Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

  Jane sat on the bed. Dorie did not move. “Here goes,” she said, and unlocked the mesh gloves, peeled them from the child’s pale skin. She rubbed Dorie’s arms down with her hands as if human touch could dispel the aftereffects of iron.

  Dorie finally looked interested as Jane got the blood flowing through her forearms. “Off?” she said, and there was a flicker of light in her eyes.

  “Today and more,” Jane said grimly. “I have a new bargain to make with you. You will work on your hands with me … and I will work on ‘mother stuff’ with you.”

  Dorie’s blue eyes were wide.

  “Only together, do you understand?” Jane seized Dorie’s hands, drew them close to her, her voice falling to a fierce whisper. “This is no game. This can only be you and me in this room. Otherwise you and your father are in danger.”

  Dorie nodded, and there was gravity in the expression.

  Jane breathed. “Now,” she said. “Lift your quilt in the air. Without your hands.”

  Dorie spread her arms over the quilt and went silent. With a little tug and bobble, the quilt slowly rose. Then fell again, and Dorie looked surprised.

  Jane nodded. “You’re weak this morning. That’s not surprising. Stop that for now and we’ll have breakfast and do morning exercises with our hands. If you work hard, we’ll come back to this before lunch. Understand?”

  Dorie nodded. Then she smiled. “Yes, Miss Jane,” she said clearly.

  Jane smiled, and the action felt strange on her cheek, the skin crinkling against the cotton veil like the cracking of a porcelain mask. Or maybe the strangeness was that she almost felt like she could feel the little girl’s emotions, and the strongest one was trust.

  * * *

  “I just don’t see why you have to go without it,” said Cook crossly. “Sure and if there’s something that helps you withstand them, you seize it. Even if it is wearing iron across your face.”

  “But my worry is that it’s not helping me,” Jane said. She had offered to chop walnuts for that night’s dessert, but the conciliatory gesture didn’t lessen Cook’s temper.

  “You’re still wearing a hat, aren’t you then? Covered all up like a beekeeper in June. Not like that’ll be normal.”

  Jane knew that the normally friendly and cheery cook couldn’t help her reaction to Jane. She knew intimately how frustrating it was to react in anger when you didn’t think of yourself as an angry person. She hadn’t been, once. She’d been even tempered, patient with children, tolerant of others’ foibles.

  Cook threw chopped yellow onions in the pot with sharp splashes. “It’s not right, and you not knowing how Dorie will react. Children need careful handling. You’ve got to be thinking of her.”

  “I am, truly,” said Jane. She attempted a smile, though she knew it was obscured by layers of cotton. “It’s all part of the master plan.”

  Cook folded bay leaves and long runners of thyme into a square of cheesecloth. She didn’t turn around. “There are plenty here who’d give nigh anything to stop their curses and you just let it out.”

  “Plenty? Who?”

  “Never you mind, missy. You just sit down and give it all a good long think, that’s what.” Cook tied off the bag of herbs with twine and dropped it in the pot, washed her hands of the argument. “Now I’ve said my piece and I’m done. You’ll be passing me the walnuts now.”

  With the back of a butcher knife, Jane scraped them from the chopping block into a green bowl. “Did Mr. Rochart need careful handling, too? When he was young?”

  “And how should I be knowing that?” Cook said. “He didn’t grow up here.”

  “Oh,” said Jane, and then remembered Nina saying last night that he had grown up abroad. “But this house belonged to his family, yes?”

  “It’ll be the family house, sure, and we all knew the last Mr. Rochart. Cross old man, rest him—he paid his workers fair and just, but never a kind word for any soul. He died a good decade before the war, and the house sat empty till this Mr. Rochart returned. A grandson, you see. His da had run off when he was just a boy—some quarrel, and the old man never forgave him.”

  “Then when did Mr. Rochart come back?”

  “Just after the Great War started,” Cook said, “but that’s enough asking into your master’s business.”

  Jane thought it better not to point out that Cook frequently volunteered similar innocuous gossip, common knowledge that had been in the village for decades. “I liked the croissants you made this morning,” she offered, like an olive branch. “With the chocolate in them.”

  “Sure and you got one of mine,” Cook said, flicking flour into the bowl. “I’ll tell you, none of these girls from the village knows how to make a decent pastry, never mind it’s a skill every mother should’ve taught them. But no one has enough time to fold a thousand layers of pastry, let alone the cost of the butter to go between them, and it does cost, because no one has cows any more than they have the cinema, nothing is the same at all.…”

  Detoured on the new rant, Cook briskly dumped honey and eggs into the walnuts, preparing the filling for the tart. Her treatment of Jane brought a sour feeling to her stomach. This is how it had been five years ago, hadn’t it? It was as if all her time with the mask had been undone. And yet, was she wrong to try it? If one way brought frustration to Jane and one way to everyone else, what was the morally correct thing to do?

  She sighed, wishing there were a third way. Poule had suggested that her water imagery was the right path, but was it really helping, or was that just wishful thinking? She would have to be pretty darn watery to counteract this curse. But it wasn’t like she had anything else to try, and there was no one inside her head to see the silliness. So why not? She would be a cheerful sparkling pond, drowning the orange flames of her cheek before they could even spring up. So cool and watery that fish could swim around inside her skull, as if her head were a glass bowl. The ridiculous image cheered her.

  Poule came through the kitchen door with mail in hand—circulars and a letter for Cook that the woman seemed pleased to get. She silently handed Jane a thick cream-colored envelope. Then, leaning closer, she stared at Jane’s veil. Jane was surprised to realize that she did not instantly take offense at the impertinence. No, she was perfectly calm and interested, a cool still pond, wondering what Poule’s reaction would be. The woman had seemed to withstand it the other night, but … Well. Jane didn’t think she could bear it if everyone in the house hated her.

  Poule’s nostrils flared and Jane remembered how she had scented after the fey in the woods. The short woman spread her hand wide and reached high, high to Jane’s face, briefly touched the crook between thumb and index finger to Jane’s chin, as if she were measuring it. Jane managed not to flinch. Poule’s silver hair streamed loose, iridescent in the sun, rippling like the waves on her imaginary Jane pond.

  “I’ve felt worse,” Poule said at last. She dropped her hand and turned to go, treading heavily across the grey kitchen stone.

  “Wait,” said Jane. “What do you mean?”

  Poule stopped at the door. “I mean we have tales of a dwarf named Moum who got cursed with rage. He started three wars, and his children tore each other to bloody bits.” She shrugged. “Say what you like, but I don’t have any urge to rend Creirwy.”

  The cook laughed as she beat the filling. “I should hope not.”

  * * *

  Jane pulled her paper knife from a drawer and slit open the heavy stationery that Helen favored. Four heavily written-on pages fell out, plus a thin blue-and-white photo of Helen in a dark gown, and a scrap of rose fabric.

  She skimmed the parties and balls. Alistair had one of the last working fey-tech cameras, and here she was before opening night of a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Tragedy. She had a new afternoon tea dress, and here was a swatch so Jane could see how it would complement her complexion. Jane laughed, imagining Helen sending a swatch of complexion as well. Then she sobered as she started on the last
page.

  “You asked me point-blank what I meant by ‘Ironskin or no.’ My ever-blunt Jane! And also you wondered if my fine friends care nothing for the war, think little of it, &c. I assure you it is true, and I am only reporting to you what I see around me. I try to be as cynical as the next woman about the malingerers who yet line our hospitals, and I try to accept it when my bosom friend Gertrude steers us clear of a begging ironskin in the street. I know she knows of you and has only pity for me, but I don’t think she understands what it means, and how that iron leg she reviles is at least the common decency of that poor boy to cover up a horrible curse. And yet she thinks he should go one step farther, and shut himself up so he is not seen at all.

  “They all think that, Jane, and so I wonder what would happen if you came to live with me as I previously begged you to do. I suppose we should become social pariahs after all. That is not something I thought a month ago at the wedding, but I do believe that the society here gets more and more rarefied each day, as all these fine ladies and gentlemen try to hide anything that reminds them of the war far, far away, and move on with their lives. I do not believe they can conceive of what it was like to be in the country—the women, I mean. The men who had to fight understand it well enough, though I am rather shocked at the number of men who paid a poor servant to take their place in the war. Alistair would call that naïve of me, and of course I understand that some lives are simply more important—their loss would make a greater impact, tear a bigger hole in the silk of society. And I knew full well when I married him that even my darling Alistair avoided the war, and I am glad of it.

  “And yet … I am not certain it seems right. Sometimes I think, would Jane approve of this? I can hear your sharp tongue decrying it even as I write.

  “By the time you read this I shall be past caring what others think of me. My Alistair has introduced me to a very surprising secret—a secret which you would no doubt be shocked to hear! Very soon those ‘fine ladies’ will be forced to treat me as one of their own, and their malicious tongues shall be well-stopped. Or rather, I shall be proof against anything said.

  “Now you must come, for with this new capital I shall be able to champion even you. No doubt I shall hardly have time to see you between invitations, and yet I will, I must.… Do come.

  “Your loving sister, Helen.”

  Worry, empathy, irritation, all snaked through Jane’s core and made heavy her heart. She folded up the letter and slipped it into the bottom of her trunk.

  * * *

  “We’ll play a game,” said Jane. She was sitting across the room from Dorie, keeping a watchful eye for any uncharacteristic signs of anger. She was also still thinking of herself as a calm pool of water, because if nothing else, it reminded her not to let her temper carry her from normal-cursed Jane into orange-tongues-of-fire Jane. It seemed as though the imagery was helping with Dorie—the girl was not reacting to Jane’s anger the way Cook had been. Although that could be due to Dorie’s strange fey talent. It was so hard to tell.

  “I like games,” said Dorie. She was speaking more this week, Jane noticed, answering with short sentences rather than nods and shakes of the head. Jane wondered if it was increased confidence, or comfort, or merely practice in listening to people hold conversations—maybe the chattering party guests were good for something after all.

  “I’m going to throw a ball at you,” Jane said. “I want you to bat it away from you, just using your fey talent. Shall we give it a go?” In her mind this “game” was defense, but she wasn’t about to explain that to Dorie.

  Dorie nodded, then remembered her voice and added: “Yes, please.”

  Jane scrunched a cloth napkin into a ball and wrapped it with a length of string. She tossed it across the room toward Dorie’s lap, where it fell on her knee, bounced, and rolled away.

  Dorie examined where the ball had come to a halt, then hefted it into the air. It glowed a faint blue. She let go, and it fell to the floor again.

  “Now try doing that quicker,” said Jane. “When I throw the ball, grab it from the air.” She retrieved the balled-up napkin, tossed it again, and again Dorie missed it.

  “Again,” Jane said. “Lash out at it.”

  Dorie tried to obey, but what she seized was her Mother doll that lay on the bed, near the arc of the napkin ball. Glowing blue with streaks of orange, the doll slipped off the bed and thumped to the floor.

  It was either a problem of dexterity or a problem of being out of practice. Or both. Just as catching a ball with your hands was a learned skill, so was catching a napkin with your mind. Dorie had built towers the first week Jane was there, before she got the tar, but that was a process of raising each piece and stacking it. Jane was certain Dorie could do this—but it was different.

  “Let’s drop the throwing part of it for now,” said Jane, after several more attempts resulted in utter failure. She paced over to the window, thinking.

  Below she could see the hired servants setting up chairs and gay canopies for a tea party on the back lawn. She wondered if the fine ladies would be nervous so close to the forest. They “cared nothing for the war,” but surely here in the war-torn country it would strike home. Jane scanned the trees, as she always did, but she saw no tall dark form, saw no blue flickering lights. Just yellow and white ruffled swathes of silk, casting dark rectangles on the green lawn. Near the patio, two men were setting up a maypole. April was almost through, and that meant May Day, the last day of the Great War five years ago, the day the fey vanished. Of course the guests would enjoy the dancing and drinking aspect of the war holiday—would expect some sort of celebration. They just wouldn’t think about what it meant.

  Jane turned and sighed. She was a lovely blue pond, who cared nothing about picnics on the lawn or thoughtless city-born guests. She picked up the Mother doll and held it in front of her. “Try pushing this away.”

  Dorie fidgeted, frustrated, considering. Behind the obscuring layers of veil, Jane could not see the minute changes in expression she usually relied on, usually watched like a hawk.

  Yet it was odd—half-blind, she seemed to have a better sense of Dorie’s mood shifts than she ever had before. Perhaps it was that she had grown close to the girl; perhaps she was picking up on body position, breaths, sighs—because she was sensing Dorie’s flickering changes, pinpointing her mute emotions with a sense that seemed eerily spot-on.

  “If you work hard now, you can go to the tea party later on,” said Jane. The mandatory event made for good bartering.

  Jane felt Dorie make the decision to try. She looked up at the doll.

  Jane held the doll’s waist, readying for a small wobbly pressure as Dorie tried this new trick. “Just push it away.”

  Dorie bit her lip, concentrating.

  Blue light gathered on the doll in Jane’s hands, bathing its porcelain face in fey glow.

  The Mother doll exploded in Jane’s hands.

  Dorie’s face went to utter shock, then crumpled. She ran to Jane, flung herself into Jane’s arms, and Jane, as shocked by that as by anything, enfolded her in her embrace and stroked the fuzzy curls.

  “There, there,” Jane said. “There, there.” She tugged her veil out from under Dorie’s fierce hug, freeing her neck. Despite the extra warmth of the cotton swathing her face, cold shivers ran up and down her spine.

  What had she unleashed?

  * * *

  Jane backed out of Dorie’s room with an apronful of porcelain shards. Dorie had sobbed herself to sleep. In between sobs she had said once, quite clearly, “Put the gloves back on.” Jane held the girl close and did not comply.

  A swish of black skirts on the right—Nina’s back, turning, closing her bedroom door. Jane turned to the left, pretending not to see, hoping to move quickly on noiseless feet, but the broken porcelain clinked in her apron, and anyway, Nina was ever too aware of who might be around her.

  A black satin arm snaked through Jane’s bent one and Jane could not free herself withou
t dropping the porcelain shards.

  “Let me guess,” said Nina, nodding at the swathing white veil. “You’re a new widow with a fear of sunstroke.” She eyed the apron filled with pink shards and two unbroken blue glass eyes. “And you’ve dropped your husband’s urn. Pity about his blindness.”

  A blue lake, a calm blue lake where no fire could burn.

  “You’ll take me to Edward’s studio now, won’t you?” Though the words were a petitioner’s, submissive, the amused drawl belied that. “He truly is expecting me this time.” Nina produced a small calling card from her décolletage, one of Mr. Rochart’s. In black spiky ink he had written “3:00” on the back. As if in response, the grandfather clock far below began to peal the hour.

  “That could be any day, any place,” Jane said, but only because Nina expected her to put up a fight. She wasn’t the guardian of his studio, and it wasn’t up to her to decide whom he should entertain there. She continued down the hall, leading them around the maze of stairs and turns into the abandoned wing.

  “It was three a.m., and he wrote it in my rooms while lying blissfully on the chaise…,” parried Nina, but her words trailed off. She fell uncharacteristically silent as they went up the dark stairs.

  Though Nina’s face was its usual mask of arrogance—haughty tilt of brow, sneer in the lips—somehow Jane knew, she knew that Nina was frightened.

  They rounded the section where the stairs curved back and the hidden mirror startled them with their shadowy figures rushing in. Nina tightened her grip on Jane’s arm but calmly she said, “I can’t stand fey architecture.”

  “Personally, I’d be more worried about spiders in this wing than fey,” Jane said. “And rats. Spiders and rats, everywhere you look. The rats eat hair, you know. Late at night, when you’re asleep.”

  Nina said nothing, which made Jane all the more sure that she was right: Nina was afraid. She must be keeping an appointment—a surgical one. Because Nina wouldn’t be this nervous if she were keeping an assignation with Edward, no matter what ruse she tried to imply. Nina probably ate men like him for breakfast.