“Then,” Louisa said, “you go back to Islington. I trust you recall the house where the London Fairy Society gathers? There’s another meeting next Friday week; you should be free by then. Speak to the Goodemeade sisters privately, and tell them…” The young woman paused, and chose her next words with care. “Tell them you come in Cyma’s name, and are searching for the boy in that photo. They will help you get him back.”
“Why should they help me?” Eliza ran one hand over her ragged hair, and felt tears unexpectedly burning behind her eyes. “You still haven’t even said why you’re doing it.”
Louisa became very occupied with her gloves, tugging their delicate seams straight along her fingers. “Someone I… that is, someone convinced me it was the right thing to do. Someone whose good opinion I value, and do not want to lose.” Her mouth quirked, as if at an unfamiliar taste.
Eliza was not about to question it. She was not certain about the changeling’s advice, though. “A few months gone, I heard a lady from the Society tell Louisa Kittering that the others there were not ready for… certain truths.” A lady who, she strongly suspected, had subsequently taken the girl’s place.
“True enough, of some,” Louisa admitted. “But not of others. You needn’t fear saying anything to the sisters; they know more than you could imagine.”
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.