As she rolled away from that she lost the wall, and ended up trying to stand in the melee and protect her head from more high heels. She was jostled and bumped and then suddenly there was a hand on her shoulder, guiding her back to safety. Alistair.
She clung to the hand and gasped out, “Help me,” as the man in blackness steered her along the wall and toward the hall that led to the back stairs to the garret. She found the stairwell railing with one hand and pressed her husband’s with the other.
But the hand did not have a ring. It was not her husband’s hand. It disentangled itself, and the man it belonged to said in her ear, “Trust none of them,” pressed something small into her hand, and was gone. From the other room came commotion still, and blinks of light as the servant girls brought in oil lamps.
Helen held on to the railing and went up the stairs.
It was pitch-black, but her hand found the worn door at the top and opened it, and there was a faint bit of light from the fog-shrouded moonlight. Enough to see that what was in her hand looked like an old-fashioned flashlight, the sort that ran on the mini-bluepacks of fey technology and had not been seen since. But when she slid the button it came on with the yellow of the modern electric lights, not fey blue.
She might have wondered more about it, but her thoughts were filled with Jane, Jane, Jane, and she ran the flashlight around the slanted room, fast at first, then slower and slower as the sweeps revealed no Jane, and her shaking nerves told her to fear the worst.
A body lay on the daybed, one arm flung down, white in the moonlight. All the candles were snuffed out. Helen crossed to the daybed. Played her flashlight slowly from feet to head. The woman’s face was white and pale.
Millicent.
She wore her beautiful face, as Helen had last seen her, though in the vision just now she thought she had seen Millicent with no face at all. Helen peered closer and saw the red line running around the outline of her face, saw it was slightly crooked, as if it had been hastily shoved back into place so she would not be lying here with no face at all.
But Millicent was not breathing, did not move. She lay in her fine black dress, sunk in the bone-stillness of fey sleep.
And there was no Jane, still there was no Jane. A cold wind swept through the garret and Helen shivered.
Small footstep noise behind her, and Helen whirled. It was Jane, it was the mystery man with the flashlight—no.
It was the small boy. Tam. He blinked in the flashlight’s glare. He had a jar with a tiny creature in it and Helen’s heart burst into a million pieces.
“Everyone was shouting and it woke up Sam,” he said.
“Oh, Tam,” said Helen. She hurried over to him, keeping the flashlight away from Millicent and blocking her from his view. “Your stepmamma’s … resting now. Perhaps you can show her your pet later.”
She knelt beside him at the top of the stairs. From below the lanterns had turned back to light—they had got the power working again. She heard the heavy pounding steps of men, moving closer.
Tam wriggled the small jar of bugs out of his pocket. “Do you want to feed Sam now?” he said. He pressed the small jar into Helen’s hand as Helen crouched, listening, waiting. She pulled Tam to the side in the garret room as they came up the steps, all those men, thundering up and into the small attic room. Alistair and Hattersley and Morse, and more she did not know, for Copperhead seemed bigger every day. Grimsby was at the head of them and he went straight to Millicent, lantern swinging, a hunting dog to its prey. The yellow light gleamed upward onto his chin, casting cruel black shadows across his face. A white candle fell to the floor.
Helen thought how awful she would feel if that were Jane, if that were Mother, if that were someone she loved so devotedly that her heart would shatter to see them like that, trapped in the fey sleep, all unknowing if they could ever come out. She tried to transfer that sympathy to Mr. Grimsby, but she watched the black shadows curl across his face and could not do it.
“Millicent…,” Grimsby said, and then he turned, and his lamplight fell on Helen, holding on to his son. “What do you know about this?”
All the men crowded in, and Alistair turned on her, his face sharp with the surety of her betrayal. Which was not fair, she thought. “I don’t know anything,” she said, which was at least partly true. She had known that Jane and Millicent were up here. But Jane knew how to do the operation. Helen did not know what had happened to bring them to this disaster, and if anything, she thought it likely to be the men’s fault, the fault of that dreadful machine Grimsby called their salvation. “You all saw me downstairs. I thought I heard noises from up here. I came up to try to find Jane.” Her arm tightened on Tam, who, surprisingly for a small boy, did not immediately squirm away.
The movement seemed to call attention to the boy. “Come here, son,” Grimsby said in a thin, cold voice. Tam obediently wriggled free and crossed the room in silent steps that seemed to shake the floor.
“It is good you are here, Thomas,” said Grimsby, looking down at the boy. Tam seemed very small next to that tall thin man. He was a mannequin, frozen, his fingers tight on his glass jar. “I have very sad news to tell you, so you must be brave.”
The constriction inside Helen’s chest loosened an inch. Mr. Grimsby would make it okay. He and his son would become closer while they waited and worried about Millicent. He was not as frightening as she had always thought.
“Your stepmother is dead.” Grimsby stared down at Tam and Helen saw that little form suppress a flinch. Tam did not speak.
“I say, Grims—,” said one of the other men and then was silent.
Helen found her voice. “But she’s not dead,” she said, moving impulsively to Millicent. “She’s in the fey sleep. She might wake up.” Helen smoothed Millicent’s hair, pressed her wrist, willing the pulse to suddenly start.
Mr. Grimsby cut her off. “As good as dead, for what fey would be willing to revive her? Do not count on a children’s tale, a sleeping beauty revived. We have to prepare ourselves for the worst.” Now he knelt beside his son at last, but apparently only to pick up something he saw on the floor. Helen could not think what it might be, but the movement called her attention to another find—Jane’s carpetbag, humped in a bit of shadow by the door.
Grimsby rose, his hand clenched around his prize. “And I know what will be the most important to you, son. Justice. Vengeance. We will make the murderer suffer.” Pause. Beat. “And we know who the murderer is.” Grimsby pointed at Helen, a tactile placeholder for his accused. “The fiend who did this is Jane Eliot. The ironskin.”
Grimsby opened his hand and in the yellow lantern light she saw it.
A tangle of iron strips, the iron that had crisscrossed Jane’s perfect, fey-infused face.
The iron that had protected Jane from the fey.
The men looked curiously at Helen. Alistair’s face was lit with a wild mixture of worry and glee.
This must be problematic with his social standing, she thought, and it was as if from a long way away, just as she had felt downstairs when Grimsby’s machine had been running. He’s so pleased to have the news—he’s grown to loathe Jane—and yet no one sensible would want an accused murderer in the family.
If you had put a dagger to her throat and said how would Alistair react to something like this … well, deep inside she might have predicted it, every word. But she would have told that small voice it was wrong, that Alistair would never rejoice at such a thing. That she would never stand here seeing it now, in the flesh, Alistair—her husband, Alistair—rubbing his hands together and pondering over how Copperhead would trap her sister. The unholy glee at having an excuse to bring Jane down was written from ear to ear.