Copperhead

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.

Ask to take charge of a small boy.

Her heart rattled as she knocked on the hydra knocker that hung on the front door.

It was not the same muscular butler as at the meeting the night before. It was a wizened old woman, who said, “An’ ye be human, enter.”

Helen stepped inside to an abruptly dark and empty house. “Where are all the things?” she said.

“Getting cleaned out,” said the woman, who seemed quite happy to talk about it. “He can’t abide anything of hers to be left, he says. First he took her out—and all still and quiet cold she was. Then fired all the servants round about midnight, them as been with the family for years. One shock on another, I’ll tell you, and then the constables crawling over it all this morning and so on, and him going out with those ruffian friends of his last night after such a tragedy.” She lingered over her gossip with relish. “And then without a by- your-leave comes back from roulette and starts flinging everybody out around two A.M., brings in three young bucks with broad backs and they ferry furniture out all night and morning, nice electric lights blazing like they’d burn the house down. Dunno where they took all the things. Nothing left but his and Thomas’s beds and some plates. Now me and my daughter come over from next door to help box things and mop. We’ve been with that family for years you see, know the history of the whole street. I daresay he wanted us as we don’t talk too much.”

“I daresay,” murmured Helen. She peeked into the large drawing room. The tidy room she’d sat in only yesterday for the meeting was dismantled—the big items gone, the small items being packed into trunks and crates. It was oddly disorienting.

“You’ll have heard about the lady then?”

“Yes,” said Helen. “Terrible. And with that small boy, too.”

“None of hers, but for all that she was better for him than that cold father of his,” said the woman, lowering her voice. “Poor thing is just sitting in the attic where she was, and his father in and out and who-knows-where.”

“That’s actually why I’ve come,” said Helen, leaping into it. “I wanted to stop by and chat with Tam. I thought he could use a friendly face.” Stop by and get him out of here was more like it, but she managed not to say that. She added, “Millicent Grimsby and I were friends,” which was stretching the point, but still, she thought they might have been, if they had had the opportunity to really know each other.

The woman shrugged. “You can go up in the attic for all of me. I’ve got no instructions to the contrary.”

Helen went slowly up the stairs. Her heart went all tight again. Tam had had time to think about what happened to his stepmamma. Perhaps he knew she was responsible, she and Jane. He was not so young that he could not put things together.

Almost she fled, but the thought of Millicent lying still on the table steeled her spine and she went up.

Carefully she opened the door to the stairs that led to the garret, and went up and up. Her mind was full of poor Mrs. Grimsby.

The slanted room was empty—no furniture, no birdcages, no people. No daybed. No Millicent.

She turned, looking at where the daybed had been. She could see it still, Millicent Grimsby, pale as death, staring into nothing.…

“Come to gloat?”

Helen’s heart leapt from her chest as she turned to see Mr. Grimsby.

He was so tall. Had he always been so tall? And he wore a finely cut suit of grey-black, and his eyes