Jane was apparently dismissed, though she wondered if she should stay planted and wait to take Nina’s message—as well as ensure that Nina did not go wandering through the house in order to find out if Jane’s information was true. Of course, if she stayed for the message she’d have to make sure that Mr. Rochart got the message, and she did not wish to seem that she’d been seeking him out in his studio.
Nina’s stiff posture, white-gloved fingers frozen on one misshapen mask, seemed to imply that she couldn’t possibly do anything as personal as write a note without the privacy of Jane being gone. So Jane turned, but as she did, her eye fell on a new mask hanging by the door. Her gaze caught and held, and she could not look away from the glistening skin, the bags and folds that caricatured a human.
But not just any human.
It was obscenely taken to extremes, true. But surely Jane recognized the model for those pouched eyes, that prizefighter nose, though she’d only seen them the once?
It was the leering face of the first Miss Ingel.
Chapter 10
THE EDGE OF THE FOREST
Jane’s knees shook. Plain Miss Ingel. Beautiful Miss Ingel. And—“the Varee chirurgiens can’t compare to him,” Nina had said, but didn’t chirurgien mean surgeon?
“Miss Ingel…,” Jane whispered. “She used to look like that sculpture.”
Nina looked where Jane’s eyes were fixed. “Oh, Blanche,” she said derisively. “I saw her yesterday, and she tried to pretend that the hot springs were restorative. As if she could fix that face and not have it be obvious.” Nina’s eyes fell to Jane, still holding her plum silk wrap. “I’ll take that. Now, if you wouldn’t mind…?”
Jane wanted to collapse to the floor right there, but she obeyed Nina, wobbled through the foyer, and sank out of sight behind the forest green curtains. She wrapped her arms around her knees, where goose bumps speckled her skirt.
It was plain as day, now that Nina had said it. Rochart-as-artist was a pretty little fiction, a cover story that certain wealthy elite knew the truth of. No artist—a surgeon. A secret surgeon, unless maybe everyone knew—everyone but Jane, who was apparently as na?ve as Alistair had painted her.
No, she reminded herself, she would not beat herself up over ignorance. She had been wrapped up in her own work with Dorie; why should she see through a mystery that she didn’t know existed?
Not to mention that facial surgery was so uncommon that Jane had only seen it once before, and that was to fix a boy in her town who had had his face mauled by a wild boar. She had seen the city surgeon’s work, and it was obvious. It was noticeable; there were scars, and stretches. It was definitely an improvement over no work, but the boy would never look quite normal, let alone handsome.
She had heard that back when the cinemas were still running, there were actresses who went voluntarily for such surgery, that noses and chins could be tweaked. But she had never seen the result, and she had never heard that it could look like this.
But that was what it was. Edward the surgeon, Edward the artist in flesh and bone. Tweaking those like the Prime Minister’s wife so they merely looked refreshed, doing major work on those like Blanche Ingel. And either way making the woman into the most dazzling version of herself. Fey beauty, the old woman at the party had called it, and that’s what it would’ve been called before the Great War, for it was inhuman to be that perfect, that symmetrical, that flawless.
She stayed there until she heard the soft front door click of Nina leaving, and then she crossed the foyer, went to the small red room to see the faces again.
Yes, there was Miss Ingel, the stretched and exaggerated sculpture of her original face. His mockups, perhaps, his befores and afters. She thought back to something he had said about them the first time she’d seen his studio. “A reminder,” he’d said. A reminder of the worst of us, extracted and displayed.
She could only guess that the sorrows in his life drove him to the extreme of making these grotesque images—perhaps he was not altogether comfortable with what he did. It was shrouded in secrecy after all, presumably because the women wanted to pretend they’d always been this beautiful—would rather pretend they’d had affairs or been on holiday than let the truth be known.
And secrecy like that had to weigh on him.
Had to cause—moodiness, as Cook had said.
Jane reached up to touch the ugly Blanche Ingel mask. The clay was smooth, the painted surface slick, almost elastic. One above and to the left caught her eye—was that the Prime Minister’s wife, with the heavy jowls? The caricature was so extreme, it was hard to tell. If that Nina person had been friendlier, perhaps she could have told Jane what name went with each piece of artwork.
Slowly Jane turned, looking at the rows and rows of masks with a new eye. Each one represented a person, somewhere. Rows of people who had jumped ship on their old lives for the chance to be someone new. She might have met them, seen them in the city, and she thought of the beautiful people at Helen’s wedding.
Thought of all the splendidly attired guests, whirling in their gauzy gowns of apricot and ruby in the gaslight, each holding to their faces a mask made of their worst self.