“Personally, I’d be more worried about spiders in this wing than fey,” Jane said. “And rats. Spiders and rats, everywhere you look. The rats eat hair, you know. Late at night, when you’re asleep.”
Nina said nothing, which made Jane all the more sure that she was right: Nina was afraid. She must be keeping an appointment—a surgical one. Because Nina wouldn’t be this nervous if she were keeping an assignation with Edward, no matter what ruse she tried to imply. Nina probably ate men like him for breakfast.
They emerged at the top of the house, which was darker than Jane expected. Black wool curtains had been hung at all the windows, extinguishing the sunlight. She wondered where he’d gotten the money for those, and then Nina gripped Jane’s arm closer, crushing it into her satin side. Her nails were chips of tile pinching Jane’s skin. “You wait for something for so long,” she said, “and when it comes, can it possibly live up to your expectations?”
“Not likely,” Jane said softly.
“The bolsters think a face is as easily changed as a dress,” Nina said. “You are the only one who might understand that you live in your face. As much as you long for the improvement, you know you will lose something, too. Well, you will see soon enough. I have seen your face, you know. Pretty enough if you like that sort of thing, but I would rather be me.”
Jane stared at her. Nina did not notice. All her attention was in front of her, on that slab of wood, on the studio door.
“I’m going to see me now,” she whispered. “The me I will soon be.” Her fingers lifted away from Jane’s arm, and she raised her hand to knock.
The door opened partway before her knuckles could hit the door, opened just enough for Jane to see a shadowy Mr. Rochart standing in the dark, opened just enough for Nina to slide through. His eyes fell on Jane and she backed away. The door closed and a strip of green-gold light turned on, lighting the crack under it. The top floor was dark except for that glowing strip of light.
Jane moved with nerveless feet down the steps.
Nina and Edward—no.
Well, maybe, but—something else.
Her face. Nina had seen her face.
Edward had sculpted her face.
Jane stumbled down the stairs, feet nerveless beneath her, slipping from one step to the next. The bottom dropped from her stomach as she ran through the thought of what Edward might be contemplating.
A new face. A whole face.
Normal.
The agony of desire struck her at a million points, a net constricting her skin, drawing her tight around that piercing hope.
To be normal.
She cried out, batting aside that hope, telling it to vanish, but it wouldn’t, it multiplied, insinuated itself into her brain, telling of all the joys she could have if only she were whole, if she were normal, if the last five years were only a bad dream.
She stumbled to the landing with the hidden mirrors. Pictures of impossible memories blinded her sight, obscuring the Janes rushing in to meet her with a different Jane. Jane in that other timeline, that one where tall Charlie had sat beside her at Helen’s wedding, that one where her family was not blindsided by war.
Jane walking through Crown Park in a yellow voile sundress, arm slung around the shoulders of a blond girl her age, laughing hysterically over an incident in her life drawing class involving a male model and his determination to pose au naturale, as one did in Varee. The normally dignified teacher had smacked his disrobing rear end with a broom.
Jane leaning over the opera balcony before the start of Ma Petite Chou-Chou. Seeing a knot of friends below waving wildly to her, trying to get her attention. “Jane,” they shout, doubling over with laughter. One of the girls flips open a fan and dances with it à la Chou-Chou. Shocking, riotous, joyous. Shouting: “Jane!”
Jane in Helen’s new pink sitting room, looking into the mirror before a dance. Her cheeks are flushed; her dark hair frames her face. She is solemn and fluttery, for tonight she will see him again, and tonight is the time that something important will happen, a declaration, a step into the future. She enters her sister’s fancy drawing room where the rich folk flit like champagne bursting and the gaslights dot yellow against the papered walls. And there he is, tall and dark, a man gaunt with the aftereffects of war. A widower, a heavyhearted man with a bite to his tongue, a man whose eyes light when they fall on her in the borrowed silver dress. The only man she could talk freely to, the only man she could ever love …
Veiled Jane swam back into view.
“Edward,” Jane whispered aloud to the stairwell. Her heart seemed to be breaking into a million shattered pieces, and the revelation of her face was only part of it, the crack in the frozen river that opened a hole to the raging current beneath. “I love Edward.”
Porcelain shards tumbled to the carpet, spattered the floor like cracking ice.
Chapter 13
THE LAST RAY OF SUNLIGHT