Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

  They emerged at the top of the house, which was darker than Jane expected. Black wool curtains had been hung at all the windows, extinguishing the sunlight. She wondered where he’d gotten the money for those, and then Nina gripped Jane’s arm closer, crushing it into her satin side. Her nails were chips of tile pinching Jane’s skin. “You wait for something for so long,” she said, “and when it comes, can it possibly live up to your expectations?”

  “Not likely,” Jane said softly.

  “The bolsters think a face is as easily changed as a dress,” Nina said. “You are the only one who might understand that you live in your face. As much as you long for the improvement, you know you will lose something, too. Well, you will see soon enough. I have seen your face, you know. Pretty enough if you like that sort of thing, but I would rather be me.”

  Jane stared at her. Nina did not notice. All her attention was in front of her, on that slab of wood, on the studio door.

  “I’m going to see me now,” she whispered. “The me I will soon be.” Her fingers lifted away from Jane’s arm, and she raised her hand to knock.

  The door opened partway before her knuckles could hit the door, opened just enough for Jane to see a shadowy Mr. Rochart standing in the dark, opened just enough for Nina to slide through. His eyes fell on Jane and she backed away. The door closed and a strip of green-gold light turned on, lighting the crack under it. The top floor was dark except for that glowing strip of light.

  Jane moved with nerveless feet down the steps.

  Nina and Edward—no.

  Well, maybe, but—something else.

  Her face. Nina had seen her face.

  Edward had sculpted her face.

  Jane stumbled down the stairs, feet nerveless beneath her, slipping from one step to the next. The bottom dropped from her stomach as she ran through the thought of what Edward might be contemplating.

  A new face. A whole face.

  Normal.

  The agony of desire struck her at a million points, a net constricting her skin, drawing her tight around that piercing hope.

  To be normal.

  She cried out, batting aside that hope, telling it to vanish, but it wouldn’t, it multiplied, insinuated itself into her brain, telling of all the joys she could have if only she were whole, if she were normal, if the last five years were only a bad dream.

  She stumbled to the landing with the hidden mirrors. Pictures of impossible memories blinded her sight, obscuring the Janes rushing in to meet her with a different Jane. Jane in that other timeline, that one where tall Charlie had sat beside her at Helen’s wedding, that one where her family was not blindsided by war.

  Jane walking through Crown Park in a yellow voile sundress, arm slung around the shoulders of a blond girl her age, laughing hysterically over an incident in her life drawing class involving a male model and his determination to pose au naturale, as one did in Varee. The normally dignified teacher had smacked his disrobing rear end with a broom.

  Jane leaning over the opera balcony before the start of Ma Petite Chou-Chou. Seeing a knot of friends below waving wildly to her, trying to get her attention. “Jane,” they shout, doubling over with laughter. One of the girls flips open a fan and dances with it à la Chou-Chou. Shocking, riotous, joyous. Shouting: “Jane!”

  Jane in Helen’s new pink sitting room, looking into the mirror before a dance. Her cheeks are flushed; her dark hair frames her face. She is solemn and fluttery, for tonight she will see him again, and tonight is the time that something important will happen, a declaration, a step into the future. She enters her sister’s fancy drawing room where the rich folk flit like champagne bursting and the gaslights dot yellow against the papered walls. And there he is, tall and dark, a man gaunt with the aftereffects of war. A widower, a heavyhearted man with a bite to his tongue, a man whose eyes light when they fall on her in the borrowed silver dress. The only man she could talk freely to, the only man she could ever love …

  Veiled Jane swam back into view.

  “Edward,” Jane whispered aloud to the stairwell. Her heart seemed to be breaking into a million shattered pieces, and the revelation of her face was only part of it, the crack in the frozen river that opened a hole to the raging current beneath. “I love Edward.”

  Porcelain shards tumbled to the carpet, spattered the floor like cracking ice.

  Chapter 13

  THE LAST RAY OF SUNLIGHT

  Jane was still woozy when Dorie woke from her nap late in the afternoon. Desire made her nerves twitch, made every step rock with the suppressed hope that threatened to explode, to split her apart.

  She sat on a bench partly concealed by the shrubbery and kept one eye on Dorie while the Misses Davenport petted her and fed her chocolate cakes under the yellow striped canopies on the slope of the lawn. She wondered if they were always so fond of children, or if it was the presence of an eligible suitor that brought out their doting. No, surely she was being catty. Jane sketched Dorie kneeling in the grass, and watched her tears from the morning vanish as the pretty ladies cosseted her. Dorie was blissful as the girls slipped her bites off of thin silver forks.

  “It’s perfect,” marveled a deep voice over her shoulder. “Chocolate cake without using her hands for anything.”

  Her heart lurched as she turned.

  Mr. Rochart stood behind her shoulder, half hidden in the curve of the laurels. He must have finished his appointment with Nina.

  Seeing him brought back all the agony of a couple hours ago. It was the first time she’d seen him since she thought that he might be planning to help her, the first time since she truly admitted what she hoped, what she could be allowed to desire if only she weren’t who she was.

  “Perhaps she can get them to feed her breakfast, too,” Jane found herself saying. “That is, if her father’s in the room.” She had not meant to say that, and the blood pounded in her damaged cheek. Flustered, she patted her cheek to make sure the veil was still in place, reminded herself to continue her thoughts of water, calm and cold.

  “Wicked girl,” growled Mr. Rochart. “Youngsters are not supposed to see so keenly into the faults of mortals.”

  “And at what age am I allowed to see what’s in front of my nose? I am twenty-one, you know. I hope I shan’t have to feign blindness much longer.” She marveled at the steadiness of her voice.

  “All of twenty-one?” He considered her for a silent moment. “I thought you were yet two years from that.” His smile was mocking, ironic. “Ah, Jane. How unfortunate that you should be a third my age.”

  “Your numbers exaggerate, sir.” Calmly, coolly, though her heart beat hard against her chest. “Two-thirds at most, I should say, for there is no grey on your temple, and you do not order stewed prunes at breakfast, like a grandfather in his dotage.”

  “You are too kind to me,” he said, and he brushed aside her covering hand to view her sketch.

  Jane willed her embarrassment at her amateur drawing to subside. He was a real artist, with a decade more experience besides. It took all her courage not to snatch the drawing away and close the sketchpad so he couldn’t see it.

  “The angle of the knees is off,” he said.

  “I know,” said Jane, looking at that over-erased spot. She clamped her lips closed on a torrent of other inadequacies she could plainly see.

  “And yet you have captured something of the spirit, which is far more important. It is Dorie to the life. May I?”

  Jane nodded, let him take her pencil.

  He studied the girl for a moment, then with firm black strokes corrected the tilt of the waist, the knees, the toes digging into the ground. “Always draw what’s underneath,” he said, “before you get to the folds and lace on top. You should have a life drawing class.”

  Jane did not say the obvious, that there were very many things that this Jane would have liked to have.

  Perhaps he saw the stubborn set of her lips, for he returned to a discussion of what he did like. “Yes, something
in the chin, the tilt of the head, is just right. Happy only when she is being adored. She is so like…”

  “Her mother?”

  “Though it pains me to admit it.”

  “Because you miss her,” prompted Jane, uncertain why else the thought would pain him.

  He handed the pencil back to her. It was warm from his hands. She let it lie loosely in her palm.

  “And now it is expected that I should take a new bride,” he said. “Dorie needs a mother, and the staff need someone else to cosset, someone who does not gruffly lock himself in an attic for weeks at a time. Miss Ingel is their frontrunner, I believe, for she is wealthy and kind and has a decade on those little chits the Misses Davenport. Yet another worry to add to my plate.” His fingers rested lightly on the sketch of Dorie.

  “Oh,” said Jane. She did not wish to say anything, yet the syllable burst forth anyway. There were so many things she wanted to say, and did not want to say, and letting the “Oh” escape at least stopped the incoherent words of desire for him, for her, from tumbling from her lips.

  There was silence in that misty air. She was transfixed by those amber eyes, caught, searching their blackening depths. Had he really sculpted her face? And why? Was he as curious as she to know what she might have been?

  Silence, and him watching her veil flutter. “You’re not wearing your mask,” he said.

  Jane’s hand flew to her cotton veil. “Does it bother you? Can you feel the curse?”

  He leaned close, considering.

  Surely her chest did not always rise and fall this much; surely her breaths were usually even and regular, barely disturbing the profile of her dress. Water, she thought, water to suffocate the flames. I could not bear it if he raged at me.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I am certainly angry that this happened to you, but I have felt that since shortly after we met.”

  “Perhaps you have more practice dealing with strangeness, because of Dorie.”

  “Perhaps I have too much anger of my own to tell. If a man is steeped in bitter anger every day of his life, how then would he notice a small additional fire? Particularly when the fire comes in the presence of…”

  She was silent as his eyes searched past her veil for hers. He was the source of all that she wanted, she knew that now, and the burdens of that were too much for one man to bear. She was insignificant; she could not be to him a tenth of what he represented to her.

  And yet, she felt something as he leaned in. It was oddly similar to the way she had seemed to sense Dorie’s feelings. Not her desire … but his?

  His breath made his voice rumble. “Words, I fling words at you, and still you bear up under them, Jane. Yet if you knew what I had seen, accepted, nay, desired … it would shock you. You are too unspoiled. If they knew, they would all leave, all those women, and good riddance. But the hurt to me is that I would lose your good opinion forever.”

  The accusation of naïveté echoed Alistair’s words, and she could not bear it from him. Oh, why did everyone think that because she was a scarred governess that she understood nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing?

  “I cannot believe you are evil,” she said. “If all the world spat on you, what care I for the world? If they all left you in a great flurry of fear, I should still be here, and stay by your side.”

  “I almost believe you would,” he said softly.

  The silence was too charged on that, and she rushed on: “Anyway, I know what you have done.”

  “You know…?”

  “Nina mentioned certain things and I uncovered the truth of the matter to my satisfaction. You are no mere artist in clay, but another sort altogether.”

  “Jane.”

  She lowered her voice. “I understand why you keep it hidden, why none of your clients talk. It would be embarrassing for them, surely.”

  His lips opened to speak, while that same rushing desire for normal welled up in her like a river that could not be contained, a waterfall that threatened to break open upon her lips.

  “Jane, I—”

  “Mr. Rochart, if—”

  “Oh, Edward!” cooed a young voice from the lawn, and another girl giggled. “Come see what we have made for our little pet.”

  Silence.

  “You are called,” said Jane, and she bent her head away from those amber eyes.

  “Of course, Miss Eliot.” A sharp bow, and he straightened with a smile, stiffened his spine as if arming for the fray. “Miss Davenports One and Two! I have been too long deprived of your company.”

  The two girls, Dorie, and Edward formed a happy little knot on the lawn, laughing and flirting as if nothing could possibly be more important. It was very like the happy moment in the bedroom that night he brought her the golden dress, except this time she was on the outside looking in.

  The waterfall of desire spilled over into her eyes and she turned away from the group into the bushes, shoulders jerking, trying to regain her composure. “Not for you,” she whispered fiercely. “Not for you.”

  It was some minutes before she could turn back to the lawn. Edward was surrounded by Blanche and Mrs. Davenport, each clinging to an arm and holding a very spirited discussion about what Edward should do next. The younger Miss Davenport was off finding croquet mallets with a gentleman, and the elder Miss Davenport was sulking. Jane blinked, blotting her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve.

  Dorie was nowhere in sight.

  The sketchpad and pencil fell from nerveless fingers, thumped to the damp grass. Jane whirled, looking up and down the lawn. Any second she would see Dorie’s curls bouncing around that willow, see her tumbling down the slope, showing off for the pretty ladies.

  No Dorie.

  Jane ran—her feet took her to the sulking girl on the divan, and though Jane had never spoken to her, she did not even notice that now she spoke firmly, commanding—“Where’s Miss Rochart?”

  The elder Miss Davenport sat up straight, saw for herself the girl’s absence, started babbling. “It’s not my fault, I’m not in charge of her, you can’t blame me…”

  There was fear in her eyes, and Jane pressed further, harder, seized the girl’s silk-trussed arms and shook her. “Where did she go?”

  The silly girl was unable to speak, fright at being scolded turning to tears in her eyes.

  The rage rose up in Jane at the delay, broke through the calm pond. She was all hot rage and orange fire, so fierce and strong that she lost control. She could not feel her fingers pinned on the girl’s arms, she did not know what she was saying, only that she was shouting something about the idiocy of city girls who spent the war sheltered and foolish, who had never learned to use their brains.

  Miss Davenport was completely unable to speak now, and something snapped in Jane and pushed through her rage. It was like a shiver of lightning, a force, something hot and fierce and fine, willing the girl: Tell me where Dorie is.

  A pale blue light flickered across the elder Miss Davenport’s face, and her eyes went glassy, and she broke. “Into the woods,” she said, the words forcing themselves from her lips. She seemed unable to look away from Jane’s gaze. “She just wanted to look at the foxgloves.…”

  Jane dropped the girl’s arms and flung herself past the foxgloves edging the wood, under branches, through brambles. Dimly she was aware of Mr. Rochart wresting himself away from the women to follow. The rage was white hot all through her, making it hard to think, hard to run without numb feet stumbling. This was no good; she would be as useless as the Misses Davenport if she could not bring herself back to reason.

  There was a natural clearing a few yards in and Jane stopped, willing her rage to clear. The water imagery was useless in the face of that snapped bolt of rage—she could not think of anything except her anger at the girl who had done nothing more than looked the other way, not been on guard. Her rage frightened her, as well as that strange moment when it was almost as if she had bent the girl to her will.

  The rage might not go, but
she would not let it stop her from finding her little girl. Through the hot rage she turned around in the clearing. “Dorie?” she shouted. “Dorie?” There was no answering sound.

  The already obscured view of Mr. Rochart’s lawn was the only bright spot in the trees around her; on all other sides the forest was green-black and dim. Well past the last ray of sunlight. Jane’s eyes flicked to rustles of leaves, small brown birds, a vole. At any moment there might be blue light slipping through the trees, back from a five-year absence to find her, to find Dorie. Blue, limning the silver birch, the parasitic mistletoe. Blue that came sharp and fast and hot, blue that whip-cracked your life like lightning striking a strong chestnut tree, tearing it in half.…

  “Have you seen any trace of her?” His breath came fast.

  Jane nearly jumped out of her boots. “No,” she said. The hot orange was giving way to fear. Anger and fright could make her do foolish things. She steeled herself, trying to find her even keel. “Should we split up?”

  “Not a chance,” said Edward, and his hand clamped down on her wrist. “Stay with me.”

  He ducked under a low-hanging branch and set off carefully but purposefully, as if following a trail only he could see. Several times he lifted his head, as if scenting the air or listening—something using a sense other than sight. Though he dropped her arm so they could navigate the narrow trail, Jane stayed close on his heels, trying to keep the ends of her veil out of the grip of brambles and twigs.

  A blue light flashed in the clearing.

  “There, over there!” cried Jane, and she took his arm as if she could physically propel him to his daughter’s side. She crashed past him, tugging, because for a moment he just stood there with stricken eyes.

  “The Queen,” Edward said, and his amber eyes were black and wild.

  She tugged on his sleeve and slowly he moved again, running after her to where the blue light had been.

  “Nothing,” she said, looking at the empty clearing. “Nothing,” and suddenly she whirled, thoughts flying—“What do you know about this forest? You grew up here. You were out here last week, when I found you. Where would the fey likely be?” Even before the Great War, when the fey had been half-made-up tales, still there had been signs. Rings where they gathered, clearings where they were said to bask, trees they swarmed in. All the spots that when you were five you believed might truly be fey, and not just fireflies.