Still, she was glad to slip inside Dorie’s rooms without encountering anybody.
Dorie was in bed but not asleep. Jane saw with sinking heart that Martha had followed earlier instructions to put the gloves back on her at night. Dorie lay with her arms in iron, flat as a pancake, staring at the silver-papered ceiling.
Jane sat on the bed. Dorie did not move. “Here goes,” she said, and unlocked the mesh gloves, peeled them from the child’s pale skin. She rubbed Dorie’s arms down with her hands as if human touch could dispel the aftereffects of iron.
Dorie finally looked interested as Jane got the blood flowing through her forearms. “Off?” she said, and there was a flicker of light in her eyes.
“Today and more,” Jane said grimly. “I have a new bargain to make with you. You will work on your hands with me … and I will work on ‘mother stuff’ with you.”
Dorie’s blue eyes were wide.
“Only together, do you understand?” Jane seized Dorie’s hands, drew them close to her, her voice falling to a fierce whisper. “This is no game. This can only be you and me in this room. Otherwise you and your father are in danger.”
Dorie nodded, and there was gravity in the expression.
Jane breathed. “Now,” she said. “Lift your quilt in the air. Without your hands.”
Dorie spread her arms over the quilt and went silent. With a little tug and bobble, the quilt slowly rose. Then fell again, and Dorie looked surprised.
Jane nodded. “You’re weak this morning. That’s not surprising. Stop that for now and we’ll have breakfast and do morning exercises with our hands. If you work hard, we’ll come back to this before lunch. Understand?”
Dorie nodded. Then she smiled. “Yes, Miss Jane,” she said clearly.
Jane smiled, and the action felt strange on her cheek, the skin crinkling against the cotton veil like the cracking of a porcelain mask. Or maybe the strangeness was that she almost felt like she could feel the little girl’s emotions, and the strongest one was trust.
*
“I just don’t see why you have to go without it,” said Cook crossly. “Sure and if there’s something that helps you withstand them, you seize it. Even if it is wearing iron across your face.”
“But my worry is that it’s not helping me,” Jane said. She had offered to chop walnuts for that night’s dessert, but the conciliatory gesture didn’t lessen Cook’s temper.
“You’re still wearing a hat, aren’t you then? Covered all up like a beekeeper in June. Not like that’ll be normal.”
Jane knew that the normally friendly and cheery cook couldn’t help her reaction to Jane. She knew intimately how frustrating it was to react in anger when you didn’t think of yourself as an angry person. She hadn’t been, once. She’d been even tempered, patient with children, tolerant of others’ foibles.
Cook threw chopped yellow onions in the pot with sharp splashes. “It’s not right, and you not knowing how Dorie will react. Children need careful handling. You’ve got to be thinking of her.”
“I am, truly,” said Jane. She attempted a smile, though she knew it was obscured by layers of cotton. “It’s all part of the master plan.”
Cook folded bay leaves and long runners of thyme into a square of cheesecloth. She didn’t turn around. “There are plenty here who’d give nigh anything to stop their curses and you just let it out.”
“Plenty? Who?”
“Never you mind, missy. You just sit down and give it all a good long think, that’s what.” Cook tied off the bag of herbs with twine and dropped it in the pot, washed her hands of the argument. “Now I’ve said my piece and I’m done. You’ll be passing me the walnuts now.”
With the back of a butcher knife, Jane scraped them from the chopping block into a green bowl. “Did Mr. Rochart need careful handling, too? When he was young?”
“And how should I be knowing that?” Cook said. “He didn’t grow up here.”
“Oh,” said Jane, and then remembered Nina saying last night that he had grown up abroad. “But this house belonged to his family, yes?”
“It’ll be the family house, sure, and we all knew the last Mr. Rochart. Cross old man, rest him—he paid his workers fair and just, but never a kind word for any soul. He died a good decade before the war, and the house sat empty till this Mr. Rochart returned. A grandson, you see. His da had run off when he was just a boy—some quarrel, and the old man never forgave him.”
“Then when did Mr. Rochart come back?”
“Just after the Great War started,” Cook said, “but that’s enough asking into your master’s business.”