Tina Connolly - Copperhead

Calendula was the perfect place to start.

By now Helen had finished the chocolate and toast, and she felt much less muddled. She felt alive and engaged again, the way she had last night when Frye had told her she could move mountains. She was going to find Jane—going to have The Hundred primed and ready for her—and then everything, surely everything, would be right as rain.

The door opened and Alistair poked his head in.

Helen did not jump, but her fingers on the journal did, tensing up into little mountains. Had he checked in on her bedroom? Did he know she had been out? She slid the journal under the covers as he crept around the door, looking woebegone.

“I’m sorry,” he said immediately, coming up to the foot of the bed and twining his fingers around the iron rails. A cloud of lavender soap and ambergris drifted in with him. “I was in shock last night from that horrible disaster. And then I had some whiskey to soften the blow. I believe I yelled at you in the motorcar?” He looked up at her under his lashes and she softened. She was safe after all. And it was so hard to be mad at him when he put on his penitent little-boy face. Because it wasn’t just a face, she knew. He really did mean it. He truly was sorry.

“You took the one thing that makes me safe,” she said. “As if you didn’t trust me.” Perhaps not the wisest thing to say, but Helen had never been good at holding her tongue. She would never be the sort to charm folks through shy silence. And if you liked using words, well … sometimes you used too many of them.

Alistair rubbed tired eyes in a rather ill-looking face. She didn’t envy him that hangover. “Look, I was upset from being with Grimsby,” he said.

“The man would rile up a saint,” Helen agreed. “Oh, you meant … the other thing.” Millicent.

“And to make it up to you,” Alistair said, cutting across her sentence. His sometimes haughty face broke into a charming grin. “A little gift for my little pet.” He tossed a paper-wrapped packet into her outstretched hands. “Go on. Open it.”

The pink paper was warm and slightly rough in her palms. Helen teased the edge free with her fingernail and tore open the paper to reveal an intricate copper necklace. She hooked one finger under the chain and lifted it, breathing in as it caught the light. “Oh, Alistair,” she said. “How pretty.” The twisted coils of copper spun delicately on the chain.

Alistair did love her. He was sorry. She remembered another fight they had had a few weeks ago—something silly that ended with him throwing her three-legged footstool down the stairs, breaking off a leg. He had brought her a new stool the next day, with a dozen roses on it, crimson-hearted and perfect.

“Put it on,” he said. “I want to see how you look in it.”

Laughing, she started to obey. Curiously, the clasp was worked into the pendant part of the necklace—one of the copper coils curved over as if biting the copper chain. She looked closer. No, not as if biting. “It’s a hydra,” she said flatly.

“A more feminine version,” Alistair said. “Grimsby had them made up specially for all the wives. I was going to wait to give it to you, but then I decided you needed it today.” He took the clasp from her hands and fastened it around her neck, letting it hang down over the high crew-neck of the wool dress. “There you are; a perfect doll,” he declared.

Helen’s fingers ran over the little snake heads. She was not certain she cared to be marked so publicly as the wife of a Copperhead party member. Yet she pasted a smile to her face, reminding herself that Alistair was trying to be kind. He seemed in so much a better humor this morning that she dared press for details about last night.

“Oh, we didn’t stay at Grimsby’s long after I sent you home,” he said, with a dismissive wave. “Frightfully gruesome, what? He dragged some private sleuth out of bed to poke around the place and then set the maids to cleaning. The rest of us dragged him out of there to roulette. We’ve all been through it before when he lost his first wife—gotta keep moving. Continuing the meeting’s all very well but you can’t do that sort of thing when your buddy’s got an eyeful of his girl lying stiff as a plank, can you?” Alistair slouched over to the window and pushed aside her curtains so he could stare out into the grey November morning. “Loses wife one to the dwarves, wife two to the fey—man’s got a rotten string of luck.” He whistled softly and turned back to her. “Made me glad I haven’t let you do anything so foolish, especially after that night in May. No, you’re safe and sound right here, and I’m glad to know that when I’m out with the boys.”

Helen hurried past that before he could directly order her to stay in. “Alistair,” she said to his back. “Why don’t you stay in tonight? Give up the boys for one night. We’ll … I don’t know, have our own dance, right here in the house. Remember when we used to dance?” Things could be like they were, she thought, without the night after night of drinking, the drinking that led to the shouting and the stool-throwing and the glass-smashing.…

He took a step away, making closed-off, disentangling gestures. “Now, lambkin, you know that I can’t very well look as though my wife has me on a string, can I? I have plans with the boys. We need to take Grimsby out and get him rip-roaring drunk.”

“You get that every night, with less excuse,” Helen said before she thought. It was the sort of thing you couldn’t say to Alistair without having him get all cold and ragey and she instantly regretted it. She knew that, goodness knows she knew that; why did she keep doing it?

“I merely do what’s necessary to keep our image up,” Alistair said icily. “One has to be seen socially doing the sort of things a man does. And since only one of us is fit to go out and keep our name active in the minds of our social peers…”

Argh, thought Helen, I want to go out, but she knew like anything that if she went down that road there would be no escape and she would end up in a confrontation about her staying home. She fell back on her usual trick of distraction. “Well, I think it’s just divine the way you all rally around poor Mr. Grimsby. And his darling son, too; poor Tam would be miserable else.”

“Who?” said Alistair. “Oh, Grimsby’s boy. His second time on the roller-coaster, too. Don’t worry, we brought him out to roulette, too. Gave him a drink.”

“Alistair!” she said, and now she really was shocked.

He held up his hands. “Just beer, just beer. Well, I’d better be off.” He closed the curtains, blocking out the thin grey light. “We have a full day planned.”

His eyes roved the room and she leaned to one side, shifting to hide the lump of journal under the covers. The carpetbag, thankfully, was hidden by the hanging folds of the quilt. He smiled at her, thin and tight under his cap of glossy fixed curls. “Don’t wait up, my pet,” he said, and then he was gone.

Helen slumped against the tufted headboard, feeling as if she’d been through a battle. Poor Tam, alone with those terrible men. There had to be something she could do to help him. She was not overly fond of children, no. She was glad to be through with governessing. And yet … roulette and beer? Her fingers rubbed the snake heads of the necklace as she tugged the journal out from under the covers. With one hand she flipped through it one last time to make sure that really nothing was going to fall out of it—no train tickets or death threats.

Her eye fell at the end of the list, at the last two names that she had skimmed over, the last two pages in Jane’s writing, blank except for the name at the top of each page. The women were not a perfect One Hundred after all, despite Jane’s referring to them as such; the last numbered person was 99.