Ironskin

by Tina Connolly

A Child’s Vase of Cursing Verses was unlikely to be of interest. Poule had surely read Kind Hearts and Iron Crowns—Jane only hung onto it for the personal inscription on the flyleaf. But the third …

  “I will lend you a book,” said Jane. “A glorious adventure novel.”

  Poule’s eyebrows raised. Her hand went unconsciously to the book she was currently reading, tucked inside her dressing gown. “You think you have something I haven’t read?”

  “Maybe,” said Jane. “I mean, it is a dwarf author.”

  “Probably read it, then,” said Poule. “You’ll have to think of something else.”

  “The Pirate Who Loved Queen Maud.”

  Poule dropped her screwdriver to the table with a clatter. “Not the one her son banned, and ordered all copies burned on sight?”

  Jane nodded, and she mentally thanked the several-greats-grandmother who had decided she’d rather risk royal displeasure than give up a book. She leaned across the table toward those bright, eager eyes. “On page twelve he carries off a girl who looks like the queen, but he doesn’t find out she’s actually the court alchemist’s daughter till they’re halfway across the ocean, with a fleet of navy ships in hot pursuit and a nest of sea dragons just off starboard, ready to ravage the ship for its gold and tear the pirate to bits.”

  Poule gulped. “Done,” she said hoarsely.

  After the bargain was sealed, Jane slowly retraced her path back to the foyer, went up the stairs to her bedroom on the second floor. She stared out the window into the night for another hour, drifting in and out of semisleep.

  But no more lights appeared.

  * * *

  Jane was the one with the midnight adventure, but Dorie seemed just as tired as she the next morning.

  But thinking back, Dorie had been slower and slower to get out of bed each morning since they’d started the tar. It was not the stubborn revolt of the first day, but a strange passive resistance, as if she had decided she’d rather sleep than do anything that Jane wanted. Listless—slumped. It was an unusual strike for a healthy child.

  A very tired Jane knelt by the bed. She was heavy on her feet and her iron mask seemed to weigh her head down. “We’re not going to do the tar today,” she said.

  Dorie slowly lifted her head. “No?” she said.

  “No. We’re going to try these interesting gloves,” said Jane. “See how pretty they are?” Jane produced the mesh gloves that Poule had made. As a concession to Dorie, she’d gotten up early and stitched red and silver sequins on the backs of the hands.

  Dorie looked blankly at the sequins.

  “Your friend Poule made them for you,” said Jane, deftly wriggling Dorie’s passive fingers in and fastening the catches up the side of the arm. She hoped she could get them on before the tantrum, as the reverse seemed highly unlikely. “Now the other pretty glove,” said Jane, and in went the other hand before Dorie could discover that these gloves had the same effect as the tar. “Pretty, yes?”

  The blank in her eyes faded, and Dorie stared at the gloves with the same intent look she used to wear when she was trying to make something move. Jane readied herself for a full-on tantrum.

  But all that happened was that the intent look in the girl’s eyes slowly died.

  Her gloved hands fell to her lap and she stared off into nothing, through the papered wall. Jane felt suddenly alone in that white-and-silver room. The air vibrated with emptiness around that little girl who sat there, saying nothing, doing nothing, slumped like a forgotten porcelain doll.

  * * *

  The nightmares increased.

  They grew more focused, more detailed, until Jane was seeing the same scene, night after night. A terrible, familiar scene, one she had tried to block out for five years.

  She sees the blackened moor, bare rubble separating her town from the terrifying forest. She played in that forest once; they all did. Yet now she and her childhood friends take their places with jagged scraps of iron, watching the menace pour from the forest. This is how the Great War is fought, for soldiers are spread too thin when the enemy is not a human enemy, with one home base, with needs of food and water and horseshoes. This is an enemy that materializes out of every forest in the land, first here, then there, an inhuman pattern not easily deciphered.

  Their misfortune, to live so close to the trees.

  It is the dawn of early spring, and the moor is dense and roiling with fog. Daily there have been reports that the Great War is being won, that they are drawing ahead. This may well be propaganda, for they have not seen it. For almost four years some trick of circumstance kept them safe here in Harbrook, untouched by the ravaging, decimating war. But after the winter solstice something turned, and the enemy began appearing. Perhaps they were driven here, or perhaps it was next in their plan. They have been attacking night after night, gnawing the town’s defenses one by one. Harrying the town, taking one child here, one woman there. Till at last they have been seen, blue-orange lights gathered just inside the perimeter of the barren forest, and the ragged army of Jane’s friends takes their desperate stand against them.

  Charlie steps in front of Mother and Helen, pushes them back with a pale, dirty hand. Helen is thirteen and useless when faced with this terror. She wrings her hands in her dirty apron and holds Mother tight. Mother is brave, brave enough to let Charlie go forth with the men, even though he is all of twelve.

  I am not as brave as Mother, Jane thinks. Not brave enough to stay behind. She picks up her stave of iron and follows her baby brother onto the field where the yellow cowslips poke through the black turf.

  “Jane!” Mother shouts, but she does not turn. “Jane!”

  * * *

  Jane thrashed herself awake. It was cold pale dawn, and Jane’s buoyant hopes for Dorie were fading to despair. The days were all the same now, and Jane went through the morning rituals by rote: locking Dorie into the gloves, helping the listless girl dress and eat and play with her toys.

  It felt ridiculous to complain about no tantrums … but Dorie wasn’t doing anything at all. Jane had expected the girl’s stubbornness and energy to sustain her through learning this new skill, but now?

  Jane watched Dorie color on a picture of a rabbit with blue chalk. The girl lay on her stomach, her cheek on her left arm as if she were too tired to lift her head. Her right arm scribbled randomly over the rabbit, but she was using her hand, so though Jane despaired, she did not say a word. Just sat and tried to quench the impotent rage inside her that wanted to jump on Dorie for the tiniest infraction.

  She tried to turn her thoughts aside from her failure, but that just turned them back to Mr. Rochart, and the frustration of not seeing someone when you wanted to change what you said, wanted to rewrite the whole scene. No, that change of subject didn’t help one bit.

  Jane breathed in and out on counts of three as she watched Dorie’s gloved hand creep back and forth across the page in short jerks. It was a good thing Jane had the mask on, or Dorie would feel her rage no matter how hard she tried to pack it down inside her where it belonged. What was it that Poule had said? Maybe the calming thoughts really did help? Jane breathed deeply, imagining water filling the mask, the rage steaming off and dissipating.

  Dorie’s hand moved slower and slower and Jane reached out and gently touched her elbow. “Why don’t you sit up and try a new color?” she said. “Or a new page?”

  Dorie’s fist opened and dropped the blue chalk. Jane placed a piece of yellow chalk on her mesh-gloved palm. Dorie did not look at the chalk, but just started scribbling on the page again.

  “Do you want to color the ears yellow?” suggested Jane.

  Dorie looked at the picture, moved her hand over the ears, and started her slow scribbles again. Her eyes closed as if they were too heavy to keep open.

  Jane sighed, not understanding why Dorie wouldn’t at least want to do a good job. She liked pretty things—surely that would be a motivator for making the page pretty. Girls this age usually didn’t have to be
enticed to attempt to stay in the lines, even if they didn’t always make it.

  Of course, Dorie wasn’t like any other girls. Jane knew that.

  But she watched Dorie’s limp curls and slow-moving gloved hand and wondered if they were making any progress at all.

  * * *

  “The old servants’ entrance got blown off with the north wing,” Cook said. “Like as not we’ll get the temporary staff wandering in at the front door today. You’ll be knowing where the side door is to show them if you see them? And the passageway to the kitchen? Little matter for today, but there’ll be none of this front door waltzing-in when the guests are here, I can tell you. Sure and I’m the closest thing Rochart has to a housekeeper, but I won’t see him humiliated for all of that.”

  Jane sat huddled in the painted white chair in the kitchen, absorbing the unwanted news that there was going to be a house party in two days. “Extra staff,” she repeated.

  “Yes, to whip this house into something not an embarrassment and to be serving the guests. We’ll be having to open up at least two bedrooms in the damaged wing and maybe three. As well as extra rooms belowstairs for those we’re hiring and the staff of the guests. Still, better pence coming in than pence going out, though why potential clients have to be romanced for a week and not just an eve, I’ll never know. Especially when that puts them here over May Day, and won’t they just be expecting a grand celebration, as if those city folk had anything to do with the ending of the war.…”

  Dorie had just gone down for her nap, and her naps were longer these days, lasting from just after lunch to near dinner. Jane was torn between worry for the girl and the thought that Dorie was merely tired from the extra physical and mental exertion. Still, if this strange listlessness continued, she would have to go back up to the studio and confess that she was failing. The thought was not appealing.

  “Is Mr. Rochart busy this afternoon, do you know?” she said.

  “Rochart?” Cook dumped a bin of fresh new potatoes into the sink and ran an inch of water to loosen their dirt. “He hasn’t been here for a fortnight. He’ll be meeting with a wealthy client in the city. Left for town just after he finished with Miss Ingel. Were you not knowing?”

  “Oh,” said Jane. “No.” So he hadn’t been avoiding her. Unless he’d been avoiding her by fleeing the house altogether, but that seemed unnecessarily silly for the owner of the house to do. No, he hadn’t even noticed her ridiculous advances in his study, and maybe that was more humiliating. She didn’t figure into his travel plans one way or another. He didn’t think of her at all. Breathe, she told herself, and let it go. Think about anything else—water, tar, potatoes.

  “Sure and I don’t see why you would know,” Cook said. “Keeps to himself, don’t he, and why a young lass like you would care about the doings of a moody widower, even if he is your employer.”

  Jane did not want to respond to that, so she turned the conversation back to Creirwy’s earlier speech and replayed her instructions, to fix on what might actually be expected of her. “The side door on the south, you said?” said Jane. “That’s where I should direct them?” She wondered what the temporary staff would be like—these local wives and daughters pitching in to pick up an extra bit of money and a hamper of leftover party food. Did they normally ward themselves when they went by Edward’s crumbling house? Did they rap on iron to come today, and did they come only because they were desperate, as desperate as she?

  Cook nodded at the side door question, her nimble fingers rubbing the tender skin from the newest spring potatoes. Sloughed skin fell to the countertop in flaking bits of red-brown. “Some of the temporary staff were here at the last party two years ago,” Cook said. “The rest said they wouldn’t come back for love nor pence. Silly girls probably got themselves with babes by now. The old ones return, you’ll see. Ones with heads on their shoulders, with sense enough not to let their bellies turn at the sight of Dorie’s tricks. You have to be thirty before you have any sense at all.”

  “I’m twenty-one,” said Jane.

  “Sure and you don’t act it. You’ll be having an old heart, you will. My grandmam used to say that was the only thing that might save you.”

  “Save me from what?” Jane prompted. Anything to derail her thoughts. She hooked her feet on the rung of the wooden chair, watched Cook’s fingers fly.

  Cook stared off over the steam rising from the soup pot. The flames licked around its copper edges. “A cousin of mine was taken by the fey,” she said. “Well, her parents thought she fell off a cliff, but my grandmam said Eirwen was too clever to go tumbling off cliffs. Eirwen was that pretty and clever, and she had a little wooden recorder painted all blue that she played as well as the birds. She and I would go roaming, we would, through the woods and cliffs around the sea, where we lived then. But one day we separated and she never came back. The only thing we found of her was the blue recorder, half-buried in the mud of the path. Grandmam was certain the fey took her for their own.”

  Jane realized she was holding her breath, that her elbows hurt from leaning on the side table. “But the fey didn’t take you? Was it because you had the old heart?”

  Cook came back to herself with a laugh. “No, that was because I wasn’t pretty nor clever nor talented. May you be born plain, that’s the way of it. Grandmam said to me: ‘Creirwy, you’ll be thanking your lucky stars you’re ordinary, ’cause that’s why your mum isn’t bawling her eyes out right now.’ And you know, I did.” She slid the delicate potatoes into their own pot of cool water. “I suppose I’m too practical for my own good.”

  “Did you ever see her again?” said Jane. It seemed like the worst way to lose a child—no clean break, but the agony of waiting day after day, holding out hope against the inevitable. She imagined Cook’s aunt turning the muddy blue recorder around in her hands day after day, watching it age as the years rolled by. First the dirt would flake off, then the blue paint. Then the wood would smooth under her hands until the recorder was merely a lump of wood with holes, out of tune and unusable. And still no child.

  “No, that we never did,” said Cook. “And they say the fey let their captives go with a gift after a certain number of years—decades—have passed. So who knows—maybe she did fall off a cliff, for aught I know. Except that was just a bit easier to believe before the war. Nowadays I reckon even Aunt and Uncle accept that the fey took her.” The water roiled under the stirring of her wooden spoon. “Sure and the fey aren’t just tales anymore.”

  * * *

  Jane volunteered to steam the curtains in the foyer and direct traffic. There wasn’t time to wash everything (“A party only every two years, and he can’t be giving us more notice than two days?” moaned Cook), but there were plenty of ways to freshen with dusting and carpet beating and steaming.

  The steamer was one of Poule’s inventions: a copper and iron contraption on spoke wheels. Jane dragged the awkward machine into the foyer and poured her full kettle into it. The heavy velvet drapes were nearly wrinkle-free, but she felt oddly satisfied as she freshened the plush, uncrushed the nap of the velvet. Maybe it was because this was a simple task, she thought, not like her open-ended struggle to turn Dorie into something she was not. Steaming the curtains fixed the curtains, and that was satisfying.

  She directed several men and women to the side door to apply to Creirwy for the temporary work. Most often the villagers arrived in pairs—unwilling to brave Silver Birch Hall without a friendly face in tow, she thought. They peered in cautiously or stoically, wiping damp palms on their cleanest black-and-whites, fingering iron charms fastened over their pulse points. Jane smiled at them, but she knew her unveiled face with its contoured iron wasn’t likely to set them at ease.

  She was nearly done with the last set of curtains when the twisted doorknocker sounded again. Jane opened the door. “Side door on the south,” she said automatically, but then she looked more closely at the visitor. “I’m sorry,” she said, for the woman at the door was clearly no
servant. Jane wasn’t embarrassed for herself, but she didn’t want her employer to lose a client because she’d been too informal to her. So she bobbed an unfamiliar curtsey by way of apology. “An’ ye be human—oh, just come in, please, with my apologies.”

  The woman laughed, her head thrown back till her throat caught the muted morning light. “I’ll have you horsewhipped,” she said, and she swept past Jane and into the house.

  Jane looked at her sharply, uncertain as to whether the woman seriously thought that was a possibility, or if she merely had an odd sense of humor. Oddly cruel, perhaps. She wished she could take back the curtsey.

  The woman was amused by Jane, judging from the expression in her snapping black eyes. She was not attractive, but Jane had to look twice to see that. The woman was tremendously distinctive, due to the fire in her face, the light in her eyes. She had clear olive skin and masses of black hair, and she knew how to dress to her advantage—she was clad in folds of black satin that slashed dramatically past her shoulders and clung to her hips, accentuated at the waist by a sunburst diamanté pin. She took the plum silk wrap from her shoulders in one fluid motion and tossed it to Jane, who fumbled for it. “You may tell Edward that Nina is here.” As if there was only one Nina in the world.

  “Oh, I’m not the—,” said Jane, but Nina looked her up and down in a way that said she couldn’t possibly be interested in what Jane was or wasn’t.

  Her attitude got under Jane’s skin. “Is he expecting you?”

  “Oh yes,” Nina said, with a significant smile. “He’s expecting me.”

  “And yet I regret to inform you,” Jane said coolly, “that he’s not here.” Score one for the governess.

  Nina’s eyebrows raised, but her retort was forestalled by a movement behind the second floor railing. She elegantly inclined her head to study the small figure above.

  Jane knew her words would have no effect when confronted with one of the “pretty ladies,” but still she said to the small figure: “Go finish your nap, Dorie. I’ll be right there.”