With Fate Conspire (62 page)

She stared at him, thinking she must have heard wrong. “The
train
? But—what about the iron?”

“You asking
me
to explain it? ’E said it ’ad something to do with magnets. All this iron circling around generates power, or some such. Damned if I understand it. But then we wouldn’t ’ave to worry about keeping the thing going.”

They certainly needed
some
source of power. As Wrain had predicted, the Engine was still clanking away, weaving more and more of the faerie palace. The growth had slowed, and aside from the immediate vicinity of the Engine—where things still changed every time one blinked—the result appeared stable, but if it was to go on functioning, it would need fuel. And no one had any intention of letting it stop.

The train drew into Mark Lane. Eliza and Dead Rick alighted there, for the nearby Tower of London Station had been closed when the new track opened. “You going back to Whitechapel?” Dead Rick asked.

Habit made Eliza draw her shawl around herself, as if to hide again. “I … don’t know.” She hadn’t yet. Whitechapel was complicated; Quinn might not be hunting her anymore, but there was still Maggie Darragh to consider, and Fergus Boyle, and Owen. None of those were matters that could be dealt with in the space of a few days.

Including her own self. The work of seven years had ended; now what would she do? Find factory work, as Tom Granger had suggested all those months ago? Go into service with some other rich family, and hope they were better than the Kitterings? Perhaps Mrs. Chase needed another maid. The expansion of the palace had swept the Goodemeades’ home into itself without faltering, so Eliza would be able to step through into Rose House any time she liked.

A gust of wind gave her a better reason to wrap her shawl close. The day was a chill one, and gloomy enough that gaslights still burned in many places, although it was early afternoon. A reminder that, whatever she did, it had better pay well enough to buy a warmer shawl. Winter was coming on.

Dead Rick, bare-armed in the cold air, noticed her discomfort. “If you’d like—” he said, then stopped.

They’d never truly had the conversation, the one where they settled all the pain and questions between them. Looking at him, Eliza realized she no longer needed it. Somehow, in the course of healing Owen and hunting Nadrett, calling ghosts and creating the new palace, they’d found a new balance of friendship. And she was comfortable with that.

He caught her smile, grinned, and kicked a broken cobblestone with one dirty foot. “You
is
a real medium, after all. And there’s that Myers fellow, as studies ghosts. You probably don’t need
my
’elp no more, but…”

“I’d be glad to have it, I would,” Eliza said quietly. As they had planned, seven years ago. She might not make a fortune, might never tour Scotland and France and the United States—but she could make enough to live on, and even to help the Darraghs. For now, that would more than do.

“Right then,” Dead Rick said, a bit too loudly; that last crossing of the breach had made him awkward. “And any time you want to come on below—inside, I mean—Ash and Thorn, ’owever I’m supposed to say it—you just let me know. We’ll always ’ave a place for you.”

The New Palace, London: October 31, 1884

They could not call it the Onyx Hall anymore. The name had suited the old palace, with its halls and chambers of gleaming black stone, but the new one showed too much variety to be captured with so simple a description. Some rooms were like rustic cottages, black-tarred timbers between whitewashed walls; others were bare stone, or papered with William Morris designs. As before, some of it echoed what lay above—or outside, or whatever the term should be—while some was pure faerie invention.

They gathered in a place clearly born from the memory of the Great Exhibition, thirty years before: a green, tree-studded space not unlike Hyde Park, dominated by an edifice of silver and glass, a recollection of the Crystal Palace even more wondrous than the original. Sunlight shone down through the panes, warming and brightening the grass-carpeted area inside. The Galenic Academy was already making noises about claiming the place as their own, a Presentation Hall grander than the one they had lost.

Outside, it was nearly night. In a few hours London’s remaining goblins would go outside, to see what ghosts needed sweeping away this All Hallows’ Eve. Ch’ien Mu, after examining the Ephemeral Engine, had concluded that it was gathering stray wisps of aether from the mortals of London, probably through their dreams; what effect that would have on the population of ghosts, no one knew. It didn’t really matter. Right now, all Dead Rick wanted was the tradition, the sense that he was upholding his duties as a skriker, after being misused by Nadrett for so long.

Before then, a gathering of faerie London. The Goodemeades had been emphatic that it wasn’t a formal, organized event; there had been talk of organizing some sort of Parliament, or at least a council, to govern the fae now that no royal authority held sway, but no decision had been reached as yet. This was simply a gathering, and a chance for everyone to hear of the changes taking place outside.

As Dead Rick had predicted, many foreigners were there: Abd ar-Rashid, and Ch’ien Mu, and that monkey fellow Kutuhal; Feidelm and Yvoir and the von das Tickens; Po from the Goblin Market, with Lacca at his side, and a faun Dead Rick now remembered as Il Veloce. Others from his memories, and strangers he did not know. Mortals, too; not just Eliza and Hodge and various Academy fellows, but that girl Louisa Kittering, dressed in a
japonnais
gown that suggested she had used her faerie-granted freedom to run off and join the aesthetic set. She had come in with Cyma and an elderly woman Mrs. Chase had introduced as Lady Jane Wilde, but now was deep in conversation with a fellow who looked like the lady’s son.

Irrith appeared at his elbow. As Dead Rick lagged a sleeve for her to tug on, she pinched a bit of the hair on his forearm instead. “Ow!” he said, and glared at her. “I’m right ’ere, you know. You could just say ’ello.”

“Actually, what I came to say is, Gertrude’s gone mad.”

He looked across the gleaming expanse of the room to where Gertrude stood, in animated argument with her own sister. “I think they was always a bit cracked.”

“
Extra
mad, then,” Irrith said. “Come on; you have to help me convince her—”

What precisely he was supposed to convince Gertrude of, Dead Rick didn’t know, but he followed before Irrith could decide to drag him by some sensitive bit of anatomy. As he drew near, Gertrude caught sight of him and brightened. “You can tell her! Didn’t you take Miss Eliza to a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research? And wasn’t it perfectly unobjectionable?”

“He didn’t ‘take’ me, and it wasn’t a meeting.” Eliza rejoined him, having freed herself from a pair of revolutionary-minded fae, Eidhnin and Scéinach, who wanted only to talk of Irish nationalism. “I sat down with Mr. Myers and the Sidgwicks and a few others, with Dead Rick there, and we talked about ghosts. It went well enough, I suppose.”

“And did they know you were a faerie?” Rosamund asked Dead Rick, hands braced on her hips.

Suspecting where this was going, he said, “They did, but—”

“You see?” Gertrude demanded, before he could say anything more. “So it’s perfectly safe for us to attend a meeting.”

She was a damned sight braver than Dead Rick, if she was willing to stake herself—and apparently her sister—out as targets for those insatiably curious bastards. If anyone could talk the Goodemeades to death, it would be the Society for Psychical Research. Myers’s presentation to them had ignited even more curiosity than the man predicted; their reports and editorials in various newspapers were currently doing battle with sensational stories from a few constables and a pub keeper in Billingsgate who swore his cellar had once been invaded by faeries. Before Dead Rick could think of what to tell Gertrude, though, his nose caught a new scent on the air.

A little girl, no more than ten years of age, with the lollipop in her hand hovering forgotten, tangled in the ribbons of her bonnet. A pretty little thing, her hair in careful ringlets; she was obviously born to a pampered life, and wandered the grass with her eyes so wide, it seemed only the upward tilt of her head kept them from falling out.

The reactions were comical. Everywhere people fell silent, fae and mortal alike, drawing back warily if the girl wandered so much as a single step in their direction.

Irrith whispered, “Ash and Thorn. Where did
she
come from?”

It was clear that nobody there knew her. Which meant nobody there had brought her in. Dead Rick licked his lips and said in a whisper, “My guess would be Hyde Park, or else Sydenham.” Where they’d moved the original Crystal Palace, after the Great Exhibition ended. Or it could be somewhere else entirely; they were still sorting out what rules governed entry into this place.

But now they had evidence that people—at least one small, beribboned, female person—could enter unannounced.

The girl’s gaze swung toward where Dead Rick stood, with Irrith and Eliza and the Goodemeades. Before it reached them, instinct made him shift shape; however disreputable a dog he might make, it was better than his appearance as a man. Unfortunately, this proved to be a miscalculation.

“Doggie!”

He rolled his eyes upward, hoping for rescue, but found the Goodemeades urging him toward the girl, Eliza failing to smother a smile, and Irrith grinning ear to ear. Then the girl was upon him. Dead Rick bolted, for all the good it did him; that, of course, made this a chase, and chasing was even
more
exciting.

It was ridiculous, undignified … and
fun
. He could have escaped by fleeing into the rest of the palace—leaving behind the unrepentant laughter of his so-called friends—but Dead Rick found he did not want to. So long as he stayed clear of sticky hands that would undoubtedly try to pull his tail, it was pleasant to run across the soft grass. Not to hunt—not out of fear—just to run, and to trip up his friends, Eliza cursing him cheerfully in Irish, and Dead Rick grinning a canine grin, his tongue lolling out as he went.

Let others plan for the future. At this moment, beneath the bright, glittering expanse of enchantment and glass, Dead Rick was content.

EPILOGUE

Burlington House, Piccadilly: September 2, 1899

“… and to those who say, we have charted all the configurations there may be; there are no more to uncover, and it remains now only to refine the applications of those already known—to those people, I say,
nonsense
. We stand upon the brink of a new century, and I feel—I
know
—that it will not be the end of discovery, an age wherein the best to which we can aspire is to perfect the knowledge already within our grasp. There are new mountains we have not climbed, and the vistas that we shall see from their peaks can scarcely be imagined, even by those with the rare gift to part the veil of time and catch glimpses of what is to come. I exhort all curious minds, whatever their origin, not to rest complacently upon the laurels of those who have gone before, but to seek out those new discoveries, and to share them with others, that all may partake of the knowledge that is our most precious wealth.”

Master Wrain had much improved as a speaker, Lord Lister thought, as he rose with the others to applaud. The sprite had delivered the first Galenic Visiting Lecture on Faerie Science, more than a decade before, and only the novelty of the subject matter—not to mention the lecturer himself—had kept his audience’s attention. No, he most certainly had improved; that, or someone else was writing his speeches nowadays.

Fifteen years had dulled that novelty somewhat. Back then, people had flocked to any event that offered them a chance to see a faerie, and protestors had thronged the streets outside. Lord Lister would not call the matter settled even now, but a scientific lecture no longer attracted disproportionate attention, and Inspector Quinn didn’t have to send constables to keep the peace. He was glad for the return to ordinary business—relatively speaking.

The President of the Royal Society made his way to the front of the room, to shake Master Wrain’s hand and pose for a picture. Eveleen Myers promised she had a better technique than before, something that would balance the demands of mortal and faerie photography. Her husband was there to test it; Lord Lister only hoped his skill with a camera had improved as much as Wrain’s speeches.

It was still a bit questionable, he thought, having scholars from the Galenic Academy and the Society for Psychical Research both come speak before the Royal Society. What they did was not exactly
science,
not so far as Lister was concerned. It was neither physical nor biological in nature, and it had a sort of inconsistency—a
mysticism
—that did not fit in here. But the London Fairy Society urged the connection; and after all, the Academy had made something from that deranged engine Charles Babbage had bothered Lister’s predecessors about, the one Babbage himself had never built. Some of the gentlemen here were quite excited about further developments in that vein. It did no harm to let the fae come speak.

And there were certain matters best addressed through cooperation. After Wrain had finished answering questions—a great many questions—and the last stragglers had gone on their way, Lister said, “If you can spare a moment before you leave, I should like to talk to you about medical matters. There is something of an epidemic building in London, if I may use that word for something that is not a disease; and I am quite concerned to address it before the matter grows any worse.”

Wrain did not need explanations. “The current fashion for eating faerie food? Yes, of course. We have been working on more reliable ways of treating those affected by it, but I would be glad for any suggestions you might make…”

Lord Lister would not enter the faerie realm; it was, he often said, a trick for the young, and not one he was eager to try. But he and Wrain strolled about the grounds of Burlington House, nodding greetings to men from the other scientific societies that shared the premises, and discussed the matter, with fruitful results.