Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

  The faintest smile hovered around the corner of his mouth—she identified it and it was gone. “I saw the tackle. You see you are our soldier; I hired you for your trim fighting form.”

  “Father!” said Dorie, and she ran to him, even as Jane tried to puzzle out whether she should be flattered or made cross by the comparison.

  Mr. Rochart dropped a kiss on Dorie’s head and steered the small girl back to the house. “Do not go in the forest, love,” he reminded her firmly. Dorie rubbed her head on his leg and did not answer. “Now march quietly back to your rooms with Miss Eliot.” Dorie went as bidden, twisting back every few feet to check that her father was following.

  “You are settling in?” he said. “Your rooms are sufficient; the fire is lit, the floors swept; all ets are ceteraed?”

  “They are,” affirmed Jane, suddenly at a loss. She offered, “The dinners are very good. Creirwy is an excellent cook.” Her fingers twisted in her skirt. Weren’t there things she had wanted to say? Truths to ask, riddles to unriddle? And all she could do was mouth bland nothings about the food.

  She fell silent, and so was he, as they trailed Dorie up the stairs. He walked them to Dorie’s rooms as if escorting them back to a cell they should not have left, Jane thought.

  He stayed in the hall, clearly not intending to come in. Dorie looked up at him with big eyes. Jane was sure she read behind that blank face the desire for her father to stay. If only some of that hero worship could be transferred to Jane! Then perhaps Dorie would try reading and adding and using her hands.…

  Using her hands.

  Lunch had been delivered while they were outside. Stewed beans and bowls of applesauce sat on two trays by Dorie’s room. Seized with a sudden impulse, Jane said, “We were going to try using a spoon today. Perhaps you’d like to watch.”

  “Of course,” Mr. Rochart murmured. He did not come over the threshold, seemed poised to flee. But he stood, watching, and Dorie looked up at him expectantly.

  “We’re going to try applesauce,” Jane said, and she set one of the blue-rimmed stoneware bowls in front of Dorie. She used the spoon to demonstrate eating a bite herself, then she held it out to the girl. “Now you try,” she said.

  Dorie looked sideways up at her father, as if deciding whether to humor Jane. Mr. Rochart just stood, waiting patiently, so Jane carefully took Dorie’s arm and showed her how to lever her spoon into the applesauce and up to her mouth.

  Jane let her hand fall away. “Now you try,” she repeated.

  The presence of her father seemed to be the deciding factor in trying the new game. Dorie turned a look of intent concentration on her applesauce and carefully raised the spoon. As it neared her mouth she forgot to hold her wrist level, and the applesauce fell in a plop on her skirt. Immediately she turned her blank face to Mr. Rochart.

  “Good try,” said her father. He reached down and wiped the blob from her dress. But to Jane he murmured, “I have seen her play the trained monkey before, when she wants something. But the minute your back is turned…”

  “Baby steps,” said Jane firmly. She turned Dorie’s hand level again. The spoon still had applesauce clinging to it. “Try again.”

  Dorie brought the spoon back, and after banging it into her chin, she slid it in. She sucked the applesauce off the end of it.

  “Very good,” said Jane. “Much better. Let’s try it again.”

  They got in two more bites, and then Dorie looked up at her father for praise.

  He was no longer standing in the door. He had melted away. No doubt trying to avoid a parting scene, Jane thought in exasperation.

  Which meant Jane was going to have to deal with the aftermath he shied away from.

  Dorie’s face stayed blank, perfectly blank. Her hand opened and the spoon fell. Drops of applesauce spattered the clean floorboards.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Jane muttered under her breath. She grabbed the spoon and put it back into Dorie’s hand. “Let’s continue to eat our applesauce,” she said. She attempted to close her charge’s fingers around the spoon handle, which was probably her first mistake.

  Dorie glared, struggling to pull her palm out of Jane’s grip. She squirmed free and threw the spoon down. “Father!” she said.

  “He’s gone!” said Jane, temper rising. “Let’s show him what a good job we can do.”

  The bowl of applesauce rose off the floor and floated up to Dorie’s chin.

  “No!” said Jane, and she pulled the bowl away. “No applesauce unless it’s with a spoon.” She wiped dust off the spoon and put it back into Dorie’s unwilling hand. Keeping her hand closed on Dorie’s, Jane maneuvered Dorie’s stiff arm toward the bowl. Carefully Jane scooped up one spoonful of applesauce with Dorie’s spoon and put it in Dorie’s mouth. “Good,” said Jane, letting go. “Now you try again.”

  Dorie stared obstinately at the spoon in her hand. Then she threw it down, mentally yanked all the silverware off the tray, and set it whirling above Jane’s head in furious clanks.

  “No!” Jane shouted. She pulled Dorie’s tray away, shoved it out into the hallway, and shut the door. She sat down beneath the whirling silverware and plucked it out of the air, one by one, until she had a fistful of spoons and forks. She kept her hand tight on the silverware and stared down at the little girl. Yanked the bowl of applesauce back in front of Dorie. “Try again.”

  Dorie lifted the bowl of applesauce and dumped it on Jane’s head.

  There was absolute silence in the room as Dorie stared blankly and stubbornly straight through Jane, and an angry Jane counted to thirty, willing her temper to calm.

  I am not on fire, she told the hot orange rage that licked the mask around her cheek. I am cool water, putting out the fire. This little girl will not beat me.

  Apple mush dripped around her ears.

  At long length Jane rose slowly and went to her room. She changed her dress, ran a washcloth over her face and hair, drank a glass of water. Stared out the window for a while, considering her options.

  When she returned, Dorie was standing at the window, looking into the forest.

  “Dorie,” Jane said, then stopped.

  The applesauce was neatly wiped off the floor and piled back in the stoneware bowl. All the silverware was tidily stacked next to it.

  Dorie turned from the white-trimmed window. Jane could not tell if the blank expression was guilt or pretend innocence. She decided not to push it.

  “Let’s listen to your gramophone,” she said.

  * * *

  A week later, Jane sat on the stairs for a while after her charge had gone to bed, leaning against the railing and thinking. In the twilight the foyer chandelier burned half-blue. One of its two mini-bluepacks had fizzled that morning, so half the foyer was dim, while the other half was decorated with blue sparks from the hanging crystal prisms. Jane absent-mindedly rubbed the bridge of her nose where the iron weighed down on it, watching the sparks dancing across the walls like tiny lights. Helen would like the way the chandelier sparkled. So would Dorie.

  Dancing and walks. It was little enough to build trust out of, and Jane was reluctant to turn their only positive times together into rewards to be dangled overhead. She wondered if Mr. Rochart would have any ideas. She wanted to ask him—but he was always gone, and when he was there, like the day with Dorie and the applesauce, he melted away as soon as he’d appeared. Day after day he shut himself in the attic studio, or was mentioned casually as being “away,” though the motorcar remained in the carriage house. She knew all too well how much Dorie missed him. He had been at dinner twice during the month, and Dorie was much better the next day.

  Down below in the foyer, Martha emerged from the forest green curtains, dragging a ladder backward that scraped on the stone floor. She wrestled it into place on the rug beneath the chandelier, tucked the hem of her skirt in her waistband to keep it free of her legs, and went up.

  Jane did not speak, not wanting to startle Martha on the ladder, or embarrass her abou
t her hiked-up skirt. But she wondered what the maid was doing—bluepacks didn’t have an empty container, a shell to remove. When they were gone they were gone. And with the rationing nowadays of the final stores left from before the war, when the bluepacks were gone they were generally gone for good. Hardly anyone had spares left to replace them. Mr. Rochart himself had said they were on the last of the big ones—the ones that would run a motorcar.

  But Martha pulled a small bit of wiggling blue from her apron pocket and tucked it into the power source on the chandelier’s right side. Jane watched the motions that used to be familiar to everyone—pushing the blue stuff into the copper container (never iron, of course, or it wouldn’t work) with one finger, clapping the lid shut to keep the squirming substance in. It wasn’t that bluepacks tried to get free, exactly, but they did thrum and move in your hands.

  Jane had dropped one, once, when she was young and changing the porch light. The old bluepack had fizzled that morning, bursting out of the copper cylinder that screwed into the light bulb, leaving the lid rattling on its hinge. Jane balanced on a kitchen stool that really wasn’t meant for balancing. She leaned wrong and had to grab the base of the light, opened her fist, and there went the bluepack. It hovered pretty much where she had let it go, as if it knew she owned it. But it was that pretty much that was the trick, since it made feeble darts up and back, as if attached by elastic to the spot in the air. Jane knocked the stool over twice more before she finally caught the bluepack and put it into place.

  The foyer was fully lit again. White-blue light glittered crazily from the jostled prisms as Martha descended the ladder and clapped it shut. She shook out her skirts, and as she did so Jane saw her apron quite clearly.

  Her apron pocket was full of mini-bluepacks.

  Martha hoisted the ladder up and headed back through the curtains, the ladder’s feet catching on the velvet.

  Jane suddenly stood. Quietly she went down the stairs, following the silent maid. She did not know exactly why, except that the question: How many bluepacks does Mr. Rochart still have? was uppermost in her mind. Why, he could sell them on the black market if he’d a mind to—certainly the various attempts at replacements were nowhere up to speed.

  Jane slipped through the forest green curtains and saw that the hallway, which had gone completely black that first night she was here, now had every sconce lit with white-blue light.

  Martha strode down the hallway, ladder under her arm now, and Jane followed her down the stairs and around the cellar as she replaced one, two, five more bluepacks. Jane was about to give up out of both boredom and feeling ridiculous when Martha stacked the ladder against a wet stone wall, left the house by a back door, and struck out down a paved walk that led to the carriage house.

  Jane waited a cautious interval before following her. She felt rather silly at this point—why was she following Martha back to some closet where they kept supplies? But on the other hand, Martha had replaced a good twenty bluepacks this evening—still had some in her pocket—and Jane had not seen anything like that in ten years.

  It was the deep blue of twilight. They were almost to the spring equinox, and though the days were chill, at least they had been getting longer more and more quickly. She longed for summer, true summer on the moor, when there would be perhaps a full month of sunny days, days that lasted well past dinner, when you could run around outside with bare arms. Between the war and her time in the city, she had not had a real country summer in years. Her best memories were all from childhood, when both her parents were alive. Memories of finishing her chores and being allowed to play tag with Charlie and Helen and the other children late into the night, well past when they should have been in bed. But summer only lasted a month, and they all went a bit mad for it.

  She wondered what summer would be like here, at Silver Birch. Almost, she could not imagine that she would still be here when the days lengthened and the sun warmed the grass. It did not seem a place for summers, or perhaps it was just that she was still uncertain that she was doing any good at all. They would dismiss her well before summer, and Jane would be on her own again.

  She shook her head, clearing her gloomy thoughts. The walk to the carriage house was not used as much now as it had been, as it took you straight between the ruined wing and the forest. Jane watched as Martha glanced side to side, then hurried through, her elbows at sharp angles as if they would ward off trouble in the night.

  Jane hurried after. Grass grew thick between the uneven stones. The air was crisp on her arms and the wet grass left cold imprints around the tops of her boots. She had seen Mr. Rochart at the edge of the woods, hadn’t she? That day from Dorie’s window? The iron mask was chill through the padding—she touched it with one finger and shivered.

  Where had Mr. Rochart gone slipping through the trees? There—no, there, perhaps. Past that thorned locust, although that wasn’t a good reference as the forest was thick with them. Locusts and birch, and the silver birch were dense with clusters of mistletoe, which Jane knew would kill the trees if left to spread. Still, who was going to wade into the woods, these woods, in order to peel a parasite from the trees? No one with sense.

  Martha was vanished now, out of sight around the ruined wing of the house. Jane moved more slowly, cautiously following the flagstone path as it curved around the black and shattered walls. There were broken stones here that had fallen and never been moved. A blown-out window with sharp glass teeth, ragged curtains silent behind it. Mr. Rochart’s studio must be up above this somewhere, a workroom perched on crumbled stone, black gaps, decay.

  Far ahead, at the end of the curving path, the door to the carriage house cracked open. The twilight was quite dim now, and Jane stood silently next to the house, hoping she would go unnoticed if she did not move. A figure emerged.

  But it was not Martha.

  Even in the twilight, Jane could tell it was a man, an older man with a stoop and a cane. He held something small—fiddled with it and tucked it into his back pocket—it looked like a wallet. Then, with a nervous glance over his shoulder at the forest, he moved off down the long driveway that led back to the road. Jane wondered if he was headed all the way back into town, for that was a long road for a man with a cane. He must be some visitor—perhaps Martha’s father, and the girl had just been meeting him to hand over her wages. Still, Jane could not imagine why such a rendezvous would happen at this time of night. She kept her eyes peeled, looking for Martha, but she did not see the thin figure emerge.

  Night was coming up faster now, blue-black fuzzing the outlines of the sturdy carriage house, the black and crippled wing of the estate. She should go.

  A crack behind her and she whirled, but saw nothing. Another noise—a crackle, a bzzzt—a fey noise, she was imagining things—! Jane cursed herself for a fool. No sane person went even this close to the woods at night, especially not to satisfy some silly curiosity about the state of her employer’s supply closet.

  Jane turned back. She left the curving path and struck out straight across the lawn, skirting flowerbeds on a direct line to the house. There was nothing behind her, nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing. Another crackle—she turned around—and he was suddenly standing where she had been a moment before, as if he had been following her, unseen.

  “What are you doing out at night?” he demanded, and he took her elbow, crushed her against his side, moved her forcibly across the lawn and into one of the back doors to the house. Inside the entryway he freed her from his grasp but not his gaze.

  Jane drew back, crumpled into her shell, a thousand things whirling through her mind so not one of them was able to get free on her tongue. He was here, when she had wanted to see him. He had too many bluepacks. He was right to be worried; and of course she knew better than to wander near the forest, like some sort of witless city girl.

  He locked the door behind them and stood, his amber eyes intense and black. Then he sighed and said with a self-mocking lilt to his tone
, “I am sorry. I am a beast; I roar.” His hand went to her shoulder, and the gentle touch, the apology, disarmed her. She would have to watch herself—it was not right to be undone every time someone casually touched her. “Yet I cannot afford to lose you, and you of all people should know not to tempt fate.”

  But that made her angry, and the anger tangled up with the embarrassment, leaving her further tongue-tied. From her tongue spilled the thought: “Perhaps if you were around for me to ask questions about Dorie, I wouldn’t have to come looking for you.”

  “You were looking for me?” He had still not released her shoulder.

  “For Dorie,” she repeated, firmly. It was true. She had been, earlier. Further, he should be around for Dorie; she shouldn’t have to hunt him down.

  He glanced upward, as if he could see back to his studio. “I have someone waiting just now,” he said. “I only left her because I saw you on the lawn.”

  Someone.

  “A client,” he amended, as if he could hear her thoughts. “I would put her aside if I could, for you.”

  “For Dorie,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She suddenly thought that he meant it, that she had a momentary power that meant he would stand there until she told him yes, it was okay to go, yes, she could do without him just now, just at this moment. She looked at him and still he stood, his amber eyes studying her thoughts and waiting.

  “Go,” she said.

  He nodded. “We will speak later.”

  And then he was gone, and she was not sure that she believed his promise, though he probably meant it as much as he could. She could not puzzle him out. He seemed to put up barriers—old walls, formal language. A man who seized every opportunity to melt away to his world of work—his masks, his clients.

  But then—he had come down from his studio for her? Was that because he cared about Jane—or cared about what she might see? Did he know, all through that conversation just now, that she had been shadowing the maid? For that matter, what door had he come out of? She pulled aside a curtain from a back window, looked back toward the walk that led to the carriage house. But it was dark now, too dark to see.