With no further ado, Andrews bowed him through the doorway. Red Lion Street, lined with rows of smaller houses, opened without warning into placid fields, just a few blocks to the north. A broad avenue led to the brick heights of the Foundling Hospital, but Galen and Dr. Andrews went left, along a footpath into the Lamb’s Conduit Fields.
He breathed much more easily out here, and not just because the nearest people were well distant, hard at work in the little market gardens that served London with fresh vegetables and flowers. The sunlight was warm without being oppressively hot, and the buttercups blooming along the sides of the path unknotted his shoulders just by their cheerful color. In such surroundings, the existence of a dark and hidden world beneath London seemed more like a point of curiosity than a threat. That was the greatest risk: that someday the Onyx Court would be exposed to one who saw them as an enemy. Galen was determined to protect himself, and the court, from that error.
Dr. Andrews gave him the time he needed to marshal his thoughts. They ambled along in silence, until Galen took a deep breath and launched into the speech he’d so carefully prepared.
“I must confess, Dr. Andrews, that while I’ve been grateful for your patronage in the Royal Society, from early on, I had an additional motive in cultivating your acquaintance. I hoped you might be able to provide me with a touch of assistance on a rather pressing matter. The questions you pursue—the nature of mortality, and the relationship between mind and body, spirit and matter—those have very direct bearing upon my concerns. I saw in your quest the opportunity not just to solicit assistance, but to offer it to you in return. You see, sir, I have these several years now been closely involved with a number of individuals upon whom mortality has no hold.”
Andrews had been walking this entire time with his hands clasped at the small of his back and his eyes raised to the sky, enjoying the scents of summer. Now he lowered his chin, so that his face fell into shadow, and turned a look of astonishment upon Galen.
He said nothing, though, for which Galen was grateful. If interrupted now, he might lose the thread of his explanation for good. “I’m well aware of the extraordinary nature of that claim. I assure you, Dr. Andrews, that I am entirely serious, though what I’m about to say to you may seem otherwise. These individuals live in London, but in secret; they never go about in public undisguised. Some of them have been here for centuries, and could tell you at first hand what it was like to live under the Tudors. They aren’t perfectly immortal—they can be slain—but in the absence of violence, they live forever.”
Here he paused to swallow, wishing he had some drink to wet his terribly dry mouth, and in that pause Dr. Andrews responded. “And who, may I ask, are these extraordinary immortals of which you speak?”
Dr. Johnson’s scornful face rose, unbidden, in Galen’s memory. He’d avoided the word deliberately, putting the meat of his explanation first, because he recalled the mockery of that great man, and did not wish to invite it a second time. But the word must, inevitably, be said.
“I speak, sir, of faeries.”
Andrews didn’t laugh. He didn’t make any sound at all.
“They aren’t the silly creatures of Shakespeare’s fancy,” Galen said. Well, some of them were—but those didn’t matter. “They exist in many varieties, from regal to foul, and not only might they teach you the very secrets you wish to learn… Dr. Andrews, they need your help.”
They had drifted to a halt in the middle of the path, surrounded by foxgloves and sunshine and the hard-packed dust of the ground. In the near distance, ordinary Londoners went about their work, blissfully free of the screaming apprehension that gripped Galen’s throat again, strangling him more with every moment in which Dr. Andrews did not respond.
He has to believe me. He must.
“Mr. St. Clair,” Andrews said, then stopped.
His chin was down even farther now, the brim of his hat concealing his expression. His hands were still behind his back, and in the set of his shoulders Galen saw rigid tension. It was to be expected; no one could take such a revelation in stride. But once he had a moment to assimilate it—
Andrews raised his head, and met Galen’s eyes with sober concern. “Mr. St. Clair, I’m not certain what possessed you to bring me out here with such a story. My guess is that you have been deceived by a mountebank—perhaps one offering wild promises of restoring your family’s fortune; perhaps one merely preying on your admirable heart, with these tales of faeries in need of a savior. I shudder to think what assistance he has asked of you.”
“There is no mountebank!” Galen exclaimed, horrified. “Dr. Andrews—”
The gentleman’s mouth hardened. “If no one has deceived you, then I must conclude that you are attempting to deceive me. I do not wish to know what your request would have been. Should I learn that, I would be forced to go to your father and share the news of this unfortunate encounter. As it stands, Mr. St. Clair, I offer you this much: I will not tell your father, nor will I bring any trouble upon you for wasting my time and goodwill. But in return, I must insist that you cease to attend the Royal Society. I can no longer in good conscience admit you as my guest, and should you persuade your father to do so again, I will speak against it to Lord Macclesfield. Have I made myself clear?”
He could have torn Galen’s heart from his chest and stomped it into the dust and he would not have been more clear. Galen wished he could sink into that dust, or leap into the sky and flee on the wings of a hawk—anything that would remove him from this sunny lane, and the disgusted gaze of Dr. Andrews.
Like an automaton’s, his mouth opened and formed words, without the instruction of his brain. “Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Andrews made a curt bow, barely more than a slight twitch forward. “I believe you can find your way home from here. Good day, Mr. St. Clair.”
Around the point when Irrith followed Galen to Red Lion Square, she had to admit she was spying on him.
How else was she to satisfy her curiosity? He was ludicrously easy to follow; a simple glamour, and she could shadow him wherever he went. Not into Royal Society meetings, where she would have to pretend to be one of the members, but other places were open to her. She visited his favourite bookshop, and saw what titles interested him. She loitered in his favourite coffeehouse, drinking the foul, bitter tonic while he played games of chance with his friends. She even investigated his house, with his three sisters and his tyrannical father.
It wasn’t spying. It was…
Very well, it’s spying.
And it sounded a bit shameful when she admitted that. Especially since she was neglecting the task Lune had set her, the concealment of England. Well and good to say she was waiting on the Queen’s negotiations with the Greeks and the folk of the sea, but Irrith had better things to do with her time than spying on the Prince.
She’d been considering sneaking into the house of the Marvellous Menagerie, to overhear what Galen might be saying, but now it didn’t seem like such a good idea. She was on the verge of convincing herself to go home when Galen emerged once more, this time in the company of that man. Dr. Andrews. The one with the fake satyr.
Following someone through green fields wasn’t shameful; it was one of her favourite pastimes in Berkshire. And she was very, very good at it. Freed from her doubts, Irrith crept close enough to hear Galen’s unbelievable speech, and Andrews’s unbelieving reaction.
She bit down on a curse. While the two men took their leave of each other, going separate ways, she fought the urge to chew on the brambles that concealed her. I should have warned Galen. I knew, when I asked him about satyrs—this isn’t a man who wants to believe in faeries. But she hadn’t realised that was what the Prince had in mind.