Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

  Poule looked thoughtful, but she clapped a comforting hand on Jane’s shoulder. “They only invade dead bodies,” she said. “Take heart—you’re not a corpse yet.”

  Jane did not feel particularly comforted.

  * * *

  She did not want to intrude on Mr. Rochart in his worry, but she could not stand to go quietly back to her rooms and wait like “patience on a monument,” as the girl in Thirteenth Night said.

  She nudged the door to Dorie’s room open a crack and saw Mr. Rochart kneeling by the bed, his forehead pressed into the white dotted coverlet and his hands wringing the sheets.

  Jane turned away, unwilling to disturb them.

  But as she turned he said her name.

  Jane came back, stood at the foot of the bed. Dorie lay there, for all the world as if she were sleeping.

  “She stirs,” he said. “She rolls and mumbles, like she’s talking in her sleep. But she does not wake.”

  Jane sat on the other side of the bed, across from Edward. He had hold of one of Dorie’s hands, and Jane took the other. The small fingers lay limply on her palm. “She will,” Jane said, willing it to be true.

  “I should never have gone into the woods,” he whispered. Jane heard in that an echo, that he did not mean today. Long ago, he meant. Regret, he meant.

  “She will wake.”

  “I did not know there would be such a cost,” he said softly. His hands closed around Dorie’s.

  Jane squeezed Dorie’s other hand, angry now, the rage coming out. You do not deserve this, she thought fiercely at Dorie. You’ve had enough trouble in your five years. You deserve to be normal. Jane’s head bowed, hot tears pricking the corners of her eyes as she held Dorie’s hand.

  Silence. Blue, gold lights, a pattern on eyelids shut too tightly. And then …

  “Dorie,” breathed Edward. “Dorie…”

  The blue eyes were open.

  A great lump of joy seized Jane. She reached down to hug Dorie just as Mr. Rochart pulled his daughter to him, cradled her tightly in his arms. Jane’s arms fell away.

  Dorie yawned and stretched. “I saw the pretty lady,” she said. She gave her father one of her rare smiles. “She showed me pretty things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  Dorie yawned again. “Lots of pretty ladies. I like pretty ladies.” She was using full sentences now, and Jane noted it with pride even through the eerie fright the words provoked. Dorie twisted around to smile at Jane. “She said you’re a pretty lady.” Jane’s heart thumped in her chest as Dorie turned back to her father. “Is she?”

  “Well,” said her father, at a loss for words, “well…”

  Jane crumpled the bit of ironcloth around in her hands.

  She wasn’t. But she could be.

  Her hand reached out to touch Dorie’s dress, fell away. “What if,” she said, and she described what he might have done, watching his reactions, wanting to know. “What if you shaped me a plain mask. Not a face of surpassing beauty, like Blanche Ingel. Or what you’re doing for Nina. Not a face to attract all the men in the world.” She touched her scarred cheek, then all at once pulled her veil aside until the thin sunlight poured over her entire face, over the ripples that writhed through her cheek and jaw. “Just me. Me as I was.” She felt along the scar ridges that extended out, up past her eyelid, forehead. “Whole.”

  If Nina had told her the truth, then he did not confess to it. “You shouldn’t risk it,” he said. “The process is dangerous.” His shadowed eyes met hers. “I do not speak lightly when I say that my past is unforgivable. You do not know what I have done, and my state of mind, my intentions, are of little excuse.” His arms tightened around Dorie’s body, his fingers locked. “The sins of the father are revisited on the child.” Eyes on her. “Do not make me compound my sins.”

  “You said you were in my debt,” said Jane. “All I want is to look normal. To feel normal.” Fire burned hot within him. “Do you understand what I mean?”

  He nodded reluctantly. “Jane…,” he repeated, and there was something so strained in that one word that she couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear to have him pity her, or dismiss her, or say anything to contradict the way her stupid wishful thinking wanted him to feel and she burst out:

  “We should tell the guests to leave. They need to get out of here, now. Before sundown.” She looked at the lone button under the chest of drawers, at the silver wallpaper, at anything but Edward and his daughter. If he was going to deny her her own face she didn’t want to know just yet.

  “No.” His knuckles were white as he gripped Dorie’s form close to him, and the fire inside him billowed out, turned to smoke, vanished. The girl murmured, protesting the grip, and Edward loosened his fingers, carefully, loosening words at the same time. More softly, “No. I’ve worked too hard to get them here. And they won’t be ready to leave by nightfall—you know these women—and in the dark on the road, they’d be in just as much danger.”

  Dorie wriggled all the way free, and he stood and set her back on the bed. She looked from one tense face to the other. She squirmed off the bed, and though Jane assumed she was going to get closer to her father, she ran to Jane and threw her arms around Jane’s skirts. Touched, Jane held Dorie’s shoulders close.

  “Jane?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  Big blue eyes, confiding. “My mother’s coming to get me,” she said.

  “What?” said Jane, and Edward stumbled backward, looking down at Dorie with horror in his amber eyes.

  Dorie squeezed Jane’s legs tighter. “Do I have to go? I don’t want to.”

  “Of course not,” said Jane. She knelt beside Dorie, hugged her little girl close, through the nerves, through the fear. “What do you mean, she’s coming to get you? What exactly did she say?”

  “She said she’s coming to get everybody,” said Dorie. Her blue eyes unfocused, looked through the wall at the woods. “She said it’s time.”

  Edward grabbed Jane’s arm and held it fast, but Jane hardly noticed through the terror. “Get the guests inside, I don’t care how,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. The silver wallpaper flickered blue as Dorie looked at it, through it, seeing something Jane could hardly guess. The room hummed with emptiness.

  “Tell Poule to check the iron at all the doors and windows.” His words swallowed themselves, dropped down his gullet like stones. “Tell her to prepare for a siege.”

  * * *

  Poule and Jane worked as silently and secretly as possible. Poule enlisted Martha for the task, and between the three of them they slipped in and out of bedrooms and washrooms, sitting rooms and hallways, staying out of the way of the guests and the extra servants from town.

  Some of the windows were solidly covered in Poule’s mesh iron screens, but many had torn or been removed completely in the last five years, and had not been replaced. Too many of these screenless windows were open to the breezy spring air. Jane and Martha marked the places that needed work and watched the bedroom doors for guests as Poule slipped inside with crinkled sheets of iron mesh and a welder.

  Mr. Rochart had disappeared almost immediately, leaving Jane with the admonition to keep an eye on Dorie—which she would have done in any case. She thought he must be in his studio—wondered how he could work with that threat hanging over him. But he had lived within the grasp of the woods for many years. Perhaps he was able to separate the two parts of him: the part that feared, the part that worked.

  When she closed the door behind Dorie the last time, she met up with Poule and Martha on the landing.

  “That’s everything in the open wing but the two rooms the guests are actually in right now,” Poule said. “Those will have to wait till they retire.”

  “All the rooms that we’ve checked are done,” Jane said grimly. She pointed at the carved door between Dorie’s rooms and her own room. “I haven’t been able to get into Nina’s room all evening. She’s got herself barricaded in there.”
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  “Then we’ll have to do it in front of her,” said Poule. “That or bar iron across her door and lock her in for good.”

  Despite the tension, Jane grinned. Mindful of her own lack of iron, she had taken the solitary tasks and continued her mantra of thinking of cool still pools of water.

  “This iron will make us safe then?” said Martha. The normally unflappable maid betrayed the slightest hint of worry. From a chance word of Cook’s, Jane had picked up that Martha was fifteen—therefore six at the start of the Great War. Old enough to know the danger they faced now, young enough to have only dimly grasped the point of all the scrap iron drives and melted-down ornamentation back then.

  “The iron mesh is so tight they can’t squeeze in,” said Poule. “We’re completely safe. As long as no one asks them in.”

  Martha’s eyes widened. She rubbed one knobby elbow, nervous.

  “I can’t imagine why anyone would do that,” said Jane, comforting. “It’s hard for a fey to hold a human shape without it being obvious. They can’t keep up a whole body for more than a few seconds before they turn back into light.”

  “Thought they could take over folk,” said Martha.

  “Yes, but only dead bodies,” said Jane. She had the irrepressible urge to add Poule’s line about them not being corpses yet, but she would not for the world scare Martha further, so she did, in fact, repress it. Gallows humor, she thought. When your nerves are wound that tight sometimes all you can do is make jokes about being as dead as King Bertram’s lover.

  “More precisely, it seems like they can only take over bodies they’ve killed,” Poule was explaining to Martha. “We’re not sure why, but perhaps something about the act of murder is a part of it. That’s why they make those fey bombs.”

  Jane bit her lip and tried not to think of Charlie.

  “And if the dead knock at the door, none would let them in,” said Martha seriously. “All right then.” She looked perfectly unflappable once more.

  “So, this Nina person,” Poule said, moving to the door. She lifted a fist and banged—monotonous, annoying thumps. Jane was impressed by her ability to skip politeness and jump right to the next level.

  At length, Nina answered. A black satin sleep mask was pushed onto her forehead, and she held a short fat glass of amber liqueur. Her eyes met Jane’s—there was a flash of the nervousness she’d seen earlier—and then it vanished as Nina glared at Poule.

  “Maintenance,” said Poule. She shoved the greasy bar of iron into Nina, so Nina had to either immediately back away or ruin her dress. She backed up and Poule squeezed past, headed straight for the windows.

  “What is this?” said Nina. “Really, Jane, I thought you were understanding.”

  “No,” said Jane. It felt good to stand up to Nina. She followed Poule’s path into the room and shut the door. (Martha in the hallway shook a firm NO at the unspoken question of whether she wanted to join them.)

  “Really, Jane,” repeated Nina, and then she fell silent as Poule’s tools whirred loudly on the window nearest Nina’s bed. When she saw that Jane and Poule were set on staying, she huffed, downed her whiskey, and sank into a tufted sixteenth-century armchair, glaring at the room.

  It was a mess. Heaps of satin and tulle straddled spindly-legged tables, arms of chairs, the canopied bed. Nina’s dramatic black hat hung giddily over a vase painted with cherubs, and several glasses ringed with plum lipstick crowded the top of the vanity. The messy modernity of Nina seemed to swallow the dated, threadbare room.

  This was what it was like to put your stamp on something. This was someone with presence. Whatever Nina wanted would be hers, just by virtue of being so unstoppably Nina. Blanche Ingel’s charisma lay only in her face, the unearthly face that Edward had created for her. But Nina’s charisma oozed from every inch of her skin. Jane thought that even now, she would place her bets on Nina to best Blanche in any social battlefield. And with the new face? Nina would be unstoppable. She’d be able to ensnare anyone, maneuver any event to her liking.

  Surely Edward would be small potatoes then.

  The thought was comforting—and then her eye fell on an embroidered chair holding Nina’s wadded-up turquoise dress.

  Under the chair were a pair of men’s shoes.

  The thought of glamorous Nina entertaining men visitors in her rooms made Jane feel smaller than Poule. The brief victory she and Poule had won over Nina dissipated, and she stood there feeling every inch of her plain day dress and veiled face as if it were Dorie’s iron gloves enclosed around her.

  The shoes were enough to rattle her, but—whose shoes? They could be anybody’s, of course.

  Nina drawled, “Edward looked very handsome today.”

  Jane looked up to find Nina innocently gazing at the shoes. “You weren’t outside with us,” Jane said.

  Nina raised eyebrows until Jane blushed.

  “Oh. When you saw him alone.”

  “He has an air so many men lack,” said Nina. She looked happier now that she was skewering Jane, wresting control of the situation. “So poised. So … skillful. We’re going to have a fine, fine time tonight.”

  Jane knew Nina had been in Edward’s studio just for a consultation … didn’t she? Of course, Nina could know Edward in more than one way. Jane despaired, not wanting Nina’s insinuations to be true. Not when Nina was capable of taking—and keeping—any man that captured her fancy.

  Poule stepped past Jane to the next window, feeling it with sensitive fingers. “I suppose you’d want him to be skillful, since he’s going to rip your face off,” she said.

  Laughter nearly bubbled out of Jane at this gruesome depiction of surgery. Gallows humor again.

  Nina’s expression of fury morphed instantly into calm calculation. She looked the short woman up and down, her eyes lingering on Poule’s homely face. “I’d have thought you’d take advantage of his services,” she said cruelly, and Jane, aghast, pressed a useless hand to the veil covering her lips, as if she could take back Nina’s words.

  Poule shouldered her tool bag. Outwardly she did not seem affected, but Jane, heart beating, thought surely the words wounded deep inside where the hurt did not show. “If you think I’d want to look like my enemy, you’re a bigger fool than I gave you credit for.”

  * * *

  Jane descended the spiral staircase by her room, thinking how nice it would be to be as sure of herself as Poule. She wondered if that came with growing up in the dwarvven culture, or from the fact that Poule could take care of herself in myriad ways. Perhaps if Jane could do something like Poule—weld iron or sniff out fey or cow obnoxious women—she could wrest control of her own life, make the Jane-that-wasn’t-supposed-to-be into a Jane she could be.

  She slipped into a back hallway to retrieve her sketchpad from the afternoon—one of the hired servants had brought it in and placed it in her boot cubby. The fear from the forest had dulled with the application of several hours of manual labor on the iron screens, leaving her time to ponder other problems.

  Were those shoes really Edward’s?

  Jane brushed the dirt off her sketchpad, absentmindedly eyeing the flaws in the sketch of Dorie, the parts where her lines deviated from Edward’s.

  Was Nina really meeting Edward tonight?

  A movement through the window next to the back door—there, standing on the back lawn was Blanche Ingel, deep in chat with one of the gentlemen, who seemed to be unable to do anything but gaze into her perfect face. Exasperated, Jane momentarily forgot her stature in the house and spoke to them as she had spoken to the elder Miss Davenport earlier that day. “Get in here,” she said, pulling the heavy back door all the way open.

  The gentleman looked startled, but Blanche laughed kindly and said, “I suppose we are out a little later than decency permits.” She came in, scraping her boot heels on the mat. “Can you have a maid fetch me a clean white cloth?” She had a white handkerchief balled in her left palm. “I had a little argument with one of those thorn t
rees. Made me quite dizzy.”

  “Certainly,” said Jane, and did not say, “What on earth were you doing at the edge of the forest? How foolish are you?” Edward had not mentioned the fey, true (he had come up with “the gardener says stay off the lawn tonight while he sprays for insects”), but anyone with half a brain stayed out of the woods after dusk. That had been true for centuries and centuries.

  The man followed, throwing a grouchy look at Jane, but she was irritated and worried enough that she was not flustered by his glare. As with Nina on that first day, Jane did remember that for Edward’s sake she should be polite and appropriately deferential to his guests, and so she thought cooling thoughts of water and said, “I apologize for my brusque request, but the other guests are gathering in the library for elderflower liqueur. Our host was worried that you had gotten lost.”

  Blanche flushed at that, and belatedly it occurred to Jane that perhaps that statement was no more polite, and maybe it implied that the two of them were doing something inappropriate in the shrubbery. The gentleman pushed past her into the house, grumbling, leaving tracks of mud, and inwardly Jane sighed. She had never been good at this polite and humble business, and with the mask off it was worse.

  She locked the back door, and, casting around, she shoved the heavy wooden hall tree in front of it as a reminder.

  As if anything would make those partygoers think.

  * * *

  Jane passed the evening either watching Dorie sleep or with Poule, checking iron. By midnight, the party had splintered off in ones and twos, and now when she peeked into the drawing room, only the younger Miss Davenport was there, flirting with one of the men while her mother snored on the window seat.

  No sign of Nina.

  She walked past Nina’s room to her own. The light was off; only moonlight shone from the crack under the door. Surely Nina was not upstairs but was in there, asleep. And if asleep, she would have her sleep mask on, and wouldn’t see the door open a silent crack.…