Ironskin (7 page)

But perhaps those walls had been removed, knocked out. Perhaps this area had been transformed.

On one side of the landing was a large empty area, bright and filled with light. Its polished wood floors were brighter than anything in the house.

On the other side was a long white wall with one door. The door was ajar, and Jane could just see a form moving around inside.

She walked over and knocked. “Mr. Rochart?”

“Come in.”

She pushed open the door and entered. She had seen shadows moving, heard him—but now, where was he? The room was empty.

Jane turned slowly, looking around the broad rectangular space. The long side opposite was a wall of windows that should face the backyard and the woods, if she hadn’t gotten completely turned around. On one end of the room was a second door, and on the other was shelving filled with supplies—some of which Jane recognized as pens and charcoal and pastels, some of which were unknown to her. A heavy worktable sat in the middle of the room, covered with tools and more stacks of materials. The walls in the wide room were white, and all the remaining available surfaces were lined with more of those same skin-colored masks that encircled the red waiting room off the foyer. It was strange that anything with hollow eyes could seem so much to leer.

A noise from behind, and she startled. “Sir?”

Quiet. Then Mr. Rochart emerged from that other door in the north wall, pulling it closed behind him. “Miss Eliot,” he said, formally polite. Perhaps he was remembering that he had not come to speak with her as he had promised. “Did Poule send you up here?”

“She brought me a letter,” said Jane, temporizing in case she would get the cook in trouble for pointing her the way. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

“Of course not. I see you are studying the masks.”

“They’re hideous,” Jane said bluntly. Too blunt, but it was the second time that he had caught her looking at them, and she was annoyed by their intentional ugliness. As if he knew that people would stop and stare at deformity, as if he were taking what she had to deal with every day and warping it for his own amusement. “I gather they’re supposed to be.” The masks caught and held the eye with their perversity—rows and rows of protruding teeth, cruel scowls, cauliflower ears.

“They’re the worst in people,” Mr. Rochart said. “Extracted and displayed. A reminder.”

She could not decide how old her new employer was. When his eyes were shadowed from her, hidden, then he seemed relatively young—late twenties perhaps. But sometimes she saw those deep amber eyes, and then he seemed a hundred years old. It was a strange feeling. “I don’t understand why you need a reminder of how evil people can be,” she said. “It’s something I try to forget.”

He moved closer, the formality fizzling off and away, as if by coming to the studio Jane had given him the necessary permission to indulge in speaking with her, watching her. His lean frame was so near to her own. “Sometimes we have to remind ourselves what we are capable of.” There was a well of sorrow in those amber eyes, and Jane didn’t know what to say. Her heart beat fast, without her permission. “I wonder what we all would be like, without the Great War. You would not be here to rescue me, Jane, so what life would you lead…?”

Jane drew away, turned her iron cheek into the shadows. Anger and strange hungers bubbled inside her, so to hide them she looked at the wall and said, “I see you’ve made none with war scars.” There were poxed cheeks, there were knife scars. But there were no masks blotched red, ridged and bubbling as if death crept beneath them. No victims of the fey.

Maybe even he couldn’t stand that much ugliness.

“I show the worst in people,” he repeated. “Not the best. Not bravery.” He was near again. He touched a bare spot on her jaw, and his fingers were warm and flecked with clay dust. “You were trying to protect someone; I’m sure of it.”

Jane set her lips and pulled back, turning away from that touch, that level gaze. Warm looks he couldn’t mean; invasive words that flicked her wounds.

No options.

The workbench in the center of the room was covered in tools, paints, glue. A damp towel covered a mound on the workbench; a lump of clay sat in a white-grey bucket of water. White and pink dust was everywhere. “Are you working on something new?”

“As always.” He drew aside the damp towel to reveal the start of a mask. At this stage it did not look ugly. He was still shaping its basic contours: cheekbones and chin, and the eyes were merely two depressions of his thumb.

“A mask you cannot look through,” said Jane. She imagined wearing a mask like that, imagined her own iron creeping over her eyes, her nose, her lips. The thought was suffocating, and not just from the imagined lack of air. “Your eyes sealed shut.”

“Perhaps there are more masks like that than we think,” he said. He covered it with the cloth, his fingers gentle around its form. He studied the cloth-covered mask as he said: “I am sorry I have not been back to help you. My work—”

“You are busy,” Jane said. She was helping him out, granting him excuses. Anything to avoid revelations of truth, which would be—what? He did not know how to help Dorie, he did not want to see Jane.…

“Tell me now,” he said. “How have you and Dorie been getting on? Have you made progress?”

“Not so much,” Jane admitted. She weighed all the frustrations and decided not to admit defeat just yet. “She is speaking a little more to me now.”

“She trusts you, then,” said Mr. Rochart.

“I don’t know about that,” said Jane, “since I keep trying to get her to do things she doesn’t want to do. Perhaps I am familiar now, is all. I know she understands everything I say—she could speak in full sentences, if she wanted to.” She remembered that shadow slipping into the forest. “She talks of you sometimes. Says she sees you from the window.”

The lines of his mouth fell; a weariness crept over his cheeks. A tiny shake of his head. With an effort he roused himself and said, “But tell me, Jane, what matter of import weighs on your mind? A letter, you say?”

“From my sister,” Jane said, recalling herself to her mission. “She is to be married quite soon—within the week, in fact. She wishes me to be there, and indeed, I wish it myself.” Jane found herself slipping into the archaic language he so often used.

The weariness returned. “You would give up on us so soon,” he said.

“No!” said Jane. She remembered her frustrations with Dorie and felt sharp guilt. “No,” she repeated. “This is not an invented dying aunt, I swear it.” She held out the engraved notice to show him. “I had thought it would be a couple months from now.”

He did not look at the invitation, but instead leaned in closer. “Decades ago, before the Great War, there was still trade with the fey. Contact, even if it was rare and limited to your friend’s cousin, your neighbor’s father. Those bluepacks were everywhere, ran all the trains and streetlights, trolleys and gramophones, and yet you never knew anyone personally who had met the fey—it was always a friend of a friend, or a faceless business who shipped the lights and bluepacks to the local stores. Stories about the fey spread, of course. Some compelling, some disturbing; and if you saw a fey at a distance, wearing a human shape—well, you never quite knew if all the stories of curses and stolen children were true or slander. The tales of the fey were fireside tales to entrance your friends and family, and not gruesome fodder for the newspaper.”

Jane nodded, uncertain what this had to do with her leave of absence.

“There was one tale of a lass who was tricked into staying with a ruined man,” he continued. “A human man, who had been cursed by the fey. A damaged man, nearly a beast. When this girl goes home for a visit, he bids her promise to stay only a week, for without her he will surely fade and die, return to the clutches of the fey that once claimed him.…”

She could not fathom this despairing mood, but she liked it little. It poured from him like a poison, clutching at her throat, overpowering even her rage. From a distance she heard herself saying, “The circumstances are very alike, then. For I clearly see your beastly fangs and sharpened claws.”

Mr. Rochart straightened. Laughter broke through the somber expression. “Go to your wedding,” he said. “I will not even hold you to the beast-man’s promise, make you swear to return to me.”

“No?” said Jane.

“No. I will fetch you home myself.”

Chapter 5

FEY BEAUTY

Six days later, Jane sat on a pink tufted stool in Helen’s new sitting room, watching her sister flit back and forth. Fair Helen, lovely Helen, pink and white, unscarred Helen was dressed in nightclothes that looked like pre-war underclothes: a white chemise and bloomers, both heavily worked with eyelets and satin ribbons. Strange to think how sharply fashions had changed in one decade after seemingly centuries of head-to-toe layers. Dresses were sleeker and clingier by the day; glimpses of legs were displayed in the thinnest stockings you could afford (and oh, weren’t stockings dear these days as the factories all labored to make coal and steam technology work as efficiently as the bluepacks once had). Soon, Jane reflected, they would all wear nothing at all, and yet her head would still be swathed in mask and hat and veil.

Helen’s copper-blond hair streamed free, her big brown eyes batted lashes at Jane. “The pearl combs or the tortoiseshell, Jane? Why won’t you make me choose?”

“I thought you had chosen,” said Jane. She was seated next to the fireplace. The fire felt lovely, warm—too warm on her iron cheek. She turned her face away from the blaze. “The tortoiseshell, then,” she said. “To offset your hair.”

Helen held one up, then dropped it on the rosewood vanity with a sigh. “No, the pearls, of course. It has to be pearls for a wedding. Come twist them in, will you?”

Jane obeyed. She always obeyed Helen on the little things. It was easier that way. And yet no matter how many small battles she let Helen win, Helen fought just as hard on the big ones. And there met Jane’s temper, and called Jane stubborn, no matter how stubborn Helen was herself.

“It’s a lovely mirror,” said Helen. “Not all wavy and silvered like ours was in the flat.”

Jane twisted the copper-blond curls over her finger, carefully not looking at the mirror.

Helen shifted, disrupting Jane’s hands. “And my rooms are lovely, don’t you think so? Did you see the fixtures for the gaslight? I selected them. All on my own.”

“Hold still.”

“Ouch,” said Helen, and her fingers flew in the way of Jane’s and back down. “I said, aren’t you fond of my rooms?”

“I’m not sure why you’re here in these rooms before the wedding,” said Jane. “Since you asked.”

“Don’t be prim,” said Helen. “Nobody here thinks anything of it.”

“I passed two cousins and a maidservant this morning that thought something of it.”

“Is that why you’ve been so cold to me all week?” said Helen. “You barely wished me a good birthday on Tuesday, and I am now eighteen and quite ridiculously adult.”

“I have not been cold to you,” said Jane, nettled. “You’ve been busy with teas and ordering the servants to twist bows and make cakes. I’ve had errands to run. There are things I can only get in the city and not—” But she stopped short of criticizing her new home.

“Not out in the sticks,” said Helen. “I understand our real trouble this week, don’t you worry. My simply divine new life will not come between us. You absolutely must give up that dreadful job and come live with us. Alistair is quite wealthy enough to feed another mouth, and I refuse to strand my sister in the remains of the war zone.”

“A touching invitation, if melodramatic.”

“Bother your sarcasm. You know what I mean. No one would think anything of it if you left that position.” Helen untied and retied the ribbon between her breasts. “Your Mr. Rochart is well known.”

“Is that so?” said Jane. She tamped down a surge of interest in the subject and calmly tucked a manufactured curl into the pearl comb.

“There is a mysterious air around him, that’s what I know,” said Helen. “Is it true he killed his first wife? Like the fey story of Bluebeard, you know, a forbidden locked room, and when the new wife enters it she finds all the dead wives hanging on the wall, and then”—she drew a finger across her throat with gruesome relish—“
snick,
she’s next.” Her eyes grew wide at her own imaginings. “Ooh, what if you’re in danger? Maybe you shouldn’t even go back to turn in your resignation. Stay here with me. They can ship your trunk.”

“His wife died in the Great War,” Jane cut in. “Fey bomb, I believe.”

“You believe. But you don’t know.”

“I’ve seen more of him than you, and I don’t believe he’s a Bluebeard for one instant,” said Jane. “If he were, he would’ve advertised for someone beautif”—a gesture with her hand cutting off the word—“someone not me. Besides, I’ve been there for a month. Surely he would’ve chopped me into bits by now.”

“Maybe he likes it to be a surprise when it happens,” said Helen thoughtfully. She cast around for more gossip. “Well, everyone knows his daughter has some sort of deficiency, so he keeps her locked up in the garret and no one ever sees her.”

“Untrue,” said Jane. “She can go nearly everywhere in the house.”

Helen pounced. “Nearly?”

“Well, not the studio, but that’s off limits to everybody. And not the western wing, but you see it’s damaged.…” Jane trailed off, annoyed by Helen’s raised eyebrows. “Well, tell me the rest of the lies.”

“Well, he had an affair with the Prime Minister’s wife, and that’s perfectly true and not lies at all, despite the fact that his cheeks are thin and he never pomades his hair. She met him at a dance last spring, and then she went down all the time to see him, and finally stayed down there for a month. And when she came back she was so refreshed and glowing, she looked ten years younger. The Prime Minister didn’t even have a clue, but everyone else was laughing and making cuckold horns behind his back. How’s that for facts?”

Jane was cold inside at the thought. “Facts?” she managed. “You haven’t produced one. There, now your hair’s done. Let’s put you in the dress.”