A movement through the window next to the back door—there, standing on the back lawn was Blanche Ingel, deep in chat with one of the gentlemen, who seemed to be unable to do anything but gaze into her perfect face. Exasperated, Jane momentarily forgot her stature in the house and spoke to them as she had spoken to the elder Miss Davenport earlier that day. “Get in here,” she said, pulling the heavy back door all the way open.
The gentleman looked startled, but Blanche laughed kindly and said, “I suppose we are out a little later than decency permits.” She came in, scraping her boot heels on the mat. “Can you have a maid fetch me a clean white cloth?” She had a white handkerchief balled in her left palm. “I had a little argument with one of those thorn trees. Made me quite dizzy.”
“Certainly,” said Jane, and did not say, “What on earth were you doing at the edge of the forest? How foolish are you?” Edward had not mentioned the fey, true (he had come up with “the gardener says stay off the lawn tonight while he sprays for insects”), but anyone with half a brain stayed out of the woods after dusk. That had been true for centuries and centuries.
The man followed, throwing a grouchy look at Jane, but she was irritated and worried enough that she was not flustered by his glare. As with Nina on that first day, Jane did remember that for Edward’s sake she should be polite and appropriately deferential to his guests, and so she thought cooling thoughts of water and said, “I apologize for my brusque request, but the other guests are gathering in the library for elderflower liqueur. Our host was worried that you had gotten lost.”
Blanche flushed at that, and belatedly it occurred to Jane that perhaps that statement was no more polite, and maybe it implied that the two of them were doing something inappropriate in the shrubbery. The gentleman pushed past her into the house, grumbling, leaving tracks of mud, and inwardly Jane sighed. She had never been good at this polite and humble business, and with the mask off it was worse.
She locked the back door, and, casting around, she shoved the heavy wooden hall tree in front of it as a reminder.
As if anything would make those partygoers think.
*
Jane passed the evening either watching Dorie sleep or with Poule, checking iron. By midnight, the party had splintered off in ones and twos, and now when she peeked into the drawing room, only the younger Miss Davenport was there, flirting with one of the men while her mother snored on the window seat.
No sign of Nina.
She walked past Nina’s room to her own. The light was off; only moonlight shone from the crack under the door. Surely Nina was not upstairs but was in there, asleep. And if asleep, she would have her sleep mask on, and wouldn’t see the door open a silent crack.…
Knowing full well she shouldn’t, Jane edged Nina’s door open. A little—and then more, searching the spill of moonlight on the unmade sheets. She unwound her veil, and both her eyes and some unknown sense confirmed it point-blank.
No one was in Nina’s room.
Jane shut the door and found herself walking down the hall, away from her own room, toward the stairs that led to the studio. Knowledge of what she should do didn’t seem to have any effect on the fact that she wanted to know.
She wanted to know if Nina was really in his studio, and if so, exactly what that meant. Was Edward really performing some secret surgery on Nina in the dead of night—or was there another, more obvious explanation for what went on behind closed doors after midnight?
What exactly had he meant by the things he had done wrong?
Was Nina one of the unforgivable things? Blanche?
It would be smarter not to know, not to torture herself with the truth. It certainly was none of her business. It was very off-limits.
And still she found herself climbing the stairs to stand at the door in the attic, an open door into a room lit with rectangles of blue moonlight.
She went softly into the room.
His worktable in the center of the room was crowded with his mask-making supplies—clay, metal tools—and a white wet towel covered his latest work. The clay bucket next to the table was nearly empty, its wooden shell containing only an inch of blue-black water.
She put her hand to the wet towel, wondering what she would see—a beautiful Nina? The grotesque version? Or more heart-wrenching still—herself, her whole self?
Her fingers trembled on the cloth, and then out of the corner of her eye, under the side door—she thought it was the moonlight, too, but no, that was light, the blue of fey-tech light.
He was there.
Jane left the cloth, slipped silently across the room to the door. Ever so quietly, before she could even think about what she was doing, she slid it open.
It took a second to resolve the scene in the small white room, and then she did. Edward, in white coat and mask like a surgeon, bending over the face of an unconscious woman wearing black satin. The scalpel in his fingers gleamed in the blue light.
On the wall hung one mask, a beautiful mask.
Nina.
Chapter 15
MAY YOU BE BORN PLAIN