Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

  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.

  Slowly Jane turned, looking at the rows and rows of masks with a new eye. Each one represented a person, somewhere. Rows of people who had jumped ship on their old lives for the chance to be someone new. She might have met them, seen them in the city, and she thought of the beautiful people at Helen’s wedding.

  Thought of all the splendidly attired guests, whirling in their gauzy gowns of apricot and ruby in the gaslight, each holding to their faces a mask made of their worst self.

  * * *

  Jane did not sleep well Thursday night. There was a windstorm in the early morning that shook the house, woke Jane from her nightmare of the battlefield. She woke with the echo of her mother ringing in her ears, one heart-wrenching word: Jane.

  She lay in bed till the last of the storm had beat itself out, dashed its brains on Silver Birch Hall. When she looked from her window, she saw the forest had been rent by winds that covered the bottom of the back lawn in dead black branches.

  Jane dressed and went to Dorie’s room, mesh gloves in hand. Prior to the gloves, Dorie had been awake well before Jane’s arrival each morning, but no more. Jane sat down on the bed and said, “There are going to be a lot of people in the house today. And longer—a fortnight.”

  Dorie opened her eyes and looked at Jane, but made no move to get out of bed. Her curls looked like they hadn’t been brushed in days, though Jane had helped her wash and comb them just last night. Dorie’s eyelids were smeared with sticky sleep and her cheeks were pale.

  “How are you feeling?” Jane said. She laid the back of her hand against Dorie’s head, but the girl did not feel hot, or damp, or anything unusual. She didn’t have any physical signs of sickness—it was just this listlessness, as if she was worn out by their work of eating from spoons, as if she was depressed from not being allowed to make blue lights flicker in the air.

  Dorie’s shoulder shrugged. She rolled over and stared out the window into the blue of an after-storm sky.

  Frustrated, Jane rose and went to the window. She would have to keep Dorie well hidden from the guests if this continued—the girl looked like a lost war orphan. Jane stared into the woods, wondering what trick to try. Maybe she should admit the task was too hard for her—maybe she should bend her pr
ide and get advice from Mr. Rochart. Mr. Rochart the surgeon. If she ever saw him of course, and where was he, with the party starting today?

  “Father,” said Dorie from the bed.

  Impossible sightline for Dorie, but the instant she said that Jane saw him standing, just inside the forest, as if Jane’s wishes and Dorie’s words had conjured him. He was clutching a tree branch with one hand and his side with another, and she saw him take a step toward the back lawn that made it look as though he were swimming through molasses. He bent, clutching his side, as if in pain.

  Concern coalesced into action. “Out of bed and wash your face,” she said firmly to Dorie, and she hurried for the stairs, whirling down them as fast as her feet would go. She emerged onto the back lawn, blinking in the clear sunlight till she saw him, immobile next to a thorny locust, his hand outstretched toward the house. “Mr. Rochart,” she shouted, running for the trees. “Edward!”

  Slowly his head tilted up. His amber eyes took a while to focus on her, as if traveling back from a great distance. “Jane,” he said wonderingly. “Jane.”

  She slipped in past the first tree, barely thinking that this was the forest in her rush to get to him. “I am here, sir,” she said. “Lean on me.”

  He clasped her forearm. “Yes, you are flesh and blood, are you not? Not a pale mist of blue masquerading as a live girl. Say you are real, Jane.”

  “I am,” she said. His hand still clutched her arm. “You look unsteady. Do you need assistance? Shall I find Poule?”

  He shook his head, his eyes vague again. “Did you hear the windstorm last night?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. A shudder rippled across her shoulders. “You must get out of the forest.”

  “My foot,” he said faintly.

  She looked and saw how his leg stretched awkwardly behind him, saw that thin scarves of blue seemed to wind around his ankle, pinioning him. His right hand held a satchel to his ribs, and blue weaved from his fingers, around it.

  Sharp anger, born of fear. It rose up in Jane, and she felt the hot orange of her curse lash at the iron, so hot she thought her face might literally burn. No time for thoughts of water—she had to pull it off to find relief. She clutched at the chin of her mask, lifting it an infinitesimal bit to get air, said desperately to distract him: “Look up at the window; do you see Dorie?”

  “My little one,” he said, turning that way, and lurched another half-step toward the house.

  Jane scrabbled at the leather straps, pulling them aside, and then the mask was suddenly off, cooling her face. The orange tongues of anger lashed out, raging at the idea that he was stolen from her, would be taken from her. He must not be caught, and she tore at his ankle with her bare hands, as if fingers alone could melt the blue shackles of air.

  “No,” she whispered to it, “no no no no no…,” and above her she felt him lurch another half-step, and another, and the blue seemed less all the time as she told it no, peeling off, crackling away. “You can make it,” she told Edward, while simultaneously willing the blue: no no no.

  Another step and he was past her. Another, and he was to the last tree, then out, out of the woods, onto the back lawn.

  “Jane,” he said, that wonder sharp in his voice. “Jane!”

  “Coming, sir,” she said, and there was a tremble in her voice. She shoved the mask into place, buckling it firm against her now-tangled hair. A blue flash zipped along the ground, back into the woods, and vanished out of sight.

  She stumbled from the woods, shivering, and suddenly his arms were around her, holding her close.

  “I should never have put you in danger, oh, Jane.…”

  “I am fine”—gulp—“I am fine.” The sharp adrenaline and rage were draining now, lessening until she was very aware of his arm around her shoulders, his hand holding her upper arm tight.

  Perhaps he realized it at the same moment, for he released her.

  He shook his head as if grounding himself in the present, and some of the old color returned to his face. His face closed off, became the familiar sardonic mask. He ran a hand unconsciously over his side where the blue had been and no longer was, tucked the thick satchel under his arm. From a distance he said, “I owe you a rather sizable debt, Jane, do I not?”

  “Sir?”

  He cast around for something to do, reached to pick up one dry branch blown free from the forest by the windstorm. He turned it to study the thorns, then tossed it into the undergrowth. “I frequently walk here to throw back the branches,” he said, and there was a self-mocking note to his voice that suggested he was trying to lighten the situation. “If I let them, the trees would come right up to the house.”

  “Sir, how is your ankle?” said Jane.

  “It is well; never mind it.” He picked up more branches and hurled them into the forest. “It is the trees that must concern you. This is Birnam Wood, and as in Shakspyr’s tale of madness, it is creeping toward me. But this wood is alive; it will catch me before my time is through.” He was retreating again—closing himself off behind archaic, formal ways of speaking and dark thoughts.

  Then he turned and saw her expression, and his mouth twisted in a sort of smile. “Forgive me,” he said. “It is but a wild fancy. For aught I know this stretch of yard has the same measurements as when it was laid two centuries ago. But you did not come out here to let me lean on your arm like an old man and hear me talk of moving trees. No, there is something of far greater import on your slim shoulders. Speak, Jane, what would you have me do? Now and forever, you must see I am in your service.”

  She shivered at his talk of moving forests, and said, “I could almost agree with you that the trees move, sir.”

  “Edward,” he said. “I could almost believe in your ridiculous fancies, Edward. If you were not so clearly a raving lunatic, Edward.”

  “You’re not!” she said. “I saw the blue on your ankle!” She startled at her own outburst and stopped herself, though deep inside ran the frightened thought: five years, they had been gone five years. They were gone for good, weren’t they, weren’t they…? She could feel her boots sinking into the mud in the silence.

  “I’m not mad, eh?” He scoffed at himself. “It is gone now, Jane. Just a passing madness of a madder wood. What proof have you that I am not a lunatic, or worse?”

  She was silent another moment, and then suddenly all her thoughts seemed to burst forth and off her tongue and she said, “I think you carry a dark burden, sir—Edward.”

  “I do?” His tone mocked her worry, but she pressed on, her brain making previously half-formed ideas into connections on the spot. It was not just the burden of his craft; no, there was more.

  “I think you blame yourself for Dorie’s manner of birth,” she said. “And further … and further I think you go—you went—into the woods secretly, to try to find the fey, so they will undo what they’ve done to her.”

  “Isn’t that rather dangerous of me? To seek out the fey? Besides, what could one little fey do to help me, even if I found them?” The dry branch broke in half under his grip. He tossed half aside and his hands closed around the remaining piece, his fingers weaving through the black thorns.

  She thought back to the stories. “The Queen, then. She can make bargains. You’re looking for the Queen.”

  “A lofty ambition,” he mocked. “And when I find her?”

  “You’ll bargain for Dorie’s soul,” she said.

  But this guess seemed to fall short.

  Mr. Rochart tossed away the stick and clasped her shoulder, steering her back toward the house. “The guests will arrive soon,” he said, as lightly as if they had been only talking about the weather. “For this tedious chore we call a ‘party.’ We pronounce mingling with uninspired souls ‘charming,’ and talking of unimportant topics ‘delightful.’ Oh, I despise it. Pity me, Jane, for I must smile and play the artist for all these women with their expectations.”

  She shuddered. “I couldn’t do it.”

  “A
nd yet, Jane, if I bring this fortnight off perfectly it could be a great thing for us—for all of us.” Mr. Rochart shook his head and she saw the financial worries laid over him like a glove.

  She remembered Miss Ingel in her aquamarines, Nina in her furs, and briefly she wondered why his situation was so dire. Surely the money was coming in—where was it going to? But merely she said, “I will do what I can to help, sir.”

  “Will you?” He turned his strange amber eyes upon her. “Then you must bring Dorie down to mingle with the guests.”

  Jane twisted away. “No,” she said immediately. “She’s not ready.”

  “She’s not?” Edward stopped her in the middle of the mud-splashed lawn. His amber eyes shadowed and focused on hers. She felt caught, like prey. “You must. Every night, you must. Don’t think I don’t know what they say of my daughter. And of me—that I lock her in a garret like some madwoman, that I keep her hidden. She must come and be normal. You must come and make sure that she is.”

  “But—”

  “Please,” he said, and she was still. He studied her. “I see thoughts whirling behind your eyes,” he said. “You feel like a trapped animal; you are desperate for any excuse not to sit in a dark corner of my drawing room for a couple hours each night. Am I such an ogre?”

  “No,” Jane said reluctantly.

  “Then what are you frightened of?”

  She did not answer.

  Finally he said, more lightly, “I foresee one objection—you are going to tell me you and Dorie don’t have any dresses suitable for evening soirees. I have brought her a new one from town, and for you I have a new pair of dancing shoes.”

  “You shouldn’t have,” she said, overwhelmed, but he held up a hand.

  “No, do not thank me. I saw your sister in town and she sent them. She said specifically to tell you that they were commissioned for you—I gather she often sends hand-me-downs?”

  “Very nice ones,” Jane said, but it was true, the thought of Helen having specifically made these for her was a spot of gladness in her heart. “Did she send a letter?”