“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
“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
“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.
But what gave Helen the shock, despite knowing it must be there, was to see those names etched out in those precise letters, one after the other, just two more women on the fey hit list, their names a record of their mistakes.
98—Helen Huntingdon.
99—Jane Eliot.
PLAYING THE GAME
There was another good reason to start with Calendula Smith, and that’s that Helen knew where she lived —over by the Grimsbys. Helen had not spent any real time in the woman’s company, but she had been to a dance there once. It was in the last six months—well, nearly all of her social engagements dated from after she received her fey face—so she had not seen the woman’s new face. The iron masks were just coming into use for The Hundred, and this woman had one. Helen had watched them all whirling around the ballroom in their bright gowns and hard masks and felt more alone in a crowd than she had ever done in her life.
Helen had changed from the comfortable dress into something suitable for going out—a crisp wool suit in chartreuse. An unusual color, but one that brought out the glints in her copper blond hair. She had bowed to her blisters and put on her most comfortable shoes, and had tied a string of seed pearls around her neck. Went back and forth on Alistair’s new necklace, but in the end decided to leave it on. He was trying to make it up to her, wasn’t he? And it was pretty, even if it was Copperhead’s symbol. It wouldn’t hurt her to stay in their good graces while she slunk about town. She smoothed the chain down under the seed pearls, feeling the copper snake warm against her skin.
Helen knocked on Calendula Smith’s doorknocker (a plain hoop, thankfully), and waited for the butler to formally forbid her to cross the iron threshold. Soon she and Mrs. Smith were seated in the parlor, drinking bergamot tea and eying each other with mutually concealed dislike.
“Dear Helen,” said the woman. “It’s so good to see you.”
“And you, Calendula,” said Helen, not meaning a word of it. This woman had shunned her at first, for the
