metamorphose and that means they’ll become man-eating butterflies, but I won’t be afraid.…,” Tam was explaining. He was more excited than she’d seen him yet.
Her spine crumbled. She bent down to Tam, her shoulders next to his. “Can you do me a big favor?” she said, her words weak and whispery.
“What?”
“I wasn’t supposed to go out today,” Helen said. “You know how it’s dangerous out with the fey. We kind of snuck out.”
Tam nodded.
“If Mr. Huntingdon asks, can you pretend we didn’t go to the museum?” she said. “So I don’t get in trouble? Say we just went to the next-door neighbor’s to play with their son.”
“Lie?” he said.
“Well.” She was teaching him cowardice and lying. If Jane were here her sharp tongue would reduce Helen to coals in two seconds flat. “Yes,” Helen said.
Tam thought about this. “Okay,” he said, and reminded her, “I’m good at lying.”
“I guess you said that,” said Helen.
“You just watch,” said Tam. “Will you find me some food for my snake though? Usually father gets me things when I lie.”
“Certainly,” said Helen.
“The copperhead hydras ate slugs. I think my garter snake would like slugs, don’t you?”
Helen winced at the thought. “It’s a deal,” she said.
She took the boy in the back way and they crept up the staircase to her set of rooms. Mary was just starting a fire. As with Helen, Mary’s defiance had wilted into worry and fear. She turned when she saw them and said in a rushed whisper, “Oh good; I just saw the master in the games room and he’s in such a state. He’ll be up here any minute. I put out your tea like it’s been half-eaten, but I can always bring you more.”
“Mary, that’s brilliant,” said Helen. She tried to smile and project reassurance. “What sort of state? Did he just wake, or did he go out and find trouble?” Drink, opium, horse didn’t win? Tripped on a stick and fired a gardener? Drop of rain plashed his lovingly buffed windshield?
Mary shook her head. “Something to do with Copperhead, I think.” She lowered her voice. “That Grimsby could incite the angels to riot.”
Tam looked up at the mention of his father’s name. Helen hurriedly motioned him to sit down and eat from the leftover scraps Mary had artfully arranged. “Oh, that’s a new hair ribbon, isn’t it, Mary? I like that plum shade on you.” Which was true, as well as turning the conversation away from the boy. “Did my telegram finally come? Tam, take off your explorer hat and try the cream cakes. If they don’t vanish it’ll definitely look fake.” She whirled around, tugging off her coat and hat, shoving things to the back of the wardrobe.
“Something came,” said Mary, passing her a sealed and folded slip of paper. “I got it away from the butler just in time. And the ribbon’s from that new beau I was telling you about—”
Tam bounced. “Miss Helen, Miss Helen, I’m going to go into the forest and capture a copperhead hydra —”
“Ooh, Mary, the clerk? Yes, you and me both, Tam.” Helen shoved the telegram into a pocket and plopped down on one of the pink tufted stools by the tea tray just as the door opened and Alistair burst in.
His face was red from his hangover, his movements stiff and painful. The lavender soap smell meant he had been up a little while, yet clearly not long enough to feel himself again. He looked like a schoolteacher who has finally found an excuse to whip a particularly disliked child. His glittering eyes roved the room until he found her, and then he pounced. “Have you been thinking about our discussion?”
Helen stood, brushing her skirt off, thinking what to say about the small boy sitting opposite, cream cake clutched in one grubby paw, eyes wide.
Alistair’s eye fell on him. “Who’s that? What’s he doing here?”
“Tam—,” she started, but he apparently didn’t really care, because he continued headlong, brushing her response aside.
“I’ve been going through everything I can think of about where to find Jane. You can make it up to me if you find her. We can make it up to Grimsby if we turn her in. I know the only reason I’m on the outs is because of this Jane nonsense. Grimsby and Morse and Boarham were all together without me this morning, did you know?”
“Maybe they were having pancakes,” Helen murmured.
Alistair paced. “Well, Hattersley’s on my side. He was just here and he swears he saw Jane last night, near the statue of Queen Maud on the pier. Why would she be there? It’s all just warehouses and the dwarfslum.”
“I don’t know,” said Helen. “Why don’t you ask your
Alistair waved this aside irritably. “Don’t hold what a man says when drinking against him. You know I couldn’t possibly suspect you of fraternizing with those half-size mongrels any more than you have to. Now look. We are going to go get Jane and trap her. And then she’ll pay for what she did to Grimsby. And we will all be back in business.”
Helen just looked at Alistair, at a loss for words. How had the man she thought she married turned into this man?
“Why is he here?” murmured Alistair, pointing at Tam. He ran fingers through his tight curls, hectic motions.
“His father said he could come for an outing,” started Helen. “We’ve just been having tea—,” but Alistair brushed that aside just as he had the boy’s name. She saw then that sometimes lies were useless, if others didn’t care enough to look under their noses. Alistair was filled with these new thoughts of capturing Jane. He probably didn’t even realize who Tam was, though he had just seen him at the Grimsbys’. Alistair was really only focused on himself, his friends, his jockeying for position—he certainly did not care about children, who could supply him with neither gossip nor gambling. She stared at her husband, thinking: Be who you were. Be who I thought you were.
“Leave him,” he said. “We’re going to get Jane.”
Helen set down her toast with trembling fingers. “I may have agreed to marry you, but I didn’t agree to do everything you ordered,” she said.
“I’m not ordering,” Alistair said. “You’re being irrational. It must be those horrid folks you’re hanging around with—Jane and her bluestocking friends, those traitors. If she’s in the dwarfslum, it’s probably because she’s in league with those disgusting creatures.” He looked over her head, thoughtful. “Yes, she’d probably be just the sort to take up with one of them, now that she’s no longer deformed. Miscegenation would be nothing to her.…”
That was the point that made her snap.
She turned on him and said softly, “You will apologize now.”
She watched until his eyes went glassy, and then he said, “I’m sorry. I am.”
The decorative nonsense was burned away. “Mary, take Tam from the room, please,” Helen said softly. As the door shut behind them she said, “I hold to my end of the marriage contract. I see no reason for me or my family to be treated like this.”
“Of course not,” he said.
It was heady, saying these ridiculously domineering things. She could spout off anything she cared to and make him agree with her. It was as if someone had had a weight on her all this time and had just pulled it off. And she found that she was twice as tall as she thought.
“I can go where I want, and if there’s danger I can damn well walk into it if I want,” she said. “I am in charge of my own safety.”
“You are,” he agreed.
The things Jane and Frye and Rook had said all came bubbling up. She didn’t even know they had come in and registered.
“We are married, but you don’t own me,” she said.
Alistair sank to one of her tufted chairs. His eyes looked concerned, and she wondered if the changes she was effecting would last while she was gone, or wear off when she turned her back. She found at the moment she didn’t really care.
“I’m going down to a place that isn’t safe for children,” Helen said. “You will watch Tam. Send word to his father that he can stay over. You can”—she cast around—“play dominoes with him, look at maps, catch bugs. That
