Tina Connolly - Ironskin

The sea of slinky gowns sliding back and forth between the rooms was arresting. Décolletage was low, T-strapped heels were high. Desperation was on more than one dewy cheek, plainly mixed with the waxy lipstick, the false eyelashes, the tight waves of curls. Single men were few—a lost generation.

But one beauty slinking past in an apricot gown needed no such ornamentation.

“Ah, the Prime Minister’s wife,” said one of the shoe-loosened women.

“The lecheress,” said the other, fluttering her handkerchief, and they cackled.

The woman’s face, elegant and porcelain-smooth, gave no sign that she had heard.

“She’s beautiful,” whispered Jane under her breath. Her face was peaches and cream, symmetrical, classic. Her apricot frock with its beaded net overlay clung softly to her lines, an elegant column. So this was the woman Mr. Rochart might have loved. An idle summer fling? Or passion, loved and lost, a tragedy bound by the rules of society?

“Fey beauty,” croaked the woman who had said it before. “It’s not smart to be that beautiful.” The other old women were in dresses thirty years out of date: full dark skirts and corsets, kidskin boots, and rows of tight buttons everywhere. But this one was modern. She wore a silk dress in sea-foam green with net flowers at the shoulder and waist. It draped oddly on her hunched and sagging form, and the leather heels slipped from her thin feet. She had a tiny pair of jeweled pince-nez that she studied the Prime Minister’s wife through. “Not smart at all.”

“Why not?” said Jane.

The women bent in, free of the restrictions the younger generations placed on their words. “They used to say the fey were drawn to the exceptionally beautiful,” said Pince-Nez.

“Or exceptionally talented,” said Shoes.

“May you be blessed with ordinary children,” contributed Handkerchief. “May you be born plain.”

“Why? What did they do with extraordinary children?” said Jane. She knew one of those, though surely the women meant a different kind of extraordinary.

“Steal them. Take them back to the forest,” said Pince-Nez.

“Eat them,” said Handkerchief.

“Bah,” said Shoes.

Pince-Nez agreed with Shoes. “They take them for entertainment.”

“And because they covet mortality,” said Shoes in sonorous tones.

“My granny knew someone who got eaten,” Handkerchief said obstinately.

Jane did not believe that the fey had ever eaten people. And “covet mortality”—well, the bodiless fey had certainly taken over corpses during the war. They killed with fey bombs that prepared dead bodies for the fey—then reanimated them, used them to fight hand to hand. That was why the crematory kilns had been going nonstop during the Great War, to save their loved ones from that wretched fate. But that was a war tactic, a horror designed to strike fear into humanity. A very effective horror, but not the desired end in itself.

But entertainment … “What do you mean by that?” she said to Pince-Nez.

Pince-Nez stretched her feet comfortably into the path of a woman towing two marriageable daughters away from the food. “Anything that lives forever gets bored,” she said.

“Like you, you old bag,” said Shoes amiably.

“Even if I reach my hundredth I will never be bored,” said Pince-Nez, rapping on the iron of her chair for luck. Her ropes of necklaces clacked against each other. “But the fey were.”

A woman walking by shushed Pince-Nez, out of habit.

“So they stole humans to feed on,” Pince-Nez said.

“I told you they ate them,” said Handkerchief.

“Not that kind of feeding,” said Pince-Nez. “They used to steal children, and everyone knew that. They fed on their beauty, their artistry. Sucked up everything that made them good. Then they let them go … each one a dried-up, shriveled old thing.”

“Like you,” said Shoes.

“Least I was a beauty to begin with,” returned Pince-Nez. “Fey beauty, they said I had. It’s a wonder I didn’t get stolen.”

“That’s enough out of you, Auntie,” said a male voice.

Jane looked up to see Helen’s new husband shaking his head at them. Handkerchief and Shoes cackled at the intrusion, while Pince-Nez hummed softly.

“But each stolen child is given a gift,” said Pince-Nez dreamily. Her face softened, and for a moment Jane saw a glimpse of the beauty she might have been. “A gift to take back to the human world, years and years later.…”

“Where’s yours, you bat?” said Shoes. “In your knickers?”

Handkerchief roared with laughter.

“Bah—enough!” said Alistair. “Come, Jane, you mustn’t become one of these harpies already. Take a turn with me.” He took her hand and pulled her up and into the children’s dance.

There was a moment of shock as she realized this was the second man to deliberately touch her this month. Though Mr. Rochart had not needed the attraction of a clingy silver dress to touch her shoulder (twice), press her hand.

Jane did not find Alistair Huntingdon handsome. She was not sure that Helen truly did, either, despite him having the features that Helen had often designated as male beauty. His hair was curled, his nose straight, his teeth white and present, but Jane did not find the arrangement of it all pleasing. More to the point, his ruddy face lacked character—both in the moral sense and in the individual sense. But perhaps she was biased from having only seen the face of one man for the last month, a man with a million oddities inscribed on the map of his face, a man who had lived. The comparison—the fact that she was thinking about this comparison—made her pause.

Alistair was looking at the silver curves of her dress, not at the iron behind her veil. Jane could not decide if that was a blessing or not. But then he smiled politely and raised his gaze to somewhere around her ear. Nodded at the old fiddler, who started one of the popular waltzes—“The Merry Mistress,” Jane thought. Though the family she worked for would never have approved, Helen had snuck off to the ten-penny ballroom (girls no charge) more than once, dragging Jane along as chaperone. Jane did enjoy the music. She would sit on a white-painted metal chair, sip a sugared coffee, watch her sister flit and flirt.

Now Alistair’s free hand took her waist and he led her smoothly into the steps of a waltz. “Helen was very glad you came,” he said. “She would hardly talk of anything else. You must come back at holidays.”

“That is very kind of you,” said Jane. She had waltzed before the war; she was pleased to find the movements still in her feet. She did not like the touch of Alistair’s hand on her waist—it seemed too warm, too insistent—but she smiled at her sister’s husband and tried not to think about it.

“We don’t want you to give up on life,” he said. “No sitting around with the old biddies anymore.”

“I was enjoying watching the children dance,” said Jane.

“You are easily amused,” he said, laughing.

Alistair seemed harmless enough. His foibles were evident from her short study of him—he was indolent, too fond of a life of pleasure and drink. From the way he’d avoided the war he must be a coward, though it wasn’t likely that his inability to fight would affect his marriage. Helen herself had admitted these faults—stated in the same breath that she was sure he would mend them, once he was settled—but counted herself lucky for more reasons than just his wealth and relative charm. So many men of their age had been lost in the Great War. Alistair might be a decade older, his birth might be no better than the Eliot girls’ own. And yet, for the penniless governess to land him was a coup.

But was it worth it?