Ironskin

“No,” said Jane. It felt good to stand up to Nina. She followed Poule’s path into the room and shut the door. (Martha in the hallway shook a firm NO at the unspoken question of whether she wanted to join them.)

 

“Really, Jane,” repeated Nina, and then she fell silent as Poule’s tools whirred loudly on the window nearest Nina’s bed. When she saw that Jane and Poule were set on staying, she huffed, downed her whiskey, and sank into a tufted sixteenth-century armchair, glaring at the room.

 

It was a mess. Heaps of satin and tulle straddled spindly-legged tables, arms of chairs, the canopied bed. Nina’s dramatic black hat hung giddily over a vase painted with cherubs, and several glasses ringed with plum lipstick crowded the top of the vanity. The messy modernity of Nina seemed to swallow the dated, threadbare room.

 

This was what it was like to put your stamp on something. This was someone with presence. Whatever Nina wanted would be hers, just by virtue of being so unstoppably Nina. Blanche Ingel’s charisma lay only in her face, the unearthly face that Edward had created for her. But Nina’s charisma oozed from every inch of her skin. Jane thought that even now, she would place her bets on Nina to best Blanche in any social battlefield. And with the new face? Nina would be unstoppable. She’d be able to ensnare anyone, maneuver any event to her liking.

 

Surely Edward would be small potatoes then.

 

The thought was comforting—and then her eye fell on an embroidered chair holding Nina’s wadded-up turquoise dress.

 

Under the chair were a pair of men’s shoes.

 

The thought of glamorous Nina entertaining men visitors in her rooms made Jane feel smaller than Poule. The brief victory she and Poule had won over Nina dissipated, and she stood there feeling every inch of her plain day dress and veiled face as if it were Dorie’s iron gloves enclosed around her.

 

The shoes were enough to rattle her, but—whose shoes? They could be anybody’s, of course.

 

Nina drawled, “Edward looked very handsome today.”

 

Jane looked up to find Nina innocently gazing at the shoes. “You weren’t outside with us,” Jane said.

 

Nina raised eyebrows until Jane blushed.

 

“Oh. When you saw him alone.”

 

“He has an air so many men lack,” said Nina. She looked happier now that she was skewering Jane, wresting control of the situation. “So poised. So … skillful. We’re going to have a fine, fine time tonight.”

 

Jane knew Nina had been in Edward’s studio just for a consultation … didn’t she? Of course, Nina could know Edward in more than one way. Jane despaired, not wanting Nina’s insinuations to be true. Not when Nina was capable of taking—and keeping—any man that captured her fancy.

 

Poule stepped past Jane to the next window, feeling it with sensitive fingers. “I suppose you’d want him to be skillful, since he’s going to rip your face off,” she said.

 

Laughter nearly bubbled out of Jane at this gruesome depiction of surgery. Gallows humor again.

 

Nina’s expression of fury morphed instantly into calm calculation. She looked the short woman up and down, her eyes lingering on Poule’s homely face. “I’d have thought you’d take advantage of his services,” she said cruelly, and Jane, aghast, pressed a useless hand to the veil covering her lips, as if she could take back Nina’s words.

 

Poule shouldered her tool bag. Outwardly she did not seem affected, but Jane, heart beating, thought surely the words wounded deep inside where the hurt did not show. “If you think I’d want to look like my enemy, you’re a bigger fool than I gave you credit for.”

 

*

 

Jane descended the spiral staircase by her room, thinking how nice it would be to be as sure of herself as Poule. She wondered if that came with growing up in the dwarvven culture, or from the fact that Poule could take care of herself in myriad ways. Perhaps if Jane could do something like Poule—weld iron or sniff out fey or cow obnoxious women—she could wrest control of her own life, make the Jane-that-wasn’t-supposed-to-be into a Jane she could be.

 

She slipped into a back hallway to retrieve her sketchpad from the afternoon—one of the hired servants had brought it in and placed it in her boot cubby. The fear from the forest had dulled with the application of several hours of manual labor on the iron screens, leaving her time to ponder other problems.

 

Were those shoes really Edward’s?

 

Jane brushed the dirt off her sketchpad, absentmindedly eyeing the flaws in the sketch of Dorie, the parts where her lines deviated from Edward’s.

 

Was Nina really meeting Edward tonight?

 

Tina Connolly's books