Copperhead

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 Desiree 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