Tina Connolly - Ironskin

Already bored, Dorie turned away. She clacked her tongue rhythmically, sketched the air in time to it. Dots and swirls of blue light flickered behind her fingers.

The last time Jane saw that blue light was on a battlefield with her brother. She breathed, she swayed—she refused to run.

Mr. Rochart’s hand came up as if he would steady her, but then he stepped back, his hands dropping. Twice was not etiquette, twice meant he did not want to touch her, and she was ice-cold inside. “We have tried a dozen governesses over the last year,” he said. “None lasted a week. They all claimed it was not us—”

But Jane knew these words and they softened something inside of her. “It was them,” she finished. “They were summoned home unexpectedly. Something urgent came up—a sickly mother, a dying aunt.”

“You wouldn’t believe the number of dying aunts in this country,” he said. And even—he smiled, and Jane saw laughter light behind his shadowed eyes. Then they closed off again, watching the blue lights flicker.

Jane took a breath. Took the smooth-faced doll from his arms and handed it to Dorie. The floating lights vanished as Dorie grabbed the doll and held it close. “Pretty Mother,” she said, burrowing her face into its cloth body.

“She likes pretty things,” Mr. Rochart said. “Her mother was the same way.” Silently he crossed to the window, looking out into the black-branched forest that crept up the grounds of Silver Birch Hall as if it would swallow the house. In the sunlight she saw that his slacks, though fine once, were worn along the crease and at his knees.

“She is gone, then?” Jane said softly. Unbidden she neared him, him and that wide window onto the choking forest. To live here would mean to live in its dark and tangled grip.

Mr. Rochart nodded. “The last month of the war.” The words landed like carefully placed stones, a heavy message grown no lighter with repetition. “She was killed and taken over by a fey. She was pregnant with Dorie.”

Jane sucked air across her teeth. The mother killed, the daughter still unborn—no wonder this child was different from any she’d ever seen. Her heart went out to the two of them.

Mr. Rochart turned to Jane, looking down, down. In the filtered light through the window she could finally see his eyes. They were amber, clear and ancient, a whole history trapped inside of them just as real amber trapped insects. He reached to take her hand; she knew he wouldn’t—but then he did. “Will you help us?”

She had not been touched like that, not simply like that, since the first year of the war. Unbidden, she recalled the last boy to touch her: a baker’s apprentice she’d loved, with blond hair and a smile of gentle mischief. She was fourteen, and he’d invited her to her first dance, taken her waist, whisked her around the piano and out into the garden, where her stockings had splattered with spring mud. Someone’s mother had stumbled on them laughing together and sternly ordered them back inside.…

A touch and an unwanted memory should not influence her decision, but in truth her decision was already made. It was made from the moment she saw Dorie, from the moment she saw the clipping, perhaps even from the moment almost exactly five years ago when she knelt by her brother’s body on the battlefield, blood dripping from her chin. If this man would take her on, she would bend all her will to the task. She would help this girl. She would help them.

“I will stay,” she said. “I will start now. This morning.”

Relief flooded his eyes—almost too much. He pressed her hand and was gone from the room before Jane could decide what it meant.

The enormous estate had all of three servants: the butler Poule (who was also in charge of the grounds and the pre-war motorcar), the cook, and one maid. When Jane, aghast, said: “One?” the maid merely nodded.

“How can you clean this whole house by yourself?” said Jane.

“Can’t.”

“Just the laundry alone—”

“Poule built scrub tank. Nice bits hired out.”

The young maid’s name was Martha, and perhaps she was treasured more for her monosyllabic qualities than her desire for cleanliness. She was tall for a girl, rangy, with ginger hair closely braided to her scalp in defiance of any current fashion. Her dark dress and apron had clearly seen better days, though they were clean and neatly patched. She showed Jane an abbreviated tour of the house. All the open rooms were in the south wing, the undamaged wing. The sapphire curtains opened to a hallway that branched off to drawing room, dining room, sitting rooms. The kitchens were beneath them in the cellar. Martha did not take her through the curtains that led to the north wing, but she explained in words of one syllable that forest green eventually led to Mr. Rochart’s studio, and mahogany only to Poule’s quarters and damage.

Jane’s rooms were on the back of the second floor, down the hall and around the corner from Dorie’s room. It was a family room that had been given over to the governess, so it was bigger than Jane had expected, and hung with a threadbare tapestry depicting a maiden taming a dragon. (A fanciful design, Jane thought critically, as the maiden was blonde, pink, and rather buoyant, but dragons had only existed—if ever—in the Faraway East.) A nearby spiral staircase appeared to go all the way up and down the house, but Jane reminded herself to check that to know for sure.

During the tour, Jane pestered Martha with a flurry of questions about the house and its schedules, but the only time the maid offered more than a grunted yes or no was when Jane asked about Dorie.

“All yours now. We told him no more. Had to get you to keep us .”

“Is she so naughty?” said Jane.

“Not a bad child. It’s what she does when she’s good,” said Martha, and shuddered.

“Can you feel when she’s doing, um … not-quite-human things?”

Martha nodded. “I’m not one to start at naught. Nor Cook. That’s why we’re here when the rest fled. Though some days the blue lights and air dolls make your hair rise.” She gestured at the iron covering Jane’s face. “Could be you’ll fare well. Since you’re a cripple too.”

Jane stiffened at the one word Martha had given two syllables to say, and perhaps the laconic, unimaginative maid saw that, because she fell silent again. More questions brought no more answers, and the only other piece of information Jane could extract was that Dorie’s supper—and thus Jane’s, for today—was at six.

When the maid was gone, Jane unpacked her small pasteboard suitcase. It was not everything she owned, but near enough. Her trunk with her winter woolens and a few books and pictures was still at the boarding house in the rooms she’d shared with her sister—though by the time she returned to the city to retrieve it, it would probably be at Helen’s new home.

As short a time as the other governesses were there, they had left traces of their passing, perhaps due to their hurried departures. A calendar from last year hung on the wall, stopped at November. A scrap of orange wool, a pen nib, a cinema stub firmly wedged between the mirror and frame—that one must be an abandoned souvenir; the films had stopped running in the first year of the war. Hairpins everywhere.

Yet someone had put a snowdrop, surely the first of them, in a tiny cream pitcher on her dresser. Jane looked at its curved white petals as she thought: Well. Someone expected me to stay.

She hung up her best dress and changed into a shapeless dropped-waist dress of dark wool, a pre-war hand-me-down a decade out of date and never in fashion to begin with. Changed her good stockings for a woolen pair she’d knit that winter while listening to the Norwood School girls recite poetry they didn’t understand or care to. The ribbed stockings were far too thick to be fashionable, but they were warm, a necessity in this house where the fires seemed few and far between. She put her few things in the drawers, checked her hair. The crimping had completely fallen out, of course. The white lock of hair was loose, torn free by him . She grabbed one of her predecessors’ hairpins and shoved it ruthlessly in place within the dark brown hair, the pin digging into her scalp. She nudged the leather straps that held her mask higher on her head, where they would start the long process of slowly dropping again.