Tina Connolly - Copperhead

Helen seized on this moment of genuine connection. “It’s all true,” she said, and then there was only simple truth, as she tried to make this woman hear it. “Shortly after Mr. Rochart gave me the new face. It really happened to me. I was invaded by the fey.”

Calendula swallowed at hearing the tale confirmed. “My brother went to one of those Copperhead meetings,” she said. “He told me of this story. But to hear it from you…”

“I suppose Alistair must have spoken of it,” said Helen. Most of their meetings were men only. She did not like the thought that she was being talked about, but perhaps the confirmation was helping to sway this woman.

Calendula looked away, at the rose-papered walls. “I’m not entirely sure about them,” she said in a low voice. “My brother was filled with such a strange fervor after meeting with them. He said they had such great plans to clean the city of the dwarvven . I had thought we were allies—the dwarvven hate the fey, too. I do not trust blood heat. But I suppose you must know more what they are about, since your husband is among their leaders.”

Helen bit her lip. “I do not,” she said. She closed her eyes and dared say it. “I am not entirely sure I trust them either.”

Calendula looked back at her. Genuine concern for their future was in her eyes. The connection between them was back again; she was listening to Helen. “What was it like?” she said. “Would I know if I was taken over? I have had such strange dreams.”

“You would know,” Helen assured her. “It was as if I was being erased. I had felt nervous anyway from the shock of the face—from the fey substance being attached. Have you—do you feel it, too?”

Calendula barely nodded.

“But then an actual fey, a whole fey—you know that your new face contains a little piece of fey, right?—came at me to take me over. When we have iron around the doorways we can forbid the entry. But when there’s substance right on your face there’s nothing you can do. It came in and I couldn’t stop it.”

A glint of hope rose in Calendula’s eyes; she could refute Helen’s dire warnings. “But you’re here now,” she said.

“Because Jane was standing a foot away and she drove sharp iron into my arm a few seconds after it happened,” Helen said. “Imagine you’re choking on a grape. That’s the amount of time you have for someone else to save you.” She had finished rolling back her sleeve during the conversation. Now she held out her arm to show the ugly puckered scar marking the flesh above her elbow.

Calendula looked at the scar. Helen saw wavering in her expression. Helen was so close she could taste it. Her fingers closed around the copper hydra and she squeezed it like a talisman. “The fey rips clean through you like the windstorm that tore the cupola off of the Queen’s country house. You’re blown out of your own body. You can’t resist it. Within seconds it’s replaced you and you’re gone for good. And then you can’t help the hospital at all, and what would they do without you?” Helen stared into Mrs. Smith’s eyes, willing her to understand the truth of her words.

Slowly Calendula nodded, her face ashen. “And … there is no other option?”

“Not to be safe,” said Helen. “You’ve seen them outside your door. When is the last time you stepped outside without your mask?”

A wistful look crossed the woman’s handsome face. “I used to love sitting in Chester Park in the summer,” she said. “Not good for the complexion, you know, but how lovely it was to just sit there with your face toward the sun. And we get so little sun … it seemed as though you could soak up enough on those few days to tide you over for the ten months of rain.” She touched her cheek, unconsciously feeling the warmth. “I couldn’t go outside this summer. Had to hurry straight from my car into a building. The mask was so hot in the sun I thought I might blister.”

Helen knew what it was to love something and not be able to do it. She took Calendula’s hands. “I don’t believe your new face had anything to do with the fund-raising at all,” she said. “I think you have the tenacity to do exactly what you did before all on your own. Raise twice as much money for the hospital as any year so far.” Helen meant every word and she willed Calendula to see it. “Will you let us help you? Will you lead the way for the others?”

A beat—breath held, world waiting. Calendula squeezed Helen’s hands in return, her lips set and resolute. “Yes,” she said. “I will.”

Helen left Calendula Smith’s house full of triumph. One down. One promised. One woman, swung to the side of victory for Jane. She thought about writing it down in Jane’s journal, but it seemed as though it would muddy Jane’s notes, and besides, it wasn’t Helen’s style. Writing things down meant someone could find out what you really thought.

Helen hurried along the sidewalk, thinking about that curious thing Calendula had said about Copperhead planning to clean the city of dwarvven . Calendula Smith herself did not seem entirely in favor of Copperhead—and she was someone who tried to be at the forefront of society, so that was interesting. Helen had also questioned Calendula about Jane’s visit. But Calendula seemed as stymied by Jane’s disappearance as Helen.

Still, Calendula had been convinced. Helen would get another woman’s name from the journal and go after her next. She was sticking to the plan. Jane would be proud.

The swathes of blue were thick outside Calendula’s house. Helen put her hands in her pockets—found nothing. No iron. She closed her hand on her copper necklace, wishing it were iron.

There was a leaf pile in front of her—orange and red and gold—innocuous except for the blue underneath, oozing out from underneath the leaves. It was as if the blue was eating the leaf pile from the underside, sucking it up like mold. Helen went around, eyes on the pile.

By the time Helen made it to the post office, it was lunch and the place was busy, mostly with men wrapped in thick overcoats and mufflers. The heavily postered walls held the usual mix of advertisements for stamps and bonds, instructions about sending telegrams and what you could not put through the mail. Except there, that mustard-colored poster with the red hydra snake on it—that was certainly new. ONE PEOPLE. ONE RACE. Posters on a random warehouse by the wharf had been one thing, but to see them in a government building …

Helen shuddered and turned resolutely away from those thoughts. She charmed her way through the overcoats to a spot near the front of the line. (The very front was held by a coat-hanger-thin woman of the strict governess type, and Helen didn’t think her eyelashes would work very well on that.) She still needed to work out what to say in a telegram, a stilted form of communication that squeezed all shades of meaning from your correspondence by making you be so wretchedly brief .

“Dear Mr. Rochart, please do not throw yourself out of any windows, but you must brace yourself for a shock of terrible proportions.…”

No, that was not it at all.

In the end she settled for “BAD NEWS SISTER VANISHED COME IF POSSIBLE SUSPECT BLUE.” She hoped “blue” would communicate fey to Mr. Rochart; she did not at all trust the skinny rumpled clerk, who looked as if he would immediately sell the penciled pink notecard to the highest bidder if she so much as mentioned MURDER or FEY.

She felt a momentary uplift of pleasure as she exited the post office. She was solving things, and this time it would all come out right.

It was perhaps the combination of winning over Mrs. Smith plus the telegram that made her suddenly turn right and swing down a side street, march across big yellow and blue piles of leaves to do something she would never in a hundred years have thought she would do.