Copperhead (16 page)

His grin faded. “I had other business there last night. I am not a member of Copperhead.”

“Other business,” repeated Helen. “So now it really gets interesting. I doubt you were in charge of the catering.” She stopped on the sidewalk. “And come to that, why were you near the trolley stop today? Did you know that was going to happen to that poor man?”

Rook looked sober at the reminder of the trolley stop incident. “Did you see what happened? Did he provoke those Copperhead men?”

“They started it,” Helen protested, then admitted, “but he wouldn’t back down.”

“Moug always was a hothead.”

“You knew him. I’m sorry.”

He nodded, and added, “Look, I wasn’t near you; we were simply both near the Grimsbys’. Now can you take that suspicious look off your face? My intentions toward you are entirely honorable, I swear.”

Helen noticed that he did not claim that
all
his intentions were honorable, but she let her shoulders loosen. Perhaps she
had
been too blunt. Normally she was better at keeping her conversation partner soothed, flattered, well bantered. But apart from not entirely trusting this man, the storm of worries in her chest swirled round and round, leaving her adrift. What on earth would she do without Jane? The lights from the theatre district faded behind them as they walked on, leaving them in a darker neighborhood of old row houses and shaggy bits of garden. They cut through a stretch of park, winding their way up into the hills.

“Things on your mind?” Rook said softly.

Helen laughed and tossed her hair, building up her wall again. “Just thinking how divine your Miss Frye looked in her dragon and slacks. I’m positive I could never pull off such a thing. Yet I think I should try to go to her little musicale, what’s it called again? You tell me, do you think it would be worth seeing?”

The flow of chatter seemed to break and crash over him, leaving him unaffected. “I think it is likely ridiculous. Frye is better than her material.”

It was so easy to pretend there was nothing more on her mind than flirting with a handsome stranger. So easy to fall into the role of frivolous, laughing Helen. “Ah, the sort of thing where you grab your date and waltz out at intermission for cocktails. Then you sneak back in, half-sloshed, and afterward…” But there her imagination failed her, never having known anyone in a play. “And what do you do then?”

“The curtain falls. Rises. The actors come out and the audience breaks into a completely unwarranted sea of applause, mostly based on the number of cocktails they have had. When they are done, we slip through the pass door and find Frye’s dressing room. The biggest one, with the star. Which is probably the size of a shoebox and tucked under some stairs. We bring her flowers—”

“—oh, dear, I would have forgotten that—”

“—and she kisses our cheeks and we tell her how wonderful she was.”

“We lie?”

“Like rugs,” Rook said cheerfully. “Or, if you like, you tell her that the scenery was very beautiful, and you could hear all of the actors surprisingly well.”

“Ohhh,” she said, and then, “Oh,” with the bump of reality.

He raised eyebrows at her.

“You make it sound so lovely, I can practically see it,” Helen said. “It makes me wish we could go.”

“Your Mr. Huntingdon could take you.”

“No, he won’t let me go out for the danger, and I owe him not to go for something frivolous.”

Rook stopped then, and looked at her. “Helen,” he said.

“What?” She was startled to hear her name on his lips.

He turned and walked faster. “You’re cold, we should hurry.”

She was confused. “What did I say?”

Rook wheeled back again, took her elbow. “Now look,” he said. “What do you mean you can’t go out? You’re here now.”

“I snuck,” Helen said. “Or is it sneaked?” She thought she could lighten the sudden tension, for she could not understand why he seemed to be angry.

“For Frye’s party?”

“To talk to those women. Alberta and Betty and Desirée. To convince them to let Jane restore their old faces.”

“Ah,” Rook said, but the thing that looked fierce in him did not go, and he said, “Now look, Helen. What do you mean, you
owe
him?”

“Oh,” said Helen. She did not know why, but she suddenly wanted to tell him, tell him more than she had ever told Jane, more than:
I’m so desperately tired of being poor.

That was maybe half of the story. Maybe a tenth.

She turned away from his fierce gaze and started walking into the wind, opening her mouth before she lost her nerve. “My mother fell sick before she died,” Helen said. It was strange how hard the words were to get out, even as something inside said
you can trust him with this
. She had never told the story, not to anyone. She was very good at changing the subject. “We tried a lot of doctors. A lot of medicine.”

“Your family?” Rook said. He kept pace with her as they walked up the street, letting her manage the words in her own way. The houses were bigger here on the other side of the park, more porches and columns and windows … but still that blue, all that blue.

“Me,” Helen said. “My father died several years before the war. My brother, Charlie … near the end of it. Jane was in the city, trying to heal herself. I wasn’t very nice to her at the time, I’m afraid. It felt as though she’d abandoned me.” Helen hadn’t thought through this in years. At least, not while awake—sometimes the dreams slipped her back through time and she woke aching with regret for a vanished past. It didn’t matter if she thought about it or consciously didn’t think about it, it was all still there. That lost feeling of being thirteen and alone in the house with Mother, who was slipping further away each day despite all of Helen’s efforts to bring her back.

“By the end, there was nothing left. Everything was mortgaged to the hilt or sold off. But I heard about a new doctor in the city. I went to him and begged. Well, he agreed to payment in installments.…” Helen trailed off. The night was cold and wet. The cloud cover blocked out the stars. Perhaps it was not clouds but smoke from the factories at the river, she thought, choking the sky.…

And these few sentences were more than she had said in years. She could not do any more, not just yet. “I don’t want to talk about this,” she said.

There was silence for a time. Then Rook said, “I grew up not knowing my father. Of course I was taller than everyone else. But
havlen
is an insult. Half-thing.”

Helen looked at him, shocked. How had she seen him and not known? She had to recalibrate. This man was only half-human. And half-
dwarvven
. Alistair would never approve.
Copperhead
would never approve. He couldn’t possibly be a member, then, unless he was a
dwarvven
spy, and in that case he had just carelessly handed a big secret to the wife of one of the top party members.

“I started out by punching everyone who called my mother a vile name. After a while I got a name for it.”

“I would have figured you for the class clown type.”

“When they finally threatened to throw me out of school for good I became the class clown instead. At least it’s a time-honored position, in
dwarvven
society. Like being a writer. Being a joker. It gave me a tenuous place.”

“It’s so much easier to talk of fun things,” Helen said. The way was getting steeper and it was hard to laugh. “If you talk silly then no one asks prying questions.”

“So let’s talk of terrible theatre some more,” Rook said, but Helen heard a bite in his voice that made her ask, “You didn’t stay the class clown?”

“Who does,” he said, “when war comes?” There was a moment when the moon caught his eyes and she looked right into him and saw that there was a
thing,
a some-thing, a black dark thing. But then his eyes glinted with a grin once more and he said, “Now, you may talk of cabbages and sealing wax and everything else Dodgson wrote of, but we are done with secrets.” He suddenly seized her arm and pointed to the footbridge they were nearing. “Have you ever climbed on a bridge rail in the middle of the night in November?”

“No!” Helen said, suddenly laughing, and Rook seized her arm, calling, “Race you,” and pulled her up the street, as if the race were the two of them together, against some other, unknown opponent. The cold night was sharp in her throat and her heels skidded on the wet pavement, but she laughed, fast and fierce, giddy with the run.

The bridge railings turned out to be stone ledges, and there was a fair amount of blue fey draped over them.

“Mm,” said Rook. “Perhaps we won’t climb
these
railings.” He looked at the blue. “No, I wanted to climb something.” He reached down and peeled away a large swath of blue with his gloved hands.

“Rook!” she cried, hurrying toward him—then stopped, for her face was still bare.

He let the blue fall over the edge of the bridge. “Go home, little fey,” he said. “Shoo.” The blue glow slid down into the black night and vanished.

“Rook,” she said again, shocked. “Do you have iron in your gloves?”

“No,” he said, and peeled another piece away. “It’ll be safe for you in a minute. Hang on.”

“But … you’re touching them. You saw what happened today, to that man.…”

“Yes,” he said. “And yet the odds are very much against that. Or perhaps I like to live dangerously.” He saw her expression and said, “Look, as much as I dislike the fey, a little piece isn’t going to harm me. You do know what the old fey tech that you humans used to trade for was made from, don’t you?”

Helen shook her head.

“Pieces of fey,” he said. “All your bluepacks that used to power things. Bits of split-apart fey. It was a punishment for them. They don’t like being torn apart like this.” He gestured around the city at the swathes of blue. “Whoever their new leader is, they’re strong enough to make it stick.” He dropped another piece over the edge. “Anyway, the small bits aren’t aware of much. It’s not till you have a whole fey that you have problems.”

“Well, I do know that much,” Helen said. “But aren’t you afraid there could be a big one hiding among these little bits?”

“I know,” Rook said, peeling off another piece. “But I am watching, and I am quick on my feet.” He dropped the bit of fey over the edge. She could see that they did not fall all the way into the water, but lazily drifted along just over it, looking for a new spot to rest. He looked over the edge, watching it go. “It doesn’t matter what I saw today. They are still not the race I fear.”

Helen did not say anything to that, because she knew which race he meant.

Humans.

Rook was
havlen,
so he was part-
dwarvven
. And Copperhead hated the
dwarvven
nearly as much as the fey, though she never could figure out why. Humans and
dwarvven
had been allies, once. The
dwarvven
did not like the fey, either.

“Well,” said Rook. “If they knew what we’ve planned for them…”

“Humans?” Helen said sharply.

But Rook just waggled his eyebrows and grinned. “Gallows humor, that’s all,” he said. “If we knew what
they’ve
planned for us … we’d be in just as much trouble and misery.” He pointed to a yellow poster, curled around the nearest streetlamp and visible in its golden glow. “Your Copperhead is getting higher in the capital’s ear every day.”

“They’re not my Copperhead.”

“Just married in, eh?”

She looked coldly at him.

He put up his hands. “My tongue always takes me too far,” he said.

“Or not as far as you’d like?” she said, which made him laugh and pulled the moment back into something funnier than perhaps it should be. After all, what did he mean by
plans
?

They started walking again, off the bridge and into Alistair’s neighborhood proper. There were more streetlamps here, and everything was more neatly maintained, making the bits of blue fey particularly jarring, like mold on bread. Her fingers were quite cold in her gloves.

“So you’re half-
dwarvven,
and the
dwarvven
hate you, but you’re working with them,” Helen said, seeing if she could tease any more information out of him.

Rook looked at the night sky. “I’m always making up,” he told it.

Helen did not know what for, but she knew what sort of a voice that was. That voice of always making up for leaving Charlie, leaving Jane, leaving Mother. Did Jane ever use that voice for leaving her? “To whom?”

“To myself.” He closed those laughing hazel eyes and suddenly no part of him looked lighthearted and fun. With his eyes closed she suddenly saw the worry lines around his eyebrows. Saw the tight way his jaw set, as if it could do hard things. “When you have been willing to kill once, you see,” he said, “it is assumed you will be willing to again.”

She could not say something lighthearted to that, so she said nothing. It was a peculiar moment, to go from a man you had talked to about dancing and theatre to thinking: This man has killed. Is he a different man now? He is the same man, but I know something about his past that casts a long shadow over his future. He will always be a man who has killed.

They were walking up the gaslit street and at the cloud-shrouded moon she said: “The payment to the doctor was so huge, the day so far off … I simply couldn’t ever meet it. I became more and more desperate. More skilled at dividing my life into two pieces. No one must know. I had taken it on to be responsible and important and clever, like Mother and Father and Jane, who were all gone, you see, and I was going to solve it in the same way. By myself. Of course I never was going to be able to meet the payment, and I suppose the doctor must have known that all along. As it drew nearer, he sought me out. Dropped hints of other methods of repayment.…

“I had hoped I could make the payments. But at some point you miss one and then the payments start escalating. I would come up with grand plans—there are always grand plans—for paying it off. I would make dresses for wealthy ladies and sell them. Things I could never accomplish because I would have to have money to buy the fabric in the first place. Or somehow—never quite satisfactorily explained how—I would get a second position, filling in for other nannies and governesses on their days off. But the thought of spending even more time with intolerable, spoilt children was … intolerable.