With Fate Conspire (18 page)

His elf-knights were down to three, Sir Peregrin, Sir Cerenel, and Dame Segraine. To that meager strength he added Bonecruncher, Cuddy, and Irrith. That was all he had, to occasionally peck at the evils of the Goblin Market. Losing even one would be too much.

Without fear to keep his knees strong, Hodge sank into a chair. The furniture was ludicrously elegant for him; the whole room was. The chambers traditionally assigned to the Prince had crumbled a few years before, but Amadea—Lady Chamberlain to a court that had long since vanished—made sure he got the best of what was left. The black stone of the walls was carved at regular intervals with decorative columns, fluted into delicate spirals. The tapestries in between showed grand scenes, their colors unfaded by passing centuries, and the wood of the furnishings was rare, exotic stuff, taken equally from Faerie and the Orient. A little island of quality, in the midst of decay.

Wiping his brow, Hodge said, “Where the ’ell did you go? Bonecruncher ’ere said you was there one minute, gone the next.”

“Ran into an old friend,” Irrith said, with her usual breezy unconcern. “And I heard a very interesting rumor. If somebody had a passage to Faerie—here, I mean, or somewhere nearby; not off in a foreign country—how much would people pay to use it?”

“It don’t exist.”

“Pretend for a moment that it did.”

The rest of the raiding party looked just like Hodge felt. Skeptical, baffled, hopeful, confused. “Depends on who’s buying,” Hodge said, after a moment’s thought. “The ones as think they can manage ’ere wouldn’t go if the price was dear—but the desperate ones, they’d pay anything.”

Dame Segraine said, “Oaths, even. All those refugees in the night garden, the Goblin Market—they’d swear fealty to anyone who could promise them safety.”

Irrith dropped heavily into a chair. “That’s what I was afraid of. According to my little bird, Nadrett might have something of the sort up his sleeve.”

Cries of dismay burst from the others, rising above their exhaustion. Having any Goblin Market boss in control of a passage to Faerie would be bad enough, but Hodge would choose Hardface or Lacca—maybe even Valentin Aspell—over Nadrett. “How
could
he?” Sir Cerenel asked, in a tone that suggested the answer he wanted to hear was,
He can’t.
“There’s nothing near London, not anymore; we would know if there were. They were destroyed years ago, and it’s not as if we can
make
—”

He cut off abruptly, a sudden expression of hope fading into horror. Peregrin swore, then asked, “Is that even possible?”

“I’ll ask the Academy,” Hodge said, grim and cold. The means to
make
a passage to Faerie … that could save any number of lives.

In the right hands.

“I say we avoid the whole problem,” Bonecruncher said, fingering the guns he was never without. His eyes flamed brighter. “Kill that bastard now, like we’ve always wanted to.”

“But if he has something useful—”

“Bonecruncher, if we go after Nadrett we’ll be dead before we get ten steps—”

Hodge thumped the arm of his chair, and got silence. “We ain’t going to kill Nadrett. If ’e does ’ave some way to make a passage, we need to know about it, and get it away from ’im.”

“Small chance of that,” Peregrin said. “For the same reason we can’t kill him. Nadrett’s too powerful in the Market.”

“And anybody who knows anything is surely sworn not to tell,” Segraine added.

A thoughtful smile began to grow through Hodge’s weariness. “Maybe not. Remember La Madura?” Their grins said they certainly did; the Spanish nymph had spent no little time in Hodge’s bed, before he lost the strength for such exercise, and Sir Adenant escorted her to a safer land than London. “She told me something interesting. So far as she knowed, nobody in ’is gang swears any oaths.”

It got him an array of disbelieving looks. Then Irrith’s eyes widened, and she said, “Ash and Thorn. He’s an oathbreaker?”

They were rare, so far as Hodge knew. Faerie oaths were more than just words; they bound their speakers to obey. Breaking one was all but impossible. Any faerie who managed it found he could no longer swear oaths—
or
receive them. One’s word, given to a fellow who didn’t keep his own, was meaningless.

Someone else could accept oaths on his behalf—a trusted lieutenant, perhaps—but that would require Nadrett to trust his ally. And he wouldn’t want to draw attention to his oathbroken status by such measures, anyway.

Bonecruncher growled low in his throat. “No wonder he’s such a ruthless bastard. He’s got nothing but fear to keep them in line with.”

“Lucky for us, frightened people ain’t the same thing as loyal,” Hodge said. “Irrith, who’s your little bird with the rumor?”

The sprite frowned, fingers twisting about each other. “I’d … rather not say. I think there’s something odd going on there.”

If it was someone in the Market, “odd” probably meant “bad.” But he’d let it pass for now. “Well, can you try to find out more? Maybe nose out somebody in Nadrett’s gang that might turn on ’im, since they ain’t bound by oaths?”

She nodded, and the bands around the Prince’s heart relaxed a notch. Locked carefully away in another room was a stockpile of bread, in preparation for the final collapse. When that day came, he would do his best to ensure that every faerie here had enough to see them clear of London. But if he could give them a path to true safety instead, in Faerie itself …

It was a Goblin Market rumor, one of the most untrustworthy things in the world. The hope was too great to ignore, though.

Sighing, Hodge levered himself to his feet. “Get to that, then. The rest of you, let’s ’elp Amadea with the kids you brought back.”

St. Anne’s Church, Whitechapel: April 13, 1884

Mrs. Fowler might be a stout evangelical, but no one in the Kittering family itself felt any deep religious sentiment. The family attended church regularly because it was the respectable thing to do; some of the servants didn’t even bother with that much. Eliza herself had never been reliable about going to Mass—mostly because she was either working, or too exhausted from work to bother.

But six months and more away from the familiar ground of her parish created a weight of longing that finally broke her common sense. Special Irish Branch was looking for Fenians in South Kensington; going from there to a Catholic church for Easter Mass was very nearly the stupidest thing Eliza could do, short of walking into Scotland Yard and cursing the peelers out in Irish. She knew that, and she didn’t care. She wanted the comforts of the familiar. So she asked for, and received, permission to visit her supposed mother for Easter Sunday, and went back to Whitechapel.

With precautions, of course. She left Cromwell Road before dawn, when the streets of South Kensington were almost completely deserted, and walked along the edge of Hyde Park, up Piccadilly, before plunging into the tangled quarters of Soho. Skirting Seven Dials—as bad a district as Whitechapel, and more dangerous for being unfamiliar to her—she paused in a back alley of Holborn to change into the clothing she’d bought from a secondhand shop, an old-fashioned full-skirted dress with an equally old-fashioned bonnet. It made her look like an old woman, and that suited her very well.

Thus disguised, she took the long way around the City, bending north through Clerkenwell and Shoreditch. Nearly seven miles in total, and the sun was well up when the familar rose window of St. Anne’s came into view.

By then she was hardly alone on the street. Nowadays it was lawful to worship in a Catholic church, even if the English wished no one would; and Easter drew out many people who found more frivolous uses for all the other Sundays in the year. It was easy for Eliza to lose herself in the crowd. If there were any Special Branch men doing the same, out of uniform, they shouldn’t recognize her in these old clothes. And if they’d managed to follow her from South Kensington, without her noticing, they were better than anyone gave them credit for.

Eliza’s throat tightened at the first notes of the choir’s entrance chant. The priests began their procession down the aisle, robed in their Easter vestments, followed by the deacons and the altar boys.
That’s Biddy McManus’s youngest boy,
Eliza thought, seeing that one of them was much shorter than the others—and that was her undoing.

Tears sprang to her eyes, and would not die down again. She fought not to sob such that others would hear, but every time she looked about, another familiar face met her eyes. Thomas O’Rourke, and Sarah Flaherty, and all the Kinsellas; their eldest daughter was carrying a babe in her arms, and Eliza wondered if it was the girl’s own—had she finally married Will Cleary?—or if it belonged to some relation of hers.

She had no family to miss; her mother was dead, her father in prison, and of her three siblings who survived childhood, Mary and Bridget had gone to America, and Robert had gone to sea. Coming back now, though, she realized she missed something else very profoundly indeed. Whitechapel was
her
London, from the buildings to the people who lived there, whether they were kin or not. Even the ones she didn’t much like seemed dear to her now, because they were like her. They were not the Kitterings, frantically courting respectability, terrified that someone might discover their human flaws, trying to convince even themselves that they had none; the people here drank and laughed and had fights the whole neighborhood could hear.
I don’t remember the last time I screamed my lungs out at anyone,
she thought—and then a hysterical giggle rose in her throat, that she could miss something like
that
.

She choked it down. Father Tooley was among the priests; of them all, he would recognize her if she drew his eye. Instead Eliza lost herself in the comforting patterns of the Mass, kneeling and rising with the rest of the faithful, her voice in the responses only part of a much greater whole. Mrs. Darragh had always made sure she went to Sunday Mass, after Eliza’s mother died in the last cholera. The other woman had stopped going, though, after Owen was taken.

I will pray for him,
Eliza thought, while Father Kearney read the offertory verse, beginning the liturgy of the Eucharist.
And for myself—strayed lamb that I am.

Upon her knees as he recited the intercession, Eliza bent her thoughts to Owen, lost somewhere among the faeries. The Latin phrases washed over her, their sense known even if their specific meaning was not; she knew when the commemoration for the dead came, and her gut clenched.
He isn’t dead. I’m sure of it. I couldn’t call his ghost.
But she hadn’t tried in two years.

It was blasphemous to think of such things, especially on Easter morning. Eliza forced the thought from her head. Hands clasped before her like a pious old woman’s, she joined the river of people flowing slowly toward the altar, where the priests had ranged themselves for the Eucharist. Within the depths of her bonnet, no one could see her face as long as she kept her head bowed. But it also meant she could see little of where she was going, and so by the time she realized which direction the eddying movements of the crowd had taken her, it was too late to shift without attracting attention.

She came to the front of her line, and lifted her head to receive the wafer from Father Tooley.

He recognized her immediately, of course. She saw it in the lift of his eyebrows—a brief crack in his well-practiced solemnity. But he would never disrupt Mass just because one errant parishioner had shown up without warning. He murmured
“Corpus Christi”
and placed the wafer on her tongue; Eliza moved on to receive the wine; and no one who was not watching his face at precisely that moment would have noticed anything out of the ordinary. But now Father Tooley knew she was there.

Eliza returned to her pew and knelt, trying to put such worldly concerns out of her mind.
Lord, protect and watch over Your son Owen Darragh, who was betrayed by one he trusted. Guard him against those unholy spirits that envy us our immortal souls. May he return to the family that loves him and the Church that shelters him—and may he do it
soon
. Help me to save him; ’tis only with Your aid that I have any hope. Amen.

It brought a measure of peace—but only a measure. After the
De profundis,
her thoughts turned quickly to leaving before anyone else could recognize her. She would have liked to confess her sins, but this was neither the first nor the last Mass the priests would conduct today; Easter brought Catholics popping up like snowdrops after winter, and St. Anne’s could not hold them all at once. Confession could wait until later.

But when she turned to go, a hand caught her sleeve. It was Brian McManus, the altar boy she’d spotted before. “If you please, ma’am,” he said, “Father Tooley wants to see you.”

Brian obviously didn’t recognize her. To a boy like him, anyone over the age of twenty was old, and her disguise was as good as gray hair for making her into a crone. But if she refused, he’d remember that, and oh, she should never have come here in the first place.

She had little choice now. Eliza nodded, and let Brian lead her to the sacristy.

Father Tooley waited there alone. Once the door had closed behind her, Eliza lifted her head; there was little point in hiding now. “Eliza O’Malley,” the priest said, and she could not tell what he meant by it: Disapproval? Concern? Resignation?

“I’m sorry, Father,” she said in a rush, hands bunching up the wool of her old skirt. “I should have confessed before taking communion—not that I’ve committed any mortal sins, I don’t think, but it’s been months, and—”

He stopped her confused apology by coming forward and taking her shoulders in his hands. They were big hands, with big knuckles; those and his broken, florid nose attested to a turbulent past before he joined the priesthood. It made him ideal for this parish, where tending to his flock occasionally meant wading into a drunken brawl and separating his parishioners by force. The warmth of his palms was as much a comfort as communion had been—a reminder that, while her father might be in prison, she still had a Father watching over her.