Copperhead i-2

by Tina Connolly

  Her eyes were dry against the black and snow-falling night when they reached Frye’s street. Her wet coat smelled like a battle and weighed a ton. Tam was so tired that Helen had resorted to carrying him, and he sagged trustingly in her arms, asleep. She stumbled down the street, half-asleep herself. What was going to happen to Tam after all this was over? She hadn’t tried to break the news to him about his stepmamma yet. She couldn’t let him go back to his father. His stepmamma had risked her life—given her life to try to get him away. And yet his father had all the claim. The courts would never see it any other way, no matter what vague, lunatic-sounding charges Helen could bring to bear.

  A bid for Tam would be as bad as a bid for her own freedom. It would all be so messy, so public. So futile.

  Yet her day with Tam had been surprisingly nice, hadn’t it? Studying at the museum, spying on fashionable young ladies attempting to resist chocolate sundaes.… She had never liked children, but Tam seemed to be cut from a different cloth than the rest of them. Yet Alistair would never agree to foster Tam, even if charges could be brought against Mr. Grimsby. And the courts would take her even less seriously as a divorcée.

  And there she was, thinking about Rook again. He was from a different world, and there was no possibility for the two of them. Besides, Nolle had said: All the dwarvven were going home. All of them.

  She needed to put Rook from her mind just as she had told him to do for her.

  Despite that kiss.

  Helen’s hands tightened on the small boy as she staggered up the walk to Frye’s narrow row house. She hated to always be running from things, but maybe that was her only course left to her. She could just take Tam and run away, far far away.…

  The door burst open before she could figure out how to ring the doorbell and still hold Tam.

  “Helen!” said Frye, and her gap-toothed smile was wide. “Get in here right now.” She took Tam from Helen’s tired arms and ushered them down the hallway toward the biggish room where the dancing had been. Deftly she divested Helen of her disgusting overcoat, patted a stray copper curl in place. “You, and you, Jane, just go right in here. I have some folks for you to meet.”

  Frye opened the door to a wave of expensive scent; rose and lilac and geranium billowed out in a fine cloud. An entire room of beautiful women turned to see Helen as she made her tired way through the door. The room lit with the glamour of their smiles.

  Chapter 13

  WHAT THE HUNDRED DID

  Helen moved among them, clasping hands and kissing cheeks. It was like some sort of twisted reunion, and they were all so pleased to see her. Some had been dozing, many were wide awake, but they all greeted Helen happily, with gay chatter or with calm fire. “We’re going to do this. We are,” she heard over and over. There was Calendula Smith. There was that dancing girl. There was Desirée. Helen could not find Alberta or Betty in the crowd, but there was Frye, presiding over it all in her billowy dragon-embroidered caftan, looking like the cat who swallowed the proverbial canary.

  “They’re not all here,” Frye said, “as I was only one person with one day. But I made a big dent.” She gestured at the sea of dazzling beauty.

  “Thank you,” said Helen. She felt like collapsing, but she straightened her spine, for it was her cue now. She moved into the center of the room, meeting their eyes and giving encouraging nods. There was a little carved bench and she stepped up, her apple green voile falling gracefully around her. She stood, feeling the slick wood under her heels, bracing herself. Her moment onstage.

  “Frye brought you all here so we can reverse the damage done to us,” Helen said. “So we can all be safe. Safe without iron masks. Safe without being locked in our rooms.”

  Nods of assent.

  “But what we thought a simple procedure that my sister Jane could manage has blossomed into something more,” Helen continued. “Mr. Grimsby, the leader of Copperhead and the instigator of this curfew, is playing a dangerous game. Three nights ago he had one of the men of Copperhead kidnap my sister, leaving his wife caught in the fey sleep. We have found Jane, but … well. Let’s say the experience may have cost her.” She pointed to Jane, who was sitting on the floor in her torn and dirty grey dress, tracing the patterns in the carpet.

  “Helen found her,” put in Frye from the sidelines. “She’s been putting the clues together. Risking herself.”

  “Jane said we needed to all gather and change back now,” Helen said. “Which seemed reasonable enough, when she first said it. Except changing back now involves Mr. Grimsby, and this warehouse, and his invention that some of you saw a couple nights ago, the one that surged all the power in the house and zapped Jane. And I don’t know exactly what his plan is,” she said, and took a deep breath. “But he has all of our original faces. All at the warehouse with him.”

  Gasps, denial. “No!” and “How do you know?”

  Through the din, Helen pointed a finger at Calendula. “Because I saw one of them, plain as day,” she said.

  Calendula went white and red all at once as shock warred with embarrassment. “Me, there,” she said. “The original.”

  “All of us,” said Helen, cutting over the voices. “We’re all in this together.”

  “But what’s he planning to do?”

  Helen swallowed. “Something involving hooking us up to the machine. It drains us through the bit of fey in our faces, feeds some sort of power to the machine. I don’t know what he plans to do with the machine. But I saw him drain one of us. His wife.” One woman let out a sharp cry of sorrow at that, and Helen felt deep regret that she could not have told Millicent’s friend in a more measured fashion.

  “So he has our faces as what, bait?”

  “Perhaps,” said Helen. “Regardless, Jane said that all of us are supposed to gather there—tomorrow at noon.”

  “You trust that?” someone said, pointing at carpet-tracing Jane.

  “Clearly not,” Helen said, to both gasps and laughter. “No, it’s a trap,” she said. “And we have to spring it.”

  Another wave of riot. “That actress didn’t say anything about danger,” said someone.

  Another: “Thought this was making us safer.”

  “We have to,” Helen shouted through the crowd, and the hold she had on them started to slip. “He’s got ten of us lined up for tomorrow. I heard him. They may be bait, but we have to rescue them.”

  “And you think they’d do the same for us?”

  “I came through curfew for this?”

  The voices swelled, rose up loud and ugly. Underneath, another sound from the hall—thumps, bangs, and the loud clack of heels as Alberta burst into the room, disheveled and splattered with mud. “They got Betty,” she said. Silence fell as heads turned to look. “We were leaving her flat—and I had my eyes peeled for cops, you know—but this joe nobody on the street corner said, ‘Don’t you birds know not to break curfew,’ and then he turned and he had the copperhead pin on, and suddenly there was a black car pulling up and they grabbed Betty. And they got my scarf, but I twisted out and dodged them. I had to lose one of them on the way here.” She glanced behind her as if to double-check that they were still alone.

  A low voice said into the shocked silence: “The first to fall.”

  Across the room Helen caught Alberta’s eye. The one woman with more reason to keep her new face than anyone, and here they were at the moment of truth, and Helen didn’t know how Alberta would decide. Alberta nodded at Helen and came forward into the room, straightening out torn fabric and brushing off mud under everyone’s gaze. Helen said calmly to the room, “I want you to hear a little story first. Then you can decide if you want to stay or go home.”

  In simple, plain language, Alberta told them of the husband she had fled. How her new face that made her vulnerable to the fey was the only thing that kept her safe from him. “But I’m tired of letting him win,” Alberta said. “And you’re all tired, too. Every day we go around with these new faces we’re in danger of ou
r lives, and those lives aren’t even our own. They’re borrowed. Well, I’ve had it. I want my own life. I want my own face, my own city, and my own freedom. I want to walk around after dark whenever the hell I want. And I don’t want the fey, or Copperhead, or some damn husband telling me what I can and can’t do. I’m going to get my own face back and then I’m going to see my husband divorced and put behind bars. And then I’m going to go out after midnight and paint the town red. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  They didn’t all nod, but many of them did, because the ones that were here were the ones who were brave enough to come through the night, break the curfew, come to Frye’s. Helen scanned the room, seeking out who was being swayed, who needed more convincing. She could do that. But not from a distance.

  “We need your help,” said Helen, and she took center stage once more. “Frye did a lot, but there’s only one Frye. We’ve thirty-five of us here. Six have been done. The seventh … well. That means fifty-seven left to go—minus the ten he already has, but we don’t know who they are, so we can’t cross them off. Then a few people are listed by first name only. How many of those are there, Frye?”

  “Five,” Frye answered immediately. “Women, think who of your acquaintances is spectacularly beautiful and answers to one of these: James, Marlys, Phyllis, Ulrich, Yvette.”

  “Yvette Aubin!” shouted several women at once.

  “James and Ulrich?” questioned another. “Do we want to get men involved?”

  “Perhaps not,” said Helen. “There were only three of them, if I remember correctly. At least, if you do try to take the men on, feel them out cautiously before telling them what’s going on. If you see a hydra pin, run the other way.” Helen looked at Frye. “So what does that leave us, fifty-four?”

  “Monica Preston-Smythe was taken by a fey last week,” someone said. “Her family hushed it up.”

  “Fifty-three then,” said Helen, not missing a beat. Gallows humor. “All right, everyone. Go to Frye and collect one or two names.”

  “I know Louisa Mayfew,” shouted one. “She isn’t here.”

  “I know Agatha Flintwhistle. She’ll come if I have to threaten to uninvite her to next week’s dance.”

  “Come to that, where’s my invitation?” joked Helen, and the woman shot back, “In the mail with everyone else’s,” which made everyone laugh and things grow a hair less tense.

  “Good, good,” said Helen. “Between us we should know practically everyone on that list. Maybe we can figure out the rest of the cryptic notations. As soon as it’s light and curfew lifts, go. Convince your women they have to come meet us. We’re all in this together. And everyone bring iron. A knife or a hatpin or what-have-you.”

  “Something sharp and poky,” shouted Frye.

  “Right,” said Helen. “Together we’re a lot stronger than those men would believe. We’ll meet at the warehouse at noon.”

  She stepped down, turned away from the center of the room, making way for the women to move to Frye and the journal. Some did. Some did not.

  Helen drifted back toward the wall, watching the roomful of color ebb and flow. She was so tired, and they were not even all moving to Frye. And this wasn’t even half the women. If they could not even convince all these, how could they possibly convince all one hundred?

  Over the shoulders of the crowd she saw a blond woman pushing her way to the door. Alberta was following her, trying to reason with her, but the blonde was agitated. Behind the blonde pushed a dark-skinned brunette, and then a pale redhead.…

  Everything they had done. Helen could not bear to make more mistakes, and the huge rushing hollow in her heart could not tell her if it was worse to let them go or to make them stay.

  But what was the point of power if you didn’t use it for good? She had been willing to change Alistair. She would have been willing to change Grimsby. She was losing Rook because she couldn’t trust herself not to change him, and if she was going to pay the penalty for the power, she should use what she was buying.

  Helen pushed through them all until she blocked their frantic exit. They stared at her with their inherent fey glamour, but Helen had her own, and she was the one with practice wielding it, she was the one who knew what Frye had said. That you could convince.

  One by one.

  Helen touched soft hands, squeezed silk-clad shoulders. Looked into their eyes and, with the help of the fey intuition, saw what they were made of, told them what they needed to hear. For some, that was enough. For the rest, she gripped her copper necklace until they fell to her charm, blindly agreeing to go, to bring everyone here, to save them all. She was on her last wind, but every woman who fell to her power boosted her, bore her up. Perhaps I shouldn’t, Helen told herself each time, but I am and I will. She was setting all of her pieces in play to win.

  Helen did not stop until she was looking around for another woman to convince and found they had all been done; that they all sat in clumps, little knots of color eagerly discussing plans and strategies for the morning. Alberta caught her as she stubbed her toe on a chair and fell, staggering.

  “When did you last sleep?” Alberta said.

  “A very long time ago,” said Helen.

  “You can’t leave till dawn anyway,” said Alberta, and she pulled Helen through the throng and made her go into Frye’s guest room and lie down.

  “But Jane, and Tam—,” said Helen.

  “Asleep in the kitchen and under the piano, respectively,” said Alberta.

  “And Mr. Grimsby, and the warehouse—” Helen’s mouth felt full of marbles. She was so tired now that she actually was on the bed, and lying down. Had Rook gotten away? Had they all? Helen could not think who had been trying to get away to where. Some people who were dear to her, all going home to the mountains, for good and always. So tired, and her eyes were shutting, shutting.…

  “Ssh,” said Alberta, and turned out the light, and Helen slept.

  * * *

  They let her sleep too long. The house was eerily silent when she woke, and the slanting sunlight betrayed the hour of the morning. Helen shook out the skirts of the apple green voile she had not taken off. It was well-creased from sleep and she said to it, “You can withstand a trolley explosion but even you have limits.” She looked around, thinking that she would perhaps stretch Alberta’s kindness too far by borrowing—and then likely destroying, the way things had been going—one of her dresses, and her eye fell on a neat pile of clothes by the door. Someone had cleaned and pressed—and apparently, even mended—her herringbone suit from the day before.

  She picked up the jacket, and the blouse, and the skirt you could not really climb in, and below that was one more neatly folded item, and she shook it out and found it was a pair of trousers. “Well, then,” she said, and took off the apple green voile and put them on. They had not been Frye’s, for they were only a little big, and she belted them with the accompanying belt, and put on the blouse and herringbone jacket, and put her hands on her hips, contemplating.

  She strode out into the rest of the house before she could think too hard about it. Jane and Tam were in the kitchen, frying bacon with one of the piano players—Stephen—for company. Everyone else appeared to be gone on their tasks. Jane looked lost and Tam looked as though he had a hangover. Brilliant sun streamed through the narrow windows, erasing the usual November fog.

  “I think you’re loony,” Stephen said in a chummy gossipy voice, not turning around from his bacon. “A hundred of you girls against those fey? Against that awful Grimsby person who runs Copperhead? You know he’s attempting to have the Prime Minister tried for treason, don’t you?”

  “Not girls,” said Jane. “Women.”

  “Semantics,” Stephen said cheerfully. “Here, eat up before you go into battle.”

  “It’s not battle,” said Helen. “We’re just going to show up and take our faces back. Oh, and take apart his weapon, whatever the heck it is. Then leave.” She began to repin her hair, using a small roun
d mirror hanging between the show posters. It was funny, but she felt as though she moved differently in the slacks. They were just clothes, weren’t they? And yet she of anyone should know the difference that clothes made.

  “Bacon, bacon, bacon,” said Stephen, dropping it onto plates. “And what’s to stop him from making another weapon?”

  “Well, he won’t have us to do it with,” Helen said to the reflection. “There’s that.”

  “He didn’t exactly have his wife’s permission, did he?” said Stephen.

  “How did you know about that? I didn’t think you were here last night.”

  Stephen shrugged. “Jane’s been telling us the whole story. How you went to look in the warehouse window last night and saw him there. Oh, and talking to someone in a sort of fey trance. Did she make it all up?”

  Helen sat down at the table, straddling the back of the chair because she could, and looked hard at Jane. “You know things,” she said. “I didn’t mention those details.”

  “I know things,” Jane said dreamily.

  “Listen, Jane,” Helen said. “There’s a fey inside you. I know it.”

  Tam raised his head from his hands, looking wide-eyed at Jane.

  Jane suddenly backed up from the table, skittering away, and Helen cursed herself for a fool. “He’s not, he’s not,” she said, eyes wide. “He’s not.”

  “What do you mean, he’s not?”

  Jane closed her eyes. “He comes and goes,” she said. “Sometimes I vanish. Sometimes I see everything. I saw you in the warehouse. I saw Millicent. I saw her go out into everything, searching into all the blue. And then … go.”

  Stephen looked from one to the other, eyes wide.

  “Tell me,” Helen said urgently, and she gripped the back of the chair. “Are you Jane now? Can you tell?” She did not know what this sometimes business was and yet it fit with everything she’d seen so far. She had thought Jane was warring with a fey that lived inside her. But how could the fey come in and out? Jane herself had said several months ago that the fey could not do that. Once they went into a person they were there until death—their death, or the body’s.