Hearn began to stammer out a list, naming off dressmakers and dancing masters, museums and friends’ houses. He gave dates when he could, and Eliza wondered if Mrs. Kittering heard what she did, that the pattern had changed in recent days. The faerie had different interests than Louisa—strange ones, a fascination with matters that a human considered mundane or distasteful. What well-bred young lady wanted to tour the halls of a hospital, other than as part of some charitable visit?
In almost all these cases Louisa was chaperoned: by a friend, or one of her married sisters, or Lucy, the lady’s maid. Mrs. Kittering descended next upon the maid, interrogating her mercilessly about every last detail of Louisa’s activities. And here arose some oddities, for there were moments for which Lucy could not entirely account; she had become distracted, or occupied in some unnecessary task, and could not swear with a clear conscience that she knew what Louisa had done during that time. Mrs. Kittering soon reduced her to tears, provoking some sympathy from Eliza—but sympathy was soon pushed aside by the realization that Lucy’s distractions had begun before the changeling took Louisa’s place. Faerie trickery, she thought. It wasn’t random; the changeling had been following her target for some time before stealing her away.
It ended as it must, with Mrs. Kittering sacking Lucy, without any of the pay she was owed. “Count yourself fortunate I do not bring you to the attention of the police,” she said, viciously and without much cause; Lucy had committed no crime. But it was a favorite threat in the household, and the Kitterings wealthy enough that they could possibly follow through, condemning their erstwhile maid to the prison, the workhouse, or the lunatic asylum.
Eliza’s relief to have escaped the ax faltered when Mrs. Kittering turned her attention to the remaining servants. “I want to know everything she does. What she reads, from whom she receives letters. She will see no callers without me present; if I am not at home, then you will say that she is not, either. And above all, she is not to go out. Am I understood?”
They all answered promptly and with vigor, eager to avoid Lucy’s fate. It thwarted Eliza’s hope that she might contrive to be the changeling’s companion on a trip out of the house, and thereby corner her away from watchful eyes and ears; she would have to find another way.
She tried to pretend the prospect didn’t call up a note of fear, and failed. It was one thing to force information out of Louisa, a sheltered young woman whose notion of cruelty was to ignore someone at a garden party, but a faerie… Eliza’s breath shallowed at the thought, and her palms grew sweaty-cold. She knew firsthand how cruel they could be.
Think of Owen. Think of Mrs. Darragh, and Maggie. You’re willing to dare the Special Irish Branch for him; surely a faerie can be no worse.
Mrs. Kittering’s eyes were upon her once more. Eliza curtsied, her face a perfect mask of obedience, and left before the missus could guess at the plan forming behind her eyes.
Night Garden, Onyx Halclass="underline" May 22, 1884
At first glance, nothing in the night garden had changed. The Walbrook’s foul waters still flowed sluggishly through the rank plants; faerie lights still drifted aimlessly about; the blankets and miserable possessions of the refugees still littered the ground.
But the population of those refugees had changed. In the aftermath of the terrible earthquake, a great many of them had fled, if not in search of Faerie, then to somewhere else less dangerous than London. Into the gaps they left came the dregs of the Goblin Market.
When the first brave souls ventured back into the warren beneath Billingsgate, they found half of that warren had disappeared. Of the two passages connecting it to the rest of the palace, one had fallen in; some of the Cornish knockers tried to dig it out, but new dirt fell to replace what they carried away. That part of the Hall now let into the ground beneath London. Even if they could dig through, there would be no palace on the other side.
Part of Dead Rick’s reason for coming to the night garden was to get out of the Market. The part that vanished had included Lacca’s entire lair, from doss-houses to Po’s opium den; now the goblin woman was fighting tooth and claw—literally—to keep from being forced out by Nadrett and Hardface. And so it went, down to the lowest sprite, everyone kicking and shoving to find new space or keep what they had, and the losers coming here, to the garden.
He didn’t have to claw for a new place—because Nadrett had decided to shorten his leash, keeping Dead Rick in his own chambers more often than not. But if it weren’t for that, he would be homeless. The stone of his refuge had finished its collapse, burying his few treasures under broken marble and onyx. With no bread to shield him, fleeing through London now would be suicide.
The rest of his reason for coming lay near the chamber’s eastern end. Two obelisks rose there, one a gravestone, the other a memorial. The dirty surface of the latter held a list of names and dates, marking the reigns of past Princes of the Stone. In its base, a small flame burned: one of the few things in the garden that wasn’t broken or fallen or stained.
No doubt the names would have meant something to Dead Rick, once. He knew the first one, Michael Deven, belonged to the man buried under the other obelisk, where he’d found and chased that girl. The rest were mysteries to him. Hodge, the only Prince he remembered, hadn’t yet joined his predecessors in the stone; the twelfth and final name carved into the obelisk was Alexander Messina, dead in 1870, long before Dead Rick’s memories began.
The skriker paused, looking at the dates. Doing the precise sums would have taken too long, but a glance was enough to show the pattern: each Prince’s reign had been shorter than the last, for quite some time now. There were two in the middle of the last century who only made it a handful of years each, Hamilton Birch and Galen St. Clair; the next, Matthew Abingdon, had done a good deal better, but after him it went steadily down.
“Probably the palace killing them,” he muttered. “Which one will go first: Hodge or the Hall?”
At the rate of progress on the Inner Circle Railway, it would be the Hall. The navvies were laying a short stretch of rail already, from Mark Lane partway toward Eastcheap Station at the Monument; that had been the cause of the earthquake. From there it was just a short gap to Mansion House, along Cannon Street and past the London Stone. The newspapers said it would be open for service by the autumn.
He scowled and jerked away from the obelisk, with its forlorn list of mortal men who’d served the Onyx Court. The finger bone he’d laid on the ground alongside it was still there, he saw, with no ashes anywhere nearby to signal that his ally the voice had seen it. Dead Rick dug in his pocket and pulled out a beef bone, cracked open for its marrow, dropping it onto the dead grass. Perhaps the finger, placed there after the incident with the ghost in the sewers, was too small, and his ally had overlooked it.
Unlikely. Much more probable that he’d given up. Or been discovered and cut down by Nadrett.
Or been in the Goblin Market when part of it vanished.
Dead Rick nudged the bone into better position with his toes and retreated, not wanting to be seen there. Intending to take a different path out of the garden, he headed toward the center and the Walbrook—only to stop short at the sight of a familiar figure, sitting on the edge of a dry and leaf-choked fountain.
Irrith spotted him at the same time and let out a dry huff of a laugh. “Seven years I don’t see one hair of your tail, and now I can’t turn around without tripping over you.”