Ironskin

But luckily Mrs. Davenport’s broad figure moved, and Dorie came back into view. She was smiling and laughing with the pretty ladies, twirling to show her skirts. Dorie did not pick up her skirts as another girl might do, or coyly twirl one of her golden curls, but for all that she did not look strange.

 

Jane sank to her chair, heartbeat slowing. As long as no one asked Dorie to demonstrate perfect penmanship, perhaps they would make it through the night.

 

A woman in a deep turquoise silk with black net overlay claimed the next chair over. Nina. “Famished!” she said. “Dieting really takes it out of one. Enough to make you want the old fashions like you’ve got on.” She gestured at the loose panels of Jane’s dress. “You could eat a cow in that frock and no one would know.”

 

“Don’t you have other girls to bother?” said Jane.

 

Nina laughed and settled into her chair. “But I find you the most entertaining. There’s no use sharpening my wit on those feather bolsters. Look at them, all hovering around poor Edward.”

 

Jane hated the possessive way that Nina spoke of him. “They don’t have a chance against Miss Ingel,” Jane said. “Look at the way she moves.”

 

“Like a confection of marzipan and rainbows,” Nina said dryly. “She’d better enjoy the attention now, because next week this party will be mine, all mine.” Jane raised her eyebrows, but Nina just laughed and dismissed her comment with a wave. Went back to assessing the chances of the women. “Well, old Ingy’s a duckling imprinting on her ‘savior’—you did see her before, yes? Men love ducklings, no matter what they might say. Then there’s the bolster Davenports—two can be twice as nice—but their mother will whisk them away soon enough when she realizes he’s flat broke. Makes you wonder where the money goes, doesn’t it?”

 

“Not particularly,” said Jane.

 

Her curt answer seemed to amuse Nina, who leaned forward. “Not even the Varee chirurgiens charge what he does, because they can’t compare to him and they know it. And now with this jump in skill he’s made, I’ve told him it’s imperative he double his prices—after me, of course.” She flapped a hand at the drawing room. “They’ll all pay it, those bolsters. So where does it all go?” She tipped back her champagne. “I think he’s got a secret child somewhere he’s paying off.”

 

“The Prime Minister’s wife,” Jane said without thinking.

 

“So you do have ears,” said Nina. “I like a girl who listens at dumbwaiters. Not her, though. She’s completely obsessed with their five drippy children and that doughy husband of hers. I think she just spent extra time with Edward trying to get those children done. At their age.” Her eyebrows were expressive. “No, I think there’s someone from the past. He grew up abroad, you know. Never came to Silver Birch until almost the end of the war.” She clacked polished nails against jet beads. “There’s something leftover from his past he’s taking care of.”

 

Jane’s memory flicked back to the old man with the cane at the carriage house that one day, the old man who was not Martha’s father.

 

Dorie ran across the drawing room floor, giggling as the elder Miss Davenport pretended to try and catch her. Miss Davenport might have had more success if she hadn’t interrupted the chase to arrange her body in artful poses.

 

“Good to see the child acting like a child,” said Nina. “That’ll go a long way to making the bolsters feel secure.”

 

“Secure?”

 

“Hard to entrust yourself and all your money to a man who everyone knows has a damaged child locked in an attic.” Nina rose from her seat. “But you might not be all bad for her,” she conceded.

 

Reflexively, Jane rose with her, watching Dorie giggle and slide.

 

“No, I never saw such a change in a child,” said Nina. She smoothed her turquoise silk around her hips, readying to sweep back into the fray. “Very odd. It’s as though she were released from chains.”

 

Chains, thought Jane. Iron chains, and the image hit her like a blow.

 

She and Dorie, encased in iron, bound by it, enclosed by it. A sarcophagus, an iron maiden—the ironskin not armor but an airtight coffin.

 

She sat down hard on the chair, her legs suddenly wobbly and useless.

 

The iron was supposed to keep the fey curse from hurting others. From leaking out.

 

But what did it do to keep it in? What was it doing to Dorie?

 

And what had it already done to Jane?

 

Her fingers trembled on the folds of her dress. So she took the mask off for sleep. That was nothing compared to sixteen hours a day of steeping in the poison, year after year. She had stopped those she met from feeling transitory rage—and in return she had taken it all, until her soul was eaten away with self-loathing.

 

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