Jane brushed down her skirt, looked down at her boots. They suddenly looked unbearably workaday, and she tugged them off, replaced them with Helen’s castoff dance slippers, white and embroidered with silver thread. They were a touch too long, and she was overdressed, certainly—but it seemed to suit her expanding, lifting mood. The twilight sky with stars and clouds, that’s what she was, and the thought was light and joyful.
Jane checked on Dorie—still sleeping, exhausted—descended to the foyer, and slipped through the forest green curtains. The landing she had stood on a week ago should be in sight—yes, there it was. She flew up the stairs to Mr. Rochart’s studio and slipped trhough his open door, knocking on it as she entered.
He was just closing the far door behind him, entering the main studio. “Jane,” he said, surprise in his voice. “You—” He stopped. “You look different in colors.”
“Black is a color,” said Jane. “So is grey.”
Mr. Rochart snorted. “You’re laughing at me, and I’m the artist. You might show your elders some respect.”
“Indeed I had forgotten you must be almost thirty,” said Jane, and then added, laughing, “I will call you Grandfather Rochart henceforth.”
“Grandfather Edward,” he replied. He crossed to her and then the worry was back in his amber eyes. He touched her arm. “You look too cheerful to be up here with bad news—but tell me. How did your day go with Dorie?”
“It wasn’t entirely perfect,” Jane admitted, “but I think I have a way to reach her.” Briefly she explained the iron paste, and concluded, “It seems to stop her from using her fey abilities.” And that one tremendous success could offset even such a day as she had.
“Just like the iron on your cheek,” he said. He shook his head in wonder. “So simple, and yet it never occurred to me.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” she said, and daringly she touched his shoulder. She was unprepared for the tremor that ran through him, as if he was as unused to touch as she, as if a mere friendly gesture was enough to undo him. His hand rose even as she withdrew hers, and she didn’t know what to do with any of her limbs anymore. So she smoothed down the skirt of her sister’s dress, feeling the embroidered dots slide underneath her palms. That fluttering happiness went sharply through her chest. “She did not want to use her hands, of course,” Jane said, trying to sound casual. “She was quite frustrated.”
“I imagine.” He was not polished like the gentlemen at Helen’s wedding, but that did not matter to Jane. He was arresting, with those strange deep-set eyes that stayed in shadow, those amber eyes whose meaning she could rarely catch. “I will have a talk with her after dinner.”
“That would be helpful,” said Jane. “I believe the tar is a tool we can use to catch her up to where she should be. But she will still have to do the work.” She remembered the rest of her purpose and added, “And I need to get into the north attic. Martha said there might be some gloves I could use for Dorie. So she doesn’t get tar on everything. I also need some linen, and linseed oil to waterproof it.”
A shadow of pain drew across his face. “Yes, I believe Grace had some gloves. She always liked parties more than I did. Tell Martha I said you might look in her trunks. Have Poule find you everything else.”
Jane nodded. “Thank you.” To distract him from the memory of his deceased wife she said, “I didn’t like Helen and Alistair’s party very much either.”
“Nasty things,” said Mr. Rochart. “Parties, that is, not your sister and her husband.”
He smiled at her and she laughed, her heart warming. She realized that she was still poised on the threshold of the studio, and she let her laughter carry her boldly past him, into the studio where the natural light poured over the golden floors, the rough working table, the mounds of white clay. Her blue skirts floated around her, the fine linen weave brushing against her legs, the legs of the table.
Her momentum carried her all the way to the window and there she stood, the afternoon sun bathing the lines of her dress as she looked away from him. Alistair’s pointed comment about her figure flickered into her mind, and then she banished it. She was not trying to seduce Edward, not trying some ploy to entrap him in the night. No, it was more the thought that with her face turned away perhaps he would see her as she should’ve been, a girl in a blue dress with embroidered dots like stars. A glimmer of her metal reflection danced in the window, but she looked past it, out into the black woods.
“I used to paint back there,” Edward said. “In the woods.” The intimacy of his words lapped her ears, like he was spilling secrets meant for her alone.
“Wasn’t that dangerous?” Even before the Great War there had always been the stories. Don’t go into the woods past the last ray of sunlight. There was always someone’s cousin’s friend who knew a girl who chased a blue will o’ the wisp past the edge of sun and never was seen again.
“I didn’t get on well with my father,” he said. “I avoided him. I spent every possible hour outside, painting.” She could feel him moving closer, though he made no noise. It was implicit in the way the air moved, in the way soft eddies of warmth and scent curled past the wisps of her hair, changed the folds of her dress. “When I grew tired of painting the moor, I turned to the forest. It occurred to me that there were very few forest paintings around. An untapped niche.”
“Ah, a mercenary,” she said. With her head turned away she was a different Jane, a Jane who still had a brother and a mother, a Jane who had taken this job as a calling to help Dorie, and not also because she was desperate. This Jane could flirt, she could tease, she could even call him “Edward.” As long as she didn’t turn and look at him, the moment would hold.
“In my head I would be the bravest artist of them all—and the wealthiest besides,” he said, and there was laughter in his voice. “You don’t have to give up your artistic merit for riches if everyone knows you were tremendously brave to get that painting.”
“I thought people with ancestral estates and good family names were supposed to despise the acquisition of money,” said Jane.
“Ah, but I didn’t get on with my father, remember? I was going to show him—show them all.”
“Wicked child,” said Jane. “Won’t go to parties, defies his parents, goes into the woods … it’s impossible to see where Dorie gets it from.”
“And you?” he said. His voice was rough; it caught at her, intense and burred. “Where do you get your stubbornness from? Your independent streak? Your strange, fierce spirit? Where?”
There was a sound from behind the far door and she turned, startled, and her eyes met his. He did not turn to look for the source of the noise, but no matter. The instant he saw her face in its mask, the other Jane popped like a burst bubble and she was plain damaged Jane Eliot again.
“Are Martha’s quarters on this floor?” she said.
“No.” He leaned forward, urgency in his voice—deep, tense—passion in his simple words. “Tell me who you are.”
She started to speak, though not knowing what she’d say—but then the door opened and a lovely woman sailed out.
Her face was perfectly symmetrical, carefully chiseled, framed by a mane of red hair, by a chain of aquamarines at her white throat. She glanced in the mirror at her perfect reflection, then beamed at Edward. “In the pink of health, I knew it. You are divine, dear, but I must run.” She saw Jane and her fine eyes widened. “Is this a new one?” She crossed to them and leaned in confidentially to Jane. “You’ll just love him. We all do.” She kissed Edward on the cheek, whispered something in his ear. A flash of worry flickered on her pretty face, her shoulders tensed, as she told him something Jane couldn’t hear. Then she was sailing toward the door, all smiles again. “See you in a few weeks for that coming out you’ve promised me. Don’t worry about me, I can see myself out.”