“Personally, I’d be more worried about spiders in this wing than fey,” Jane said. “And rats. Spiders and rats, everywhere you look. The rats eat hair, you know. Late at night, when you’re asleep.”
Nina said nothing, which made Jane all the more sure that she was right: Nina was afraid. She must be keeping an appointment—a surgical one. Because Nina wouldn’t be this nervous if she were keeping an assignation with Edward, no matter what ruse she tried to imply. Nina probably ate men like him for breakfast.
They emerged at the top of the house, which was darker than Jane expected. Black wool curtains had been hung at all the windows, extinguishing the sunlight. She wondered where he’d gotten the money for those, and then Nina gripped Jane’s arm closer, crushing it into her satin side. Her nails were chips of tile pinching Jane’s skin. “You wait for something for so long,” she said, “and when it comes, can it possibly live up to your expectations?”
“Not likely,” Jane said softly.
“The bolsters think a face is as easily changed as a dress,” Nina said. “You are the only one who might understand that you live in your face. As much as you long for the improvement, you know you will lose something, too. Well, you will see soon enough. I have seen your face, you know. Pretty enough if you like that sort of thing, but I would rather be me.”
Jane stared at her. Nina did not notice. All her attention was in front of her, on that slab of wood, on the studio door.
“I’m going to see me now,” she whispered. “The me I will soon be.” Her fingers lifted away from Jane’s arm, and she raised her hand to knock.
The door opened partway before her knuckles could hit the door, opened just enough for Jane to see a shadowy Mr. Rochart standing in the dark, opened just enough for Nina to slide through. His eyes fell on Jane and she backed away. The door closed and a strip of green-gold light turned on, lighting the crack under it. The top floor was dark except for that glowing strip of light.
Jane moved with nerveless feet down the steps.
Nina and Edward—no.
Well, maybe, but—something else.
Her face. Nina had seen her face.
Edward had sculpted her face.
Jane stumbled down the stairs, feet nerveless beneath her, slipping from one step to the next. The bottom dropped from her stomach as she ran through the thought of what Edward might be contemplating.
A new face. A whole face.
Normal.
The agony of desire struck her at a million points, a net constricting her skin, drawing her tight around that piercing hope.
To be normal.
She cried out, batting aside that hope, telling it to vanish, but it wouldn’t, it multiplied, insinuated itself into her brain, telling of all the joys she could have if only she were whole, if she were normal, if the last five years were only a bad dream.
She stumbled to the landing with the hidden mirrors. Pictures of impossible memories blinded her sight, obscuring the Janes rushing in to meet her with a different Jane. Jane in that other timeline, that one where tall Charlie had sat beside her at Helen’s wedding, that one where her family was not blindsided by war.
Jane walking through Crown Park in a yellow voile sundress, arm slung around the shoulders of a blond girl her age, laughing hysterically over an incident in her life drawing class involving a male model and his determination to pose au naturale, as one did in Varee. The normally dignified teacher had smacked his disrobing rear end with a broom.
Jane leaning over the opera balcony before the start of Ma Petite Chou-Chou. Seeing a knot of friends below waving wildly to her, trying to get her attention. “Jane,” they shout, doubling over with laughter. One of the girls flips open a fan and dances with it à la Chou-Chou. Shocking, riotous, joyous. Shouting: “Jane!”
Jane in Helen’s new pink sitting room, looking into the mirror before a dance. Her cheeks are flushed; her dark hair frames her face. She is solemn and fluttery, for tonight she will see him again, and tonight is the time that something important will happen, a declaration, a step into the future. She enters her sister’s fancy drawing room where the rich folk flit like champagne bursting and the gaslights dot yellow against the papered walls. And there he is, tall and dark, a man gaunt with the aftereffects of war. A widower, a heavyhearted man with a bite to his tongue, a man whose eyes light when they fall on her in the borrowed silver dress. The only man she could talk freely to, the only man she could ever love …
Veiled Jane swam back into view.
“Edward,” Jane whispered aloud to the stairwell. Her heart seemed to be breaking into a million shattered pieces, and the revelation of her face was only part of it, the crack in the frozen river that opened a hole to the raging current beneath. “I love Edward.”
Porcelain shards tumbled to the carpet, spattered the floor like cracking ice.
Chapter 13
The Last Ray of Sunlight
Jane was still woozy when Dorie woke from her nap late in the afternoon. Desire made her nerves twitch, made every step rock with the suppressed hope that threatened to explode, to split her apart.
She sat on a bench partly concealed by the shrubbery and kept one eye on Dorie while the Misses Davenport petted her and fed her chocolate cakes under the yellow striped canopies on the slope of the lawn. She wondered if they were always so fond of children, or if it was the presence of an eligible suitor that brought out their doting. No, surely she was being catty. Jane sketched Dorie kneeling in the grass, and watched her tears from the morning vanish as the pretty ladies cosseted her. Dorie was blissful as the girls slipped her bites off of thin silver forks.
“It’s perfect,” marveled a deep voice over her shoulder. “Chocolate cake without using her hands for anything.”
Her heart lurched as she turned.
Mr. Rochart stood behind her shoulder, half hidden in the curve of the laurels. He must have finished his appointment with Nina.
Seeing him brought back all the agony of a couple hours ago. It was the first time she’d seen him since she thought that he might be planning to help her, the first time since she truly admitted what she hoped, what she could be allowed to desire if only she weren’t who she was.
“Perhaps she can get them to feed her breakfast, too,” Jane found herself saying. “That is, if her father’s in the room.” She had not meant to say that, and the blood pounded in her damaged cheek. Flustered, she patted her cheek to make sure the veil was still in place, reminded herself to continue her thoughts of water, calm and cold.
“Wicked girl,” growled Mr. Rochart. “Youngsters are not supposed to see so keenly into the faults of mortals.”
“And at what age am I allowed to see what’s in front of my nose? I am twenty-one, you know. I hope I shan’t have to feign blindness much longer.” She marveled at the steadiness of her voice.
“All of twenty-one?” He considered her for a silent moment. “I thought you were yet two years from that.” His smile was mocking, ironic. “Ah, Jane. How unfortunate that you should be a third my age.”
“Your numbers exaggerate, sir.” Calmly, coolly, though her heart beat hard against her chest. “Two-thirds at most, I should say, for there is no grey on your temple, and you do not order stewed prunes at breakfast, like a grandfather in his dotage.”
“You are too kind to me,” he said, and he brushed aside her covering hand to view her sketch.
Jane willed her embarrassment at her amateur drawing to subside. He was a real artist, with a decade more experience besides. It took all her courage not to snatch the drawing away and close the sketchpad so he couldn’t see it.