Ironskin by Tina Connolly

Author:Tina Connolly
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780765330598
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2012-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

THE EDGE OF THE FOREST

Jane’s knees shook. Plain Miss Ingel. Beautiful Miss Ingel. And—“the Varee chirurgiens can’t compare to him,” Nina had said, but didn’t chirurgien mean surgeon?

“Miss Ingel…,” Jane whispered. “She used to look like that sculpture.”

Nina looked where Jane’s eyes were fixed. “Oh, Blanche,” she said derisively. “I saw her yesterday, and she tried to pretend that the hot springs were restorative. As if she could fix that face and not have it be obvious.” Nina’s eyes fell to Jane, still holding her plum silk wrap. “I’ll take that. Now, if you wouldn’t mind…?”

Jane wanted to collapse to the floor right there, but she obeyed Nina, wobbled through the foyer, and sank out of sight behind the forest green curtains. She wrapped her arms around her knees, where goose bumps speckled her skirt.

It was plain as day, now that Nina had said it. Rochart-as-artist was a pretty little fiction, a cover story that certain wealthy elite knew the truth of. No artist—a surgeon. A secret surgeon, unless maybe everyone knew—everyone but Jane, who was apparently as naïve as Alistair had painted her.

No, she reminded herself, she would not beat herself up over ignorance. She had been wrapped up in her own work with Dorie; why should she see through a mystery that she didn’t know existed?

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

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