*
There was dancing, but Jane deliberately found another room to sit in, where it wouldn’t look like she was wanting to dance and not able to find a partner. She ended up sitting next to the old woman who had called Helen fey earlier, and two other old women who loosened their shoes and watched the girls on display flit back and forth from the crammed ballroom to the room where the cakes and tidbits were laid out. A smaller dance with some of the youngsters was going on in this room, and an old man with a fiddle played for the kids and competed with the string quartet’s sound emanating from the larger dance floor.
The sea of slinky gowns sliding back and forth between the rooms was arresting. Décolletage was low, T-strapped heels were high. Desperation was on more than one dewy cheek, plainly mixed with the waxy lipstick, the false eyelashes, the tight waves of curls. Single men were few—a lost generation.
But one beauty slinking past in an apricot gown needed no such ornamentation.
“Ah, the Prime Minister’s wife,” said one of the shoe-loosened women.
“The lecheress,” said the other, fluttering her handkerchief, and they cackled.
The woman’s face, elegant and porcelain-smooth, gave no sign that she had heard.
“She’s beautiful,” whispered Jane under her breath. Her face was peaches and cream, symmetrical, classic. Her apricot frock with its beaded net overlay clung softly to her lines, an elegant column. So this was the woman Mr. Rochart might have loved. An idle summer fling? Or passion, loved and lost, a tragedy bound by the rules of society?
“Fey beauty,” croaked the woman who had said it before. “It’s not smart to be that beautiful.” The other old women were in dresses thirty years out of date: full dark skirts and corsets, kidskin boots, and rows of tight buttons everywhere. But this one was modern. She wore a silk dress in sea-foam green with net flowers at the shoulder and waist. It draped oddly on her hunched and sagging form, and the leather heels slipped from her thin feet. She had a tiny pair of jeweled pince-nez that she studied the Prime Minister’s wife through. “Not smart at all.”
“Why not?” said Jane.
The women bent in, free of the restrictions the younger generations placed on their words. “They used to say the fey were drawn to the exceptionally beautiful,” said Pince-Nez.
“Or exceptionally talented,” said Shoes.
“May you be blessed with ordinary children,” contributed Handkerchief. “May you be born plain.”
“Why? What did they do with extraordinary children?” said Jane. She knew one of those, though surely the women meant a different kind of extraordinary.
“Steal them. Take them back to the forest,” said Pince-Nez.
“Eat them,” said Handkerchief.
“Bah,” said Shoes.
Pince-Nez agreed with Shoes. “They take them for entertainment.”
“And because they covet mortality,” said Shoes in sonorous tones.
“My granny knew someone who got eaten,” Handkerchief said obstinately.
Jane did not believe that the fey had ever eaten people. And “covet mortality”—well, the bodiless fey had certainly taken over corpses during the war. They killed with fey bombs that prepared dead bodies for the fey—then reanimated them, used them to fight hand to hand. That was why the crematory kilns had been going nonstop during the Great War, to save their loved ones from that wretched fate. But that was a war tactic, a horror designed to strike fear into humanity. A very effective horror, but not the desired end in itself.
But entertainment … “What do you mean by that?” she said to Pince-Nez.
Pince-Nez stretched her feet comfortably into the path of a woman towing two marriageable daughters away from the food. “Anything that lives forever gets bored,” she said.
“Like you, you old bag,” said Shoes amiably.
“Even if I reach my hundredth I will never be bored,” said Pince-Nez, rapping on the iron of her chair for luck. Her ropes of necklaces clacked against each other. “But the fey were.”
A woman walking by shushed Pince-Nez, out of habit.
“So they stole humans to feed on,” Pince-Nez said.
“I told you they ate them,” said Handkerchief.
“Not that kind of feeding,” said Pince-Nez. “They used to steal children, and everyone knew that. They fed on their beauty, their artistry. Sucked up everything that made them good. Then they let them go … each one a dried-up, shriveled old thing.”
“Like you,” said Shoes.
“Least I was a beauty to begin with,” returned Pince-Nez. “Fey beauty, they said I had. It’s a wonder I didn’t get stolen.”
“That’s enough out of you, Auntie,” said a male voice.