Copperhead i-2

by Tina Connolly

  But poor Millicent was not Jane’s second facelift. There were no dates on these, and Jane’s organizational system was meant to keep track of all the interactions Jane had had while trying to convince a particular woman to do the facelift—it wasn’t meant for someone trying to sort out a timeline to find Jane after she had vanished.

  Helen flipped through the book. The pages were ordered by the list of women, which was the same list as at the beginning. Each one was numbered. She did not know if that was the order that Mr. Rochart had done their faces, but whatever it was, it was certainly not the order in which Jane was removing them.

  Helen sighed. This was why she had married Alistair, among other reasons. She just wasn’t any use at focused concentration like this, sorting through the details. This was a matter for the police—if the police weren’t firmly in Copperhead’s pocket, that was. She didn’t dare expose her sister to the charges of murder. No, it was all up to Helen, but how could she possibly hope to solve this mystery?

  She shook her head. That was a ridiculous way to think. She might be a fool and a coward, but she was a stubborn one, and Jane needed her. I have my own plans, Jane had said. You convince The Hundred.

  Helen would.

  So what did she know? She knew Jane had completed some facelifts. Six, she thought Jane had said. Helen was not sure—but surely this journal knew.

  Helen pulled out a pad and pencil, flipped to the beginning of the book, and began writing down every name that had notes under it. The ones that had the additional notes about the facelift she crossed back out.

  It turned out that Jane had indeed done a half-dozen facelifts. Helen spent a few minutes trying to decide whether to strike through poor Millicent Grimsby’s name or not and in the end drew a soft wiggly line through it with the lead, whispering an apology under her breath.

  That left her with eighteen women with notes underneath. Eighteen women that Jane had tried and failed to impress upon the need for changing their face.

  Jane had definitely needed her help.

  Helen found the first of those attempted women in the book and glanced at the end of the entry.

  “Terrible afternoon,” read the journal. “Agatha Flintwhistle threw me out on my ear and threatened to sic the police upon me if I so much as walked on the other side of the sidewalk from her. I am not entirely certain what I said, but she seems to be convinced that allowing me to help her would lead down ‘the slippery path of sin into suffrage and other such nonsense.’ At that point I flat-out said that I would be very glad to see women get the vote, if for no other reason than that they could think about something other than the cut of their hair for once. (Her bob was set with so much of that smelly fixative nonsense that when she shook her head, not one single piece moved.) That was when the police and the sidewalk, &c, were mentioned. I think I will not be going back for a time.”

  Helen laughed an oh dear sort of laugh. Jane had really, really needed her.

  She went through all the women who had notes but no record of finishing with facelifts. Many of the entries ended in disaster like the first one. Helen knew most of these women socially—some even more so. When she read about Louisa Mayfew being standoffish to Jane, she muttered under her breath, no, no, Jane! That’s not how you manage her. First you tell her how much you like the piano. Then the parlor. Then that snot rag of a child. Then she’ll be eating out of your hand. You don’t barge in like a schoolteacher and try to tell a Mayfew what to do.

  If Jane—no, when Jane made it back safely, Helen was going straight around to all these folks with her and mending fences. They were all ripe for the picking and didn’t even know it.

  It seemed as though there were only two entries left that didn’t end in success or disaster. They were Rosemary Higgins and Calendula Smith. Rosemary was noted as “abroad but promised to speak with me upon return,” but what really caught Helen’s eye was at the end of Calendula Smith’s entry, where Jane mentioned “after this encounter, the next woman will be a piece of cake.”

  That is, if Helen was reading that right, Calendula Smith was the last woman (except for Millicent) that Jane had tried to convince before her untimely disappearance. And while Frye thought Jane had just gone to ground, Helen couldn’t help but feel that Jane would have tried to contact her by now. Besides, there was that ransacked flat and death threat.

  She couldn’t bear to think that something had happened to Jane, so she firmly told herself that Jane was in hiding, exactly as Frye thought. And therefore, she was to follow Jane’s words: You have one purpose for the next week. Convince every last one of them.

  All the same, why not kill two birds with one stone? If Helen was going to convince The Hundred for Jane, she had to start somewhere. It didn’t seem too likely that pillar-of-society Calendula Smith would have threatened Jane with a torn-paper note and then had her abducted, merely for the insult of asking Calendula to take her old face back. But Calendula might know something. Jane hadn’t even told Helen about the death threat, but maybe she had let something slip to someone.

  Calendula was the perfect place to start.

  By now Helen had finished the chocolate and toast, and she felt much less muddled. She felt alive and engaged again, the way she had last night when Frye had told her she could move mountains. She was going to find Jane—going to have The Hundred primed and ready for her—and then everything, surely everything, would be right as rain.

  The door opened and Alistair poked his head in.

  Helen did not jump, but her fingers on the journal did, tensing up into little mountains. Had he checked in on her bedroom? Did he know she had been out? She slid the journal under the covers as he crept around the door, looking woebegone.

  “I’m sorry,” he said immediately, coming up to the foot of the bed and twining his fingers around the iron rails. A cloud of lavender soap and ambergris drifted in with him. “I was in shock last night from that horrible disaster. And then I had some whiskey to soften the blow. I believe I yelled at you in the motorcar?” He looked up at her under his lashes and she softened. She was safe after all. And it was so hard to be mad at him when he put on his penitent little-boy face. Because it wasn’t just a face, she knew. He really did mean it. He truly was sorry.

  “You took the one thing that makes me safe,” she said. “As if you didn’t trust me.” Perhaps not the wisest thing to say, but Helen had never been good at holding her tongue. She would never be the sort to charm folks through shy silence. And if you liked using words, well … sometimes you used too many of them.

  Alistair rubbed tired eyes in a rather ill-looking face. She didn’t envy him that hangover. “Look, I was upset from being with Grimsby,” he said.

  “The man would rile up a saint,” Helen agreed. “Oh, you meant … the other thing.” Millicent.

  “And to make it up to you,” Alistair said, cutting across her sentence. His sometimes haughty face broke into a charming grin. “A little gift for my little pet.” He tossed a paper-wrapped packet into her outstretched hands. “Go on. Open it.”

  The pink paper was warm and slightly rough in her palms. Helen teased the edge free with her fingernail and tore open the paper to reveal an intricate copper necklace. She hooked one finger under the chain and lifted it, breathing in as it caught the light. “Oh, Alistair,” she said. “How pretty.” The twisted coils of copper spun delicately on the chain.

  Alistair did love her. He was sorry. She remembered another fight they had had a few weeks ago—something silly that ended with him throwing her three-legged footstool down the stairs, breaking off a leg. He had brought her a new stool the next day, with a dozen roses on it, crimson-hearted and perfect.

  “Put it on,” he said. “I want to see how you look in it.”

  Laughing, she started to obey. Curiously, the clasp was worked into the pendant part of the necklace—one of the copper coils curved over as if biting the copper chain. She looked closer. No, not as if biting. “It’s a hydra,” she said
flatly.

  “A more feminine version,” Alistair said. “Grimsby had them made up specially for all the wives. I was going to wait to give it to you, but then I decided you needed it today.” He took the clasp from her hands and fastened it around her neck, letting it hang down over the high crew-neck of the wool dress. “There you are; a perfect doll,” he declared.

  Helen’s fingers ran over the little snake heads. She was not certain she cared to be marked so publicly as the wife of a Copperhead party member. Yet she pasted a smile to her face, reminding herself that Alistair was trying to be kind. He seemed in so much a better humor this morning that she dared press for details about last night.

  “Oh, we didn’t stay at Grimsby’s long after I sent you home,” he said, with a dismissive wave. “Frightfully gruesome, what? He dragged some private sleuth out of bed to poke around the place and then set the maids to cleaning. The rest of us dragged him out of there to roulette. We’ve all been through it before when he lost his first wife—gotta keep moving. Continuing the meeting’s all very well but you can’t do that sort of thing when your buddy’s got an eyeful of his girl lying stiff as a plank, can you?” Alistair slouched over to the window and pushed aside her curtains so he could stare out into the grey November morning. “Loses wife one to the dwarves, wife two to the fey—man’s got a rotten string of luck.” He whistled softly and turned back to her. “Made me glad I haven’t let you do anything so foolish, especially after that night in May. No, you’re safe and sound right here, and I’m glad to know that when I’m out with the boys.”

  Helen hurried past that before he could directly order her to stay in. “Alistair,” she said to his back. “Why don’t you stay in tonight? Give up the boys for one night. We’ll … I don’t know, have our own dance, right here in the house. Remember when we used to dance?” Things could be like they were, she thought, without the night after night of drinking, the drinking that led to the shouting and the stool-throwing and the glass-smashing.…

  He took a step away, making closed-off, disentangling gestures. “Now, lambkin, you know that I can’t very well look as though my wife has me on a string, can I? I have plans with the boys. We need to take Grimsby out and get him rip-roaring drunk.”

  “You get that every night, with less excuse,” Helen said before she thought. It was the sort of thing you couldn’t say to Alistair without having him get all cold and ragey and she instantly regretted it. She knew that, goodness knows she knew that; why did she keep doing it?

  “I merely do what’s necessary to keep our image up,” Alistair said icily. “One has to be seen socially doing the sort of things a man does. And since only one of us is fit to go out and keep our name active in the minds of our social peers…”

  Argh, thought Helen, I want to go out, but she knew like anything that if she went down that road there would be no escape and she would end up in a confrontation about her staying home. She fell back on her usual trick of distraction. “Well, I think it’s just divine the way you all rally around poor Mr. Grimsby. And his darling son, too; poor Tam would be miserable else.”

  “Who?” said Alistair. “Oh, Grimsby’s boy. His second time on the roller-coaster, too. Don’t worry, we brought him out to roulette, too. Gave him a drink.”

  “Alistair!” she said, and now she really was shocked.

  He held up his hands. “Just beer, just beer. Well, I’d better be off.” He closed the curtains, blocking out the thin grey light. “We have a full day planned.”

  His eyes roved the room and she leaned to one side, shifting to hide the lump of journal under the covers. The carpetbag, thankfully, was hidden by the hanging folds of the quilt. He smiled at her, thin and tight under his cap of glossy fixed curls. “Don’t wait up, my pet,” he said, and then he was gone.

  Helen slumped against the tufted headboard, feeling as if she’d been through a battle. Poor Tam, alone with those terrible men. There had to be something she could do to help him. She was not overly fond of children, no. She was glad to be through with governessing. And yet … roulette and beer? Her fingers rubbed the snake heads of the necklace as she tugged the journal out from under the covers. With one hand she flipped through it one last time to make sure that really nothing was going to fall out of it—no train tickets or death threats.

  Her eye fell at the end of the list, at the last two names that she had skimmed over, the last two pages in Jane’s writing, blank except for the name at the top of each page. The women were not a perfect One Hundred after all, despite Jane’s referring to them as such; the last numbered person was 99.

  But what gave Helen the shock, despite knowing it must be there, was to see those names etched out in those precise letters, one after the other, just two more women on the fey hit list, their names a record of their mistakes.

  98—Helen Huntingdon.

  99—Jane Eliot.

  Chapter 5

  PLAYING THE GAME

  There was another good reason to start with Calendula Smith, and that’s that Helen knew where she lived—over by the Grimsbys. Helen had not spent any real time in the woman’s company, but she had been to a dance there once. It was in the last six months—well, nearly all of her social engagements dated from after she received her fey face—so she had not seen the woman’s new face. The iron masks were just coming into use for The Hundred, and this woman had one. Helen had watched them all whirling around the ballroom in their bright gowns and hard masks and felt more alone in a crowd than she had ever done in her life.

  Helen had changed from the comfortable dress into something suitable for going out—a crisp wool suit in chartreuse. An unusual color, but one that brought out the glints in her copper blond hair. She had bowed to her blisters and put on her most comfortable shoes, and had tied a string of seed pearls around her neck. Went back and forth on Alistair’s new necklace, but in the end decided to leave it on. He was trying to make it up to her, wasn’t he? And it was pretty, even if it was Copperhead’s symbol. It wouldn’t hurt her to stay in their good graces while she slunk about town. She smoothed the chain down under the seed pearls, feeling the copper snake warm against her skin.

  Helen knocked on Calendula Smith’s doorknocker (a plain hoop, thankfully), and waited for the butler to formally forbid her to cross the iron threshold. Soon she and Mrs. Smith were seated in the parlor, drinking bergamot tea and eying each other with mutually concealed dislike.

  “Dear Helen,” said the woman. “It’s so good to see you.”

  “And you, Calendula,” said Helen, not meaning a word of it. This woman had shunned her at first, for the ridiculous and tangled reason of being the best friend of a woman who had wanted Alistair for herself. Helen never could understand being so tied up over a man that you (and all your friends) would hate another woman for his sake. Surely the first woman could have thought of a more interesting reason to hate Helen. Hate her for her copper blond curls, hate her for her blue eyes. But really. A man? And now Calendula Smith, hating Helen merely to stay in her friend’s good graces.

  Well, you played the game or it played you.

  “Won’t you have another piece of cake?” purred Mrs. Smith. “You’re practically skin and bones.”

  “I know, it’s a shame, isn’t it?” returned Helen. “And yet Alistair was just saying how glad he was I hadn’t let my figure go after marriage like some women.”

  “Men! Who can predict their bizarre tastes.”

  “I was just thinking the same.”

  The initial pleasantries exchanged, Helen looked around the room under pretense of admiring it. It was all over roses. A pink rose sofa perched daintily on a red rose rug, and two tasseled rose chairs faced each other. Rose-pink curtains in a gauze that was the very height of fashion draped the windows. It was completely hideous, Helen decided with satisfaction. But she smiled and made nice about the roses (not to mention Calendula’s matching perfume) while deciding exactly how to play her hand.

  “Now, Mrs. Huntingdon, c
ome to the point. What can I do for you?”

  Concern, Helen decided. Lead in with concern and goose it with gossip. “Well,” she said dramatically. “I was just talking to my sister, Jane, and she said she’d seen you the other day.”

  Calendula tensed. Sort of around the shoulders, but Helen caught it. “I wasn’t very interested in her conversation,” Calendula said sharply. “Seems to me she should keep her nose in her own affairs.”

  “I’m so glad you feel that way,” said Helen. “I told her it was unthinkable for a woman of your stature to go back to her old face.”

  Those perfect eyes narrowed. “I have no idea to what you refer. More tea?”

  “Certainly,” said Helen, and leaned back, studying the woman.

  Calendula Smith’s fey-brilliant face seemed incongruous on that broad-shouldered, wide-waisted body. But when Helen looked again—no, the woman was stunning after all. Helen had seen it time and again, but that was the brilliance of what Mr. Rochart had done. He had made each person not into some cookie-cutter girl, but into the most dazzling version of themselves. It was why you couldn’t have said for sure with so many of them. You thought they were more beautiful—but was it that they were just more alive, more real?

  This woman was not meant to be pretty. She was perhaps not meant to be a dainty little girl, although that was the sort of comment Jane was always chiding her for. But what else was Helen supposed to think? Mrs. Smith was built like a man, with a wide frame that strained against the panels of her mauve silk dress. A silk rose dangled incongruously from a waist that even the draped bias cut could not slim. “You should wear slacks,” Helen said, and then put a hand to her mouth, far too late.

  “Excuse me?” said Calendula Smith.

  Helen valiantly tried to save the situation. “They’re chic, I mean. I’ve been seeing them more frequently. I just thought you could carry them off.”

  “Thank you, I suppose,” said Calendula, not sounding terribly mollified. “I’m not sure that slacks would be appropriate for a pillar of society. One has to set an example, you know.”