Copperhead i-2

by Tina Connolly

  He looked up at her, and when she saw his bright, wounded eyes, she knew the next question. “Did you make it happen?”

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly, keeping her face turned away from the door. “We were helping your stepmamma so she would always be safe. But something went wrong.” Helen did not know if there was a better way to talk to small children; all she could do was treat Tam the way she wished someone would have treated her—tell him the truth, as much as she could. To the side she saw the door swing shut; Mr. Grimsby was gone. “The fey are dangerous,” she said. “But I’m trying to find my sister, and I hope my sister can fix your stepmamma.”

  He looked down at his jar, which had two june bugs thudding around in it. Slowly he opened the jar and watched them crawl out. “I didn’t tell about you being up there with her,” he said. “I’m a good liar.”

  “Er. Thank you,” said Helen. She squeezed his shoulder. “Your father says I can take you for an outing tomorrow. Where would you like to go?”

  A bit of interest played around his features. “The Natural History Museum? Stepmamma said they have a big reptile exhibit with basilisks and copperhead hydras.” The big words flowed out with the ease of much use, though Helen was quite sure she had not heard of any of those creatures at his age, and even now could not tell you if a basilisk was a reptile or amphibian.

  “Done,” said Helen. “It’ll be fun. I like snakes.”

  “I know,” he said, and pointed at her necklace. “My dad gave me a pin like that. See?” He tugged on his coat lapel to show her.

  Marking them. Owning them. Helen’s fingers closed on the copper. She wanted to rip their emblem off, snap the chain. And yet she did not. So it was a hydra—Grimsby’s hydra. Wasn’t it proof that Alistair cared about her? Some days she needed that proof. She let the necklace fall, smiling down at Tam. “Till tomorrow, then. And we’ll find you some more bugs. I’m afraid I lost yours.”

  Tam watched one of the june bugs crawl around the lip of the jar, uncertain what to do with its freedom. He picked up the lid and held it over the jar, trapping the bug inside. Raised it, lowered it. “Do they have dwarvven in the museum?” he said.

  “Um,” said Helen. “I don’t think so. You mean like pictures of them?”

  “Father said they should be rounded up and shot, and then the potato-faced man said they should be put on display as a lesson, and then Father said someday the last dwarf will be like the stuffed bear in the museum. I like the stuffed bear. I can see his claws up close. I would like to see the stuffed dwarf.”

  Helen recognized the “potato-faced man” as an accurate if unflattering description of Boarham. “I’m afraid there aren’t any stuffed dwarvven,” she said. It disturbed her to hear the ugly slur “dwarf” fall as easily as “basilisk” from the boy’s lips, but she supposed it was inevitable with that father of his. She stopped over the next bit and decided to say it anyway. “Whatever they say while drinking, take it with a grain of salt. I mean, it isn’t all true … or right.”

  He nodded as if he understood, although she wasn’t sure he did. But the door was being opened by the cleaning woman, and clearly Helen’s time was up. “Tomorrow,” she promised, and left.

  * * *

  Back down the street toward the trolley. Helen was getting awfully sick of the trolley. She reached the stop in time to see one pulling away, and then she regretted saying she was sick of the trolley, for it was even more annoying to want to get on one and not be able.

  Because it was a nice neighborhood, there was a small shelter, empty except for a dwarvven man just walking into it. She went in after him and stood there, stamping her feet against the cold. The brick wall around the Grimsbys’ back garden had dampened the gale, but here it whisked through the street in full force, blowing dead leaves before it, covering and uncovering the swathes of blue that lined the sidewalks. Tomorrow she would not take the trolley, that’s all. She would take Tam in the car to the Natural History Museum … and oh goodness, Helen, how foolish were you? Supposedly you were doing such a clever job of sneaking out, and now you went and saw your husband’s good friend and made arrangements to take his son out the next day? This is where rash decisions led you. The motive was good but the execution was abysmal.

  Relax, she told herself. Alistair has never expressly forbidden you to leave. You are a grown woman, capable of leaving the house on your own. And yet she shook her head, despairing, running through increasingly ridiculous options in her head. She could get Mary to pretend to be Helen. She could ask Mr. Grimsby to lie about her visit.

  People trickled into the shelter, waiting for the next trolley to pull up. Gentlemen, mostly, in worn but decent overcoats, copper lapel pins winking in buttonholes. A fellow in a soft cap eyed her and she tugged her own copper necklace out where it was more plainly visible. If she was marked as the wife of a top party member she might as well enjoy its benefits of implied protection. She moved away from him, closer to the dwarvven man, studying the inevitable lineup of posters. Trolley times and fares. A curling one for Painted Ladies Ahoy! that she smoothed out. She realized she had seen it before, and not known till now that the darling ink caricature of the central painted lady was clearly Frye.

  “This shelter’s becoming crowded, isn’t it? Perhaps someone should know his place a little better,” said the man in the cap. He was staring at the young dwarvven.

  The dwarvven folded his arms and did not budge. He appeared to be in his early twenties—a dangerous age for getting into trouble. “Know it as well as you do.”

  “Not really right for your kind to be here with a lady present.”

  “By lady I suppose you mean yourself?”

  The man in the cap went red and the mood in the shelter suddenly turned much uglier. Helen could feel the overcoated men slowly shifting, moving into a circle to enclose the dwarvven.

  The man in the cap bent down as though he were lecturing a child, tapped the dwarvven on the nose. “One people,” he said. “One race.”

  The dwarvven was dying to take the first swing, she could tell. He settled for spitting: “You’ve learned your lesson well.”

  Just then the trolley pulled up and Helen saw her cue. She tapped on the man with the cap’s sleeve and slid into the circle. “Thank you so kindly for protecting me,” she said to the man in the cap, “and I feel much safer now. We were just going.” She tugged on the dwarvven’s arm and pulled him through the openmouthed circle of men. Everyone was momentarily too stunned to resist, and Helen stepped onto the open trolley, motioning the dwarvven man to follow her.

  But what had worked so beautifully with the dwarvven grandmother did not work with this young man.

  He growled at her, “Don’t plan to owe a debt to a Copperhead,” and turned away, back into the crowd. The air seemed to crackle with electricity. A knife flicked into his hand, and he crouched, motioning at the men to dare step forward. The overcoated men surrounded him, ringing him, a circle of leering hydras. He was so small compared to them, and yet as he gestured with his knife they backed up a step. “I’m tired of bending over to you lot,” he shouted. “Don’t think you can tell us what to do. Don’t think it’s not going to come back to bite you.” A pile of maple leaves whisked furiously past, uncovering more and more blue on the sidewalk.

  “Oh, just go on home to the slums,” shouted one, and then suddenly he caught sight of something over the dwarvven’s shoulder and fell silent. Helen could not see what he saw, but one by one they all went agape, and backed up.

  “That’s right,” jeered the dwarvven. “Cold metal will scare you, won’t it? Not so brave now—”

  The trolley doors closed in front of her as a sea of blue rose from the surrounding plants and maple tree and sidewalk. The air tingled as the blue surrounded the young dwarvven. He dropped his knife, trying frantically to extricate himself from the tangle of slithery blue.

  And then there was a noise she hadn’t heard in five years, a sharp metallic noise.


  The explosion of a fey bomb.

  Chapter 6

  DANCING BACKWARDS

  Helen tugged at the trolley doors, certain she should get back out and do something, although she did not know what. But the steel would not budge, and the conductor hurried over and said firmly, “Miss, stop, stop.”

  Through the greasy trolley windows she could see that the blue had died away, leaving only a small figure, still and silent upon the ground. The overcoated men were picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, hurriedly backing away from the scene of the accident. The explosion seemed to have been contained by the whirlwind of blue fey that brought it. No one else was hurt. But oh, that poor young man …

  “Please sit down, miss. The trolley is starting.”

  From a distance she saw someone running. The trolley jerked under her feet, and through the tears standing in her eyes she saw a slight black-clad figure leap over a fence, running toward the man.

  Him. The man she had seen twice now—at the Grimsbys’ and on the trolley.

  What was he doing here?

  As he reached the crumpled form of the dwarvven, he looked at the trolley, and their eyes met. She was sure of it. Just for a second, and then they were pulling away, and she could no longer see anything clearly through the trolley window.

  * * *

  Helen opted for a long bath instead of Painted Ladies Ahoy! She washed her hair thoroughly, trying to scrub out the imaginary scent of blood and smoke and fey. There was no return telegram from Mr. Rochart yet. And Alistair had not come back—he was probably out with Grimsby, hearing that his wife had been gallivanting around town today. She sank under the water, eyes closed, and wished she could just stay there.

  But she couldn’t hold her breath forever. She climbed out and got into her mint green bathrobe and snuggled into her pink chair in front of the fireplace in her rooms. Mary had gotten it well and thoroughly going, and set out more chocolate, and some buttered toast, and a little vase with a red-leafed maple twig. Helen tossed the twig into the fireplace without a second thought.

  There was a fashion magazine on the table (SKIRTS! FROM VAREE! it exclaimed) and Helen reached for it to complete her evening of sitting and drinking chocolate and forgetting about everything else (she was going to help Tam tomorrow, surely that was enough?) but instead her treacherous fingers picked up the faded leather journal, and her notepad and pencil, and then there she was, settling in for an evening of work.

  “Bah,” muttered Helen. Apparently she was going to see whom she could win over next, now that she had convinced Mrs. Smith. Her mind leapt back to Jane, and, sidetracked, she thought perhaps she should investigate what Mrs. Smith had said about the dwarvven. If Copperhead was anti-dwarvven, then perhaps dwarvven were anti-Copperhead? They had infiltrated a meeting, unbeknownst to anyone. Sure, okay. And then ransacked Jane’s flat … why?

  She tapped the pencil against her chin. Start over. Millicent was stuck in fey sleep and Jane was gone, but what if both things were an accident? What if someone had been trying to stop Millicent from running away, and ended up kidnapping Jane so she wouldn’t tell anyone? But no, Millicent hadn’t decided to run until Jane talked her into it. Scratch that. She rolled the pencil back and forth. What if it was an accident in a different way? Grimsby had surely not expected that showing off his toy would end in a disaster of that magnitude—surging the lights and so on. Perhaps his machine had been sabotaged. By the dwarvven? Again, why? And if whoever sabotaged the machine knew what effects it would have … well, Jane was anti-fey, but not anti-dwarvven. Jane was notoriously not aligned with Copperhead. And who knew that Jane was going to be in the garret doing a facelift that night? Only Helen, and though she was flaky and flighty, she knew she had not told.

  Helen sighed and dropped the pencil into her lap. She could not make it make sense.

  She went back to the notes she had made earlier, looking through the list of eighteen women Jane had tried and failed to convince. She had reread about half of them when a niggling thought in the back of her mind forced its way out. “Alberta,” she said out loud, and peered at the short list again. Yes. Alberta was on it, right at the top, and halfway down there was a Betty.

  Helen flipped back to the journal, to the long list of 99 women that started the book. Down at number 73 she saw Desirée.

  “Bah,” Helen said again, and pulled out Frye’s bright orange missive from that morning to check. Those were the names in her PS: Alberta, Betty, and Desirée.

  Helen stood, putting down her chocolate and kicking off her slippers. “Oh, bother, here we go,” she muttered, and found herself dressing for a party and heading out the front door.

  * * *

  Frye’s house was not at all like any of the other society houses she’d been to. And of course not; Frye was not exactly high society. Yet she was clearly educated and well-spoken, she had some money—oh, artists were hard to classify. She lived in a medium-sized brick house on a row of other brick houses. But inside, every square inch was covered with artwork and memorabilia. Helen moved down the hallway, looking at the framed sheets of music, signed by their composers; lush oils, charcoal sketches, dashed-off nudes. She thought that Jane should be the one to be here; she would appreciate it. But then, this woman knew Jane, didn’t she? Perhaps Jane had already seen this bounty of art.

  The hall began to curve around a central staircase, and the wall decor turned from art to theatre memorabilia. Posters from shows, some framed, some not, some torn, some signed, all the way from cheap printings to elaborate productions with color painted onto them. Some of the newest ones had STARRING MISS EGLANTINE FRYE in bold letters on them. Interspersed were curio shelves with gloves and cups and beads and a wide variety of oddities that Helen could only assume were props, mementos. Behind it all was intricate wallpaper, the pattern of which changed every time it had the slightest excuse of a corner or chair rail.

  The wood floors were covered with long runners of carpets in exotic patterns. Flowers bloomed in profusion; birds darted in between them. Helen got so caught up in trying to decide whether there was a pattern to the birds that she only belatedly realized she was still hanging around the hallway, and piano music was banging away at a distance, somewhere else in the house.

  Her spirits began to rise with the prospect of dancing. It was emphatically not what she was here for. She was here to talk to Frye, to find those other three women that Frye had lured her here for, to convince them all to see the light, to come to Jane. To find out if they knew anything about Jane. She had done it this afternoon; she could do it again.

  But, oh, the dance. Oh, how she missed the dance.

  Helen followed the curve in the hallway and there in a burst of light was the party. It was a small room, too small for the number of laughing bodies that filled it. But it was gold and warm and glittering with strings of that yellow electric light. The heady smell of burning clove cigarettes drifted out, and from somewhere else, almonds. The music came from a battered upright piano in the back corner—a long-legged man in fitted sweater and wide slacks thumped out a riotous tune, and three young women in variously scarlet red, bright orange, and deep purple dresses sang with him. The one in bright orange was perched on top of the piano and was dark-skinned, slim, and so lovely that even Helen did a double take.

  Well, she’d found one of the women, she thought dryly.

  Chairs and stools were pushed back against the wall and in the middle, a messy glut of couples and singles danced the very latest dances, wild affairs with kicks and elbows and enthusiasm. A smile began to curve up Helen’s face. She had not seen these dances since the days at the tenpence music hall. Heaven knows they did not do them in Alistair’s house, or any of the other places she went.

  A hand grabbed hers and suddenly she was in the dance, despite all her good intentions to stay on task. A good-looking chap with a riot of curls swung her in and out, and she dredged up old memories from seven months ago to keep pace with him, glad tha
t seven months ago was not hopelessly out of date, that she was somewhat still au courant.

  The piano thumped to a stop, and the curly-haired chap beckoned an invitation for the next, eyes sparkling, but she demurred, smiling at him, and threaded her way through the dancers to the doorway. The party spilled out into the next small room, and then to the balcony after that, where French doors stood ajar and brought in welcome relief. She was pleased to see that the time she had spent at her wardrobe attempting to figure out exactly what you wore to an actor’s aftershow party was not in vain; many of the girls were wearing the more up-to-the-minute higher waists and wide shoulders of her own seafoam silk. Some outfits were more daring, and some simply fit no scene that she knew at all, and she particularly studied those girls, watching to see where creativity had hit on something new and desirable.

  She fetched up against a trio of giggling girls whose combination of baby fat and gangle marked them as probably too young to be here. She wondered if they were actors, too; she wondered if she had ever been that young. Behind them, a woman in an atrocious purple dress made of scraps of silk and what looked like faux fur looked out an open window into the night. She turned at Helen’s approach, and the perfection of her heart-shaped face made Helen instantly sure she had found a comrade.

  You didn’t just ask, though.

  “Breath of air?” she said to the wistful-looking girl.

  “Bit stuffy, ain’t it?” the girl said. “It was hot in the theatre tonight, too.” She fanned herself with a discarded playbill and wafted over a cloud of rose perfume. It was the same expensive scent as Calendula Smith’s, which was both amusing and informational. This girl must have a benefactor.

  “Are you an actor?” said Helen. She wondered if the girl had chosen the face for the same reason as Frye, to advance her career. But the girl’s dreadful accent would probably hold her back, she thought. Frye could switch in and out of beautiful diction at will, apparently, and Helen had paid attention to her own when she first started working as a governess, trying to eradicate any country from it. This girl sounded as though she had marbles in her mouth.