“Can you follow them?” Irrith asked. She kept bouncing on the balls of her feet, as if chafing to do something. Probably to hunt Aspell, given her long-standing hatred—though she presumably wouldn’t say no to Nadrett, should he present himself.
Dead Rick shrugged. “Maybe—but they both know I’ve got a sharp nose. They’ll ’ave done something to cover their tracks. Don’t need no scent to tell me where Nadrett’s probably gone, though; ’e’s back in the Market by now.” Unless he had another bit of palace to hide in, but the skriker doubted it.
Irrith grimaced. Going after Nadrett there would mean war; it was why Hodge never did more than send his knights on occasional raids. Nadrett, like the other bosses, kept his fellows well armed. And even if the Prince’s men could beat them in a straight up and down fight, nothing in the Goblin Market ever went straight; within ten seconds it would be every faerie for himself, with bloodshed the Prince was too soft-hearted to risk. He certainly wouldn’t do it for something like this.
Aspell was a more interesting question. Would he go back to the Market, as well? There might be war there already, now that Nadrett had uncovered his treachery. If Dead Rick were Aspell, he wouldn’t risk it; he’d go to ground somewhere else, away from underlings that might take the chance to seize advantage for themselves.
He needed to find Aspell; he needed that photograph to help him bargain with Hodge. Irrith might help him out of the goodness of her heart, but he couldn’t count on any such sympathy from the Prince. Especially not if the Prince recognized Dead Rick as the dog who had attacked him in Blackfriars a few months ago.
Yvoir sighed and stood up from the pitted floor stone he’d been examining. “There is not much here I did not already know. I will look at the plates you brought; perhaps they will tell more.”
Perhaps was a thin word for Dead Rick to hang his hopes on—but it was better than he’d had yesterday, because at least he had the plates. “I’ll try to follow Aspell,” Dead Rick said, even though weariness dragged at him like lead.
Irrith immediately drew her gun, as if she expected him to find the sod as soon as they went outside. “I’ll come with you.”
Uncomfortable, he said, “You don’t ’ave to.”
“What are you going to do, yawn at him? He may be bleeding, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a threat.” The sprite’s lip drew up in a delicate snarl. “I didn’t trust him not to be a threat even when he was in prison for a hundred years. And it looks like I was right.”
Aspell wasn’t half the threat Nadrett was. But Dead Rick could tell there wasn’t much point in trying to convince Irrith of that. So long as she didn’t shoot their quarry on sight, he supposed it couldn’t hurt to let her come along. She was better company than Old Gadling or Gresh, at least.
In the end, though, it didn’t matter whether she came or not. There were no trails he could follow in the street above. The snaky bastard was gone, along with the ghost of Galen St. Clair.
Leckhampton House, Cambridge: August 12, 1884
“If you need me,” Eveleen Myers said in coolly polite tones, “I will be in my workshop.”
Contradictory impulses twisted Frederic Myers’s heart as his wife turned and swept down the corridor. He should stop her going; they should not leave matters as they were, angry and distant. But what could he say to mend that rift, when his mind kept drifting to another woman? Perhaps a few hours of work over her beloved photographs would calm her, and then they could talk. And in the meanwhile, he was guiltily glad of her absence, which would give him time to work on matters he could not share with her.
Had Louisa Kittering not come to possess his thoughts, he would not have hesitated to ask the Goodemeades and Mrs. Chase whether he could share the London Fairy Society—the true one—with his wife. Eveleen was not a psychical researcher herself, but the secret of the faeries’ presence would surely fascinate her. Yet now, with the two of them more estranged every passing day, he worried what she might do with that secret. Would she use it against him? Even betray the faeries’ trust?
Six months ago, he would have said no. But now his thoughts were so tangled, he could no longer tell what was sound judgment, and what merely the fearful whispers of his poor, overtaxed brain.
Work might settle Eveleen; it might settle him, too. Sighing, Myers went to his study.
He had promised the rest of the Society that he would draw up a plan for how they might introduce themselves to the larger world, if they chose to begin with the Society for Psychical Research. It was difficult, when he himself was so new to their world; he could scarcely be sure anything he might say to Sidgwick and the others would even be accurate. Where did faeries come from? How did the realm of Faerie itself relate to this world, and to Heaven and Hell? Was there any truth in Miss Harris’s theosophical speculation at the séance a few months ago, that a connection existed between the fae and the spirits of the dead? Fjothar, one of the faerie members of the Society, had given him three books written by their own scholars, describing the elements that made up their reality, but after reading through them all Myers still hardly understood it.
But he had promised, and he would try. The Goodemeades expected the fae had at most a few months before they must abandon London. Those who remained—in Rose House, or sheltering by other means—would wait until the exodus was complete, and then begin their emergence. It was the agreement they had formed with Hodge, the one they called Prince of the Stone. “By then, I won’t be in no condition to stop you anyway,” he’d said, with a gallows grin. Myers shuddered to think of what the fellow meant.
Safely closed away in his study, Myers searched for an empty notebook he could use to write up his plans. One he could hide from Eveleen. I never used to hide things from her… The thought slipped away, to be replaced by another. Louisa came to a few Society meetings. I should ask if she might be permitted to join us for the private ones. I should very much like to share them with her.
There ought to be plenty of empty notebooks, but he could not find them. I haven’t filled them already, have I? Eveleen would know, but he did not want to ask her. Frowning, Myers rummaged around in drawers, on the shelves, wondering where they might have gone. Finally he came across one he might use; there was writing inside, but it could not have been anything important, for its cover was unlabeled, and the notebook lay at the bottom of a towering stack that must have lain untouched for years.
Paging through, looking for empty pages he might use, Myers caught a word slipping past. Ectoplasm. Now, where had he heard that before?
From Sidgwick, at that séance—the one with the physical manifestation, where Miss Harris had proposed her theosophical theory. Curious, Myers turned back until he found the word again. The page was filled with bits of Greek and Latin, combined into different possibilities; not just ectoplasm but also teleplasm and various other alternatives, all under a header reading An Emanation of the Spirit, which was underlined twice.
All of it in his own handwriting—but he had no recollection of writing it.
Curiosity deepened. Myers went back to the beginning of the notebook. The pages were undated, but a reference to a row he had with Edmund Gurney told him it must have been started in early 1879. Strangely, it began with speculations not far afield from those of Miss Harris: links between ghosts and faeries, jotted notes about legends from different parts of the country, and then other things written down as if they were the true story, though he’d marked no references for them. Three kinds of apparitions, he’d noted; recent; recurrent; recalled. The recent, this notebook claimed, were swept away by the faeries every All Hallows’ Eve, sent on to their eventual rest. Different kinds of fae could see them: fetches, skrikers, church grims, and more. Then musings on where exactly these spirits resided—the astral plane of the theosophists?—and how someone might not only call a ghost from that realm, but enter it physically. But he had abandoned that line of inquiry at the page headed An Emanation of the Spirit, and pursued instead the question of the gauzy substance that accompanied true physical manifestations.