Copperhead (15 page)

Alberta shook her head. “Nightclubs,” she said.

“Oh, a singer,” said Helen. She was realizing that for the women she had met through Frye, a more beautiful face was not just vanity—it was part of their livelihood. Where did that fall on Jane’s line of who should and shouldn’t make themselves more beautiful? People would always rather go hear a beautiful
chanteuse
than a plain one, even if they had the exact same voice.

But Alberta shook her head. “Saxophone,” she said.

Helen’s face crinkled in puzzlement.

A tiny smile broke through on Alberta’s sullen beautiful face. “I know. There aren’t too many of us. I can sing well enough, but … no. I play sax in a cabaret band called
Sturm und Drang
. You might have heard of us.”

“I have,” said Helen, though admittedly the “heard of” amounted to Alistair grinching about the terrible modern music that was becoming popular for no discernible reason that he, Alistair, could see. She looked at Alberta with new respect. “But then why.…”

Alberta looked wary. “Frye mentioned you. You’re Jane’s sister, aren’t you? You’re wasting your time.”

“To convince you to do the facelift? It really is safer.”

Alberta rolled her eyes. “Spare me. I’m not like all of you rich ladies who just wanted to be prettier.”

Helen tried not to be offended by the venom in her tone. Or at least, reminded herself that it didn’t matter if she was offended. “Why then?” she said, as neutrally as she could manage.

Alberta looked at her coldly. “Abusive husband,” she said. The words were sharp and blunt. “Wouldn’t grant me a divorce. Thought he could beat me and I wouldn’t mind.” She showed teeth. “Turns out I did.” At Helen’s horrified expression her face relaxed and she laughed again. “I didn’t smash his face in with a frying pan or anything, don’t worry. Just ran away. A … friend … helped me scrape up the money to change my face.”

Helen could tell from her pursed lips she was not going to say any more about the friend, so instead she asked, “So you’re not just a more beautiful version of before?”

“No,” said Alberta. “It’s nice to be beautiful; I don’t mind that. As long as I was getting it done, why not go all the way, you know? But the point is that I’m not the same. And he can’t recognize me.”

Helen thought of all the folks she’d met, that this woman was the hardest to want to convince. Who was she to tell this woman to go back in living in fear for her life?

And yet, Alberta was in danger now, too, and the facelifts needed to be done. The wistfulness in Alberta’s voice when she said “I’m not the same” was Helen’s necessary clue. “You miss your old face?” she said.

“Sure, who wouldn’t?” said Alberta, but her tone was brash over loss.

Helen touched her arm. “I won’t try to convince you to change back,” she said, “because honestly, I’m not sure you should.”

“Oh. Good,” said Alberta with surprise.

“I miss my old face, and it was pretty much the same,” Helen said. “Although it had freckles, and this one doesn’t. Turns out for all my time spent trying to get rid of freckles … I miss them once they’re gone. Silly, I suppose. Well, Alistair never liked them.”

Alberta nodded. “So you changed for your husband, too.”

It was true, though Helen hadn’t thought about it in those terms. Alistair had said it would erase the freckles—fix the imperceptible bump on her nose—et cetera. That she needed to be as beautiful as the Prime Minister’s wife to make all those people who laughed at her when she used the wrong fork respect her.

“And it’s not right, is it?” Helen said. “It’s as if they took something that was yours. You can leave … but you’re still changed by them. They still have power over that piece of you. You’re never really free.”

“True,” said Alberta. She looked thoughtful and Helen judged the moment right to excuse herself for another martini. She had started out just exercising her wits to find arguments to work, but the conversation had dredged up things she hadn’t really thought about, and wasn’t sure she wanted to. A little shaken, she looked at herself for a long time in the window into the night, running pale fingers over the missing freckles, and thinking.

After Alberta, the third one was a piece of cake. Fortified with another gin from the winsome bartender, Helen met with Desirée, and armed with Frye’s information about the iron allergy, had no trouble extracting a promise to meet with Jane as soon as she was found. Indeed, Desirée sounded eager, and she pulled back the locks of her hair to show Helen where her cheek was blistered around the edge of the iron mask. It reminded Helen of the bloodred line around Millicent’s face, and she shuddered.

At last some rather languid-looking actors vacated one of Frye’s striped divans, and Helen seized it gladly. Her legs were protesting yesterday’s exercise, and she was starting to get tired. Also, it had just occurred to her that she had come here on the trolley, and just like last night, the trolley was certainly done running for the day. Zero foresight. Zip. She drained the last of her gin, postponing the problem of getting home for a bit longer. She could flag down a cab … if she had her purse … if she begged Frye for a loan.… Of course, Frye might try to get Helen to stay, and attempt that facelift all by herself.…

Helen crossed her ankles on a carved elephant that was doubling as a coffee table and tried to imagine following through on Frye’s demand that she take over Jane’s line of work. Perhaps Frye thought through consequences even less than she, Helen did. She wondered how that worked out for Frye. It seemed to, but then Frye seemed to be all alone in the world. Maybe if your muddles only muddled you, you could make your way better. You wouldn’t be always trying to atone for past muddles, and muddling more.

As if summoned by Helen’s thoughts, the purple caftan ballooned into her sight and Frye stood in front of her and the carved elephant. “I don’t want this face,” Frye said. She had a martini in each hand and a peculiarly desperate expression on her face.

“I know,” said Helen, with a twinge of exasperation and a good deal of sympathy. “But even if I
could
do it I couldn’t do it tonight. One, we don’t know where your real face is, and two, I’ve had three gins.”

Frye’s fingers tensed on the martini glasses. Up close Helen could see that her fingernails were jade green. “You don’t know, do you?” said Frye. “You can do things with it.”

Helen’s heart beat faster. Jane had hinted at something like this. Something more than the natural fey glamour that simply made people want to please her. “What things?”

Frye slumped next to Helen on the striped divan in a cloud of jasmine. Her eyes were feverish and Helen thought that although Frye seemed to hold her liquor quite well, she was also possibly at the point where she was not going to remember any of this tomorrow.

“You have to be focused,” Frye said. “Remember that.”

“I will,” said Helen, humoring her.

“Did you have a good time? Did you take the trolley again and need a ride? I bet you did, since it sounds like you have to sneak away from some dreary old husband.”

“Focused,” pointed out Helen, for Frye seemed to be evading her own story.

“I met this … artist,” said Frye at last. She cradled the two martini glasses in one hand so she could gesture with the other. “I was desperately in love. It didn’t matter how many other folks brought me flowers, you know? There was only one person I wanted. But even with all my fey glamour … No. Just not interested in someone like me. Heart of stone.”

“It’s the worst,” agreed Helen.

Frye looked up and into Helen’s face. “I changed all that,” she whispered. “I changed it. With the fey power in the mask.” Misery glittered in her eyes. “Where there was indifference I made love. I
made
someone love me.” Haltingly, the words slipped out: “And you see I didn’t deserve it. Anyone who could do what I did doesn’t deserve to be loved.”

Helen didn’t know what to say, and Frye seemed to interpret her silence as disgust, for she looked away, shoulders crumpling. “Don’t worry, I undid the changes. We’ve stopped speaking—they think it was a temporary lapse in judgment, I’m sure.” Her free hand traced the stripes on the divan. “So you see I can’t be trusted. I need the mask gone before I do it again.”

Compassion riddled Helen’s heart in response. “Love is not the worst thing in the world,” she said gently, and put a warm hand on Frye’s own.

Frye pressed Helen’s fingers, then let them go. “Love is perhaps the best thing,” she said, and she laced her fingers tightly around her martini glasses. “But forcing someone into it is perhaps the worst. Those Copperhead people have a term for it, what the fey did to the ones they took over. Brainwiping.”

The party was thinning out at this hour of the night as actors slumped to divans or left for home. Frye’s confession thinned out and died away, and Helen thought what a slippery slope this fey power was. Even before the power, she had employed her beauty and charm as tools; how could you not? They were her own, and she had sharpened them like razors. It seemed like all one could do, in this world where others had wealth and status at their disposal, and all she had were a couple of pretty little knives that would crack with age.

Across the room Helen saw her mysterious dance partner, chatting animatedly to a brunette woman with a curvy figure. If I were her I would not wear that horizontal panel at my waist, Helen mused.

Frye followed Helen’s gaze. “Did you meet Roxanne?”

“That man,” said Helen. It suddenly occurred to her that he could be a spy for Copperhead, here for some sinister purpose. “Do you know him?”

“Oh, you,” said Frye. “Of course.” She stood up, mussing Helen’s perch on the cushions, and gestured imperiously, the two glasses she held clinking together. “Rook!” she said. “Rook!” He grinned impudently at Frye, excused himself from the brunette, and came loping over, sliding through the tangle of sitting-down bodies.

“You. Meet this young woman named Helen,” said Frye. “Now, if I understand the situation correctly, she’s going to need an escort home tonight.” To Helen she said, “I would invite you to stay, but you’re going to tell me no, and I don’t do well when people tell me no.” She turned back to Rook. “Now I know you’re ridiculously charming and everything, but she has a husband so no funny business.”

“No funny business,” said Rook, shaking Helen’s hand as soberly as if they were now meeting for the first time. That warm sandalwood scent lingered around her fingertips.

“Does everyone just do what she says?” said Helen, and then immediately bit her tongue, for she hadn’t meant it like that, not like she was betraying the confidence Frye had just shared.

Frye just laughed at her discomfort. “If they’re smart they do,” she said. She waved a pair of now-empty martini glasses at Helen. “I’ll see you later this week.”

Frye left and then they were alone in the crowd. All sorts of things to say whirled through her mind as she studied him, this man. Rook. He had no hydra pin—but if he were a spy, he wouldn’t, would he? What did he want from her?

A hint of a smile played over Rook’s features as he watched her studying him. Languidly he offered an arm and said, “Shall we?”

Helen settled on saying airily: “Kind of you to offer. But I’m afraid I find your suspicious ways suspicious. I don’t need an escort who’s going to trail ten feet behind me like a sneak.”

“No, that’s too far,” he agreed. “I plan to be within … oh, about six inches.”

His grin was irresistible, but she tried valiantly to be firm, to not let his charm trump her sensible suspicions. He had been at the Grimsbys’, after all. For all she knew he was a spy for Copperhead, sent to keep an eye on her. “Really, you needn’t,” said Helen. “You have a whole party to amuse you. I’ll be fine.”

“As fine as when you dumped the bugs on that idiot on the trolley? And he turned into a raving lunatic?”

Helen couldn’t think of a response to this. She tried, but by the time she’d come up with anything barely usable, she seemed to have her coat on and be at the door with him.

“Some people need to have bugs dumped on them,” she said brightly as she put on her lilac gloves. She tried to make it sound as though it was just good common sense.

“I quite agree,” Rook said. “In fact, I found it quite admirable.”

“Thank you,” said Helen.

“And yet, if you can’t promise me that you will incite no more men by throwing bugs on them, I think you’d better have an escort. You know. For their safety.”

“There is that,” said Helen. She muffled her scarf tightly around her chin and neck. It was no iron mask, but it made her feel better.

They stepped out into the cold.

Rook moved silently along beside her as they passed through the theatre district, crossed the empty trolley tracks, headed through the neighborhoods that would eventually take them up to Helen’s own. If he stopped talking he could blend into the night and she would not see him again. It was odd—he was neither as tall nor as stout as Alistair, and yet Helen felt safer walking beside him in the night than she would have with her husband. It was a peculiar feeling to have in her gut about someone that her intellect told her to mistrust. Perhaps it was the way she had seen him interact with the drunkard on the trolley—sleek and swift, perfectly calm—and yet the man had immediately backed down. Yet even if she had not witnessed that moment she thought she would feel just as safe. Safe from others—but safe from him, too—despite his joke about staying close, if she told him to keep five feet away the whole journey home, she rather thought he would do that.

But how smart was it to trust him?

“You followed me last night, didn’t you?” she said suddenly. “After the Copperhead meeting.”

“I saw him take your iron mask,” he said. Alistair, he meant.
Your husband,
he meant, but did not say it. “You were in danger.”

“I was in a car,” she said dryly. “You, what, ran along beside us because of a mask?”

“Stole a bike,” Rook said cheerfully. “Borrowed if you’re feeling generous. I did return it.”

“It’s certainly very flattering,” said Helen, “I’ll give you that.” She looked sideways at him, trying to puzzle him out. Even if she believed that he had just followed her due to concern for her welfare, there was still the point that he was at a Copperhead meeting last night, and here in what might as well be the enemy camp tonight. Somehow she had ended up with a foot in both worlds—but how had he? “Where’s your lapel pin?” she said. “Don’t you walk the party line?”