He thought about asking what this distraction might be, then thought the better of it. What I don’t know I can’t give away. Or be scared of. “If they ’ave?”
“Do not go through.” Dead Rick heaved a sigh of relief. “Return to the palace, notify me—by a different signal; we’ve used the night garden too often—and I will tell you what to do next.”
If he moved fast enough, he could possibly even risk going back to the Academy, and telling Irrith what he had learned. But even as that thought took shape in Dead Rick’s head, the voice spoke again. “Before you go, I will have your oath that you will not tell anyone else the location of Chrennois’s laboratory.”
Dead Rick’s mouth fell open. “My oath?”
“Yes.” The word was cold once more. “Since it seems you cannot be trusted to hold your tongue otherwise.”
“Even Nadrett don’t make us swear oaths!”
A contemptuous sound answered him. “For very practical reasons, I assure you; he would make his minions swear six times a day if he could. Fortunately for me, I enjoy more freedom in the matter. You will swear, or we are done.”
Dead Rick could ask Irrith for bread, or go into the City without it. Surely other people remembered where the entrances had been. But did he dare throw this ally away?
He ground his teeth together, remembering the original form of their deal. “Tell me something first. More about myself.”
“After turning to outside help the way you have, you expect me to reward you?”
The coldness was back, and stronger. Dead Rick already crawled for Nadrett; he was damned if he’d do it for this bastard, too. Any more than he had to. “No, I expects you to pay me. Like we agreed.”
Silence made him wonder if the voice had gone away, if that demand was one push too many. But the words came at last, clipped and hard. “You came to the Onyx Hall not long after Lune became Queen. Ostensibly because cities breed disease, and therefore death, which is in your nature; but the truth is that you were lonely in Yorkshire, and liked the notion of companionship. To put it in crude terms, you wanted a pack.”
How in Mab’s name could he know that? Even if the voice had been here centuries ago, he couldn’t be sure what had been in Dead Rick’s head. Unless they’d been friends—no, not a chance. And Yorkshire… that was just unexpected enough to be true. There were Yorkshire fae among the refugees, and their accents sounded nothing like Dead Rick’s. But some fae changed their way of speaking, and others did not. For all I know, eight years ago I didn’t sound like a cockney.
It was the payment he’d asked for, even if it came without proof. He didn’t dare fight for more. Hanging his head, Dead Rick asked, “’Ow do I swear?”
As far back as he could remember, he’d never given his binding word, nor heard anyone else do the same. The voice instructed him, and Dead Rick spoke the oath. “In Mab’s name, I swear not to tell nobody where Chrennois’s laboratory is, except you, or if you says I can.”
It was more than mere words. He felt the promise wrap around him like an unbreakable chain. Shivering, Dead Rick hoped his ally could be trusted. It had just become that much harder to look to anyone else for help.
Hyde Park, Kensington: July 25, 1884
Despite the fine summer’s day, Hyde Park was not well populated for one o’clock in the afternoon. The London Season was nearly done; soon the quality would be departing for their country estates, the men to hunt grouse, the women to visit with one another and either celebrate their escape from the city or bemoan the tedium of rural life, as their dispositions inclined them.
“When will your family be leaving?” Myers asked Miss Kittering, as they strolled down one of the park’s graveled paths.
He was vaguely aware that they seemed to have misplaced the maid who was supposed to be chaperoning the girl. Myers hardly regretted her absence—unpleasant woman—but it was not really appropriate for him and Miss Kittering to be walking alone, even in a public place such as this. Indeed, it might do damage to her reputation.
Miss Kittering did not seem to care. “Not until the fourteenth, I think. Mama is convinced she can arrange a match for me before then, and all my efforts to convince her that I will not do it fall on deaf ears.” She sounded both disgruntled and impressed.
Startled, Myers said, “Do you not care to be matched?”
The young woman hesitated, concealing her uncertainty behind her fan. “I… perhaps I am a foolish girl, too easily swayed by sentiment, but I cannot marry where I have not given my heart.”
Myers’s own heart contracted with an unaccustomed pang. It was foolish, and he knew it; he hardly knew this girl more than twenty years his junior. They’d met only a handful of times, and during the first two of those—meetings of the London Fairy Society—he had scarcely registered her, noting only that she seemed more rebellious against her respectable class than was likely to end well for her. But then they had encountered one another by chance, outside the meetings, and something about her was so oddly familiar…
She reminded him of Annie, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it. The way she held her head, and her manner of speaking; had she not been born years before Annie drowned herself, Myers might have thought her his lost love reborn, like some Hindu tale.
It was foolish, and it was disloyal to Eveleen, his wife. He pushed the unquiet feelings of his heart aside, and answered her as innocuously as he could. “At least being married, or going into the countryside, will save you from your mother’s unwise taste in servants.”
His hand, damn it for a traitor, tried to rise and brush her cheek, from which the bruises had faded. Miss Kittering colored as if he’d done it anyway. “Yes, well—the servant had her reasons. Which is not to say I forgive her, but…”
He thought at first that she she paused so the bored young gentleman passing in an open carriage would not hear her words. But when the gentleman was gone, Miss Kittering was still silent. “But?” Myers prompted her.
The annoyed crease between her brows was mercifully not much like Annie at all. “Oh, I—I can’t get the blessed woman out of my head.”
Myers had the distinct impression that she had almost used a different word than blessed. “Is it guilt, do you think?”
Miss Kittering’s golden head whipped around to regard him indignantly. “Guilt? Certainly not! I had nothing to do with—” She stopped again and gritted her teeth. Then, taking a deep breath, she said, “I trust your good judgment, Mr. Myers. Perhaps you can guide me in a matter which has been troubling me for some time now.”
“I certainly will do my best.”
She looked away from him, fingers playing with her fan. “The maid, as I said, had her reasons for attacking me. She… lost someone dear to her, I suspect; a brother, perhaps. I fear it drove her mad. She somehow got it into her head that I knew something of this—which I most certainly did not—and was attempting to beat that information out of me. For the sake of the one she lost.”
Myers, studying the tense line of her neck, the movement of the fan, considered her phrasing. Most certainly did not. “Have you learned something since then?”
Again that look, both disgruntled and impressed. “How do you know these things?”