With Fate Conspire (38 page)

Even if the changeling was wrong—even if the Miss Goodemeades were not so eager to help as Louisa assumed—Eliza would find a way to convince them. “You haven’t said where Owen is.”

Again, Louisa would not meet her gaze. This time, though, she seemed less uncomfortable for herself than for Eliza. “You understand that he’s been among the fae for a long time. And I’m afraid the ones who had him first were … not kind at all.”

Anger and grief alike rose in her throat. “What did they do to him?”

“I don’t know. But he’s being cared for, now—by an Irish lady, in fact; her name is Feidelm—and if there’s a way to mend him, the Goodemeades will find it.”

If.
Eliza squeezed her eyes shut, unwilling to let a tear slip free. But what had she expected? For Owen to emerge after seven years lost, smiling as he always had? All this time, the promise she’d repeated to herself over and over again had been,
I will get you back.
Now it seemed that would not be the end. Clenching her fist until it hurt, Eliza added another promise to it.
I’ll find a way to make you well.

And then make the ones who hurt you pay for it.

She opened her eyes to find Louisa giving the seated matron a considering look. “She’ll be coming to before long. When she does, I will go.”

A month ago, the sight of the new Miss Kittering had filled Eliza with fury; now the changeling felt more like the rope that was offering to draw her up from the abyss. Desperate, Eliza stuffed the photo inside her ragged dress, then closed the distance between them and grasped the young woman by her silk-covered shoulders. “Swear to me that all of this has been true. You’ll free me from this place.”

“I will,” Louisa said, her body stiff with surprise.

“If you do not, then my oath to God, I’ll win myself free, and then I’ll hunt you down.”

She meant it, and she saw that the changeling believed her. “I’ll do everything I can. You have my word.”

It would have to be enough.

The City of London: July 30, 1884

The hour was not quite midday, and London’s beating heart was full of life. Men thronged the narrow, old-fashioned streets of the City, the business men nearly as uniform as soldiers in their suits and top hats, the street-sellers and beggars and musicians a less orderly lot. They carried with them a welter of scents, from food to horseshit to the macassar oil on the gentlemen’s hair. Somehow, Dead Rick was supposed to pick his way through that knot to find the few thin strands that might tell him where Nadrett had been—and quickly, before his master noticed he was gone.

Dead Rick’s faceless ally had, as promised, slipped a piece of bread to him. The skriker had found it in his waistcoat pocket earlier today—a trick that unnerved him even more than Irrith’s beetle had, because he didn’t know how it had gotten there. But that was the signal for him to go into the City, so he swallowed it and went. Hoping, with a devoutness few Londoners showed for their divine Master nowadays, that the voice was upholding his other promise, to distract Nadrett from Dead Rick’s absence.

Just don’t ask ’ow ’e’s doing it.

Aldersgate, Crutched Friars, Threadneedle Street, and Ketton Street. Four places for Dead Rick to search. He knew where Aldersgate was—or rather, where it had been, before the gate itself was torn down—and Threadneedle was important enough of a street to be familiar, but for the other two, he would need help. The voice had tried to tell him where to look, but directions meant little when most of Dead Rick’s memories of the City were gone.

He went to Threadneedle Street first. There had once been a well here, the voice said, that gave access to the Onyx Hall, but it was long gone, replaced by pumps. Weakened by the loss of the wall, the palace below had fractured, taking the Queen’s old lesser presence chamber with it. But some piece might remain, cut off from the rest.

Dead Rick circled the area in human form, wondering where the entrance had been, and how anyone would pass through it without the well. He sniffed the air, and got a nose full of smells, but nothing that hinted at Nadrett, Chrennois, or their photographic experiments.
’E should be up ’ere, not me. ’E knows right where they used to be. I ain’t going to find nothing, searching like this.

Scowling, he looked around for a private corner, and found none. In the end he slid under a cab that stood at the corner by the Royal Exchange, and changed in the shadow while the driver and passenger argued. But even in dog form, his nose turned up nothing. Did that mean there was nothing to find—or just that his quarries had left no trace of their passage?

On four paws, he trotted down Cheapside until he reached St. Martins le Grand, then went north more slowly, examining the ground once it became Aldersgate Street. The entrance here had been a tree, long ago, but everything around him was stone and brick, without so much as a shrub or a potted plant to soften the harshness. Dead Rick had to dodge aside when a man tried to kick him out of the way, but went back once the bastard was gone, to make certain he didn’t miss so much as an inch. In fact, so absorbed was he in searching, he made it as far as Barbican before realizing he’d gone beyond the reach of the Onyx Hall.

Back in man form, he retraced his steps to the City and began to ask directions. He ignored the gentlemen; they would look askance at his rough attire and bare feet, and probably only know the principal streets anyway. On Cheapside a seller of newspapers scratched through his whiskers and shook his head. “Crutched Friars, sure—over by the Tower. Go down King William Street, then Lombard, which’ll turn into Fenchurch; then right on Mark Lane, and left at the church—that’s St. Olave ’Art Street—and pretty soon the street will be Crutched Friars. But Ketton? I’ve been selling papers ’ere since I were nine years old, and I ain’t never ’eard of Ketton.”

“The cove told me it were a big street,” Dead Rick said, hoping he could remember the first set of directions. “North of Cheapside, going from west to east.”

The newspaper seller shrugged. “Gresham Street, then, or London Wall. All the rest is little poky lanes, unless you goes more north.”

North would be outside the wall. It had to be one of those two. Even in the City, where streets mostly stayed the same as centuries before, sometimes things changed; what the fae still called the Fish Street entrance now gave onto Queen Victoria Street.

Dead Rick searched Gresham Street and London Wall both, from one end to the other, and the curved length of Crutched Friars, until it became Jewry Street around Aldgate. Every yard of roadway was paved and curbed, lined with buildings and trampled by people, without the faintest hint of any scent he recognized.

It had been a good notion—until it fell apart.

His steps dragged as he turned back toward the Goblin Market. They dragged even more as he went down the rest of Mark Lane, on his way to Billingsgate and the door there; hoardings blocked one side of the roadway, and a piece of paper glued to them promised in bold letters that it wouldn’t be long at all before the new Mark Lane Underground station opened for business. “Bugger you all,” he snarled under his breath, then hunched his shoulders and hurried by. The visible work here was already done, the roadway dug up and tunneled and covered once more, but the navvies were probably right beneath his feet, toiling away at destroying his home.

He wasn’t even certain how safe it was to use the Billingsgate door. It had clung to existence after the rails were laid from Mark Lane to Eastcheap—
no,
he thought,
the
Queen
’eld onto it.
But if her grip slipped, any faerie in the middle of passing through might go along with the door.

His choice was that or crawling through the sewers, or else going into some other part of the Hall, and hoping nobody noticed him on his way back to the Market. Sighing, Dead Rick went into the pub that now covered the door, and put up a charm to hide himself briefly as he passed the owner on his way to the cellar stairs. Not that he needed it; the man’s wits had been half-scrambled by all the charms used to make him forget the temporary invasion after the earthquake in May.

Down in the cellar, with one hand outstretched to open the door, he stopped.

The entrance was enchanted, just like the rest of the Hall. Enchantment was a faerie thing, and faerie things involved faerie elements. That was very nearly as far as Dead Rick’s knowledge of science went, but he knew two things more. First, that one of those elements was aether.

And second, that the Academy had invented devices for detecting it.

He’d seen one in the Goblin Market, after someone brought in a load of things supposedly from the faerie courts of India and China. Jade figurines, strange weapons, things like that. A Greek trader named Arkheton had been interested in buying them, but only if they were genuine, and so he’d tested them with one of those devices. An aetheric versorium, that was the term.

All but two pieces proved to be false, and Arkheton kept the versorium in case anyone tried to swindle him again.

’E won’t mind if I borrow it, right?

*   *   *

Dead Rick almost didn’t make it out of the Goblin Market with his head attached, but not because Arkheton objected to him stealing the object. The skriker doubted his victim even knew the thing was gone.
Right now, you could steal a man’s left nutmeg and ’e might not notice.

His ally, it seemed, had decided to cover his absence by laying an enormous charm over what remained of the warren, confusing both sight and sound. Smell was more or less untouched, and that was the only reason Dead Rick had been able to carry out his purpose; he’d closed his eyes, ignored what he heard, and followed his nose to the incense of Arkheton’s stall. Then nearly lost his ears when Charcoal Eddie, convinced this was prelude to some kind of attack, began waving a rusted sword at anything resembling movement nearby.

“Blood and Bone,” he muttered, climbing with relief back into the cellar. “I thought I was working with somebody
subtle
.”

But it was effective. Nobody would be able to tell Dead Rick was gone. He didn’t know how much longer the effect would last, though; best to hurry.

Nothing at Crutched Friars. Nothing at Threadneedle. At Aldersgate …

The device looked something like a compass, with a barrier to prevent the needle from swinging about to point at the faerie holding it. On the way up Aldersgate Street, the needle began to twitch, and a thin line of something shimmering copper began to show along its length; the line grew, and the needle moved more strongly as he neared a particular building. When Dead Rick held the versorium out, it pointed steadily toward the building’s corner, and the line steadied to about a quarter the needle’s length.

Not much, for what ought to be the most powerful enchantments in London. But enough to tell him that
something
faerie still existed there.

Dead Rick had no desire to find out what, not on his own. Chrennois could be inside; so could half a dozen Market bullies, all prepared to kill anyone who walked in without permission. He would leave that to his ally.

And why didn’t that blighter get ’is own versorium and do this ’imself? It don’t need a good nose—so why send me?

Stupid question.
Standing out here was dangerous; it might attract attention. Much better, from the voice’s perspective, to send an expendable skriker.

Dead Rick quickly put the versorium behind his back—as if that would save him, had anyone been watching. Then, with a shiver, he went back to the chaos his ally had made of the Goblin Market.

White Lion Street, Islington: August 6, 1884

There would be no waiting for Friday. Eliza walked through the gates of the Kensington workhouse late in the afternoon, and immediately turned her steps toward Islington.

She’d seen nothing more of Louisa, but the changeling must have kept her word;
someone
had persuaded the authorities to release a woman that only a little while ago had been declared a violent lunatic, a menace to those around her. Eliza kept to her best behavior while waiting for freedom, but couldn’t resist making a rude gesture once she was clear of the gates. They could go to the devil, the lot of them, from the workhouse matrons to the justice who put her there.

Put her there, and then put her back out, with nothing more than the dress and shoes she wore. All her other possessions had vanished somewhere between assault and freedom, save the photograph of Owen, rescued from Cromwell Road. How they expected her to feed herself, she didn’t know. Begging, she supposed. And it would come to that soon enough, when she dared not return to Whitechapel. But before she did that—before she decided what, if anything, to tell Quinn about the changeling—she would do what she’d been trying to do for seven long years.

She would get Owen back.

This time, there was no spying from a neighbor’s front steps, no disguising herself as more than she was. Eliza walked straight up to No. 9 and knocked on the door. When the maid opened it, Eliza said, “I’m here to see Mrs. Chase. Don’t bother trying to keep me out; it’s urgent business I’ve come on, concerning the London Fairy Society and the Goodemeade sisters. If she isn’t at home, I’ll wait until she is.”

Intimidating people wasn’t so very difficult; mostly what it required was an absolute refusal to back down. Eliza was prepared to shove the maid out of the way, if it proved necessary. It didn’t: a door not far down the hall opened, and Mrs. Chase herself looked out. “What on earth … Miss Baker, wasn’t it? Whatever are you doing here?”

The maid stepped clear. Eliza came into the hall—it would be a good deal harder to force her from the house, now—and said, “I need your help.”

Mrs. Chase’s white eyebrows rose. “Oh dear. Do come in—shut the door, Mary; we don’t need the whole of Islington knowing our affairs—and I will see what I can do.”

The parlor had a much more lived-in look than the drawing room upstairs, with faded upholstery and a pattern of roses climbing the wallpaper. Mrs. Chase gestured Eliza toward a seat, but she didn’t take it. “I need to see the Goodemeade sisters,” she said.