lines deviated from Edward’s.

Was Nina really meeting Edward tonight?

A movement through the window next to the back door—there, standing on the back lawn was Blanche Ingel, deep in chat with one of the gentlemen, who seemed to be unable to do anything but gaze into her perfect face. Exasperated, Jane momentarily forgot her stature in the house and spoke to them as she had spoken to the elder Miss Davenport earlier that day. “Get in here,” she said, pulling the heavy back door all the way open.

The gentleman looked startled, but Blanche laughed kindly and said, “I suppose we are out a little later than decency permits.” She came in, scraping her boot heels on the mat. “Can you have a maid fetch me a clean white cloth?” She had a white handkerchief balled in her left palm. “I had a little argument with one of those thorn trees. Made me quite dizzy.”

“Certainly,” said Jane, and did not say, “What on earth were you doing at the edge of the forest? How foolish are you?” Edward had not mentioned the fey, true (he had come up with “the gardener says stay off the lawn tonight while he sprays for insects”), but anyone with half a brain stayed out of the woods after dusk.
That
had been true for centuries and centuries.

The man followed, throwing a grouchy look at Jane, but she was irritated and worried enough that she was not flustered by his glare. As with Nina on that first day, Jane did remember that for Edward’s sake she should be polite and appropriately deferential to his guests, and so she thought cooling thoughts of water and said, “I apologize for my brusque request, but the other guests are gathering in the library for elderflower liqueur. Our host was worried that you had gotten lost.”

Blanche flushed at that, and belatedly it occurred to Jane that perhaps that statement was no more polite, and maybe it implied that the two of them were doing something inappropriate in the shrubbery. The gentleman pushed past her into the house, grumbling, leaving tracks of mud, and inwardly Jane sighed. She had never been good at this polite and humble business, and with the mask off it was worse.

She locked the back door, and, casting around, she shoved the heavy wooden hall tree in front of it as a reminder.

As if anything would make those partygoers think.

*   *   *

Jane passed the evening either watching Dorie sleep or with Poule, checking iron. By midnight, the party had splintered off in ones and twos, and now when she peeked into the drawing room, only the younger Miss Davenport was there, flirting with one of the men while her mother snored on the window seat.

No sign of Nina.

She walked past Nina’s room to her own. The light was off; only moonlight shone from the crack under the door. Surely Nina was not upstairs but was in there, asleep. And if asleep, she would have her sleep mask on, and wouldn’t see the door open a silent crack.…

Knowing full well she shouldn’t, Jane edged Nina’s door open. A little—and then more, searching the spill of moonlight on the unmade sheets. She unwound her veil, and both her eyes and some unknown sense confirmed it point-blank.

No one was in Nina’s room.

Jane shut the door and found herself walking down the hall, away from her own room, toward the stairs that led to the studio. Knowledge of what she
should
do didn’t seem to have any effect on the fact that she wanted to know.

She wanted to know if Nina was really in his studio, and if so, exactly what that meant. Was Edward really performing some secret surgery on Nina in the dead of night—or was there another, more obvious explanation for what went on behind closed doors after midnight?

What exactly had he meant by the things he had done wrong?

Was Nina one of the unforgivable things? Blanche?

It would be smarter not to know, not to torture herself with the truth. It certainly was none of her business. It was very off-limits.

And still she found herself climbing the stairs to stand at the door in the attic, an open door into a room lit with rectangles of blue moonlight.

She went softly into the room.

His worktable in the center of the room was crowded with his mask-making supplies—clay, metal tools—and a white wet towel covered his latest work. The clay bucket next to the table was nearly empty, its wooden shell containing only an inch of blue-black water.

She put her hand to the wet towel, wondering what she would see—a beautiful Nina? The grotesque version? Or more heart-wrenching still—herself, her whole self?

Her fingers trembled on the cloth, and then out of the corner of her eye, under the side door—she thought it was the moonlight, too, but no, that was light, the blue of fey-tech light.

He was there.

Jane left the cloth, slipped silently across the room to the door. Ever so quietly, before she could even think about what she was doing, she slid it open.

It took a second to resolve the scene in the small white room, and then she did. Edward, in white coat and mask like a surgeon, bending over the face of an unconscious woman wearing black satin. The scalpel in his fingers gleamed in the blue light.

On the wall hung one mask, a beautiful mask.

Nina.

Chapter 15

MAY YOU BE BORN PLAIN

Surely he could hear her heart racing. But he didn’t turn, didn’t look up.

Edward ran his scalpel around the woman’s face, as close to the hairline as possible. Just before the ears and just under the jawline. Then he worked underneath the flap of skin with a spatulate tool until he could peel the face up and away. It hung up around the nostrils and eyelids and he had to fiddle with it until it lifted away completely.

The woman’s face—Jane could hardly think
Nina
in connection with it—was horrifying underneath. All red like a war victim—Jane shut her eyes. When she forced herself to reopen them, Edward was settling Nina’s skin back into place.

But no, not skin.

A mask.

A clay mask, matte white and opaque and sculpted by a master craftsman.

From Jane’s angle, the clay mask did not blend with the rest of the woman at all. It was rigid, dead white. Unthinkably unlike human skin. Edward picked up a delicate brush, thick with glue, and began to attach the mask to the red scalp line, the red neck. He pulled the woman’s skin, the skin of the mask, as he bound the two together. Despite his orders to the contrary, the window was open to the night, and the sheet draped across the wooden table fluttered in the breeze.

His hands—no, that wasn’t just the blue-lit room—his hands were faintly blue. Jane made some sound, too tiny to be a gasp.

Slowly he turned and looked
through
her. She backed up one step. His eyes—she had never seen them like this. They were glassy, filmed over as if she were seeing them through stagnant lake water, through layers of mold and algae.

The blue in his hands died, till Jane could almost doubt that she’d seen it. A small zip, a pop. And then he was looking at her, and the glass in his gaze was gone, and he was not smiling, but he was
there
.

“How long have you been standing there?” he said.

“Long enough,” Jane said in a low voice. “Long enough to see you peel a woman’s face back like the skin off a rabbit. You’re no artist. Nor a surgeon. Surgeons can’t do what you just did.” Her hands clenched, went instinctively to where she’d once kept a feyjabber at her side. “You’ve got fey technology.”

This wasn’t like Dorie, who couldn’t help it.

He was in league with them.

Edward turned back to his work, running his fingers along Nina’s cheek. He seemed to be searching for what to say.

Dazed, she thought: This must be what it means, his hints, his allusions. The presence of bluepacks in this household, to run our lamps and motorcars and machines, long after everyone else’s have died.

He is working with the fey.

From the table he picked up a fine sandcloth, began brushing away pilled glue and blood. “You will leave me now,” he said. “You will exit my life. You will denounce me to the world.”

Her breath caught, hearing not command in his tone but sharp regret, an envisioned future. “Not that,” she said. “Never that.”

“You will make your excuses then, and leave us.”

“An invented dying aunt,” said Jane, and she seemed hardly to have the breath for the words. Her feet took her two steps closer, one step back—she froze there, watching as he gently teased the mask’s eyelids in place with a long tool like an ice pick. One word, that she hoped would bring her closer and not farther away.

“Why?”

Why do you have this skill, why are you using it, why. Tell me, tell me why, and in that telling let there be some measure of explanation that will make it okay, will make it so I don’t have to hate you, don’t have to pick up my stone-still feet and run to my sister in the city.

Why.

In that silence she seemed to hear him swallow his fear. Then the words rolled out, deep and velvet, above the woman in black with the frozen white face.

“Once upon a time, a long time ago,” he said, “back when the waters were low and calm and the stars were hardly hung in the sky, there was a young boy who wanted to be an artist. The fey were different in those days, back when the air was clean and the sky blue. More substantial. They had bodies, especially when they were in the forests, and they did not need to steal forms from mankind. They were as dangerous then as they are now … but they were reclusive. They rarely attacked unless provoked, and so they were like recluse spiders, or copperhead hydras—you hardly heard of them unless you happened to live right at the edges of the forests where they walked. And then you knew how not to provoke.”

And you provoked them, thought Jane, for around the flowery description of
a
long time ago
she heard this fey tale like heartbeats in her throat.
My father was cold and I was lonely. I went into the forest with my sketchpad. I sketched beauty.

“Well, go on,” said Jane when he stopped. “What sort of things provoked them? Back then.” The roughness in her voice broke against the spell his words were weaving, fell away.

The ice pick coaxed eyelashes from the clay lids. “Great beauty. Great artistic talent. Passion. There used to be a saying in the towns near the fey, though it was forgotten long before the wars—”

“May you be born plain,” breathed Jane along with him.

“Yes.” His voice rolled on, filling the room with the long-ago world. She closed her mouth, certain her words would derail him from the only way he could get through this story. It had to be distant, it had to be a fantastical tale to spin itself out of a pile of horrid truths and a story of
me
.
Me, I lived this.

“Some average men set up trade, of a sort, with the fey,” he said, “and many curious things were brought over to ease human existence. Blue-lit fey technology replaced human invention, and it never occurred to the men who traded for bluepacks to run lights and cameras that everything had its own price, its own story.