“She is not … like me,” Jane said. “She is not cursed?”
“She’s cursed, sure enough,” said Mr. Rochart. “But she is not like you. I had heard that there were people like you, hit by fey shrapnel in the Great War, scarred with a curse that everyone around them feels. But she has no scar. And her curse is not like yours. Merely…,” and he gestured at the doll that had been dancing in the air.
Jane was all at sea. It was all wrong that this tiny mite should wave her hands and have power dance behind them, should be able to make Jane recall the talents of the frightening, relentless fey.
Not to mention the creepiness of calling this doll with its waving porcelain hands “Mother.” True, the strange Mother doll did look like Dorie. They had similarly perfect features: button noses, rosebud mouths, rouged cheeks. The doll had painted crimped yellow hair—Dorie had blond ringlets.
But at least there was life behind Dorie’s blue eyes. And not behind the doll’s glass ones. Both things were a blessing.
“I see,” Jane said. She stood her ground and kept her trembling fingers in her coat pockets.
Dorie studied Jane. “Your face is funny,” she announced, displaying tiny white teeth.
“I have to wear iron on my cheek to keep other people from getting infected,” said Jane, though she knew this explanation would go over the girl’s head. She was sure she had been told that Dorie was five, but even minus the curse, Dorie was unlike any five-year-old she’d met.
Already bored, Dorie turned away. She clacked her tongue rhythmically, sketched the air in time to it. Dots and swirls of blue light flickered behind her fingers.
The last time Jane saw that blue light was on a battlefield with her brother. She breathed, she swayed—she refused to run.
Mr. Rochart’s hand came up as if he would steady her, but then he stepped back, his hands dropping. Twice was not etiquette, twice meant he did not want to touch her, and she was ice-cold inside. “We have tried a dozen governesses over the last year,” he said. “None lasted a week. They all claimed it was not us—”
But Jane knew these words and they softened something inside of her. “It was them,” she finished. “They were summoned home unexpectedly. Something urgent came up—a sickly mother, a dying aunt.”
“You wouldn’t believe the number of dying aunts in this country,” he said. And even—he smiled, and Jane saw laughter light behind his shadowed eyes. Then they closed off again, watching the blue lights flicker.
Jane took a breath. Took the smooth-faced doll from his arms and handed it to Dorie. The floating lights vanished as Dorie grabbed the doll and held it close. “Pretty Mother,” she said, burrowing her face into its cloth body.
“She likes pretty things,” Mr. Rochart said. “Her mother was the same way.” Silently he crossed to the window, looking out into the black-branched forest that crept up the grounds of Silver Birch Hall as if it would swallow the house. In the sunlight she saw that his slacks, though fine once, were worn along the crease and at his knees.
“She is gone, then?” Jane said softly. Unbidden she neared him, him and that wide window onto the choking forest. To live here would mean to live in its dark and tangled grip.
Mr. Rochart nodded. “The last month of the war.” The words landed like carefully placed stones, a heavy message grown no lighter with repetition. “She was killed and taken over by a fey. She was pregnant with Dorie.”
Jane sucked air across her teeth. The mother killed, the daughter still unborn—no wonder this child was different from any she’d ever seen. Her heart went out to the two of them.
Mr. Rochart turned to Jane, looking down, down. In the filtered light through the window she could finally see his eyes. They were amber, clear and ancient, a whole history trapped inside of them just as real amber trapped insects. He reached to take her hand; she knew he wouldn’t—but then he did. “Will you help us?”
She had not been touched like that, not simply like that, since the first year of the war. Unbidden, she recalled the last boy to touch her: a baker’s apprentice she’d loved, with blond hair and a smile of gentle mischief. She was fourteen, and he’d invited her to her first dance, taken her waist, whisked her around the piano and out into the garden, where her stockings had splattered with spring mud. Someone’s mother had stumbled on them laughing together and sternly ordered them back inside.…
A touch and an unwanted memory should not influence her decision, but in truth her decision was already made. It was made from the moment she saw Dorie, from the moment she saw the clipping, perhaps even from the moment almost exactly five years ago when she knelt by her brother’s body on the battlefield, blood dripping from her chin. If this man would take her on, she would bend all her will to the task. She would help this girl. She would help them.