Ironskin (17 page)

Dorie had just gone down for her nap, and her naps were longer these days, lasting from just after lunch to near dinner. Jane was torn between worry for the girl and the thought that Dorie was merely tired from the extra physical and mental exertion. Still, if this strange listlessness continued, she would have to go back up to the studio and confess that she was failing. The thought was not appealing.

“Is Mr. Rochart busy this afternoon, do you know?” she said.

“Rochart?” Cook dumped a bin of fresh new potatoes into the sink and ran an inch of water to loosen their dirt. “He hasn’t been here for a fortnight. He’ll be meeting with a wealthy client in the city. Left for town just after he finished with Miss Ingel. Were you not knowing?”

“Oh,” said Jane. “No.” So he hadn’t been avoiding her. Unless he’d been avoiding her by fleeing the house altogether, but that seemed unnecessarily silly for the owner of the house to do. No, he hadn’t even noticed her ridiculous advances in his study, and maybe that was more humiliating. She didn’t figure into his travel plans one way or another. He didn’t think of her at all. Breathe, she told herself, and let it go. Think about anything else—water, tar, potatoes.

“Sure and I don’t see why you would know,” Cook said. “Keeps to himself, don’t he, and why a young lass like you would care about the doings of a moody widower, even if he is your employer.”

Jane did not want to respond to that, so she turned the conversation back to Creirwy’s earlier speech and replayed her instructions, to fix on what might actually be expected of her. “The side door on the south, you said?” said Jane. “That’s where I should direct them?” She wondered what the temporary staff would be like—these local wives and daughters pitching in to pick up an extra bit of money and a hamper of leftover party food. Did they normally ward themselves when they went by Edward’s crumbling house? Did they rap on iron to come today, and did they come only because they were desperate, as desperate as she?

Cook nodded at the side door question, her nimble fingers rubbing the tender skin from the newest spring potatoes. Sloughed skin fell to the countertop in flaking bits of red-brown. “Some of the temporary staff were here at the last party two years ago,” Cook said. “The rest said they wouldn’t come back for love nor pence. Silly girls probably got themselves with babes by now. The old ones return, you’ll see. Ones with heads on their shoulders, with sense enough not to let their bellies turn at the sight of Dorie’s tricks. You have to be thirty before you have any sense at all.”

“I’m twenty-one,” said Jane.

“Sure and you don’t act it. You’ll be having an old heart, you will. My grandmam used to say that was the only thing that might save you.”

“Save me from what?” Jane prompted. Anything to derail her thoughts. She hooked her feet on the rung of the wooden chair, watched Cook’s fingers fly.

Cook stared off over the steam rising from the soup pot. The flames licked around its copper edges. “A cousin of mine was taken by the fey,” she said. “Well, her parents thought she fell off a cliff, but my grandmam said Eirwen was too clever to go tumbling off cliffs. Eirwen was that pretty and clever, and she had a little wooden recorder painted all blue that she played as well as the birds. She and I would go roaming, we would, through the woods and cliffs around the sea, where we lived then. But one day we separated and she never came back. The only thing we found of her was the blue recorder, half-buried in the mud of the path. Grandmam was certain the fey took her for their own.”

Jane realized she was holding her breath, that her elbows hurt from leaning on the side table. “But the fey didn’t take you? Was it because you had the old heart?”

Cook came back to herself with a laugh. “No, that was because I wasn’t pretty nor clever nor talented. May you be born plain, that’s the way of it. Grandmam said to me: ‘Creirwy, you’ll be thanking your lucky stars you’re ordinary, ’cause that’s why your mum isn’t bawling her eyes out right now.’ And you know, I did.” She slid the delicate potatoes into their own pot of cool water. “I suppose I’m too practical for my own good.”

“Did you ever see her again?” said Jane. It seemed like the worst way to lose a child—no clean break, but the agony of waiting day after day, holding out hope against the inevitable. She imagined Cook’s aunt turning the muddy blue recorder around in her hands day after day, watching it age as the years rolled by. First the dirt would flake off, then the blue paint. Then the wood would smooth under her hands until the recorder was merely a lump of wood with holes, out of tune and unusable. And still no child.

“No, that we never did,” said Cook. “And they say the fey let their captives go with a gift after a certain number of years—decades—have passed. So who knows—maybe she did fall off a cliff, for aught I know. Except that was just a bit easier to believe before the war. Nowadays I reckon even Aunt and Uncle accept that the fey took her.” The water roiled under the stirring of her wooden spoon. “Sure and the fey aren’t just tales anymore.”

*   *   *

Jane volunteered to steam the curtains in the foyer and direct traffic. There wasn’t time to wash everything (“A party only every two years, and he can’t be giving us more notice than two days?” moaned Cook), but there were plenty of ways to freshen with dusting and carpet beating and steaming.

The steamer was one of Poule’s inventions: a copper and iron contraption on spoke wheels. Jane dragged the awkward machine into the foyer and poured her full kettle into it. The heavy velvet drapes were nearly wrinkle-free, but she felt oddly satisfied as she freshened the plush, uncrushed the nap of the velvet. Maybe it was because this was a simple task, she thought, not like her open-ended struggle to turn Dorie into something she was not. Steaming the curtains fixed the curtains, and that was satisfying.

She directed several men and women to the side door to apply to Creirwy for the temporary work. Most often the villagers arrived in pairs—unwilling to brave Silver Birch Hall without a friendly face in tow, she thought. They peered in cautiously or stoically, wiping damp palms on their cleanest black-and-whites, fingering iron charms fastened over their pulse points. Jane smiled at them, but she knew her unveiled face with its contoured iron wasn’t likely to set them at ease.

She was nearly done with the last set of curtains when the twisted doorknocker sounded again. Jane opened the door. “Side door on the south,” she said automatically, but then she looked more closely at the visitor. “I’m sorry,” she said, for the woman at the door was clearly no servant. Jane wasn’t embarrassed for herself, but she didn’t want her employer to lose a client because she’d been too informal to her. So she bobbed an unfamiliar curtsey by way of apology. “An’ ye be human—oh, just come in, please, with my apologies.”

The woman laughed, her head thrown back till her throat caught the muted morning light. “I’ll have you horsewhipped,” she said, and she swept past Jane and into the house.

Jane looked at her sharply, uncertain as to whether the woman seriously thought that was a possibility, or if she merely had an odd sense of humor. Oddly cruel, perhaps. She wished she could take back the curtsey.

The woman was amused by Jane, judging from the expression in her snapping black eyes. She was not attractive, but Jane had to look twice to see that. The woman was tremendously distinctive, due to the fire in her face, the light in her eyes. She had clear olive skin and masses of black hair, and she knew how to dress to her advantage—she was clad in folds of black satin that slashed dramatically past her shoulders and clung to her hips, accentuated at the waist by a sunburst diamanté pin. She took the plum silk wrap from her shoulders in one fluid motion and tossed it to Jane, who fumbled for it. “You may tell Edward that Nina is here.” As if there was only one Nina in the world.

“Oh, I’m not the—,” said Jane, but Nina looked her up and down in a way that said she couldn’t possibly be interested in what Jane was or wasn’t.

Her attitude got under Jane’s skin. “Is he expecting you?”

“Oh yes,” Nina said, with a significant smile. “He’s expecting me.”

“And yet I regret to inform you,” Jane said coolly, “that he’s not here.” Score one for the governess.

Nina’s eyebrows raised, but her retort was forestalled by a movement behind the second floor railing. She elegantly inclined her head to study the small figure above.

Jane knew her words would have no effect when confronted with one of the “pretty ladies,” but still she said to the small figure: “Go finish your nap, Dorie. I’ll be right there.”

Dorie didn’t obey. Her legs pushed through the banister railings and her head leaned against the rail as she stared down at them. Her curls were limp and matted; her iron-gloved hands hung loosely at her side in a now-familiar gesture of tired defeat. Even her eyes seemed dull.

“That child needs castor oil,” said Nina. “Or a pony.”

Temper rose and with it sarcasm. “I’ll make a note on her charts,” Jane said. “Mr. Rochart will be back the day after next. Would you like to leave him your card?”

Nina’s eyebrows met along her low forehead. “I would,” she said. “With a note. You wouldn’t have an ink pen, would you?” Something about her tone implied that Jane would be unlikely to have anything related to literacy.

“In here,” said Jane. She drew aside the freshly steamed garnet curtains and ushered Nina into the small red room.

Nina’s gaze immediately snapped to the rows of masks and she studied them, touching jutting chins and hooked noses. “The Varee
chirurgiens
can’t compare to him,” she said in a low voice.

Jane was apparently dismissed, though she wondered if she should stay planted and wait to take Nina’s message—as well as ensure that Nina did not go wandering through the house in order to find out if Jane’s information was true. Of course, if she stayed for the message she’d have to make sure that Mr. Rochart got the message, and she did not wish to seem that she’d been seeking him out in his studio.

Nina’s stiff posture, white-gloved fingers frozen on one misshapen mask, seemed to imply that she couldn’t possibly do anything as personal as write a note without the privacy of Jane being gone. So Jane turned, but as she did, her eye fell on a new mask hanging by the door. Her gaze caught and held, and she could not look away from the glistening skin, the bags and folds that caricatured a human.

But not just any human.

It was obscenely taken to extremes, true. But surely Jane recognized the model for those pouched eyes, that prizefighter nose, though she’d only seen them the once?

It was the leering face of the first Miss Ingel.

Chapter 10

THE EDGE OF THE FOREST

Jane’s knees shook. Plain Miss Ingel. Beautiful Miss Ingel. And—“the Varee
chirurgiens
can’t compare to him,” Nina had said, but didn’t
chirurgien
mean surgeon?

“Miss Ingel…,” Jane whispered. “She used to look like that sculpture.”

Nina looked where Jane’s eyes were fixed. “Oh, Blanche,” she said derisively. “I saw her yesterday, and she tried to pretend that the hot springs were restorative. As if she could fix that face and not have it be obvious.” Nina’s eyes fell to Jane, still holding her plum silk wrap. “I’ll take that. Now, if you wouldn’t mind…?”

Jane wanted to collapse to the floor right there, but she obeyed Nina, wobbled through the foyer, and sank out of sight behind the forest green curtains. She wrapped her arms around her knees, where goose bumps speckled her skirt.

It was plain as day, now that Nina had said it. Rochart-as-artist was a pretty little fiction, a cover story that certain wealthy elite knew the truth of. No artist—a surgeon. A secret surgeon, unless maybe everyone knew—everyone but Jane, who was apparently as naïve as Alistair had painted her.

No, she reminded herself, she would not beat herself up over ignorance. She had been wrapped up in her own work with Dorie; why should she see through a mystery that she didn’t know existed?

Not to mention that facial surgery was so uncommon that Jane had only seen it once before, and that was to fix a boy in her town who had had his face mauled by a wild boar. She had seen the city surgeon’s work, and it was obvious. It was noticeable; there were scars, and stretches. It was definitely an improvement over no work, but the boy would never look quite normal, let alone handsome.

She had heard that back when the cinemas were still running, there were actresses who went voluntarily for such surgery, that noses and chins could be tweaked. But she had never seen the result, and she had never heard that it could look like this.

But that was what it was. Edward the surgeon, Edward the artist in flesh and bone. Tweaking those like the Prime Minister’s wife so they merely looked refreshed, doing major work on those like Blanche Ingel. And either way making the woman into the most dazzling version of herself. Fey beauty, the old woman at the party had called it, and that’s what it would’ve been called before the Great War, for it was inhuman to be that perfect, that symmetrical, that flawless.

She stayed there until she heard the soft front door click of Nina leaving, and then she crossed the foyer, went to the small red room to see the faces again.

Yes, there was Miss Ingel, the stretched and exaggerated sculpture of her original face. His mockups, perhaps, his befores and afters. She thought back to something he had said about them the first time she’d seen his studio. “A reminder,” he’d said. A reminder of the worst of us, extracted and displayed.

She could only guess that the sorrows in his life drove him to the extreme of making these grotesque images—perhaps he was not altogether comfortable with what he did. It was shrouded in secrecy after all, presumably because the women wanted to pretend they’d always been this beautiful—would rather pretend they’d had affairs or been on holiday than let the truth be known.

And secrecy like that had to weigh on him.

Had to cause—moodiness, as Cook had said.

Jane reached up to touch the ugly Blanche Ingel mask. The clay was smooth, the painted surface slick, almost elastic. One above and to the left caught her eye—was that the Prime Minister’s wife, with the heavy jowls? The caricature was so extreme, it was hard to tell. If that Nina person had been friendlier, perhaps she could have told Jane what name went with each piece of artwork.