*
Jane did not sleep well that night. She turned back and forth, restless. Awoke sharply just past dawn with the feeling that an unpleasant dream was slipping just out of her grasp. Some nameless terror, and she had been frozen as the terror insinuated itself into the scar on her cheek, wound itself around her, through her.…
She hurriedly got dressed and went down to the kitchen to see if she could find Martha. Cook was up making some wonderfully scented bread, but when Jane asked about the maid she just laughed. “Sure and you won’t find that one out of bed before she has to. I’m not saying she’s not a hard worker, but she won’t see dawn if she can help it. But she’s willing to work here at Silver Birch, and there you are. Much can be overlooked for that.”
“Does she have family in town?” Jane asked suddenly, remembering the old man at the carriage house that night. “Parents?”
Cook shook her head. “Just a married sister. I tell her she should be visiting home more to find herself a man, but she just grunts.” She shrugged. “Who am I to say a shiftless village fool husband’s better than good honest work on your own, not I.…”
“True,” murmured Jane.
So the attic would have to wait until Dorie’s naptime, assuming they would let Jane go up at all, assuming this was not an intentional obstacle. Jane went back to her room, idly wondering what eccentricities Cook had that were being overlooked, like Martha’s late hours and Jane’s mask. Or perhaps Cook just had an old-fashioned sense of loyalty.
She sat on her bed and thumbed through the blue book of Ilhronian city-state politics. It seemed to be a treatise on the best ways to use treachery to hold power. Not really Jane’s cup of tea. She had three books in her trunk, all read a hundred times. A Child’s Vase of Cursing Verses was a classic nursery book: rhymes and stories about dealing with the other—mostly the fey, but a few of the stories were about dwarves, dragons, and other creatures. Even before the war, Jane had been fascinated by the way the book ranged from utterly real and practical advice—how to avoid the copperhead hydra—to things that were surely just tales—who, after all, had ever seen a giant?
The other two books were excellent novels, full of excitement and adventure. Kind Hearts and Iron Crowns was a cheap, yellow-backed, acid-tongued mystery that had been printed in Bowdler Street by the thousands. And The Pirate Who Loved Queen Maud was gloriously exciting, an extremely rare family heirloom from the time of Queen Maud herself, written by one of the famous dwarf authors that lived at court and were part of her infamous salons. (Queen Maud’s son had been less than pleased by the lurid tale, and he later ordered all copies burned on sight.)
Still, Jane had read them all. She could not get the gloves yet, Dorie would not wake for another hour, and she needed a distraction to stop thinking of him and that humiliating moment in his studio when the beautiful woman sailed out of his back room. Jane picked up the blue book on politics, intending to go to the library.
But when she left the room, Dorie was out in the hall.
“You’re awake!” said Jane. “Well. Good.”
Blue eyes looked up and through her, mutinous and steady.
Jane’s heart sank. Today was going to be just as miserable as yesterday.
Well. She’d known that, right? This was just the hard work part. She could do this.
Jane took Dorie’s hand and led her back to the nursery. “We’re going to start by eating breakfast,” she said to the little girl. “With a spoon.”
*
The tar made it so Dorie couldn’t do a repeat of the applesauce incident. But it didn’t make Dorie cooperative. By lunchtime she had eaten a quarter of her morning oatmeal and thrown the rest on the floor. At least she had to use her hands to throw it, Jane thought, trying to see the bright side. Progress was progress, even when it involved oatmeal on the dressing table. Jane opened the door so Dorie could see her lunch waiting, hardened her heart—and then made Dorie wipe up every single oatmeal blob that she had thrown.
The girl fell asleep in the middle of cleaning up the last of the oatmeal from under the bed. When Martha came back to take the lunch tray, she found Dorie asleep under the bed with her legs sticking out, an exhausted Jane with her head pillowed on her knees, watching her, and a full lunch tray still sitting outside the door.
“What the—?” Martha shook her head, as if indicating this whole mess was Jane’s affair. “Should I leave it?”
“We’ll eat it after her nap,” Jane said. Wearily she rose from the sticky, oatmealy floor, took a bun from the tray. “Can you take me to the north attic now? I have permission.”