Not to mention that facial surgery was so uncommon that Jane had only seen it once before, and that was to fix a boy in her town who had had his face mauled by a wild boar. She had seen the city surgeon’s work, and it was obvious. It was noticeable; there were scars, and stretches. It was definitely an improvement over no work, but the boy would never look quite normal, let alone handsome.
She had heard that back when the cinemas were still running, there were actresses who went voluntarily for such surgery, that noses and chins could be tweaked. But she had never seen the result, and she had never heard that it could look like this.
But that was what it was. Edward the surgeon, Edward the artist in flesh and bone. Tweaking those like the Prime Minister’s wife so they merely looked refreshed, doing major work on those like Blanche Ingel. And either way making the woman into the most dazzling version of herself. Fey beauty, the old woman at the party had called it, and that’s what it would’ve been called before the Great War, for it was inhuman to be that perfect, that symmetrical, that flawless.
She stayed there until she heard the soft front door click of Nina leaving, and then she crossed the foyer, went to the small red room to see the faces again.
Yes, there was Miss Ingel, the stretched and exaggerated sculpture of her original face. His mockups, perhaps, his befores and afters. She thought back to something he had said about them the first time she’d seen his studio. “A reminder,” he’d said. A reminder of the worst of us, extracted and displayed.
She could only guess that the sorrows in his life drove him to the extreme of making these grotesque images—perhaps he was not altogether comfortable with what he did. It was shrouded in secrecy after all, presumably because the women wanted to pretend they’d always been this beautiful—would rather pretend they’d had affairs or been on holiday than let the truth be known.
And secrecy like that had to weigh on him.
Had to cause—moodiness, as Cook had said.
Jane reached up to touch the ugly Blanche Ingel mask. The clay was smooth, the painted surface slick, almost elastic. One above and to the left caught her eye—was that the Prime Minister’s wife, with the heavy jowls? The caricature was so extreme, it was hard to tell. If that Nina person had been friendlier, perhaps she could have told Jane what name went with each piece of artwork.
Slowly Jane turned, looking at the rows and rows of masks with a new eye. Each one represented a person, somewhere. Rows of people who had jumped ship on their old lives for the chance to be someone new. She might have met them, seen them in the city, and she thought of the beautiful people at Helen’s wedding.
Thought of all the splendidly attired guests, whirling in their gauzy gowns of apricot and ruby in the gaslight, each holding to their faces a mask made of their worst self.
Jane did not sleep well Thursday night. There was a windstorm in the early morning that shook the house, woke Jane from her nightmare of the battlefield. She woke with the echo of her mother ringing in her ears, one heart-wrenching word: Jane.
She lay in bed till the last of the storm had beat itself out, dashed its brains on Silver Birch Hall. When she looked from her window, she saw the forest had been rent by winds that covered the bottom of the back lawn in dead black branches.
Jane dressed and went to Dorie’s room, mesh gloves in hand. Prior to the gloves, Dorie had been awake well before Jane’s arrival each morning, but no more. Jane sat down on the bed and said, “There are going to be a lot of people in the house today. And longer—a fortnight.”
Dorie opened her eyes and looked at Jane, but made no move to get out of bed. Her curls looked like they hadn’t been brushed in days, though Jane had helped her wash and comb them just last night. Dorie’s eyelids were smeared with sticky sleep and her cheeks were pale.
“How are you feeling?” Jane said. She laid the back of her hand against Dorie’s head, but the girl did not feel hot, or damp, or anything unusual. She didn’t have any physical signs of sickness—it was just this listlessness, as if she was worn out by their work of eating from spoons, as if she was depressed from not being allowed to make blue lights flicker in the air.
Dorie’s shoulder shrugged. She rolled over and stared out the window into the blue of an after-storm sky.
Frustrated, Jane rose and went to the window. She would have to keep Dorie well hidden from the guests if this continued—the girl looked like a lost war orphan. Jane stared into the woods, wondering what trick to try. Maybe she should admit the task was too hard for her—maybe she should bend her pride and get advice from Mr. Rochart. Mr. Rochart the surgeon. If she ever saw him of course, and where was he, with the party starting today?
“Father,” said Dorie from the bed.
Impossible sightline for Dorie, but the instant she said that Jane saw him standing, just inside the forest, as if Jane’s wishes and Dorie’s words had conjured him. He was clutching a tree branch with one hand and his side with another, and she saw him take a step toward the back lawn that made it look as though he were swimming through molasses. He bent, clutching his side, as if in pain.
Concern coalesced into action. “Out of bed and wash your face,” she said firmly to Dorie, and she hurried for the stairs, whirling down them as fast as her feet would go. She emerged onto the back lawn, blinking in the clear sunlight till she saw him, immobile next to a thorny locust, his hand outstretched toward the house. “Mr. Rochart,” she shouted, running for the trees. “Edward!”
Slowly his head tilted up. His amber eyes took a while to focus on her, as if traveling back from a great distance. “Jane,” he said wonderingly. “Jane.”
She slipped in past the first tree, barely thinking that this was the forest in her rush to get to him. “I am here, sir,” she said. “Lean on me.”
He clasped her forearm. “Yes, you are flesh and blood, are you not? Not a pale mist of blue masquerading as a live girl. Say you are real, Jane.”
“I am,” she said. His hand still clutched her arm. “You look unsteady. Do you need assistance? Shall I find Poule?”
He shook his head, his eyes vague again. “Did you hear the windstorm last night?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. A shudder rippled across her shoulders. “You must get out of the forest.”
“My foot,” he said faintly.
She looked and saw how his leg stretched awkwardly behind him, saw that thin scarves of blue seemed to wind around his ankle, pinioning him. His right hand held a satchel to his ribs, and blue weaved from his fingers, around it.
Sharp anger, born of fear. It rose up in Jane, and she felt the hot orange of her curse lash at the iron, so hot she thought her face might literally burn. No time for thoughts of water—she had to pull it off to find relief. She clutched at the chin of her mask, lifting it an infinitesimal bit to get air, said desperately to distract him: “Look up at the window; do you see Dorie?”
“My little one,” he said, turning that way, and lurched another half-step toward the house.
Jane scrabbled at the leather straps, pulling them aside, and then the mask was suddenly off, cooling her face. The orange tongues of anger lashed out, raging at the idea that he was stolen from her, would be taken from her. He must not be caught, and she tore at his ankle with her bare hands, as if fingers alone could melt the blue shackles of air.
“No,” she whispered to it, “no no no no no…,” and above her she felt him lurch another half-step, and another, and the blue seemed less all the time as she told it no, peeling off, crackling away. “You can make it,” she told Edward, while simultaneously willing the blue: no no no.