Ironskin

“No!” said Jane. She remembered her frustrations with Dorie and felt sharp guilt. “No,” she repeated. “This is not an invented dying aunt, I swear it.” She held out the engraved notice to show him. “I had thought it would be a couple months from now.”

 

 

He did not look at the invitation, but instead leaned in closer. “Decades ago, before the Great War, there was still trade with the fey. Contact, even if it was rare and limited to your friend’s cousin, your neighbor’s father. Those bluepacks were everywhere, ran all the trains and streetlights, trolleys and gramophones, and yet you never knew anyone personally who had met the fey—it was always a friend of a friend, or a faceless business who shipped the lights and bluepacks to the local stores. Stories about the fey spread, of course. Some compelling, some disturbing; and if you saw a fey at a distance, wearing a human shape—well, you never quite knew if all the stories of curses and stolen children were true or slander. The tales of the fey were fireside tales to entrance your friends and family, and not gruesome fodder for the newspaper.”

 

Jane nodded, uncertain what this had to do with her leave of absence.

 

“There was one tale of a lass who was tricked into staying with a ruined man,” he continued. “A human man, who had been cursed by the fey. A damaged man, nearly a beast. When this girl goes home for a visit, he bids her promise to stay only a week, for without her he will surely fade and die, return to the clutches of the fey that once claimed him.…”

 

She could not fathom this despairing mood, but she liked it little. It poured from him like a poison, clutching at her throat, overpowering even her rage. From a distance she heard herself saying, “The circumstances are very alike, then. For I clearly see your beastly fangs and sharpened claws.”

 

Mr. Rochart straightened. Laughter broke through the somber expression. “Go to your wedding,” he said. “I will not even hold you to the beast-man’s promise, make you swear to return to me.”

 

“No?” said Jane.

 

“No. I will fetch you home myself.”

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 5

 

 

FEY BEAUTY

 

 

Six days later, Jane sat on a pink tufted stool in Helen’s new sitting room, watching her sister flit back and forth. Fair Helen, lovely Helen, pink and white, unscarred Helen was dressed in nightclothes that looked like pre-war underclothes: a white chemise and bloomers, both heavily worked with eyelets and satin ribbons. Strange to think how sharply fashions had changed in one decade after seemingly centuries of head-to-toe layers. Dresses were sleeker and clingier by the day; glimpses of legs were displayed in the thinnest stockings you could afford (and oh, weren’t stockings dear these days as the factories all labored to make coal and steam technology work as efficiently as the bluepacks once had). Soon, Jane reflected, they would all wear nothing at all, and yet her head would still be swathed in mask and hat and veil.

 

Helen’s copper-blond hair streamed free, her big brown eyes batted lashes at Jane. “The pearl combs or the tortoiseshell, Jane? Why won’t you make me choose?”

 

“I thought you had chosen,” said Jane. She was seated next to the fireplace. The fire felt lovely, warm—too warm on her iron cheek. She turned her face away from the blaze. “The tortoiseshell, then,” she said. “To offset your hair.”

 

Helen held one up, then dropped it on the rosewood vanity with a sigh. “No, the pearls, of course. It has to be pearls for a wedding. Come twist them in, will you?”

 

Jane obeyed. She always obeyed Helen on the little things. It was easier that way. And yet no matter how many small battles she let Helen win, Helen fought just as hard on the big ones. And there met Jane’s temper, and called Jane stubborn, no matter how stubborn Helen was herself.

 

“It’s a lovely mirror,” said Helen. “Not all wavy and silvered like ours was in the flat.”

 

Jane twisted the copper-blond curls over her finger, carefully not looking at the mirror.

 

Helen shifted, disrupting Jane’s hands. “And my rooms are lovely, don’t you think so? Did you see the fixtures for the gaslight? I selected them. All on my own.”

 

“Hold still.”

 

“Ouch,” said Helen, and her fingers flew in the way of Jane’s and back down. “I said, aren’t you fond of my rooms?”

 

“I’m not sure why you’re here in these rooms before the wedding,” said Jane. “Since you asked.”

 

“Don’t be prim,” said Helen. “Nobody here thinks anything of it.”

 

“I passed two cousins and a maidservant this morning that thought something of it.”

 

“Is that why you’ve been so cold to me all week?” said Helen. “You barely wished me a good birthday on Tuesday, and I am now eighteen and quite ridiculously adult.”

 

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