With Fate Conspire (25 page)

This was why he’d spent seven years under Nadrett’s thumb. Because he wasn’t clever enough to scheme and lie and trick his way out. The moment he tried, he nearly got himself killed.

But he couldn’t give up. The voice had cracked the shell of despair that had hardened around him, these past seven years; there might be something like hope, if Nadrett’s scheme was real. And Dead Rick could barter that hope for aid in getting his memories back.

If you can get your paws on it.

He couldn’t wait forever for his ally to come back. Stupid whelp though he was, Dead Rick would have to keep going on his own.

Memory: July 7, 1798

Lune’s messenger—a pigeon from the world above, given very precise instructions—fluttered into the chamber and settled upon a small table by the wall. Placing her right hand upon the London Stone and extending her left to Robert Shaw, the Queen said, “It is time.”

The Prince mirrored her without hesitation or outward sign of fear. He was a brave man, a colonel in the Horse Guards, and had distinguished himself in battle before taking up his position as Lune’s consort; if the knowledge that he might not survive the next moments unsettled him, he did not show it. He merely braced his feet, set his own hand upon the Stone, and sank alongside the Queen into the deepest of trances.

Once the Stone had stood alongside the Walbrook, at the heart of the City of London. An ancient relic, placed there long before the creation of the Onyx Hall, it seemed eternal, immutable, the perfect foundation for that edifice of enchantments.

But given enough time, even the eternal changed. The mortals of London had already moved the Stone once, from the south side of Cannon Street to the north, where it would be less of an obstruction to traffic. Now, finding it a nuisance still, they were moving it a second time.

With it, they moved the entirety of the Onyx Hall.

Lune and Shaw prepared themselves for the upheaval. Joining their spirits in concentration, they reached out through their realm, binding it together, from their hidden place within the Queen’s chambers to the farthest reaches of the palace. The frayed edges flared with pain, where the loss of much of London’s wall had damaged the integrity of the whole. There had been some fraying the previous time, too, but it had grown worse in the last fifty years; deep within the quiet of her mind, Lune worried what the effect now would be.

She did not have long to fret. In Cannon Street above, workmen jammed long crowbars beneath the Stone’s exposed base, and began to lift.

A bone-jarring tremor ran through the Stone they touched. This one, suspended from the chamber’s ceiling, was a reflection of the Stone above, the linchpin that held London and its shadow together. The shattering jolts that ensued as its original began to move could destroy the Hall in an instant—if Queen and Prince did not stand together, cushioning the blow.

Whether the ache Lune felt was in her body, or in the Hall itself, she could not say. At that moment, there seemed no difference between the two. Painful as it was, she knew it was only the first stage of the process, and she steeled herself against the next.

The shifting of the Stone to its new home.

Direction lost all meaning as the linchpin, the immovable point around which all else was fixed, began to move. Nausea rose up in Lune’s gorge; distantly, she heard Shaw retch. With her attention spread throughout the entire Onyx Hall, she had little sense of her own vertigo, but she fought to keep that disorientation from the palace itself, fought to hold all the chambers and galleries and entrances to the world above in place. All except the reflection of the Stone itself: not even one of the great powers of Faerie could have held that in position. Once it had resided in a secret alcove at the heart of the Onyx Hall’s power. The first shifting had moved it to Lune’s chambers. Where it would be when this process was done, she could only guess; she had no power to control it.

Still the world shuddered and whirled, until Lune wanted to let go, allow the maelstrom to fling her away. She had no teeth to grit, but she strained every particle of her soul, desperate to hold on. If she released her grip now, it might destroy the Hall; the final moments of this change surely would.

Shaw held on with her, and she felt the Prince prepare himself, sheltering her soul with his own.

In the world above, the workmen grunted and swore, and finally pushed the London Stone into the setting that awaited it.

The exterior wall of St. Swithin’s Church.

Sacred power washed through the connection between the two worlds. Shaw took it into himself, contained it, kept it from flooding on into the Onyx Hall itself. Then Lune, working with him in the shadow of his protecting spirit, reached deep into the Stone. It, too, was an entrance to the Onyx Hall, though it answered only to the Queen and the Prince; but if the palace were to survive having its central point embedded in the wall of a church, that doorway must be closed.

With a sound like grinding rock, the portal sealed, and Lune and Shaw returned to their bodies.

The Queen blinked, dizzy with effort, and looked about to see where they were. The chamber was a larger one than before, perhaps ten paces across, and Lune recognized it as lying in a part of the Hall few fae ever came to; it was very nearly beneath St. Paul’s Cathedral. A consequence, no doubt, of the new placement at the church. She felt peculiar, as if she were looking out over familiar ground from an unaccustomed vantage point.

Shaw wiped sweat from his brow and said, “We’ll need to hide this.”

Yes, they would. Even if few fae ever came here, some did, and the London Stone was a vulnerable point. Extending her hand once more, Lune said, “If you have the strength?”

Robert Shaw’s strength was an endless thing. He wrapped callused fingers around hers, and together they went through the archway into another room, this one larger, just by the stairs that led to the cathedral above. Turning to face that arch, they concentrated, and the black stone grew shut, until it seemed there had never been an opening there at all.

The Onyx Hall would be safe a while longer.

Shadwell, London: May 24, 1884

With much shouting and cursing, the packed body of men surged forward across the dockyard, past the fallen chain that until a moment ago had held them back. Not far ahead, a group of foremen waited on a platform of boards laid across barrels, raised just high enough to allow them to survey the charging mass. As the first runners reached them, the foremen began to bellow with powerful voices, naming off the work they needed done, and calling out the men they would hire to do it.

This was only the Shadwell Basin, not the West India Docks, nor any of the other great pools that had been built in the East End of London to accept the commerce of the world. Even in those places, the foremen could not hire more than a fraction of the fellows who came each morning to beg for work. Here, only a fraction of a fraction met with luck; the rest were turned away, grumbling or silent with despair, to find what employment they could.

Or to drink away what coin they still had. Eliza had watched the scrimmage from the safety of an empty cart along a warehouse wall; she stayed where she was, letting the energetic men depart again, waiting for those who had nothing to hurry on to. As she expected, Dónall Whelan was among the last of these, and one look at him was enough to tell that he’d be lucky to afford a dram of gin, in his current state.

So much the better for her. Eliza hiked up her skirts and jumped over the cart’s rail to land on the filthy cobbles in front of Whelan, startling him from his weary shuffle. She smiled broadly into his surprised eyes. “I knew I’d find you here, for all that you’re too old; sure you know the calling-men will never choose yourself. But I’ve a threepenny bit in my pocket, and that’s enough to get you blind drunk—after you help me.”

Whelan’s face had seen hard wear since she last saw him. He was old for a dockworker, old for any job in the East End; nearly forty, she thought, for he’d been a boy when his father came over during the Hunger. Whelan followed after his mother perished in Galway, waiting for money that never came. His shoulders, though still broad, had taken on a hunch, one riding higher than the other, and most of his hair was long since gone. One of these days he would drown himself in the Thames, or find work and then be killed by it. Or drink himself to death, if he could get enough money to do it in one go.

His rheumy eyes took on what he probably thought was a cunning look, and Eliza wondered if he was thinking of robbing her. Let him try; she had a knife under her shawl, and in his state she was probably the stronger of the two. “You’re looking wondrous fine, Miss O’Malley,” he said, with a mockery of a bow. “Fine enough to be buying a dinner of whitebait, even. And a man can help much better on a full stomach, he can.”

How bad had things been for him lately, that he wanted food more than drink? Against Eliza’s better instincts, a touch of pity stirred her heart. Grudgingly, she said, “Not whitebait, or do you think silver sprouts up wherever I walk? But you’ll have oysters now, and a hot baked potato afterward, if you can keep your hands to yourself. Grab my paps like you did last time, and you’ll have a knee in the bollocks instead, understand?”

Whelan had fewer teeth, too, since the last time she saw them, and what remained were badly tobacco stained. But his smile looked sincere enough. “You always were a spirited lass. Oysters first, and then we’ll talk.”

It was true, she could have afforded more. For all the many things Eliza hated about working on Cromwell Road, her wages were not one of them; between the pace of her work and her own instinct to keep her head low, she’d scarcely spent a penny more than she had to. It might have been nice to go into one of the riverside taverns, get a table in a bay window, have a proper meal of fish and beer—like a normal woman.

But not in Dónall Whelan’s company. They ended up perched on two piles of rope on one of the sufferance wharves, licking oyster juice off their fingers while gulls circled in predatory hope. Eliza kept one eye on the birds and one on Whelan, not trusting him more than an inch. At the moment, though, he was fully involved with his food, bolting it as if he hadn’t eaten in days—and perhaps he hadn’t.

When he paused for breath, she said, “I need to know what to do about a changeling.”

She was glad she’d waited; her statement set Whelan to coughing, and she wouldn’t have wanted him to choke on an oyster. The coughing turned to laughter soon enough. “A changeling? And you with your harsh words before, swearing it would be a cold day in hell before you asked Dónall Whelan’s advice again, on fairies or any other thing.”

Eliza remembered those words very well. She’d gone to Whelan after Owen vanished, because Mary Kinsella said his father had been a fairy doctor in Ireland, with knowledge of how to treat the ailments they brought on mankind. Supposedly the father had passed that knowledge on to his son. If that was true, Whelan had forgotten half of it, and scrambled the other half. He wouldn’t even believe her about what she’d seen, swearing blind these English had no fairies, that they’d run them all out with their soulless Anglican church. But all Eliza knew of changelings was some half-remembered tales; she needed advice, and Whelan’s—bad as it might be—was the only advice she knew how to get.

“It won’t be your missing lad,” Whelan said, picking bits of oyster from between his teeth with one ragged fingernail. “You’d have more panic in you if it were, and more hope. So who’s been stolen this time?”

“’Tis none of your concern, who it might be.”

“I could say it was.” Whelan shifted to find a more comfortable perch on his rope. “Could tell you it matters, for disposing of a fairy. But the truth is I want to know, and I’m thinking you owe it to me—call it an apology. You hurt my feelings something dreadful, last time.”

Eliza scowled. “The devil with you and your hurt feelings. Answer me, or I’ll be off, and you’ll get nothing more than the oysters you’ve already had.”

But Whelan’s gap-toothed grin told her the bluff had failed, even before he spoke. “And you’ll be asking the next fairy doctor instead? If you knew one, you’d be asking him already. You’re desperate, Eliza O’Malley; it may not be your lad who’s gone changeling, but either you care about whoever it was, or you still think you can get him back. So tell me what I want to know, and we’ll go on from there.”

A fellow passed by them, pushing an empty wheelbarrow. Eliza’s skin drew tight, muscles tensing to readiness. She’d taken one of the workmen’s trains that morning, leaving Cromwell Road before five o’clock to pay her fare and join the throngs of laborers on their way to work. She’d reckoned the Underground a safe enough way to go; few people boarded the third-class carriages from South Kensington Station, especially at that hour, and none rode so far around the incomplete Inner Circle, a horseshoe journey north and east and south to the Tower of London. If anyone had followed her, she would have seen. But the peelers kept watch over the docks, and especially over the Irish there, to stop dynamite being brought in. She waited until the workman was gone, then said, “Not that it means anything to you, but Miss Georgiana Barlow.”

It was the first name that came to hand, a friend of Louisa Kittering’s, likewise making her debut in London.
“Miss,”
Whelan said, as if tasting the courtesy. “Some young nob, is it? And why do you care?”

“I don’t. But as you said, it might help Owen. Now you’ve got what you want; give me what I’m paying for.”

Whelan eyed her, sucking in his hollow cheeks, as if gauging whether he could squeeze anything more from her first. Eliza glared at him, not having to pretend a mounting fury, and he gave in. “Sure ’tis simple enough; I’ve done it a dozen times. Sometimes, with infants, you can give them back: put the changeling on the seashore, or where two rivers come together, or on the edge of a lake, and the fairies will reclaim their own, knowing ’tisn’t wanted. But more often, you have to make it go away on its own.”