Copperhead

surface of her eyes. “Oh, Mr. Grimsby, you’re hurting me!” which was in point of fact true, but mostly it gave her a chance to duck her head away from his gaze, blink obscuring tears into place.

“Come, Grimsby, don’t manhandle my little one,” said Alistair. “She doesn’t know anything. You see her face—could someone with a face like that even leave the house? Let alone plot things.”

Helen turned her perfect face on the men, tears standing in her eyes. Her fey allure seemed to soften them all, even Grimsby, who dropped her arms and stepped back a pace. “Can we go home now?” she said meekly. “This is all so … so disturbing. That such a thing could happen to poor Millicent. And with Jane involved…”

“I must stay,” Alistair told her, “but I will have you driven home. I will come later.”

“Be safe,” Hattersley said kindly, and Helen nodded, picked up the carpetbag ever so casually, and fled down the stairs in careful slow meek steps, heart racing, brain burning clear.

Away from them in the hallways she walked faster and faster, grabbing her coat, her lilac gloves, her iron mask, kicked under a chair by the attic stairs. Her passage was slowed by the glut of couples hurrying home, away from the disastrous meeting. She nodded to them politely, trying to control the energy that burned within. Carefully tied the iron mask in place and told the massive butler to have their driver bring the motorcar around. There would not be any word to report to Alistair that she had done anything wrong.

At last inside the car, she curled her fingers around the door handle and slammed it closed, heart racing.

Jane was gone.

Millicent might die.

And then Grimsby was going to blame Jane for his wife’s death.

It was too clear. The men of Copperhead hated Jane already, hated that she was trying to help their wives regain some measure of freedom. The cowards like Morse and Boarham made fun of her when she wasn’t there (they were scared to do it to her face). Helen had tried to help Jane; Jane had tried to help Millicent, and now everything was a mess.

Worse, Jane would not have left Millicent in the fey sleep without a very good reason. Jane was too responsible, too duty-bound to run just because something spooked her. Perhaps Mr. Grimsby’s machine had caused her so much pain that she had had to flee. No, Helen did not like that idea. But perhaps the machine had messed up the operation to the point where Jane could not rouse Millicent. And then, the only thing Jane could do was press the old face in place in case Millicent did wake up, and run before the men caught her and hauled her off for their own brand of questioning.

And in that case, where would Jane have run?

“Mrs. Huntingdon?” the chauffeur said patiently again.

“Yes, please take me home, Adam,” Helen said. She found she was sitting in the middle of the backseat in a huddle, and she forced her legs to straighten to the floor. “How’s your mother doing? Are her legs still troubling her?”

“It comes and goes,” Adam said, “but she said to tell you thanks for the oranges.” The car started moving and then abruptly jerked to a halt. Alistair was banging on the rear window.

Helen swallowed and straightened as he pulled open the door and got in, slamming it behind him. “I thought you were staying here,” she said, her words muffled and hollow.

“I am. I am!” Alistair waved his hands in frustration. “You don’t know what it’s like up there.”

“With poor Millicent?”

“They’re all ranting at me, Helen. What do I do about you?”

“About me?”

“Boarham said if I’d cast Jane out this never would have happened, and Grimsby said I needed to have a tighter grip on you. He said you and Jane are working against us. That you aren’t following the party line. But I trust you, Helen.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

Alistair looked up at her, indecision written on his face. “I’m going to need your mask.”

“What?”

He nodded more firmly, as if trying to convince them both. “I need it, Helen. Grimsby said so, and he’s right. You need to be protected. I need to make you safe.”

“The mask makes me safe.”

“But you love your sister,” said Alistair. “I understand that, even if she’s not worth it. I do understand.”

“Yes?…”

“And I know you. You’re about to charge off to find her, or rescue her, or some sort of harebrained goose chase. I need to make you safe.” He reached up to Helen, and before she could think of any clever way to talk him out of it, before she could jump from the motorcar and run so fast, so fast, he unbuckled the straps and lifted it from her face, leaving her skin exposed to the warmed air of the vehicle.

She blinked at him, and she thought then that perhaps her face would calm him, that he would turn and see how lovely she was, and give in. Maybe smile and call her his pet, like he used to do.

But he thrust his fingers through the eyehole of the mask he held and said, “Yes, this is much better, isn’t it? Much better for us both.” He patted her silk-skirted leg and then hurried from the car, her iron mask dangling from his canary-gloved fingertips as he hurried back into the house.

Silence passed, and at length Adam said, “Home, miss?”

As if she had a choice.

“Yes,” Helen managed, and turned her trembling lips away from his sightline, looked out the window into the icy night.

Adam turned out of the drive. She could feel his worry like a palpable presence. That was the way it was since Rochart replaced her old face with the fey version—she seemed to have a sixth sense of what people wanted, what they felt. Now Adam was trying to help her make things better, help her show a stiff upper lip. “Those oranges cheered my mum right up, I’ll tell you.”

“Good,” said Helen. The gaslights cast strange shadows through the mists of fey. “I’ll send over some more.”

Her eyes closed against the fey, against the night, thinking about poor Millicent. Without Jane’s fey power keeping Millicent protected and under thrall, no one could survive a process like the facelift. How long would Millicent stay in the fey sleep? Jane herself was no fey—her power was not that vast. If Helen did not find Jane soon … she was very afraid Millicent would waste away and die, as Mr. Grimsby seemed to want to believe already. Millicent was on death’s door because of what Jane had done, but it wasn’t Jane’s fault, it was that horrid Mr. Grimsby and his machine. How would she make those men believe that?

And what would they do to Jane once they found her? It would be Jane against Copperhead, and Helen didn’t give a fig for those chances. She had to find her sister before they did. She closed her eyes, in that moment hating herself for the blithe way she had seen Millicent’s escape, for the casual way she had set up Jane to help Millicent. As if it were all a game. “I didn’t mean it,” she whispered fiercely. “Jane, come home.”

“What’s that, ma’am?”

“Stop here,” she said, before she knew what she was saying.

Adam pulled to the side, looking dubiously at the strip of storefronts lining the wide thoroughfare. “Probably all closed, ma’am.” She heard in the cautious sentence all the things he couldn’t say, both: Don’t get yourself into trouble, and, equally, Don’t make me lose my position.

She seized Jane’s carpetbag. “I’ve got to find my sister,” she said. “She’s my family.”

He nodded slowly, thinking this over.

“Please don’t tell my husband when you pick him up,” she said. “I’ll—I don’t know. Take a cab or the trolley or something. If he finds out … I’ll swear to him I left from home and you know nothing about it.”

“Do you have money?”

Of course she didn’t. “Oh, Adam, why am I such a wreck?”

“You’re not a wreck, ma’am,” he said in his stoic way, and handed her some coins from his pocket. “I’d watch out for the trolley, though. Full of malcontent dwarvven causing trouble, they say.”

“I’ll be careful,” Helen said, and promised, “I’ll pay you back tomorrow morning.”