Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

Jane held her side as if it had a stitch. Her ribs were too broad for her dress, suddenly, and they labored against the golden panels. What was it to her if he danced with his clients? That was what he was supposed to do—what he had told her he would do. It wasn’t his fault that she couldn’t understand how he could say he hated parties, hated smiling, hated the dance—and now could whisk away the redhead in the slinky green silk with an air of absolute charm, smile at her as if she were the only person in the room, whirl her around as if he loved every minute of this gathering.

  He wasn’t supposed to dance with Jane, not in this life or any other. Even the imaginary whole-faced Jane was nothing compared to this woman’s sculpted perfection (the perfection he had created, oh, why wouldn’t he adore his living artwork), and it wasn’t just her. More women were in the room now, including Nina, and the Misses Davenport’s cousin, who was nearly as striking as Blanche. She was shorter, and her figure not nearly so fine, but her face was a tiny cornered thing of heartbreaking beauty, and the few men flocked around her, to the dismay of both Misses Davenport. Had the cousin, then, already been under his knife?

  It mattered little if she had or not—the women’s beauty was still from money, whether bred or bought. These were the people of this world, and she was a fool to believe that Mr. Rochart’s seemingly unguarded moments with her could mean anything more than that she happened to be standing nearby when he spoke. A man who could swear that he despised parties and then charm a roomful of women—no, she didn’t understand him, she couldn’t understand him, and the familiar claws of cold humiliation tore her up inside.

  The waltz rang to a bright finish, and Mr. Rochart twirled Blanche into his arms and against the piano. They stopped, breathing with the effort of the dance, and Mr. Rochart took a long time to draw away from his lovely partner in green, to let her escape his arms. Jane’s shoulder blades prickled under her filmy dress, recalling how that touch felt.

  The elder Miss Davenport also watched this interaction carefully, her eyes flicking from Mr. Rochart and Blanche to her younger sister and the moon-eyed boy gazing at her. Weighing options, but good luck to her, thought Jane. As if anyone in the room could surpass Blanche Ingel.

  “Da!” said Dorie, and she ran to hug his knees.

  Edward bent to caress the blond head. “Are you behaving yourself, my little terror?”

  “Oh, you ogre!” butted in the elder Miss Davenport. “This sweet thing is an angel, a bunnykin, a darling moppet. I just adore her, and she adores me already, don’t you, precious? Look at her sweet pink frock. Can you give us a curtsey, pet?”

  Jane’s hand crept down to the radiator to rap on iron as Dorie smiled and curtseyed prettily at the crowd. “Oh, what a doll!” she heard Miss Davenport exclaim, and then the other girls pressed in until Jane couldn’t see Dorie at all. She stood, unwilling to either leave her dark corner or risk Dorie getting out of her sight.

  Too much attention might be a balm, might make Dorie sufficiently happy that she would not be tempted to destroy her father’s reputation in a single flash of blue light. On the other hand, Jane had seen more than once what excessive adoration could do to a child. She did not know Dorie’s measure in this situation, and she took a step in, nerving herself to fight her way into that flock.

  But luckily Mrs. Davenport’s broad figure moved, and Dorie came back into view. She was smiling and laughing with the pretty ladies, twirling to show her skirts. Dorie did not pick up her skirts as another girl might do, or coyly twirl one of her golden curls, but for all that she did not look strange.

  Jane sank to her chair, heartbeat slowing. As long as no one asked Dorie to demonstrate perfect penmanship, perhaps they would make it through the night.

  A woman in a deep turquoise silk with black net overlay claimed the next chair over. Nina. “Famished!” she said. “Dieting really takes it out of one. Enough to make you want the old fashions like you’ve got on.” She gestured at the loose panels of Jane’s dress. “You could eat a cow in that frock and no one would know.”

  “Don’t you have other girls to bother?” said Jane.

  Nina laughed and settled into her chair. “But I find you the most entertaining. There’s no use sharpening my wit on those feather bolsters. Look at them, all hovering around poor Edward.”

  Jane hated the possessive way that Nina spoke of him. “They don’t have a chance against Miss Ingel,” Jane said. “Look at the way she moves.”

  “Like a confection of marzipan and rainbows,” Nina said dryly. “She’d better enjoy the attention now, because next week this party will be mine, all mine.” Jane raised her eyebrows, but Nina just laughed and dismissed her comment with a wave. Went back to assessing the chances of the women. “Well, old Ingy’s a duckling imprinting on her ‘savior’—you did see her before, yes? Men love ducklings, no matter what they might say. Then there’s the bolster Davenports—two can be twice as nice—but their mother will whisk them away soon enough when she realizes he’s flat broke. Makes you wonder where the money goes, doesn’t it?”

  “Not particularly,” said Jane.

  Her curt answer seemed to amuse Nina, who leaned forward. “Not even the Varee chirurgiens charge what he does, because they can’t compare to him and they know it. And now with this jump in skill he’s made, I’ve told him it’s imperative he double his prices—after me, of course.” She flapped a hand at the drawing room. “They’ll all pay it, those bolsters. So where does it all go?” She tipped back her champagne. “I think he’s got a secret child somewhere he’s paying off.”

  “The Prime Minister’s wife,” Jane said without thinking.

  “So you do have ears,” said Nina. “I like a girl who listens at dumbwaiters. Not her, though. She’s completely obsessed with their five drippy children and that doughy husband of hers. I think she just spent extra time with Edward trying to get those children done. At their age.” Her eyebrows were expressive. “No, I think there’s someone from the past. He grew up abroad, you know. Never came to Silver Birch until almost the end of the war.” She clacked polished nails against jet beads. “There’s something leftover from his past he’s taking care of.”

  Jane’s memory flicked back to the old man with the cane at the carriage house that one day, the old man who was not Martha’s father.

  Dorie ran across the drawing room floor, giggling as the elder Miss Davenport pretended to try and catch her. Miss Davenport might have had more success if she hadn’t interrupted the chase to arrange her body in artful poses.

  “Good to see the child acting like a child,” said Nina. “That’ll go a long way to making the bolsters feel secure.”

  “Secure?”

  “Hard to entrust yourself and all your money to a man who everyone knows has a damaged child locked in an attic.” Nina rose from her seat. “But you might not be all bad for her,” she conceded.

  Reflexively, Jane rose with her, watching Dorie giggle and slide.

  “No, I never saw such a change in a child,” said Nina. She smoothed her turquoise silk around her hips, readying to sweep back into the fray. “Very odd. It’s as though she were released from chains.”

  Chains, thought Jane. Iron chains, and the image hit her like a blow.

  She and Dorie, encased in iron, bound by it, enclosed by it. A sarcophagus, an iron maiden—the ironskin not armor but an airtight coffin.

  She sat down hard on the chair, her legs suddenly wobbly and useless.

  The iron was supposed to keep the fey curse from hurting others. From leaking out.

  But what did it do to keep it in? What was it doing to Dorie?

  And what had it already done to Jane?

  Her fingers trembled on the folds of her dress. So she took the mask off for sleep. That was nothing compared to sixteen hours a day of steeping in the poison, year after year. She had stopped those she met from feeling transitory rage—and in return she had taken it all, until her soul was eaten away with self-loathing.

  She watched t
he tiny blond girl smile up at the pretty ladies, her curls light and bouncing, and Jane felt sick. It had taken Nina to point out what Jane should’ve known immediately. It wasn’t that Dorie was being stubborn and resistant, though she was. It was the iron making her ill by forcing her to bottle up her true self.

  Jane rose, unsteady on her feet, fingers clutching her golden skirts to hold onto something, anything. Across the room she saw Edward’s eyes go to her, saw him look worried at her distress, but she couldn’t, she just couldn’t, be there one more minute. She lurched from the drawing room, climbed the side stairs with nerveless feet, flung herself into the safety of her room.

  The moonlight laid a square of white on the wooden floor and she stood on its edge till the light lapped her toes, glittered the hem of her dress. Breathing, breathing.

  If she were right about this, then everything she had thought was wrong. The good she had attempted was bad, and not just for her.

  And now it wasn’t just that she would have to start working to undo years of damage.

  She would have to reveal herself to the world.

  Oh, say she was wrong, say it! She must be overreacting, must be mistaken. Anything so the answer was not inevitably: The mask comes off.

  Jane spun to face the mirror. It was a good mirror, clear, unwavy. Unrepentant. Her iron mask looked back at her, her companion and protector, hiding the half-destruction. Skin on one side, iron on the other. Skin and iron, and her gauzy golden dress moonlit around her like fey light.

  An explosion.

  Through the mirror she looked until she saw, not Jane, but her past, the battlefield, plain as daylight and as immediate.

  There was no sheltering past, no curtain of sleep to filter the nightmare, no, there it was, freed from its nightly confines to attack her in the day. There was her past, coming for her.

  “Jane!” Mother shouts, but she does not turn. She won’t embarrass Charlie by taking his hand or squeezing his shoulder, but she nods at him, and he nods back. There are no soldiers, no King’s Men to come to their aid. They are all elsewhere, or dead. There is just them, clumped together on the white-grey moor, iron raised against an enemy.

  Grim and white-faced they march across the moor.

  That dawn Jane thought she saw no signal, no sign that the day was beginning. But she did, or perhaps she only sees it now, now in this living memory, this waking dream. An orange-blue flash like a comforting candle flame.

  Then Sam—the baker’s apprentice, the lighthearted boy she danced with once—explodes next to Charlie.

  A cry goes up. “There! The fey! The fey!”

  Bombs are costly for the fey, she knows. But fey have no body in their natural state, no way to touch humans. Their strategy is to kill the strongest humans and take over their bodies. Then in their borrowed human forms, they can fight. It is why they have been harrying the village before the battle. We knew it, Jane thinks, and yet our hearts lurch when our dead stagger out of the forest, swinging sharpened wooden picks at us.

  “Stab them with the iron,” she shouts to her little brother. “It’s the only way to drive the fey out.”

  Charlie knows. And they advance, iron staves at the ready. It is gruesome work, and not all the villagers are up to the task. A man runs, retching. Jane’s nerves are strung so tight that every fey she studies seems to be at the end of a long tunnel of fog. Or perhaps that is the actual fog, insistent and cruel, hiding their attackers until they are too near. A farmer she knows by sight runs at her with a sharpened wooden pole and she thinks it is all up. But Charlie trips him, and his clumsy dead feet fall over her. Jane rolls and stabs the dead farmer with the iron. Tentatively, then harder, reminding herself that war is not a time for politeness, reminding herself that this friendly farmer is now a mask worn by the fey.

  As the iron goes in, the fey dies. A fey in a human body is vulnerable; the state in which they have bodies to kill is the state in which they can be killed. Blue light ripples around the stave and turns stark white, crackles, keens—is gone. For good. The farmer slumps into the dirt.

  “Good work,” Jane says to Charlie, who is ten feet off holding his iron bar. He smiles, that happy-boy smile she knows so well, and then a ball of orange-blue light and rock and glass falls behind him at his feet.

  “Charlie!” she screams, and she runs toward him. I think I can bat the bomb away with my iron staff, I think—I do not know what I think. Time slows, and over his shoulder she sees the fey that threw it, a thin blue light with a carefully formed human face floating in its center. The face is exhausted, gloating.

  Charlie has time to turn and see his death before it explodes.

  The world is suddenly hot then, and full of rage. Her vision goes red and smeary. She loses some time then, in life, in the dream. The next thing she knows she is bent double, spearing her brother’s chest with cold iron to destroy his killer. Blood drips from the left side of her face, and it seems that everything around her is very angry, though at that moment she feels nothing.

  Nothing except for the weight of the cold iron in her hands. The battle has moved away, east across the moor, but she doesn’t want to let the stave go. She clutches it to her chest as her other hand touches the strange whirring light that buzzes around her cheek. Her fingers come away wet and carmine and glowing. Shouts and clangs ring in the distance as blood drips down her chin, through her fingertips and onto the early yellow cowslips that dot the blackened moor.

  Now in the bedroom of Silver Birch Hall, in this waking dream, the vantage point swings around until dreaming Jane is looking down at kneeling Jane. The kneeling girl raises her face, her gaze. Half of the girl’s face is Jane’s, clean and perfect, serene and trusting. The other half is an inky void, a nothing, a bottomless pit like a night without stars.

  One green eye blinks in slow motion, falling like the crash of a piano lid. The girl’s half-mouth moves, and words form in Jane’s mind. It’s a sentence, or maybe an echo of a sentence, repeated with the monotony of a ticking clock.

  I am Jane, and you would be frightened to look upon me.

  * * *

  The room swam back into focus until Jane was merely staring at a mirror. Her fingers trembled.

  She had to know.

  Jane closed her eyes and unbuckled the straps of the mask as she did every night. The iron came away from her face, leaving little strips of cold where the edges had touched her around the cotton padding. The padding conformed to her face and it stayed there until Jane seized it at her chin and peeled it away, dropped it and the mask to the dresser with a cold thump. The mask rocked on the cheek plate, thrummed as it stilled.

  If she was going to face the world like this, she had to know. No more hiding from the mirror.

  This was the start of her new life, and from now on Jane would be strong. Would master the poison, somehow, or would learn to live with the anger she caused, or would learn to live alone. The image of herself flashed behind her closed eyes, the black nothingness splitting her face, and the girl repeating: I am Jane, and you would be frightened to look upon me.

  I am Jane, I am Jane, I am Jane.

  She opened her eyes.

  Chapter 12

  WITHOUT IRON

  The iron mask gleamed dully in the morning sun, glinting light from where Jane had dropped it on the dresser the night before.

  Jane was fully dressed for the day, her hand on the doorknob, and still she could not make herself leave the room without the mask. She could not walk out the door with that face.

  That face that no one had seen in five years.

  She told herself she should be bold, told herself she should not be ashamed of an accident that was not her fault. There was no reason to feel naked and exposed, as though she were walking down the street without a skirt. Her face was nothing to be ashamed of, and she needed to see what her life would be without iron.

  She must go.

  Jane opened the door and then heard Nina’s drawling voice from the hall. �
�You can’t possibly expect me to be up this early—oh, just give me the cup of chocolate and go. No, I don’t want that leaden cow patty your cook calls a croissant.”

  The servant’s reply was inaudible in the slamming of Jane’s door.

  Jane leaned against the back of the door, hand curled cold against her good cheek. Dorie she could face. Cook she could face. Maybe she could even screw up her courage to face Edward without her mask.

  But she could not face all those women. She didn’t really want to see any of the party guests, true, but she knew it was chiefly the women. The men were another species, out of reach, out of mind, but those horribly perfect women made her shrivel inside. Blanche Ingel with her heart-stopping beauty; Nina, who could be amusing one second and raze you with a single well-placed word the next.

  Jane pressed her chest, willing her panic to slow. She would not put on the mask, but she would go veiled. Fair enough? She listened to her conscience inside, and it agreed: Yes. That will do to start.

  Baby steps. Just like Dorie. Except no one would be Jane to her Dorie, so Jane would have to encourage herself, and not flay herself open over what she couldn’t do. One step at a time.

  Jane pinned her second-best hat to her head and wrapped the cotton veil around her bare cheek—several times, more fully than she’d hidden the first day here. At last her face was completely obscured once more. Her breath came slower as she hid herself away, protected herself.

  Out into the hall.

  This time it was empty. Some of the guests were on this floor, some on the third. It was just her bad luck to have Nina billeted between her and Dorie. Of course, in most regular households the governess would’ve been in the garret, and she would’ve had to brave the entire household to wend her way down to her charge.

  Still, she was glad to slip inside Dorie’s rooms without encountering anybody.

  Dorie was in bed but not asleep. Jane saw with sinking heart that Martha had followed earlier instructions to put the gloves back on her at night. Dorie lay with her arms in iron, flat as a pancake, staring at the silver-papered ceiling.