Ironskin (13 page)

Or for bearding an artist in his den.

She unbuckled her mask and laid it on the bed. She scrubbed her face and arms scrupulously clean before stepping out of her dirty dress and into the sapphire blue one. She changed out the padding in her mask for fresh—and then rather than twist her hair up, she suddenly decided to leave it down. The brown and white locks did not hide, but they softened the side of her cheek, obscured the lines of the iron.

Her mood lifted as she cleaned up and changed. Helping Dorie was not going to be easy, no. But she had proved that the tar would work. She had a way to get through to the girl, to break her of her disturbing fey habits.

The rest was just going to be hard work for the two of them—but Jane knew what hard work was like. She could do this.

Jane brushed down her skirt, looked down at her boots. They suddenly looked unbearably workaday, and she tugged them off, replaced them with Helen’s castoff dance slippers, white and embroidered with silver thread. They were a touch too long, and she was overdressed, certainly—but it seemed to suit her expanding, lifting mood. The twilight sky with stars and clouds, that’s what she was, and the thought was light and joyful.

Jane checked on Dorie—still sleeping, exhausted—descended to the foyer, and slipped through the forest green curtains. The landing she had stood on a week ago should be in sight—yes, there it was. She flew up the stairs to Mr. Rochart’s studio and slipped trhough his open door, knocking on it as she entered.

He was just closing the far door behind him, entering the main studio. “Jane,” he said, surprise in his voice. “You—” He stopped. “You look different in colors.”

“Black is a color,” said Jane. “So is grey.”

Mr. Rochart snorted. “You’re laughing at me, and I’m the artist. You might show your elders some respect.”

“Indeed I had forgotten you must be almost thirty,” said Jane, and then added, laughing, “I will call you Grandfather Rochart henceforth.”

“Grandfather Edward,” he replied. He crossed to her and then the worry was back in his amber eyes. He touched her arm. “You look too cheerful to be up here with bad news—but tell me. How did your day go with Dorie?”

“It wasn’t entirely perfect,” Jane admitted, “but I think I have a way to reach her.” Briefly she explained the iron paste, and concluded, “It seems to stop her from using her fey abilities.” And that one tremendous success could offset even such a day as she had.

“Just like the iron on your cheek,” he said. He shook his head in wonder. “So simple, and yet it never occurred to me.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” she said, and daringly she touched his shoulder. She was unprepared for the tremor that ran through him, as if he was as unused to touch as she, as if a mere friendly gesture was enough to undo him. His hand rose even as she withdrew hers, and she didn’t know what to do with any of her limbs anymore. So she smoothed down the skirt of her sister’s dress, feeling the embroidered dots slide underneath her palms. That fluttering happiness went sharply through her chest. “She did not want to use her hands, of course,” Jane said, trying to sound casual. “She was quite frustrated.”

“I imagine.” He was not polished like the gentlemen at Helen’s wedding, but that did not matter to Jane. He was arresting, with those strange deep-set eyes that stayed in shadow, those amber eyes whose meaning she could rarely catch. “I will have a talk with her after dinner.”

“That would be helpful,” said Jane. “I believe the tar is a tool we can use to catch her up to where she should be. But she will still have to do the work.” She remembered the rest of her purpose and added, “And I need to get into the north attic. Martha said there might be some gloves I could use for Dorie. So she doesn’t get tar on everything. I also need some linen, and linseed oil to waterproof it.”

A shadow of pain drew across his face. “Yes, I believe Grace had some gloves. She always liked parties more than I did. Tell Martha I said you might look in her trunks. Have Poule find you everything else.”

Jane nodded. “Thank you.” To distract him from the memory of his deceased wife she said, “I didn’t like Helen and Alistair’s party very much either.”

“Nasty things,” said Mr. Rochart. “Parties, that is, not your sister and her husband.”

He smiled at her and she laughed, her heart warming. She realized that she was still poised on the threshold of the studio, and she let her laughter carry her boldly past him, into the studio where the natural light poured over the golden floors, the rough working table, the mounds of white clay. Her blue skirts floated around her, the fine linen weave brushing against her legs, the legs of the table.

Her momentum carried her all the way to the window and there she stood, the afternoon sun bathing the lines of her dress as she looked away from him. Alistair’s pointed comment about her figure flickered into her mind, and then she banished it. She was not trying to seduce Edward, not trying some ploy to entrap him in the night. No, it was more the thought that with her face turned away perhaps he would see her as she should’ve been, a girl in a blue dress with embroidered dots like stars. A glimmer of her metal reflection danced in the window, but she looked past it, out into the black woods.

“I used to paint back there,” Edward said. “In the woods.” The intimacy of his words lapped her ears, like he was spilling secrets meant for her alone.

“Wasn’t that dangerous?” Even before the Great War there had always been the stories.
Don’t go into the woods past the last ray of sunlight.
There was always someone’s cousin’s friend who knew a girl who chased a blue will o’ the wisp past the edge of sun and never was seen again.

“I didn’t get on well with my father,” he said. “I avoided him. I spent every possible hour outside, painting.” She could feel him moving closer, though he made no noise. It was implicit in the way the air moved, in the way soft eddies of warmth and scent curled past the wisps of her hair, changed the folds of her dress. “When I grew tired of painting the moor, I turned to the forest. It occurred to me that there were very few forest paintings around. An untapped niche.”

“Ah, a mercenary,” she said. With her head turned away she was a different Jane, a Jane who still had a brother and a mother, a Jane who had taken this job as a calling to help Dorie, and not also because she was desperate. This Jane could flirt, she could tease, she could even call him “Edward.” As long as she didn’t turn and look at him, the moment would hold.

“In my head I would be the bravest artist of them all—and the wealthiest besides,” he said, and there was laughter in his voice. “You don’t have to give up your artistic merit for riches if everyone knows you were tremendously brave to get that painting.”

“I thought people with ancestral estates and good family names were supposed to despise the acquisition of money,” said Jane.

“Ah, but I didn’t get on with my father, remember? I was going to show him—show them all.”

“Wicked child,” said Jane. “Won’t go to parties, defies his parents, goes into the woods … it’s impossible to see where Dorie gets it from.”

“And you?” he said. His voice was rough; it caught at her, intense and burred. “Where do you get your stubbornness from? Your independent streak? Your strange, fierce spirit? Where?”

There was a sound from behind the far door and she turned, startled, and her eyes met his. He did not turn to look for the source of the noise, but no matter. The instant he saw her face in its mask, the other Jane popped like a burst bubble and she was plain damaged Jane Eliot again.

“Are Martha’s quarters on this floor?” she said.

“No.” He leaned forward, urgency in his voice—deep, tense—passion in his simple words. “Tell me who you are.”

She started to speak, though not knowing what she’d say—but then the door opened and a lovely woman sailed out.

Her face was perfectly symmetrical, carefully chiseled, framed by a mane of red hair, by a chain of aquamarines at her white throat. She glanced in the mirror at her perfect reflection, then beamed at Edward. “In the pink of health, I knew it. You are divine, dear, but I must run.” She saw Jane and her fine eyes widened. “Is this a new one?” She crossed to them and leaned in confidentially to Jane. “You’ll just love him. We all do.” She kissed Edward on the cheek, whispered something in his ear. A flash of worry flickered on her pretty face, her shoulders tensed, as she told him something Jane couldn’t hear. Then she was sailing toward the door, all smiles again. “See you in a few weeks for that coming out you’ve promised me. Don’t worry about me, I can see myself out.”

Edward shook his head at Jane. “Just a moment.” He hurried after the beautiful woman and ushered her to the stairwell door, his head close to hers. Jane saw his finger touch the woman’s rose petal cheek before she managed to look away.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said as he returned. “Miss Ingel is a client. I didn’t want you to think—”

“There’s something familiar about her,” Jane interrupted. A familiar anger coiled around her heart, suffused her head.

“Really? I wouldn’t have guessed that you’d know her.”

“We’re not in the same social circle, no,” Jane said dryly. Though he had betrayed no covenant with her, she felt hideous and ashamed; humiliation made her hostile. “Did she buy one of your masks?”

“Yes,” he said.

“They are popular, then? I can’t understand it.”

“Yes. I take it you wouldn’t want one.”

“I wouldn’t want to bring
more
ugliness into the world.”

“I understand,” he said. “Jane…,” and he took her hand.

The familiarity of her first name on his lips infuriated her. He had the upper hand; people like him always would. People like her had to be grateful for crumbs. She had nothing, she was no one, and she was a great big fool in her sister’s dress and shoes, mooning out the window, feeling linen touch her thighs and dreaming of a different present.

“Of course you understand,” she said, and jerked away. “Why wouldn’t you?” The rows of masks watched her every move. “I like your daughter just fine. The house isn’t even that weird.” She licked dry lips as the orange rage erased all wit and tact from her tongue. “It’s you. You and your horrible artwork scare people off.”

Chapter 8

MOONLIGHT

“Jane,” he said to that, but she was gone. His voice echoed down the stairs behind her. Her flight stopped on the landing with the mirrors, the one that flung your reflection back on you, as if you were coming to meet yourself from the other end of the staircase.

She stopped, breathing hard, watching the girl in the iron mask. Between heartbeats she listened to the stairs above.

But he did not follow.

*   *   *

Jane did not sleep well that night. She turned back and forth, restless. Awoke sharply just past dawn with the feeling that an unpleasant dream was slipping just out of her grasp. Some nameless terror, and she had been frozen as the terror insinuated itself into the scar on her cheek, wound itself around her, through her.…

She hurriedly got dressed and went down to the kitchen to see if she could find Martha. Cook was up making some wonderfully scented bread, but when Jane asked about the maid she just laughed. “Sure and you won’t find that one out of bed before she has to. I’m not saying she’s not a hard worker, but she won’t see dawn if she can help it. But she’s willing to work here at Silver Birch, and there you are. Much can be overlooked for that.”

“Does she have family in town?” Jane asked suddenly, remembering the old man at the carriage house that night. “Parents?”

Cook shook her head. “Just a married sister. I tell her she should be visiting home more to find herself a man, but she just grunts.” She shrugged. “Who am I to say a shiftless village fool husband’s better than good honest work on your own, not I.…”

“True,” murmured Jane.

So the attic would have to wait until Dorie’s naptime, assuming they would let Jane go up at all, assuming this was not an intentional obstacle. Jane went back to her room, idly wondering what eccentricities Cook had that were being overlooked, like Martha’s late hours and Jane’s mask. Or perhaps Cook just had an old-fashioned sense of loyalty.

She sat on her bed and thumbed through the blue book of Ilhronian city-state politics. It seemed to be a treatise on the best ways to use treachery to hold power. Not really Jane’s cup of tea. She had three books in her trunk, all read a hundred times.
A Child’s Vase of Cursing Verses
was a classic nursery book: rhymes and stories about dealing with the
other
—mostly the fey, but a few of the stories were about dwarves, dragons, and other creatures. Even before the war, Jane had been fascinated by the way the book ranged from utterly real and practical advice—how to avoid the copperhead hydra—to things that were surely just tales—who, after all, had ever seen a giant?

The other two books were excellent novels, full of excitement and adventure.
Kind Hearts and Iron Crowns
was a cheap, yellow-backed, acid-tongued mystery that had been printed in Bowdler Street by the thousands. And
The Pirate Who Loved Queen Maud
was gloriously exciting, an extremely rare family heirloom from the time of Queen Maud herself, written by one of the famous dwarf authors that lived at court and were part of her infamous salons. (Queen Maud’s son had been less than pleased by the lurid tale, and he later ordered all copies burned on sight.)

Still, Jane had read them all. She could not get the gloves yet, Dorie would not wake for another hour, and she needed a distraction to stop thinking of
him
and that humiliating moment in his studio when the beautiful woman sailed out of his back room. Jane picked up the blue book on politics, intending to go to the library.

But when she left the room, Dorie was out in the hall.

“You’re awake!” said Jane. “Well. Good.”

Blue eyes looked up and through her, mutinous and steady.

Jane’s heart sank. Today was going to be just as miserable as yesterday.

Well. She’d known that, right? This was just the
hard work
part. She could do this.