With Fate Conspire (15 page)

Graff’s exhalation of annoyance ruffled his mustaches. “What proof do you think exists?”

“People who have seen them,” Eliza said again. Then she hesitated. Now was the moment to tell her own story—

But what would it gain? Graff wouldn’t listen to her; she could tell that just by looking at him. Her suspicion was confirmed when Myers said, “Scholars of folklore have been collecting such stories for some time. Indeed, some claim to have seen fairies themselves, particularly in Ireland—”

“Ireland! Bah!” Graff dismissed that with a contemptuous wave of his hand. “Superstitious peasants, the lot of them, and probably drunk to boot.”

Myers stiffened, giving him a very cold look. “As a scholar, sir, I should look first to the evidence they present, rather than the nationality of those who present it.”

He, at least, might listen if Eliza spoke. But it was clear from what Myers said, continuing his argument with Graff and Macgregor, that he had no personal experience of faeries himself. He could not help her. Glancing across to the silent Miss Kittering, Eliza saw her own frustration mirrored.
Of course; she probably came here hoping to meet her friend. Now she’s gone and disobeyed her mother—and been caught out—and all she has to show for it is a stupid argument among men who love the sound of their own voices.

Mrs. Chase finally managed to calm them into something like a truce, once it became obvious that neither of the men was going to sway the others. Unfortunately, she then turned her attention to Eliza. “So, Miss Baker. We have already heard from Mr. Graff, who is the other newcomer among us, but you have been rather quiet. Tell us, what is your interest in fairies?”

I want to know how to catch one and wring his neck.
Eliza pasted a vague smile onto her face, covering the anger beneath. “Oh,” she said, “I’ve always found the stories very interesting—the Irish ones particularly,” she added, as a jab at Graff. He snorted.

Mrs. Chase, however, brightened. “Indeed? Then surely you’ve read the works of Lady Wilde?” Eliza was forced to shake her head. “Oh, but you
must
—she’s quite a famous poet, really, under the name of ‘Speranza,’ and she has been publishing articles based on her late husband’s research. Here, I should have one on hand—”

One of the Goodemeade sisters rose on the old woman’s behalf and found it, and they passed the remainder of the time in listening to Mrs. Chase read. Only Mr. Myers seemed to pay much attention, though, and so the meeting straggled to an unhappy close.

Eliza rose promptly from her chair, intending to go straight over to Miss Kittering. She no longer cared whether anyone guessed they already knew each other. Before she could take a step, though, the Miss Goodemeades appeared in front of her. “We didn’t have a chance to welcome you properly before the meeting, but we wanted to say we’re very happy you came. Did you see the advertisement we placed in the newspaper? Or did a friend tell you about our society?”

“The newspaper,” Eliza said, distracted. Miss Kittering was speaking to Mr. Myers, but she couldn’t hear what the young woman was saying.

“You see?” Miss Goodemeade said to her sister. “I
told
you that would catch the right kind of eyes! Well, some of the right kind; I fear we’ve pulled in a few we might have done without.” This last was said in a lower tone, easily hidden under the argument Graff and Macgregor had resumed.

“But we’re very glad to have you,” the sister said. The two women were almost impossible to tell apart: both short, both honey haired and honey eyed, in dresses of brightly printed cotton. Only the roses on one and the daisies on the other kept them from being identical; unfortunately, Eliza had forgotten their given names. “In fact, we should like to invite you to join us at another meeting—more a private circle of friends, really, that—”

Eliza risked a glance over at Miss Kittering and Mr. Myers, only to find Mrs. Chase had taken the fellow aside into private conversation, and the drawing room door was swinging shut behind Miss Kittering.

Her heart leapt into her mouth. If she were to salvage anything from the wreck of this evening—and keep it from getting any worse—she could not let the young woman go off without her!

“I’m sorry,” she said, cutting Miss Goodemeade off. “I’m afraid I have to go.”

“Oh, you mustn’t,” the daisy Goodemeade said, trying to catch her hand.

Eliza pulled away, making some half-coherent excuse, not caring anymore that she was catching people’s attention. “At least come back next month—” the rose Goodemeade said.

“Yes, certainly,” Eliza lied; anything to get away without being inexcusably rude.
Why do I even care? I’ve no reason to see these people again.
But she was reluctant to hurt the sisters’ feelings, when they obviously meant well. “I’m very sorry—I’ve stayed too long already—goodbye.” She flung herself out to the staircase.

Even with her haste, those words proved prophetic. When she got downstairs, Miss Kittering was gone, and the maid nowhere in sight. Eliza hurried out into the street, but it was no use; the gaslight showed her a variety of people and vehicles, but not her quarry. “Stupid girl,” Eliza muttered. “You should have tried to talk to me, bribe me to lie—” Instead, she’d run. To her home? If not there, then Eliza didn’t have the first guess where she’d gone; so Cromwell Road it was.

If she hurried, she might even be able to stop Miss Kittering from doing anything else stupid. The Angel Inn was just on the corner, a few doors down, with cabs standing outside. Cursing the expense, and the optimism that had made her waste money on an omnibus earlier, Eliza went to hire a driver, and try to race Miss Kittering home.

Cromwell Road, South Kensington: April 11, 1884

She saw no one outside when she arrived, and hesitated for just an instant, wondering. Had Miss Kittering gone elsewhere? If she’d come here, and already gone inside, there was nothing Eliza could do for her; by now she’d certainly been caught.

Then she saw a furtive shape dodging from shadow to gaslight shadow, toward the servants’ entrance on Queensberry Place.

Eliza couldn’t be both fast and quiet. She ran, and the furtive shape did, too, throwing herself down the steps to the area. Eliza caught her halfway down, with a grip hard enough to bruise.

Miss Kittering drew breath to scream, until Eliza clapped her other hand over the young lady’s mouth. “Hush, you stupid girl,” she hissed, half her attention on the servants’ door. “Unless you want them out here, before you’ve had a chance to save yourself from what’s waiting inside.”

The struggling stilled. When Eliza was sure Miss Kittering had calmed, she lifted her hand, and the young lady turned to face her.

Standing on a higher step put her at eye level with Miss Kittering, who licked her lips and tried to regain a measure of dignity. “What do you think you’re doing, grabbing me like that? You have no right to treat me this way; I’ll—”

Her voice was far too loud; the basement would be full of servants, swarming like ants in a kicked hill, and if Eliza didn’t stop her Miss Kittering would bring them all out to investigate. But she held an advantage: whatever secrets Miss Kittering might keep, she was a sheltered soul. Eliza, on the other hand, was a daughter of London’s Irish slums. Brendan Hennessy, a petty criminal she’d known in Whitechapel, had once told her people weren’t much different from dogs: the one who came out on top wasn’t necessarily the bigger or the stronger, but the one who growled louder, bit harder, and scared the other into submission.

Brendan Hennessy ended up hanged in Newgate for his growling and biting, and maybe Eliza would end the same way. But it was worth the risk, for Owen’s sake.

She seized hold of Miss Kittering’s shoulders, ignoring the young lady’s indignant squeak. “You’ll close your mouth and listen, you will. You’ve gone and sneaked out, without your mother’s permission, and her with no idea why … sure I could spin her such a tale, it would turn her hair white. A spiritualist meeting, it could be—even a secret lover—”

Miss Kittering went even more rigid. She might not want to marry that baron’s son, but if she lost her reputation, she’d be lucky to get any marriage at all.

“Or,” Eliza went on, before the girl could find her tongue, “I could be telling her something more respectable. It won’t save you the thrashing, and that’s the truth of it—but ’tis better than you’d have otherwise.”

The girl licked her lips again. She had no ability to hide her nerves; how had she evaded her mother’s control for this long? “Why … why would you do that?”

Thank Heaven for sheltered idiots, who don’t see a chance for power when it’s in their hands.
But Miss Kittering didn’t know Eliza had told her own lies tonight; she was entirely vulnerable.

Eliza showed her teeth in a smile, and not a friendly one. “Because you’ll be helping me in return, you will. I—”

She didn’t get a chance to say anything more. The servants’ door opened to reveal Ann Wick, bracing a bin of refuse against her hip. The housemaid gaped at them, and Eliza seized Miss Kittering’s arm once more, stepping behind the young woman to hide Ann’s borrowed dress. With an effort, she summoned something more like her usual false demeanor. “She followed me,” Eliza said in a brisk tone, dragging the girl down the stairs. “Heard my mum was sick, and wanted to help; but as soon as she came, I turned around and marched her right home again. We shouldn’t bother Mrs. Kittering, I think, Mrs. Fowler can tell me what to do with the silly chit.”

Miss Kittering, blessedly, had the sense to keep her mouth shut.

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: April 11, 1884

Under the cool glow of a faerie light, the
carte de visite
in front of Dead Rick assumed an otherworldly aura. Who the stern-faced woman depicted in it was, he had no idea; it didn’t much matter. Her image fascinated him. The photograph was shoddy work, nothing to the sharp detail of a daguerreotype, but that very vagueness allowed him to spin a hundred stories about her. She was an upper-class wife, devoting all her time to the pressing question of what pattern her china should bear. She was a suffragist, campaigning to extend the vote to women. She was a frustrated bluestocking, more interested in books than a lady’s pursuits.

All he knew of her was that she was real: that she had lived, and sat for a photographer’s portrait, and given the resulting cards to her friends.

Proof of her existence.
I should be lucky to leave so much behind.

The stone of his hidden refuge trembled faintly beneath him. A train, perhaps, or just one of the periodic tremors that shook the Onyx Hall. Dead Rick held his breath, waiting to see if it would grow stronger, but after a few seconds it subsided. As if the tremor had been a bell at the door, the voice spoke.

“What have you learned?”

Dead Rick stuffed the
carte de visite
into his waistcoat pocket and pushed his back against the wall. Even though he’d summoned the stranger, burying the bone near the pavilion in the old garden, it still made him uneasy to have anyone else sharing this space. Even if that someone else was just words in the air.

He said, “I knows a few things. But afore I go telling you anything, I need some proof.”

“Proof of what?”

“That you can get my memories back.”

The silence that followed sounded a great deal like a suppressed sigh. He could hear the stranger’s irritation echoing in his next words. “Haven’t we been through this before?”

“You told me something I didn’t know, and I think it’s true. But there’s lots of ways you might ’ave learned it. That don’t mean you can get my memories back. Do you know where Nadrett keeps them?” Dead Rick’s crossed arms were pressing in hard enough to make his ribs hurt. “Do you even know what they
look
like?”

It would be so easy for someone to play him. Dead Rick almost wished the stranger had never come to offer him hope; it made it that much harder to endure his life under Nadrett’s heel. Hope kept him from sinking into the blinding embrace of despair. It meant he had to keep fighting. But he couldn’t make himself give it up, and anybody who knew that could use it to lure him into damn near anything.

The voice was silent for long enough that Dead Rick wondered if it had been a bluff after all, and so easily called. Then came the answer: “Pieces of glass.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, before any tears could escape. It didn’t stop his ears, though, and the memory of sharp, shattering sound. When Nadrett wanted to punish Dead Rick, or just to remind him of the chain around his neck, he broke one of the stolen memories. The wisp of light that escaped was too vague for any detail to be made out, but it carried something—not quite a scent—that told Dead Rick it was his own.

Lost forever.

Through his teeth, he asked the question that really mattered. “Do you know ’ow to put them back?”

This time, the hesitation was much briefer. “No.”

Dead Rick slammed his hand against the floor, hard enough to bruise. “Then what fucking use are you to me?”

“I can get them away from Nadrett; surely that is some use. And it may be I can help you discover how to return them to their rightful place. Once they are in your possession, many things become possible. Now, do you have anything for
me
?”

The skriker drew a series of breaths, each one deeper than the one before, shoving his knotted emotions out of the way. “You ain’t given me nothing yet. I already knowed about the glass, so you tell me something else. Something I’ve forgotten.”

The annoyance was much more distinct now, but Dead Rick didn’t care. “Are you going to haggle every time we speak? Never mind; I’m sure I know the answer to that. Very well … something you’ve forgotten.” The stranger paused, then said, “You were once a faithful Queen’s man.”

It wasn’t at all what he’d expected. Lune, the Queen of the Onyx Court: he didn’t remember her, but he’d heard stories, even in the seven short years since his mind was wiped clean. How she’d won her throne from the cruel Queen Invidiana, centuries past. How she’d battled a Dragon to save London, twice. How she’d struggled to hold the Hall together, in the face of human destruction.