Copperhead

by Tina Connolly

  The men looked curiously at Helen. Alistair’s face was lit with a wild mixture of worry and glee.

  This must be problematic with his social standing, she thought, and it was as if from a long way away, just as she had felt downstairs when Grimsby’s machine had been running. He’s so pleased to have the news—he’s grown to loathe Jane—and yet no one sensible would want an accused murderer in the family.

  If you had put a dagger to her throat and said how would Alistair react to something like this … well, deep inside she might have predicted it, every word. But she would have told that small voice it was wrong, that Alistair would never rejoice at such a thing. That she would never stand here seeing it now, in the flesh, Alistair—her husband, Alistair—rubbing his hands together and pondering over how Copperhead would trap her sister. The unholy glee at having an excuse to bring Jane down was written from ear to ear.

  Helen had thought Alistair handsome when she met him, charming. The fact that he was wealthy was an added inducement—she was grateful for his wealth in a way she dared not remember, even now, without doubling up in shame. She had loved him once; she had been grateful. She had thought he would be kind to her. Was he not kind? She stared at the restless energy burning behind those reddened, soft cheeks, and wondered what she had done wrong to make him into who he was now.

  “Well, Helen,” said Alistair. “Do you know where your sister might have run to?”

  “No … no,” she said, and the part of her that was social, that carried on despite whatever true Helen felt deep inside, did a pretty little gasp for the men to see. Raised the pitch of her voice and said in a silly way, “Goodness, you don’t really think my sister did anything wrong, do you? If anything, it seemed as though that machine did something to her.”

  “The machine did nothing to her except reveal her despicable behavior,” said Grimsby. “Meddling in things she didn’t understand. Shouldn’t be dealing with. If she crossed into those forbidden boundaries, she was as good as working with them.”

  “Jane? No. She hates the fey as much as any of you.”

  “It’s not a question of hating the fey,” Grimsby said. His blue eyes were intense; they burned into Helen as if they could see every little thought flicker across her brain. “This is what Copperhead is here for, Mrs. Huntingdon, don’t you understand? One People. One Race. Nothing good can come of mixing with the other, even with the best intentions. Humans will only be safe once the fey and dwarves are eradicated. Your sister was working with things she could not control, and when the machine revealed her actions to us, she ran.” With a sweep of his long arm he pointed to the skylight in the slanted roof, now open—the source of the cold wind Helen had felt moments ago.

  Stoop-shouldered Morse crossed to the skylight and looked down. “She could have gotten onto the neighbor’s fire escape from here,” he said. A twisted smile played across his face. “Unless she fell and broke her legs.”

  “She was frightened by the disaster she had caused, and she ran,” cut in Grimsby.

  “I’m sure she meant well,” said one of the other men. Hattersley, the drunkest and most good-natured of the bunch.

  Grimsby rounded on Hattersley, blue eyes flaming. “You dare say that with my wife right there?” He flicked his fingers in the direction of Millicent, a cold gesture somehow more dramatic than a sweep of arms. “‘Meant’ doesn’t enter into it.” Those keen blue eyes bored into Helen as he swiftly crossed the room and seized her shoulders. Suddenly she wondered how she could have ever written this man off as one of Alistair’s drunk friends. He was something else, something more. His iron grey hair was close-cropped; it lay flat across a sleek snaky skull. “You must tell us where she is. Where she would have gone.”

  His eyes were penetrating her, sweeping back and forth. She was hiding in her own mind from him, darting between black bushes while the searchlight of his eyes swept the grounds. He would find her in another minute; everything she knew would come tumbling out. With an effort she gasped again, let a tear or two rise to the surface of her eyes. “Oh, Mr. Grimsby, you’re hurting me!” which was in point of fact true, but mostly it gave her a chance to duck her head away from his gaze, blink obscuring tears into place.

  “Come, Grimsby, don’t manhandle my little one,” said Alistair. “She doesn’t know anything. You see her face—could someone with a face like that even leave the house? Let alone plot things.”

  Helen turned her perfect face on the men, tears standing in her eyes. Her fey allure seemed to soften them all, even Grimsby, who dropped her arms and stepped back a pace. “Can we go home now?” she said meekly. “This is all so … so disturbing. That such a thing could happen to poor Millicent. And with Jane involved…”

  “I must stay,” Alistair told her, “but I will have you driven home. I will come later.”

  “Be safe,” Hattersley said kindly, and Helen nodded, picked up the carpetbag ever so casually, and fled down the stairs in careful slow meek steps, heart racing, brain burning clear.

  Away from them in the hallways she walked faster and faster, grabbing her coat, her lilac gloves, her iron mask, kicked under a chair by the attic stairs. Her passage was slowed by the glut of couples hurrying home, away from the disastrous meeting. She nodded to them politely, trying to control the energy that burned within. Carefully tied the iron mask in place and told the massive butler to have their driver bring the motorcar around. There would not be any word to report to Alistair that she had done anything wrong.

  At last inside the car, she curled her fingers around the door handle and slammed it closed, heart racing.

  Jane was gone.

  Millicent might die.

  And then Grimsby was going to blame Jane for his wife’s death.

  It was too clear. The men of Copperhead hated Jane already, hated that she was trying to help their wives regain some measure of freedom. The cowards like Morse and Boarham made fun of her when she wasn’t there (they were scared to do it to her face). Helen had tried to help Jane; Jane had tried to help Millicent, and now everything was a mess.

  Worse, Jane would not have left Millicent in the fey sleep without a very good reason. Jane was too responsible, too duty-bound to run just because something spooked her. Perhaps Mr. Grimsby’s machine had caused her so much pain that she had had to flee. No, Helen did not like that idea. But perhaps the machine had messed up the operation to the point where Jane could not rouse Millicent. And then, the only thing Jane could do was press the old face in place in case Millicent did wake up, and run before the men caught her and hauled her off for their own brand of questioning.

  And in that case, where would Jane have run?

  “Mrs. Huntingdon?” the chauffeur said patiently again.

  “Yes, please take me home, Adam,” Helen said. She found she was sitting in the middle of the backseat in a huddle, and she forced her legs to straighten to the floor. “How’s your mother doing? Are her legs still troubling her?”

  “It comes and goes,” Adam said, “but she said to tell you thanks for the oranges.” The car started moving and then abruptly jerked to a halt. Alistair was banging on the rear window.

  Helen swallowed and straightened as he pulled open the door and got in, slamming it behind him. “I thought you were staying here,” she said, her words muffled and hollow.

  “I am. I am!” Alistair waved his hands in frustration. “You don’t know what it’s like up there.”

  “With poor Millicent?”

  “They’re all ranting at me, Helen. What do I do about you?”

  “About me?”

  “Boarham said if I’d cast Jane out this never would have happened, and Grimsby said I needed to have a tighter grip on you. He said you and Jane are working against us. That you aren’t following the party line. But I trust you, Helen.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

  Alistair looked up at her, indecision written on his face. “I’m going to need your mask.”

  “
What?”

  He nodded more firmly, as if trying to convince them both. “I need it, Helen. Grimsby said so, and he’s right. You need to be protected. I need to make you safe.”

  “The mask makes me safe.”

  “But you love your sister,” said Alistair. “I understand that, even if she’s not worth it. I do understand.”

  “Yes?…”

  “And I know you. You’re about to charge off to find her, or rescue her, or some sort of harebrained goose chase. I need to make you safe.” He reached up to Helen, and before she could think of any clever way to talk him out of it, before she could jump from the motorcar and run so fast, so fast, he unbuckled the straps and lifted it from her face, leaving her skin exposed to the warmed air of the vehicle.

  She blinked at him, and she thought then that perhaps her face would calm him, that he would turn and see how lovely she was, and give in. Maybe smile and call her his pet, like he used to do.

  But he thrust his fingers through the eyehole of the mask he held and said, “Yes, this is much better, isn’t it? Much better for us both.” He patted her silk-skirted leg and then hurried from the car, her iron mask dangling from his canary-gloved fingertips as he hurried back into the house.

  Silence passed, and at length Adam said, “Home, miss?”

  As if she had a choice.

  “Yes,” Helen managed, and turned her trembling lips away from his sightline, looked out the window into the icy night.

  Adam turned out of the drive. She could feel his worry like a palpable presence. That was the way it was since Rochart replaced her old face with the fey version—she seemed to have a sixth sense of what people wanted, what they felt. Now Adam was trying to help her make things better, help her show a stiff upper lip. “Those oranges cheered my mum right up, I’ll tell you.”

  “Good,” said Helen. The gaslights cast strange shadows through the mists of fey. “I’ll send over some more.”

  Her eyes closed against the fey, against the night, thinking about poor Millicent. Without Jane’s fey power keeping Millicent protected and under thrall, no one could survive a process like the facelift. How long would Millicent stay in the fey sleep? Jane herself was no fey—her power was not that vast. If Helen did not find Jane soon … she was very afraid Millicent would waste away and die, as Mr. Grimsby seemed to want to believe already. Millicent was on death’s door because of what Jane had done, but it wasn’t Jane’s fault, it was that horrid Mr. Grimsby and his machine. How would she make those men believe that?

  And what would they do to Jane once they found her? It would be Jane against Copperhead, and Helen didn’t give a fig for those chances. She had to find her sister before they did. She closed her eyes, in that moment hating herself for the blithe way she had seen Millicent’s escape, for the casual way she had set up Jane to help Millicent. As if it were all a game. “I didn’t mean it,” she whispered fiercely. “Jane, come home.”

  “What’s that, ma’am?”

  “Stop here,” she said, before she knew what she was saying.

  Adam pulled to the side, looking dubiously at the strip of storefronts lining the wide thoroughfare. “Probably all closed, ma’am.” She heard in the cautious sentence all the things he couldn’t say, both: Don’t get yourself into trouble, and, equally, Don’t make me lose my position.

  She seized Jane’s carpetbag. “I’ve got to find my sister,” she said. “She’s my family.”

  He nodded slowly, thinking this over.

  “Please don’t tell my husband when you pick him up,” she said. “I’ll—I don’t know. Take a cab or the trolley or something. If he finds out … I’ll swear to him I left from home and you know nothing about it.”

  “Do you have money?”

  Of course she didn’t. “Oh, Adam, why am I such a wreck?”

  “You’re not a wreck, ma’am,” he said in his stoic way, and handed her some coins from his pocket. “I’d watch out for the trolley, though. Full of malcontent dwarvven causing trouble, they say.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Helen said, and promised, “I’ll pay you back tomorrow morning.”

  “I know you will, ma’am.” He opened the door for her and looked dubiously down at her unprotected face.

  No mask. No iron.

  She almost flung herself back in the safety of his car. But she had to find Jane. She had to save Millicent.

  Adam’s grey-black eyebrows knitted. “You’re sure you’ll be fine?”

  He couldn’t order her to stay home and be safe the way Alistair could. It was as close as he could come to asking if she was certain she wasn’t mad. She supposed she was mad. She pressed his arm and said, “Not a word to Alistair. Not a word!”

  He nodded solemnly, and she turned and set off as if she was full of purpose, hurrying off before she could change her mind.

  * * *

  It was pitch dark now, except for the faint glow of the eerie blue mist. Helen strode down the cold empty street, intensely aware of her bare face. She started every time she thought she saw a quiver from the mist.

  Where was Jane living now?

  Jane had lived with them for a couple months earlier in the year, helping Helen to convalesce from the fey attack. Jane had often taken the train down to the country to see her fiancé, Edward Rochart, and his daughter, Dorie. But as the grey summer continued, the blue bits of fey started appearing—little by little, settling over the city. Alistair’s gang turned from horses and dice to secret meetings where they plotted to rid the world of anything inhuman—dwarvven and fey.

  Helen had not paid it much attention at first, assuming there was more drinking than politicking going on. But Jane did, and Jane was becoming more and more visible, agitating to fix the faces of the beautiful women. Beautiful women who refused to give up their dangerous beauty. Husbands who, though supposedly anti-fey, were not quite as quick to sign off on their wives returning to their old faces. It sometimes reminded Helen of that old fey story about the knight told to choose whether his wife should be beautiful at day and ugly at night, or vice versa. It was clear what these men were choosing.

  To be fair, it wasn’t just the men. Helen had actually heard that fake masks were popping up at dances around the city. Not at the very best houses, mind you, but down a rung or two. For the price of some iron, you could pretend that you were a dazzling beauty underneath. Tempt some bachelor with the promise of what he might find, safe inside his home, once he carried you over that iron threshold …

  Oh, Jane would never believe that one. Helen could just imagine her vitriol now. She sighed. Stubborn Jane did not see that you simply had to let these men, men like Alistair and Grimsby, have their own way. There was no arguing with obstinate fools. Not to mention that Jane’s temper (never good in the old days) had gotten on edge after her fiancé had gone into the woods with his fey-touched daughter—Helen didn’t know exactly why, as Jane called the decision foolish and pigheaded and refused to discuss it. Jane stopped returning to the country, and therefore spent more and more time at Helen and Alistair’s house. Which resulted in a violent quarrel between Jane and Alistair that ended with Jane stalking out to find some terrible shack to live in and Alistair threatening to hurl her ironskin self from the door if she came through it again.

  Helen realized she was paused on the street corner close to the trolley stop, staring at a shop completely covered in blue. Early on, the city had tried paying poor folks to scrape blue off of walls and streets. But the fey had seemed to organize and retaliate—targeting only the cleaners, until at last the mounting number of deaths had caused the city to abandon that plan. Her fingers clenched around the handles of Jane’s carpetbag as she stood there in the biting cold. There had been a bakery there, before. But the bits of fey kept coming and coming, like ivy climbing the walls, choking the windows and doors. The owners had tried everything. Finally they moved out. She thought she had heard they decamped to some relatives in the country—ironic, when all the fey once came from there
.

  After the owners left, the mists of fey just got worse and worse, till no one would walk up to that shop for love or money. The mist thickened. Bulged.

  But she had never realized that it sort of thrummed before.

  Or that the tendrils coming off the house came so close to the sidewalk.

  Helen’s heart jolted, beat a wild rhythm, flooded her body with the command to run.

  No, the house had not been like that before.

  The mists were moving. Toward her.

  The interwoven bits of fey flowed from the store, creeping toward her across the front walk, all of that thick deadly blue coming at her like a slow-building wave.

  Helen ran.

  She pelted down the street, breath white in the cold, eyes watering from the November wind. The carpetbag beat a lumpy rhythm against her side and still she ran, not looking back, down and around the corner until she got to the trolley station where, wonder of wonders, a trolley was just preparing to depart. She flung herself through the closing doors and it pulled away.

  She moved to the window, looked out between the pasted-up notices and garish advertisements to see if she saw a blue wave tearing down the street after them. But she saw nothing more than the familiar thin scarves of blue that dotted the houses and shops and streets.

  Her breath fogged the glass and her face came back into focus, white and strained, mouth dark and breathing fast.

  Good night, she looked a mess.

  Helen sat down in an empty seat with the carpetbag firmly on her knees, still breathing hard, and attempted to smooth her hair. Slowly she adjusted her skirts, straightened the silk jacket of her dress where it had twisted around her waist, felt her heartbeat slow. A weary ticket-taker moved down the aisle, stuck a hand out for her pence without inquiring into her distress.

  She had only rarely been on the trolley, and never this late at night before. It had been down for most of the war—all the fey trade had ceased at the beginning of the war, and everyone had quickly run out of those fey bluepacks that used to power everything so cleanly. Tech had come lurching back in a number of different directions at once, as humans tried to make up for the missing energy. The electric trolley had been one of the big civic pushes to get going again—but that did not mean that everyone rode it equally. Men outnumbered women, but a few women did ride it. The working poor, in old-fashioned layers of skirts, headed home to the factory slums from some slightly better position elsewhere. Reformers like Jane, in trim suits or even slacks, working for their pet causes: women’s votes or dwarvven accessibility or some equally tedious thing. Women in silk dresses, no matter how civic-minded they were, did not ride the trolley. Helen wrapped her dark coat more tightly around the plum silk, as if that would help her blend in.