Copperhead (9 page)

Helen stumbled to her feet, away from Frye’s kind touch. Numbly she wrapped her coat more tightly, hunched her shoulders against the cold. So much to do, and no assurance that anything she did would make it right. It seemed just as likely that she would get herself in over her head again, and need rescuing herself, when there was no one left to rescue her.…

“Why are you leaving me?” said Frye, as Helen put her hand to the doorknob.

“The trolley,” said Helen, and Frye laughed a loud bellow.

“Doesn’t run much past dark, what do you think? You probably caught the last one getting here.”

Helen’s eyes were wide with despair at this last blow. All sense fled and silly words tumbled from the depths of her heart. “You mean—so I’ll never get home and I’ve already walked miles and the calluses are blisters, why didn’t I break the heels in, of course I never wear the sensible shoes because sensible means hideous, and he’ll be so angry if he happened to check on me and I’m tired, so very tired.…”

Frye handed Helen a handkerchief. “I drive a car, love. I’ll take you home.”

*   *   *

Helen drifted under a pile of lap robes, semi-awake. Frye hummed some mournful-sounding musical number to herself, but otherwise kept quiet. The grey mist smeared with blue drifted by and Helen thought how it seemed that you jumped ship from person to person, always seeking a new one to be your rock. But they sank. She could leap into this spot where she was in Frye’s motorcar; a protected island, just drive on till morning. But it would sink, too. They all did, in the end.

Frye turned into the street Helen had told her, and Helen pointed out their house. The square windows in the games room—Alistair’s room—were golden. He was home. He was awake.

She was so very, very tired.

“She’s just lying low, out of danger,” said Frye as she pulled to a stop. “It’s what anyone would do. She’ll come home.”

“Thank you,” Helen said, stumbling out of the motorcar. Her blistered feet landed in a puddle, splashing ice up her legs. She fumbled in her inner coat pocket for a card. “Look, here’s my address. Send me word if anything turns up.”

Frye’s face held concern as she took the card. “You’re all right?”

Weak grin, game face. “Nothing two olives and a little Lovage’s Gin won’t cure,” Helen said jauntily to Frye, and waited for the woman’s answering grin before turning away and striding into the house as if she had every right to return to it at two in the morning.

Helen closed the front door softly behind her, running through excuses in her head, ones that didn’t involve getting Adam in trouble. None of them were very good, or believable.

The thin electric light spilled out of the games room into a triangle in the hallway. She had never thought much of the idea that one should face the music. In fact she thought she’d rather go hide in bed now, and let him yell at her in the morning, if he must. Maybe Jane would be home by then and everything would be fine, fine.

But she heard a scratchy melody drifting out, and she stepped out of her ruined shoes and crept down the hall on stocking feet to see.

The gramophone was on. Even the rich had long ago run out of the fey bluepacks that used to power everything, but Alistair’s circle were trying out the newest inventions as soon as they were relatively safe, and Alistair had recently had the house wired for electricity. He had purchased an electric gramophone five times the size of the old one that ran on bluepacks. It was a massive cabinet, and it smelled funny when it ran. But it did run, and right now it was playing through an old waltz that made Helen want to lift her arms to a partner and turn around the floor.

The music fell to a quiet moment, and under that she heard snoring.

Helen dared to peek around the door, then. Alistair was stretched out in the armchair in front of the fireplace, emptied whiskey glass on the table next to him, fast asleep. The contents of his pockets were on the end table, wallet among them, and Helen remembered that she had to pay back Adam. On noiseless feet she went in, heady with the up and down of the night, feeling in a strange way that surely he couldn’t wake up right this second if he hadn’t already.

Helen extracted the notes from the leather wallet, watching him, thinking, I loved you once. She had gone into the marriage expecting to make it work. To be good to him. To
repay
him. To care for him and run his household and generally do all the things a wife should—wasn’t that enough to make a partnership last? Love didn’t have to be thrilling, fascinating, throw-yourself-off-a-cliff sort of love. They could care for each other in a friendly fashion, bring their charm and her beauty and his wealth to the table, bounty to share. They
had
cared for each other. And yet, everything had become so unequal.

No options, she thought to herself.

That was where she had been a year ago, why she had signed up with Alistair. It seemed the best way out of the abysmal hole she’d gotten herself into, and he had been so kind, she thought then. So charming. They had danced every night at the tenpence dance hall, the wildest, gayest dances, him in black and she all in white with a grass green sash.… Marrying him had been a sensible, calculated decision.

Perhaps she wasn’t a very skilled mathematician.

She turned to leave the room, and he stirred, and she stopped, one hand on the wood corner of the gramophone, heart in throat.

“Another round,” he murmured. “Another.”

She wondered if the men had been over, after that terrible meeting at the Grimsbys’. She had loved his parties at first—she loved parties, after all. But more and more they just seemed an excuse for drunken behavior, not chat and wit and dancing. And then afterward those men would all stay over, for days on end, wheeling about the parlor and the library and everywhere else, sucking down port.

And that horrid Mr. Grimsby with them. Oh, he was abstemious enough. His method of entertaining himself was worse—all that “One People One Race” business that Alistair had at first scoffed at, but now seemed more and more fervent about. Alistair had avoided the Great War—paid a young factory worker to take his place. Most of the wealthy men left had done the same. The ones that hadn’t … well. They weren’t here. In some strange way, the men of Alistair’s set seemed to be making up for their dereliction then by cleaving to Grimsby’s racial purity fanaticism now. Alistair had had a
dwarvven
chambermaid when she married him seven months ago. Boarham had had a
dwarvven
groundskeeper, Morse a
dwarvven
cook. All since dismissed.

Helen stared at her sleeping husband for a long time. But all she really saw was an image in her head, stark like the old blue-and-white fey-tech cameras: Millicent Grimsby, stone-still on the cold white daybed, a red line tracing the outline of her perfect face.

*   *   *

She dreams that she is ten again, playing on the field that will one day be a battlefield, that will one day kill her little brother, Charlie. But that is still three years away. The war rages on, but it has not touched Harbrook, and the only foretelling of the battlefield is the yellow cowslips that carpet the field. They will be there on the day that Charlie dies and Jane marches in with him and Helen stays behind with Mother, who would dissolve without them.

It is hard to stay behind. It is hard to be the one who says, Mother, I will not leave you, and watch your brother and sister march into war without you. To tell yourself, you are a coward for staying, and to yet feel you would be a coward to go. It is hard to watch the wounded come home, and the dead never, and to
be there
. Just be there.

But that is not yet, Helen says fiercely, and the dream pulls back and she is ten, still ten, and she is playing with Charlie in a field of cowslips. She has plaited them into her hair, and Charlie, who is nine, is whacking their heads off with a stick. It is a rare holiday from school and work and Jane has promised to help her paint a picture but instead, restless Jane is at the edge of the forest, poking the undergrowth as if to uncover a lurking fey.

She can’t remember how it happened on that day, but here in the dream she calls to Jane and Jane does not answer. Helen runs to the edge of the forest, calling her name, but Jane goes in, away from her, deeper and deeper, well past the first ray of light, till she is dissolved, vanished in the black woods. Helen whirls around, but Charlie is vanished. Jane is gone. And all there is is Helen, clutching the last tree at the edge of the forest, shouting Jane, Jane, Jane.…

*   *   *

The next morning Helen woke curled in her bed, sore in every limb. She, Helen, whose idea of a long walk was meandering beautifully twice around the garden, had walked more than she’d walked in a month of Sundays, and in the freezing cold to boot. Her thighs ached and when she dared to stand they felt like jelly.

She tugged off her sleeping mask, hobbled to her wardrobe, and pulled out her softest, most shapeless wool dress to wear; wriggled into a big cardigan over that. Her head was groggy and her bare legs still cold and sore under the dress. She hobbled to her vanity and dabbed a touch of lilac scent behind her earlobes, then just stood there, trying to think about springtime and sunshine, and not about missing Jane or the confrontation with Alistair last night in the car.

Then she got back in bed.

The maid brought chocolate and toast and a vivid orange envelope. Helen opened it while Mary chattered through recent gossip. Helen was awfully fond of Mary for just this reason, yet this morning she could not concentrate on anything the maid said. Helen’s head was a brick wall, and Mary’s gossip dashed itself into it and fell back, exhausted. After Mary had repeated the choice bit about Lord Meriwether and his naughty ice statuary for the third time, looking progressively more downcast with each telling, Helen finally said, “I’m sorry, Mary, my head’s a muddle. You’ll have to tell me later.”

“Yes’m,” Mary said dubiously. Helen could almost hear her thoughts: The mistress must be sick.

The orange envelope was from Frye, Helen found, when she finally got her focus on it. A short, equally orange note inside said, in strong slashing handwriting:

DIVINE
to meet you.
MUST
have just one last carouse with this face. Having a few friends over tonight after the show gets out. Stop by Will Call for
Painted Ladies Ahoy!
if you want tix. Tell them I sent you and
NOT
to fob you off with restricted viewing, otherwise you’ll miss my number with the lampshade.

FRYE.

PS: You
MUST
come to the party as I will have Alberta, Betty, and Desirée there.

PS 2: Don’t worry. We will find Jane.

Helen turned the orange note over, seeking further explanation of the three cryptic ladies, but found nothing but a scribbled black address.

She leaned against her tufted pink headboard and closed her eyes. It would be so comforting to just go back to sleep. To stay in bed all day. Surely Alistair would be over his anger by now. She needn’t talk about it, or even talk to him at all. She could just curl under the covers and no one would expect anything of her. The house would run itself—Alistair had never seen fit to let her take on any responsibilities from the efficient housekeeper. Jane would turn up when she was good and ready, would laugh at Helen for worrying about her. Yes, it would be smart of all of them to not expect anything of her. She, Helen, was not a bit dependable.

She burrowed into her pillow and pulled the covers over her head.

Yet she could not return to sleep. She tossed and turned, wriggled and squirmed—and then found herself sitting back up and dragging the carpetbag over to the bed, all the while admonishing herself that she was undependable, unreliable, and was going back to bed right now.

There was a clue in the carpetbag, the back of her mind told her. There was something she had seen and overlooked, distracted. No, not the train stubs.

The leather book—it was a journal. That handwritten list of names.

Helen pulled the journal out of the rough carpetbag and studied it. It was a faded maroon leather sleeve, soft with long use, that fit over bound paper. The red ribbon bookmark had fallen out when she shook it, but she turned the pages until she found the list of names that she remembered.

She skimmed the list, certain now that she knew what they were. It was The Hundred, as Jane called them. The list of women who were in danger. The Prime Minister’s wife. Lady Dalrymple. Monica Preston-Smythe—ooh, Helen hadn’t known that. A few men were sprinkled through, and a few people were known only by a first name. Other than that, it read like a society page, a who’s who of the most influential women in the city.

The names were written in ink, in Jane’s tiny precise hand. Helen flipped to the end of the names and saw that at the top of a clean page writing followed, a name followed by copious notes. Henrietta Lindcombe. She recognized that as the first facelift Jane had done. “Mrs. Lindcombe is nervous but I think I have talked her into it,” wrote Jane. “After she had that close encounter with a fey in the park she was a much easier catch. Before that it was all ‘I don’t believe the danger is what you say it is.’ I am reminded time and again that the war was fought in the country, and the city folk were never exposed to it. So many of the wealthy men paid others to go in their place. The war is a hundred miles away and five years gone, and the blue in the city are just another obstacle you learn to live with, like pickpockets. You avoid the waterfront for pickpockets; you wear an iron mask for the fey. You pretend that’s enough, and yet … If only all of them could be nearly attacked, they might be more willing to accede to what I know to be true and necessary!”

Helen skimmed the description until she saw the part that said “At last.” And then, a long description of how it had felt to perform her first facelift, on Mrs. Lindcombe. Helen shuddered and turned the page. The next page was also labeled with a name, the second one on the list, but it was blank beneath. Same with the next page, and the next. Helen flipped through several blank pages until she found the next page with writing on it. Millicent Grimsby.