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.
The old woman’s brow knitted in confusion. “I’m afraid they aren’t here, Miss Baker.”
“I know that,” Eliza said. Belatedly, she realized she sounded like an Irishwoman. She hadn’t attempted to pass for English since she attacked the changeling; after that, there hadn’t been much point. Now she was out of the habit. It doesn’t matter—I hope. “But you seemed friendly with them; you can tell me where they live.”
Maybe the accent did matter; Mrs. Chase seemed deeply reluctant. “They are… rather private individuals, Miss Baker. It wouldn’t be right of me to direct you to their house, out of the blue, without even asking them first. But if you would like to write a letter—”
“I do not have time for that!” Eliza grimaced, regretting the sharpness of her tone. “Forgive me, Mrs. Chase. This is very important. I come in Cyma’s name; I’m searching for someone, a friend who’s been missing for a very long time, and I was told the Goodemeades could help. Please, I must find him.”
She didn’t miss the way Mrs. Chase’s face stilled at the name “Cyma.” When Eliza finished speaking, the old woman sat in thought, one finger tapping on her lower lip. Then she nodded decisively. “I cannot send you to their house, but I can ask them to meet with you here. Go to the Angel on the corner—” Rising, she pressed a sixpence into Eliza’s palm. “Have something to drink, and settle your nerves. Come back in half an hour, and we will see what we can do.”
What pride Eliza had once possessed was long since gone. She took the sixpence without hesitation; it was all the money she had in the world. But when Mrs. Chase showed her to the door, Eliza did not go to the coaching inn on the corner of High Street. She started in that direction, but stopped as soon as she could watch the door of No. 9 discreetly, and there she waited.
It wasn’t so much that she intended to follow Mrs. Chase—or Mary, if she sent the maid—to the sisters’ house. Simply that there was something decidedly odd about this entire affair. Clearly there was more going on here than Eliza could see, and she’d had enough of that in her life; right now, information and that sixpence were the only things of value she had.
But the door to No. 9 did not open again. Eliza fretted, rolling the coin between finger and thumb. There might be a back way, some garden gate through which the maid could go, though it did not look like that kind of house. She cursed her failure to look out the window during the meeting a few months ago. Or perhaps the explanation was simpler; Mrs. Chase had only intended to get rid of her, and was not contacting the Goodemeades at all. But in that case, wouldn’t she send her maid to fetch a constable? She couldn’t possibly believe Eliza would fail to return.
Twice she had to move to avoid suspicion, but she came back almost immediately, fast enough that she doubted anyone had slipped away in her absence. Which surely they would have done, if they knew she was spying, and wanted to go to the sisters unseen.
Eliza knew her thoughts were running like panicked dogs, inventing one wild theory after another, all of them probably wrong. She couldn’t help it. To be so close, after all these years—her fingers ached, the coin’s edge digging into them. She loosened her grip, and waited for half an hour to pass.
As soon as she thought it had, she marched back down the street and rapped on the door again.
This time the maid was expecting her. “They’re waiting for you in the parlor,” she said.
They? Eliza opened the door and found three women inside: Mrs. Chase, and the mirror images of the Goodemeade sisters. Where the devil did they come from? She was certain they hadn’t slipped past her on White Lion Street.
Upstairs, perhaps. Mrs. Chase wouldn’t be first widow to seek out female companionship in her old age; maybe the Goodemeades lived here, too, and didn’t want that known. It hardly mattered, though. They were here.
Now she just had to convince them to help her find Owen.
“Miss Baker,” the rose Goodemeade said, “we’re so terribly sorry about what you’ve been through. Please, do sit down—Gertrude, the tea, if you would—and we will do everything we can to help you.”
The changeling had told the truth. Dumbfounded, all the arguments she’d prepared dying on her lips, Eliza took a seat. That easily. They scarcely know me, let alone Owen—and yet, without so much as a single question, they offer to help. She accepted the teacup from the daisy Goodemeade, Gertrude, and almost laughed. Sitting in a parlor, drinking tea out of a porcelain cup, as if she were a respectable woman. And preparing to talk about faeries.
Once she’d taken a sip of the tea, the other Goodemeade—Rosamund, that was her name; it should have been easy to remember—smoothed her hands over her skirt in a businesslike fashion. “Now. Where did you hear that name? Cyma, I mean.”
“From Miss Kittering,” Eliza said.
The sisters exchanged glances. “How exactly did she put it?” Gertrude asked.
Eliza thought back. “She said I should tell ye I came in Cyma’s name.”
They both seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. “And she sent you here for help, I imagine,” Rosamund said. Eliza nodded. The tiny woman shook her head in fond exasperation. “Wouldn’t bring you herself, I see. I wish I could say I’m surprised, but—well. Never mind. Tell us what happened, from the beginning.”
A simple request. Yet when Eliza opened her mouth, nothing came out. She had told Quinn the truth, and that was far more dangerous… but what if they doubted her? The others had spoken so much at the Society meeting; she had no idea what these women knew or believed about faeries. Because you left, she remembered suddenly. It had been lost in the panic of chasing Louisa Kittering. They were trying to invite you to something further. If you had stayed to listen…
Rosamund seemed to guess her thoughts. Smiling encouragment, she said, “Tell us everything. Faeries and all. You won’t surprise us, I assure you.”
Hearing the word out of the other woman’s mouth both unsettled Eliza and steadied her. Licking her lips, she began.
“When I was a girl, my friend Owen and I came across a group of boys tormenting a dog. They’d looped an iron chain around his neck, and they were dragging him about, throwing stones to make him yelp… boys do things like that all the time, and most people hardly take notice, but this dog saw me.” Even now, years later, she remembered those eyes. However much she tried not to. “One look at him, and I—I made the boys stop.”
Ran at them shrieking, actually, and knocked the biggest lad down before he could throw the broken bottle in his hand. Its jagged edge gouged her arm as they fell, but Eliza didn’t feel that until later. She’d slammed his head against the ground, and one of the others got her around the neck, but by then Owen had come to her aid. Six boys, and only two of them; but they were fourteen, and the others a good deal younger. Besides, there’d been a fury in Eliza that none of them were eager to face.
Her hands clenched again, in the stained fabric of her skirt. Eliza stared at them as she said, “The dog let me take the chain from its neck. I knew even then it was in an odd way; sure any dog hurt like that would have tried to bite, but it just stood there and let me help. Once the chain was gone, it licked my hand and limped off, and I thought that was the end.”