Copperhead (32 page)

Heart beating rapidly, she looked for Alistair, but she could not find him. She almost laughed in relief, but then he advanced out of the shadows and said, “Grimsby wishes me to tell you your presence is requested.”

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“I am appointed emissary,” he said dreamily. “Ambassador. Go-between. We men understand that sacrifices must be made in war. Today, we will annihilate the fey. We would like you to assist in the glorious cause.”

“You men understand very little,” said Helen sharply. “We do not choose to lay down our lives for some fey’s nefarious plot.”

There was movement then, and she heard some of the men shifting in concern at her words, but whether at the “lay down our lives” or “fey” she did not know.

Alistair turned wide dreamy eyes on her. “Our leader has assured us that none of you will be permanently harmed,” he said. “If anything, you may come out of it more docile and sweet-tempered, which surely you would rejoice to hear.”

Helen smiled then, with all her teeth. “You may tell Grimsby—or rather, that fey living in him—that our presence is neither necessary nor required. Except that we will get what we came for.”

“You think so?” he said with curiosity.

The blue sharpened and the men stood straighter.

Helen set her jaw. “To your faces!” she shouted to The Hundred, and they all poured in. Their iron letter openers and scissors and kitchen knives had been taken by the magnets, but they came with fingernails. They came with copper hatpins. They came with the golden pins of diamond brooches. They came, and they came, pouring into that cold warehouse.

It is almost like a dream, how she stands above them all and sees the wave of women break and flow around the jutting rocks of men. She sees potato-faced Boarham rub his hands together and say, They really did all come, Grimsby, how clever of you—before falling under a sea of sherbet silk. Yes, that is Lady Dalrymple, leading that charge. And there, Agatha Flintwhistle, unhooking faces one by one, handing them carefully to Louisa Mayhew. Tam clambers up the crates like a monkey to throw random junk at the men’s unprotected heads, and Frye whoops and hollers whenever he scores a shot. Alberta stands near them all, whacking men with a wooden bat when they get too close. How clever of Alberta to prepare for the human enemy instead of fey, Helen thinks, for the men did not have a plan to ward off bats.

She sees Calendula Smith, leading a battalion of women in an organized attack into the heart of the room, where Morse and the others are attempting to keep their women tied to their beds. Hattersley has pushed Betty’s bed away from the others—she can’t tell if it’s to keep Betty safe or to deliver her to Grimsby for some even more nefarious purpose. Calendula barks orders like a lieutenant, and the women work together to loosen wrists and ankles, to push and shove and kneecap the men. Calendula herself overpowers scrawny Morse and pushes him with all her sturdy bulk onto the bed, holds him down while another woman ties him up. A lewd comment falls from his lips—another women stuffs rags in his mouth and then nobody has to hear him.

The men are strong, but there are more of the women. And the men are not really expecting a battle. Helen sees that again and again, sees the surprise in their eyes when a pack of beautiful ladies plows into them and bites.

But surprise only works for so long. The men remember that they know how to box and hit, that they have a warehouse full of scrap wood and metal they can pick up and swing. The fighting wears on and she sees the Prime Minister’s wife crumple under a powerful blow from Boarham. Helen herself has been methodically going where she is needed, where she sees a woman alone and outnumbered. It has all been very numb and she is surprised to find she has tears in her eyes when she looks down and sees Calendula Smith’s old face crumpled on the floor, the forehead twisted and smashed from a vicious twist of a heel.

In the blurriness she stands, and there is a man bearing down on her with a lead pipe. There is no time, and suddenly a copper knife flashes out and into the man’s arm, and he stumbles, and drops the pipe. “Iron allergy,” Desirée says to Helen with satisfaction. “Magnets didn’t catch
me
.” Desirée picks up her copper knife and grins fiendishly at the bleeding man, and he turns and runs out of the warehouse.

He’s not the only one who has run, Helen notices. There are fewer men than there were when they charged in, and some of the ones left are tied up or otherwise indisposed. Backlit by the open warehouse doors she sees Hattersley helping Betty pick her stilettoed way over machine parts and fallen bodies. They flee out the door and Helen watches them go with a mixture of pride and disappointment. They are not the only couple to leave together, and though she is glad that some of these Copperhead husbands are still open to being persuaded to reason, she also wishes more men had turned to fight against their old party as soon as it was clear that not all was as Grimsby said. She remembers again how Alistair spoke of avoiding the Great War five years ago—he paid a poor soldier to take his place. The men of her generation, the ones that are left, are cowards.

Helen wades back to help free the remaining women and faces, to unhook, uncouple, release that machine. She turns and there is Rook, working alongside her and suddenly everything snaps clearly back into focus and they are alone in the midst of a battle.

Like in the dance.

Like in the trolley.

He was there, helping them. He had been there all along.

“You missed your boat,” was all she could think to say.

“I stayed,” he said. “I had to see finished what I started.”

“But how will you get home?” She did not want him to leave and yet the words kept coming out.

His mouth set and he shrugged. “Take a passenger boat. Or go overland. I can’t crew a ship but I do know how to walk.”

“You can’t possibly walk all that way,” she said. “I’ll give you money for the train if you need it.”

“Alistair’s money?” he said, and she reddened.

She matched the intentional rudeness with coldness of her own, retreated into ice. “I suppose
my husband
can spare it.”

His lips twisted, and he said, “There’s always a husband.”

She wanted to break then, to let the floodgates open but here they were in a battle, and she was too tired to see anything but the future she had already laid out, that she would go one way and he another.

The silence lengthened until his moment of levity fell away, and he said softly, bitterness tracing his tongue, “I suppose you can make him be how you want,” he said. “Keep him so he’s never himself again.” He turned away and she heard the last words called back, “He’ll never have to know how he’s failed you.”

She stood there, heart beating.
Keep him so he’s never himself again.
What had she done to Alistair?

She was no better than the Fey King, changing Grimsby to suit himself. She remembered Grimsby in that moment of kneeling at Millicent’s side, crushed and heartbroken. A moment when he was free from the Fey King’s spell. When he could be his own person, make his own mistakes.

What had she done to The Hundred?

When did the end stop justifying the means?

Helen moved out into the remains of the melee, moved among the women as if in a daze, undoing what she had done. They fought hand to hand for control of their faces, themselves, and she reached out and touched them, and told them silently to make their own mistakes, live without her command.

She expected a rout. That the battle would suddenly swing back the other way, even with fewer men left to fight.

But she had misjudged them.

There were women who had been afraid. There were women who had been brave. There were women who had been weak and strong and sharp and tough and feeble and clever. Helen could not tell who was who as they wrestled for themselves, to win the day.

The battle was dying down now. The women were winning—had won. At what point did you declare,
won
? she wondered. At what point were you no longer afraid?

The women found their faces and she and Frye told them to take them and go. Go back to Frye’s. Find Jane. Become yourself again. And many did, and many stayed, helping the others, for there was still much left to do.

Through it all Helen moved, until she found Alistair, dreamily helping a woman over a pile of rubble and out the door to safety. He smiled kindly at her, and she thought, perhaps I have misjudged him, too. Perhaps he is who I always thought he was, and he stands apart from Grimsby because he is something better, something finer.

And even if he isn’t, he deserves his own chance to make mistakes.

She touched him on the arm and took all her changes back. One by one she took them away until he was wholly himself again. He shook himself, blinking, and she smiled up at him and said, “Thank you for helping us.”

Alistair looked around, getting his bearings. Then his eyes narrowed and he seized her arms. “What have you done?” he said in a broken voice. “What have
I
done?”

Helen swallowed. And then said calmly, firmly, “I changed you. I shouldn’t have. But you were helping us win.” More quietly: “
Aren’t
you helping us?”

“Out in public?” Alistair dropped his head to his hands. “Grimsby will never forgive me now. Oh, it’s hopeless. I tried to help you, I really did. But you’ve been nothing but trouble to me.”

“Really,” Helen said coldly. She was not going to stay for this. She turned away to help the others.

“I was going along fine as a bachelor. Thought I needed a wife. More fool I. I should have run the other direction when Hattersley told me about you.…”

Helen swung around. Her heart seemed to be beating preternaturally still, as though she was a hawk in the instant before it swoops.
Hattersley
. That single dropped sentence last night about Betty being a consolation prize for Helen. Everything in her fell to the tip of her tongue, into one swift, dangerous question. “What do you mean,
told me about you
?”

Alistair did not have the grace to stumble or look abashed. Glumly he said, “About your bargain with the doctor, of course. Hattersley boasted about how he’d found the perfect girl; all he had to do was rescue her from a doctor friend of his. He couldn’t believe the doctor would try to get balloon payments out of you when a variety of obvious answers were staring him in the face. Hattersley’s a family man at heart, though—he wanted a wife. He was thrilled by the lady-in-distress routine, talked of being your white knight.” Alistair laughed ruefully. “That was his undoing. Of course we all had to troop down to the tenpence dance hall and see you for ourselves.” He looked up at her now, as if seeing her then, a girl in a white dress with a green sash. “Well, perhaps it can be okay again,” he mused. “Served old Hattersley right I got to you first, I always thought.”

“Got to me first,” Helen said. He didn’t see the hawk’s claws closing on him, didn’t know he was only a mouse and she blazed with pure predation.

Alistair sighed. “This is why I didn’t tell you,” he said reasonably. “I knew you would take it the wrong way.”

So many years of splitting herself into private Helen and public Helen left her unable to speak. Unable to say the deep thoughts that came roiling up. She could smile and joke with him and laugh it off as a misunderstanding, except she couldn’t. She did not have the words, only she knew like a gut punch that there was something pathologically inequitable about seeking her out when he already knew she was blindly grasping for any lifeline.

No, she could not speak. All her cleverness had deserted her.

But she could be the hawk, all muscle instinct and focused fury.

“Come on,” Alistair said. “We can still reclaim our place. Just let’s go on home before anyone sees. We’ll meet up with Grimsby later. He’ll make it out okay; he’s like a fox.”

“I am not going home with you,” she said, carefully, precisely. “I am not going to your home ever again.”

The color faded from his face as he saw that she meant it. She registered that in the back of her mind, that she had chosen a life of trouble and chaos and public ordeal … and freedom. It blossomed in her mind that if she made it out of here alive, she would have freedom.

And then, because there seemed only one thing left to do, she moved to the center of the room and picked up the last remaining funnel. She would not be like poor Millicent—she hoped. Because she would be both the source and the wielder of the power.

And she moved to the copper hydra that ran it all, and placed one hand on it, even as she placed the funnel on her face.

She was plunged into that waking dream again. But this time she was moving among it herself. She wondered if poor Millicent had felt that before she vanished, that she was a figure on this alien landscape, as she touched every corner of the city at once and they all fed to her eyes and ears and mind.

She could see the fey that controlled Mr. Grimsby in this maelstrom. The self-styled Fey King. He was out there, and he had pieces of himself all over the city, not just in Mr. Grimsby’s face and her necklace. He was in other fey faces. As Tam said, he was in every single one of those hydra pins and necklaces. Before the advent of the iron masks, he had been able to dip in and out of a handful of well-placed people—and now with the copper pins there were another few hundred he could use as eyepieces to the whole city. It was how he had gained so much power so quickly. How he had risen to prominence and caught the ear of the Prime Minister. He must have planned long ago for this, seeding the clay given to Rochart with bits of himself. He was everywhere.

Helen felt it all, and her thoughts ranged across the city. It was something. But it was not enough. She could not reach out to stop the Fey King, who was moving rapidly, connecting pieces of fey out there into nets that pulled and tensed. She felt what she had before in the warehouse, that sense of the bits of fey trying to coalesce, and as the tension grew stronger and stronger she felt the power growing behind it, a sense of stored energy as the grid of fey that lay all over the city crackled alive, joining together in one massive grid of power.