Ironskin

Chapter 11 Mask and Shadow

By evening the guests were all in. All dined, already bored and ready for the amusement of repairing to the drawing room with drinks and painted chocolates. One of the younger girls sat down at the rosewood piano—to show off, but she was good, and the latest waltzes sang from the freshly tuned keys. The women laughed and flashed rings and angled their hips to display their dressmakers’ concoctions of slim silk and beaded net.

And yet. Now that Jane knew Edward’s true occupation, she saw the women with a different eye. Not art patrons, but women wealthy enough to buy themselves new noses and cheekbones. Not content with the normal faces she’d give anything to have. For an instant she viewed them with disdain, sad creatures focused on appearance. And in the next moment that superiority washed away in shame as she reminded herself that she was focused on her own looks, whatever justification she felt she might have.

Jane ducked out of the shadow of the doorway as one of the new hires hurried through, intent on not spilling her tray. The woman’s pinched, set mouth implied it had been a long day for her already, trying to properly navigate her new employment. Jane wondered if it would be better or worse to carry a tray rather than mind a child. More boring, certainly—but perhaps easier during times like this.

But at least she was not poor Edward, having to actually give the party. Jane was not so naïve as to think he’d rather sit and talk to his fey-scarred governess, but still. She would hate to give parties for all those frighteningly perfect people, so she sympathized with him.

Jane went slowly up the stairs and sat on the bed in Dorie’s room. “Ready to wake up?”

Dorie roused, blinking sleepy eyes.

Jane gently untangled the golden curls, helped the girl from the bed. A shame, keeping her up past her bedtime. Jane lifted the rose-pink dress off the padded white hanger. “Are you awake enough to go?”

Dorie swallowed a yawn, nodded firmly, face lighting at the sight of the party frock. Jane smiled, glad a new dress could still catch Dorie’s interest. She helped the girl into the frock and was attempting to tie a decent-looking bow in the silk sash when there was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” said Jane, expecting Martha with their summons. And yet when she looked up it was Edward, staring down at Jane ministering to Dorie, an oddly soft look on his face.

“Father!” said Dorie, and she ran to him, leaving the sash to trail behind.

He set down the paper-wrapped parcel he held, scooped Dorie up in his arms, and swung her around till she giggled. Jane had never seen him do that, and she thought: He is happy, and look how she beams from it. How did he get that way, and can it happen more often?

Edward stopped spinning and came to a halt, still holding Dorie, and for a moment looking very boyish indeed. His hair had already gotten mussed, and one of the locks stood straight up. “You are going to be perfectly behaved tonight, I can tell,” he told Dorie, and she nodded.

Jane smiled faintly at the two of them, and did not say, “We hope so.”

He set Dorie down. “Your tail is trailing,” he told her solemnly, and she laughed again, beaming at them both, and for one ridiculous moment the three of them were lit with happiness, because of how normal it all was, could be. “Be good and let Jane tie it.”

Dorie let Jane catch her trailing sash, and Jane bent again to the task. Her fingers slipped on the silk, but at last she managed a creditable attempt at a bow, and she set Dorie free to spin around in front of the mirror, engrossed in the whirl of her skirt.

Edward cleared his throat.

“Yes?” said Jane, and she was surprised to see hesitancy in his face.

He picked up the lumpy brown parcel from the floor and handed it to Jane. It felt like cloth, folded and wrapped in butcher paper to keep it tidy. “The slippers from your sister, and a dress for you,” he said at last. “If it would please—if you like it.”

“Thank you,” said Jane, but he cut in:

“It’s nothing, just from the attic. Just washed and pressed is all.” He spread his hands. “Perhaps I should have picked you up something in town.…”

“That would not be necessary,” said Jane, meaning, that would not be appropriate, and she felt warm with embarrassment. “Thank you for this.”

“So you will come,” he said, and his usual assured cynicism seemed to flow back in, his mask settling back in place. “You will save me from being quite alone down there. Ah, Jane, I told you once of the tale of the beastly man, but do you know the famous tale of Tam Lin? Stolen away by the fey, and for his beloved to win him back, she had to hold him as he changed into a variety of loathsome beasts.”

“I have heard it,” said Jane. She wished they could return to the Edward who swung Dorie around, rather than the Edward who brooded on fey tales of misery and despair.

“I request that you not think badly of me as I change into that most loathsome of all beasts, the Gentleman,” he said.

“I would hardly think badly of you for being a good host to your guests, sir.”

“And yet I am certain that to once lose Jane’s good opinion is to lose it forever,” he said, and that bit of cowlick waved madly. “So I ply her in advance with dresses and words, hoping she will take pity on poor Tam Lin when he becomes an ogre.”

Jane did not know what to say to that.

He laughed, a laugh with dark in it. “Jane, if you could see your face. You are certain I have quite lost all remaining sanity. Well then, never mind me, but array yourself in my finery with all speed, and bring that little terror with you. Make haste, Jane.” And he was gone, even as Dorie still whirled in front of the mirror.

Jane clutched the package to her. “Wait for me,” she told Dorie, and she hastened to her room.

She tore open the butcher paper and the dress spilled out on her bed.

The golden dress from the attic.

Jane held it close, warmth flooding her face. He had picked this one for her. He had thought about the gowns and said, this one. Jane will look well in this one. Their tastes had coincided on the exact same dress.

Jane recalled herself with a sigh, and with a bump came back to reality. No, Martha had seen her mooning over it; she probably picked it herself.

She quickly washed her face, sponged down her arms, and changed into the gold dress. It fit beautifully—but the flowing pre-war styling meant it would fit many girls equally well. More surprising was that the dancing shoes from Helen fit perfectly—she must have gotten Jane’s measurements from the old cobbler, though the man who’d made her work boots had surely never made these beaded beauties.

Just as with the silver dress, Jane felt odd in her new attire, a different person—though in the silver dress she had felt like Jane-as-she-was-supposed-to-be, and in the gold she felt—like a fraud? Like a creature from another time, another place? This dress made her into a not-Jane, not any version of Jane. A lady in a different time, a wealthy girl in an estate like this, one of his houseguests from the city. Getting ready for an exciting night of dances and meaningful looks and stillnesses of wild heartbeats. She would never have been Blanche Ingel, with her perfectly chiseled face; she could not be Nina, with her rapier wit and striking demeanor. A friend of the Misses Davenport, perhaps—those two silly girls with their wide eyes and their fits of giggles. Girls, because they had not yet had a reason to grow up. Here before the Great War, in a world where the fey were estranged and practically forgotten, and there was nothing more pressing for any of the guests than to drink too much and to meet a charming stranger. Some tall mysterious man who stepped in behind her with a sardonic quip about the party, and as soon as she dared turn around, she would look up and see his face, see who it was.…

Jane ruthlessly pinned back a stray lock of hair, shoving down that silly flight of fantasy.

The iron mask was cold around her eye. She readjusted the mask on the bridge of her nose, nudged the dark leather straps higher behind her head, where they blended into her hair. So almost pretty, if only she turned her ironskin away, if she only saw her cheek of normal skin, pale against her dark hair, so almost, almost, almost.…

“Pretty ladies,” Dorie said from the stairs, breaking Jane’s spell. Jane hurried after her, concentrating hard on the almost-girl in the rose-pink dress. She picked the child up and swooped her down the last few stairs, and Dorie giggled, before standing upright and saying solemnly, “No, I am grown-up tonight.”

“I believe you are,” said Jane, and they looked at each other and Jane thought—maybe I have done some good, after all. She curtseyed and motioned Dorie to proceed her into the drawing room, and Dorie did, pink step by pink step, looking perfectly happy, intrepid, normal.

She was surprised to see that Mr. Rochart was not in the drawing room. There was a small knot of guests by the piano where the younger Miss Davenport was still playing and smiling up at one of the men. The elder Miss Davenport had her elbow on the piano, trying to steal attention from her sister.

Dorie trotted confidently to the pretty ladies as Jane found a seat behind a table with a large plant on it. The drawing room had seemed bigger this morning before the guests, before Cook had had extra chairs brought from the attic and moved in. Now the piano was too close, the lipsticked girls in their slinky frocks too near. Edward had told her to come, bolstered her self-assurance with his confidences—but he was not here, and the girls very much were.

Dorie neared the girls, who didn’t notice her immediately. Jane clutched the folds of the golden dress—Dorie wouldn’t act out, would she? Wouldn’t show off, to get noticed?

But then the elder Miss Davenport turned and saw the little girl, and the wheels plainly moved in her head. “Ah, what a pet!” she cried, and she began fussing over Dorie.

“What do you have there?” said one of the gentlemen, and the piano broke off as the younger Miss Davenport turned, pouting, to see.

“What’s your name, sweet child?” cooed the older Miss Davenport.

“Dorie,” said Dorie, and curtseyed, which sent the older girl into raptures.

Jane saw the amused look on the gentleman’s face—the cooing over Dorie was likely to be of little interest except to the father, and where was he?

“Just look at these golden curls! Nearly as bright as mine.”

Come to think of that, where were the other guests? Where was Nina, and hadn’t she seen a redhead earlier, from above?

A gentle laugh by the door, and Jane turned to see her question answered. Mr. Rochart. And the redhead … of course.

That’s where he had been.

Blanche Ingel slipped her arm under Mr. Rochart’s, laughing. “I won’t melt, will I?” she said, and she turned her perfectly chiseled face up to his. Mr. Rochart leaned closer, and Jane couldn’t catch what he said, but she saw his lips move with his reply. The tall dark man swept the redhead with the unearthly beauty into the drawing room; the younger Miss Davenport struck up a waltz, and they danced.

The well-dusted curtains sagged overhead, creased and worn as if they’d not been touched for two centuries. The boarded windows were made gayer for the evening, tacked over with cloth cut from remnants of upstairs curtains. Only one of the paned windows was still whole, and it showcased the dusky moor.

Jane held her side as if it had a stitch. Her ribs were too broad for her dress, suddenly, and they labored against the golden panels. What was it to her if he danced with his clients? That was what he was supposed to do—what he had told her he would do. It wasn’t his fault that she couldn’t understand how he could say he hated parties, hated smiling, hated the dance—and now could whisk away the redhead in the slinky green silk with an air of absolute charm, smile at her as if she were the only person in the room, whirl her around as if he loved every minute of this gathering.

He wasn’t supposed to dance with Jane, not in this life or any other. Even the imaginary whole-faced Jane was nothing compared to this woman’s sculpted perfection (the perfection he had created, oh, why wouldn’t he adore his living artwork), and it wasn’t just her. More women were in the room now, including Nina, and the Misses Davenport’s cousin, who was nearly as striking as Blanche. She was shorter, and her figure not nearly so fine, but her face was a tiny cornered thing of heartbreaking beauty, and the few men flocked around her, to the dismay of both Misses Davenport. Had the cousin, then, already been under his knife?

It mattered little if she had or not—the women’s beauty was still from money, whether bred or bought. These were the people of this world, and she was a fool to believe that Mr. Rochart’s seemingly unguarded moments with her could mean anything more than that she happened to be standing nearby when he spoke. A man who could swear that he despised parties and then charm a roomful of women—no, she didn’t understand him, she couldn’t understand him, and the familiar claws of cold humiliation tore her up inside.

The waltz rang to a bright finish, and Mr. Rochart twirled Blanche into his arms and against the piano. They stopped, breathing with the effort of the dance, and Mr. Rochart took a long time to draw away from his lovely partner in green, to let her escape his arms. Jane’s shoulder blades prickled under her filmy dress, recalling how that touch felt.

The elder Miss Davenport also watched this interaction carefully, her eyes flicking from Mr. Rochart and Blanche to her younger sister and the moon-eyed boy gazing at her. Weighing options, but good luck to her, thought Jane. As if anyone in the room could surpass Blanche Ingel.

“Da!” said Dorie, and she ran to hug his knees.

Edward bent to caress the blond head. “Are you behaving yourself, my little terror?”

“Oh, you ogre!” butted in the elder Miss Davenport. “This sweet thing is an angel, a bunnykin, a darling moppet. I just adore her, and she adores me already, don’t you, precious? Look at her sweet pink frock. Can you give us a curtsey, pet?”

Jane’s hand crept down to the radiator to rap on iron as Dorie smiled and curtseyed prettily at the crowd. “Oh, what a doll!” she heard Miss Davenport exclaim, and then the other girls pressed in until Jane couldn’t see Dorie at all. She stood, unwilling to either leave her dark corner or risk Dorie getting out of her sight.

Too much attention might be a balm, might make Dorie sufficiently happy that she would not be tempted to destroy her father’s reputation in a single flash of blue light. On the other hand, Jane had seen more than once what excessive adoration could do to a child. She did not know Dorie’s measure in this situation, and she took a step in, nerving herself to fight her way into that flock.

But luckily Mrs. Davenport’s broad figure moved, and Dorie came back into view. She was smiling and laughing with the pretty ladies, twirling to show her skirts. Dorie did not pick up her skirts as another girl might do, or coyly twirl one of her golden curls, but for all that she did not look strange.

Jane sank to her chair, heartbeat slowing. As long as no one asked Dorie to demonstrate perfect penmanship, perhaps they would make it through the night.

A woman in a deep turquoise silk with black net overlay claimed the next chair over. Nina. “Famished!” she said. “Dieting really takes it out of one. Enough to make you want the old fashions like you’ve got on.” She gestured at the loose panels of Jane’s dress. “You could eat a cow in that frock and no one would know.”

“Don’t you have other girls to bother?” said Jane.

Nina laughed and settled into her chair. “But I find you the most entertaining. There’s no use sharpening my wit on those feather bolsters. Look at them, all hovering around poor Edward.”

Jane hated the possessive way that Nina spoke of him. “They don’t have a chance against Miss Ingel,” Jane said. “Look at the way she moves.”

“Like a confection of marzipan and rainbows,” Nina said dryly. “She’d better enjoy the attention now, because next week this party will be mine, all mine.” Jane raised her eyebrows, but Nina just laughed and dismissed her comment with a wave. Went back to assessing the chances of the women. “Well, old Ingy’s a duckling imprinting on her ‘savior’—you did see her before, yes? Men love ducklings, no matter what they might say. Then there’s the bolster Davenports—two can be twice as nice—but their mother will whisk them away soon enough when she realizes he’s flat broke. Makes you wonder where the money goes, doesn’t it?”

“Not particularly,” said Jane.

Her curt answer seemed to amuse Nina, who leaned forward. “Not even the Varee chirurgiens charge what he does, because they can’t compare to him and they know it. And now with this jump in skill he’s made, I’ve told him it’s imperative he double his prices—after me, of course.” She flapped a hand at the drawing room. “They’ll all pay it, those bolsters. So where does it all go?” She tipped back her champagne. “I think he’s got a secret child somewhere he’s paying off.”

“The Prime Minister’s wife,” Jane said without thinking.

“So you do have ears,” said Nina. “I like a girl who listens at dumbwaiters. Not her, though. She’s completely obsessed with their five drippy children and that doughy husband of hers. I think she just spent extra time with Edward trying to get those children done. At their age.” Her eyebrows were expressive. “No, I think there’s someone from the past. He grew up abroad, you know. Never came to Silver Birch until almost the end of the war.” She clacked polished nails against jet beads. “There’s something leftover from his past he’s taking care of.”

Jane’s memory flicked back to the old man with the cane at the carriage house that one day, the old man who was not Martha’s father.

Dorie ran across the drawing room floor, giggling as the elder Miss Davenport pretended to try and catch her. Miss Davenport might have had more success if she hadn’t interrupted the chase to arrange her body in artful poses.

“Good to see the child acting like a child,” said Nina. “That’ll go a long way to making the bolsters feel secure.”

“Secure?”

“Hard to entrust yourself and all your money to a man who everyone knows has a damaged child locked in an attic.” Nina rose from her seat. “But you might not be all bad for her,” she conceded.

Reflexively, Jane rose with her, watching Dorie giggle and slide.

“No, I never saw such a change in a child,” said Nina. She smoothed her turquoise silk around her hips, readying to sweep back into the fray. “Very odd. It’s as though she were released from chains.”

Chains, thought Jane. Iron chains, and the image hit her like a blow.

She and Dorie, encased in iron, bound by it, enclosed by it. A sarcophagus, an iron maiden—the ironskin not armor but an airtight coffin.

She sat down hard on the chair, her legs suddenly wobbly and useless.

The iron was supposed to keep the fey curse from hurting others. From leaking out.

But what did it do to keep it in? What was it doing to Dorie?

And what had it already done to Jane?

Her fingers trembled on the folds of her dress. So she took the mask off for sleep. That was nothing compared to sixteen hours a day of steeping in the poison, year after year. She had stopped those she met from feeling transitory rage—and in return she had taken it all, until her soul was eaten away with self-loathing.

She watched the tiny blond girl smile up at the pretty ladies, her curls light and bouncing, and Jane felt sick. It had taken Nina to point out what Jane should’ve known immediately. It wasn’t that Dorie was being stubborn and resistant, though she was. It was the iron making her ill by forcing her to bottle up her true self.

Jane rose, unsteady on her feet, fingers clutching her golden skirts to hold onto something, anything. Across the room she saw Edward’s eyes go to her, saw him look worried at her distress, but she couldn’t, she just couldn’t, be there one more minute. She lurched from the drawing room, climbed the side stairs with nerveless feet, flung herself into the safety of her room.

The moonlight laid a square of white on the wooden floor and she stood on its edge till the light lapped her toes, glittered the hem of her dress. Breathing, breathing.

If she were right about this, then everything she had thought was wrong. The good she had attempted was bad, and not just for her.

And now it wasn’t just that she would have to start working to undo years of damage.

She would have to reveal herself to the world.

Oh, say she was wrong, say it! She must be overreacting, must be mistaken. Anything so the answer was not inevitably: The mask comes off.

Jane spun to face the mirror. It was a good mirror, clear, unwavy. Unrepentant. Her iron mask looked back at her, her companion and protector, hiding the half-destruction. Skin on one side, iron on the other. Skin and iron, and her gauzy golden dress moonlit around her like fey light.

An explosion.

Through the mirror she looked until she saw, not Jane, but her past, the battlefield, plain as daylight and as immediate.

There was no sheltering past, no curtain of sleep to filter the nightmare, no, there it was, freed from its nightly confines to attack her in the day. There was her past, coming for her.

“Jane!” Mother shouts, but she does not turn. She won’t embarrass Charlie by taking his hand or squeezing his shoulder, but she nods at him, and he nods back. There are no soldiers, no King’s Men to come to their aid. They are all elsewhere, or dead. There is just them, clumped together on the white-grey moor, iron raised against an enemy.

Grim and white-faced they march across the moor.

That dawn Jane thought she saw no signal, no sign that the day was beginning. But she did, or perhaps she only sees it now, now in this living memory, this waking dream. An orange-blue flash like a comforting candle flame.

Then Sam—the baker’s apprentice, the lighthearted boy she danced with once—explodes next to Charlie.

A cry goes up. “There! The fey! The fey!”

Bombs are costly for the fey, she knows. But fey have no body in their natural state, no way to touch humans. Their strategy is to kill the strongest humans and take over their bodies. Then in their borrowed human forms, they can fight. It is why they have been harrying the village before the battle. We knew it, Jane thinks, and yet our hearts lurch when our dead stagger out of the forest, swinging sharpened wooden picks at us.

“Stab them with the iron,” she shouts to her little brother. “It’s the only way to drive the fey out.”

Charlie knows. And they advance, iron staves at the ready. It is gruesome work, and not all the villagers are up to the task. A man runs, retching. Jane’s nerves are strung so tight that every fey she studies seems to be at the end of a long tunnel of fog. Or perhaps that is the actual fog, insistent and cruel, hiding their attackers until they are too near. A farmer she knows by sight runs at her with a sharpened wooden pole and she thinks it is all up. But Charlie trips him, and his clumsy dead feet fall over her. Jane rolls and stabs the dead farmer with the iron. Tentatively, then harder, reminding herself that war is not a time for politeness, reminding herself that this friendly farmer is now a mask worn by the fey.

As the iron goes in, the fey dies. A fey in a human body is vulnerable; the state in which they have bodies to kill is the state in which they can be killed. Blue light ripples around the stave and turns stark white, crackles, keens—is gone. For good. The farmer slumps into the dirt.

“Good work,” Jane says to Charlie, who is ten feet off holding his iron bar. He smiles, that happy-boy smile she knows so well, and then a ball of orange-blue light and rock and glass falls behind him at his feet.

“Charlie!” she screams, and she runs toward him. I think I can bat the bomb away with my iron staff, I think—I do not know what I think. Time slows, and over his shoulder she sees the fey that threw it, a thin blue light with a carefully formed human face floating in its center. The face is exhausted, gloating.

Charlie has time to turn and see his death before it explodes.

The world is suddenly hot then, and full of rage. Her vision goes red and smeary. She loses some time then, in life, in the dream. The next thing she knows she is bent double, spearing her brother’s chest with cold iron to destroy his killer. Blood drips from the left side of her face, and it seems that everything around her is very angry, though at that moment she feels nothing.

Nothing except for the weight of the cold iron in her hands. The battle has moved away, east across the moor, but she doesn’t want to let the stave go. She clutches it to her chest as her other hand touches the strange whirring light that buzzes around her cheek. Her fingers come away wet and carmine and glowing. Shouts and clangs ring in the distance as blood drips down her chin, through her fingertips and onto the early yellow cowslips that dot the blackened moor.

Now in the bedroom of Silver Birch Hall, in this waking dream, the vantage point swings around until dreaming Jane is looking down at kneeling Jane. The kneeling girl raises her face, her gaze. Half of the girl’s face is Jane’s, clean and perfect, serene and trusting. The other half is an inky void, a nothing, a bottomless pit like a night without stars.

One green eye blinks in slow motion, falling like the crash of a piano lid. The girl’s half-mouth moves, and words form in Jane’s mind. It’s a sentence, or maybe an echo of a sentence, repeated with the monotony of a ticking clock.

I am Jane, and you would be frightened to look upon me.

The room swam back into focus until Jane was merely staring at a mirror. Her fingers trembled.

She had to know.

Jane closed her eyes and unbuckled the straps of the mask as she did every night. The iron came away from her face, leaving little strips of cold where the edges had touched her around the cotton padding. The padding conformed to her face and it stayed there until Jane seized it at her chin and peeled it away, dropped it and the mask to the dresser with a cold thump. The mask rocked on the cheek plate, thrummed as it stilled.

If she was going to face the world like this, she had to know. No more hiding from the mirror.

This was the start of her new life, and from now on Jane would be strong. Would master the poison, somehow, or would learn to live with the anger she caused, or would learn to live alone. The image of herself flashed behind her closed eyes, the black nothingness splitting her face, and the girl repeating: I am Jane, and you would be frightened to look upon me.

I am Jane, I am Jane, I am Jane.

She opened her eyes.