Tina Connolly - Copperhead

Tam was sitting on the damp ground in the cool morning, wrapped in coat and scarf and gloves. A little patch of sun had burned off some of the fog where he sat, but it was still chilly. He was busy tracking something on the ground.

Helen went down the steps into the back garden. She got all the way to Tam before she turned and saw Mr. Grimsby still standing, looking at them with covetous, glittering eyes. Did he know she was trying to get Tam away from his influence? She knelt, and Tam flicked his eyes sideways at her. Up close she could see that his face was unwashed; his cheeks streaked with the tracks of old tears.

“Tam,” she said gently. “I am so sorry about your stepmamma.”

He looked up at her, and when she saw his bright, wounded eyes, she knew the next question. “Did you make it happen?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly, keeping her face turned away from the door. “We were helping your stepmamma so she would always be safe. But something went wrong.” Helen did not know if there was a better way to talk to small children; all she could do was treat Tam the way she wished someone would have treated her—tell him the truth, as much as she could. To the side she saw the door swing shut; Mr. Grimsby was gone. “The fey are dangerous,” she said. “But I’m trying to find my sister, and I hope my sister can fix your stepmamma.”

He looked down at his jar, which had two june bugs thudding around in it. Slowly he opened the jar and watched them crawl out. “I didn’t tell about you being up there with her,” he said. “I’m a good liar.”

“Er. Thank you,” said Helen. She squeezed his shoulder. “Your father says I can take you for an outing tomorrow. Where would you like to go?”

A bit of interest played around his features. “The Natural History Museum? Stepmamma said they have a big reptile exhibit with basilisks and copperhead hydras.” The big words flowed out with the ease of much use, though Helen was quite sure she had not heard of any of those creatures at his age, and even now could not tell you if a basilisk was a reptile or amphibian.

“Done,” said Helen. “It’ll be fun. I like snakes.”

“I know,” he said, and pointed at her necklace. “My dad gave me a pin like that. See?” He tugged on his coat lapel to show her.

Marking them. Owning them. Helen’s fingers closed on the copper. She wanted to rip their emblem off, snap the chain. And yet she did not. So it was a hydra—Grimsby’s hydra. Wasn’t it proof that Alistair cared about her? Some days she needed that proof. She let the necklace fall, smiling down at Tam. “Till tomorrow, then. And we’ll find you some more bugs. I’m afraid I lost yours.”

Tam watched one of the june bugs crawl around the lip of the jar, uncertain what to do with its freedom. He picked up the lid and held it over the jar, trapping the bug inside. Raised it, lowered it. “Do they have dwarvven in the museum?” he said.

“Um,” said Helen. “I don’t think so. You mean like pictures of them?”

“Father said they should be rounded up and shot, and then the potato-faced man said they should be put on display as a lesson, and then Father said someday the last dwarf will be like the stuffed bear in the museum. I like the stuffed bear. I can see his claws up close. I would like to see the stuffed dwarf.”

Helen recognized the “potato-faced man” as an accurate if unflattering description of Boarham. “I’m afraid there aren’t any stuffed dwarvven, ” she said. It disturbed her to hear the ugly slur “dwarf” fall as easily as “basilisk” from the boy’s lips, but she supposed it was inevitable with that father of his. She stopped over the next bit and decided to say it anyway. “Whatever they say while drinking, take it with a grain of salt. I mean, it isn’t all true … or right .”

He nodded as if he understood, although she wasn’t sure he did. But the door was being opened by the cleaning woman, and clearly Helen’s time was up. “Tomorrow,” she promised, and left.

Back down the street toward the trolley. Helen was getting awfully sick of the trolley. She reached the stop in time to see one pulling away, and then she regretted saying she was sick of the trolley, for it was even more annoying to want to get on one and not be able.

Because it was a nice neighborhood, there was a small shelter, empty except for a dwarvven man just walking into it. She went in after him and stood there, stamping her feet against the cold. The brick wall around the Grimsbys’ back garden had dampened the gale, but here it whisked through the street in full force, blowing dead leaves before it, covering and uncovering the swathes of blue that lined the sidewalks. Tomorrow she would not take the trolley, that’s all. She would take Tam in the car to the Natural History Museum … and oh goodness, Helen, how foolish were you? Supposedly you were doing such a clever job of sneaking out, and now you went and saw your husband’s good friend and made arrangements to take his son out the next day? This is where rash decisions led you. The motive was good but the execution was abysmal.

Relax, she told herself. Alistair has never expressly forbidden you to leave. You are a grown woman, capable of leaving the house on your own. And yet she shook her head, despairing, running through increasingly ridiculous options in her head. She could get Mary to pretend to be Helen. She could ask Mr. Grimsby to lie about her visit.

People trickled into the shelter, waiting for the next trolley to pull up. Gentlemen, mostly, in worn but decent overcoats, copper lapel pins winking in buttonholes. A fellow in a soft cap eyed her and she tugged her own copper necklace out where it was more plainly visible. If she was marked as the wife of a top party member she might as well enjoy its benefits of implied protection. She moved away from him, closer to the dwarvven man, studying the inevitable lineup of posters. Trolley times and fares. A curling one for Painted Ladies Ahoy! that she smoothed out. She realized she had seen it before, and not known till now that the darling ink caricature of the central painted lady was clearly Frye.

“This shelter’s becoming crowded, isn’t it? Perhaps someone should know his place a little better,” said the man in the cap. He was staring at the young dwarvven .

The dwarvven folded his arms and did not budge. He appeared to be in his early twenties—a dangerous age for getting into trouble. “Know it as well as you do.”

“Not really right for your kind to be here with a lady present.”

“By lady I suppose you mean yourself?”

The man in the cap went red and the mood in the shelter suddenly turned much uglier. Helen could feel the overcoated men slowly shifting, moving into a circle to enclose the dwarvven .

The man in the cap bent down as though he were lecturing a child, tapped the dwarvven on the nose. “One people,” he said. “ One race .”

The dwarvven was dying to take the first swing, she could tell. He settled for spitting: “You’ve learned your lesson well.”

Just then the trolley pulled up and Helen saw her cue. She tapped on the man with the cap’s sleeve and slid into the circle. “Thank you so kindly for protecting me,” she said to the man in the cap, “and I feel much safer now. We were just going.” She tugged on the dwarvven ’s arm and pulled him through the openmouthed circle of men. Everyone was momentarily too stunned to resist, and Helen stepped onto the open trolley, motioning the dwarvven man to follow her.

But what had worked so beautifully with the dwarvven grandmother did not work with this young man.