Sometimes I wondered about my own.
NINETEEN
The afternoon sunlight was bright after the muted light of the gallery, but the day's sunny disposition did not match my mood. Sam was right, he had given me something, but not enough. I knew that there were government files on my daughter and on me. I knew that files like that had existed since the thirteenth century. It tied into what I already knew about the Feyre.
When I was first presented to the High Court, Kimlesh had told me that the Feyre had taken a risk and mixed their bloodlines with those of humanity. She hadn't said when that happened, but I knew that the Quit Rents Ceremony, which was part of the barrier that kept the Seventh Court from visiting our world whenever they wanted, was almost eight hundred years old. That meant the barrier against Raffmir and his kindred dated from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, shortly before the Stone House, which Sam had mentioned, was moved to Bishopsgate and renamed Bethlem.
That humanity would treat its mad and vulnerable as freaks was not news to me. I had lived and worked in London for years and the sight of homeless, helpless individuals living in cardboard boxes and begging was so much part of the wallpaper that most of the time I just didn't see it. When occasionally something or someone got past the social blindness, the best I could offer was the price of a meal or a hot drink. Even then, I was never quite sure whether I was actually supporting a drug habit or an alcoholic binge. Some people were hard to help, but that had always been the case.
Blackbird had once told me that the genes of the Feyre were mixed with humanity and could manifest unpredictably in the population. She'd told me that some of those people were like her and became part of fey society, and some managed the way they were, rationalising their abilities as an uncanny talent or a psychic ability. I was reminded of Greg, who lived and worked in the community, using his fey sense to follow his vocation, knowing he was different but not knowing why. If he chose to regard that as a gift from God, who was I to argue with him?
Others, though, did not cope with the discovery of their fey nature. Fey gifts could be very strange, and if you woke one day to find your reflection was no longer a face you recognised, or that items in your possession took on odd and perverse properties, then I could see how that might tip the balance of your mind. It was hard enough to accept it for yourself, but then to try and tell friends and loved ones that weird things were happening to you, that your perception of the world had shifted radically, that inanimate objects held strange messages or that you could see the fragmented futures of other people? It was no surprise that people like that ended up in institutions for the delusional.
What happened, though, when it turned out that you could see the future? What happened when the mad people turned out to be right? There had been witch-trials in the seventeenth century. Were those women simply people who had inherited an ability they could neither understand nor control? Wasn't it better to treat those people as mad rather than hang them or burn them at the stake? Or was the treatment worse than the cure?
Mankind knew about the Feyre. The helicopter over our burning cottage, the strange markings on the truck outside the hospital where Alex was being treated, the men waiting outside my ex-wife's house – all these pointed to an organised response. Somewhere, someone knew what was going on and had for a long while. As Garvin said, they were prepared and every time they encountered the Feyre they learned a little more. Now they had my daughter and they were looking for me.
As I walked slowly back up through Whitehall it occurred to me that somewhere behind the blank exterior were civil servants making decisions about people's lives. Somewhere buried in a department – Health, maybe, or perhaps Defence – was a small office that dealt with the incarceration and treatment of people for whom there was no place in society: not criminals, not enemies, just people that didn't fit.
In a democratic country it should be impossible for people simply to disappear. That method of dealing with dissent ought to be confined to banana republics and despots, but I knew it happened, either through choice or through intervention, as in my daughter's case. They had tried to do it to me. A passing thought occurred to me that I could give myself up and thereby discover what happened to people like me, but I did not think I would enjoy their concept of care.
They must know that she had not intended to harm anyone. They must know that she was innocent, mustn't they? How could they blame a fifteen year-old girl who had been bullied – tortured even? The girls that had persecuted her had used methods that would be illegal in most decent countries – water-boarding, they called it, didn't they? A form of torture banned under international law. How could they blame someone for retaliating, if they had the opportunity?
Yet three girls had died. It might not be murder, but they were still dead. The state would treat her as a murderer. It brought home to me that even if I managed to find her, Alex would not be able to go back to her life. It made me regret telling Kayleigh, since they would never be able to resume their friendship. Their lives would diverge rapidly. Alex couldn't go back to school. She would not be able to live a normal life. The moment she appeared in normal society, she would be arrested, the same as me. More final than that, Kayleigh would grow up and get older. Alex would grow up, but once she reached her adult size, she was going to age far more slowly. Kayleigh would be dead before Alex looked middle-aged.
It meant she would no longer be able to live with her mother either. It left the issue of whether to tell Katherine that her daughter was alive unresolved. If it was me, I would want to know. I would need to know. If I had found out that she was alive and that someone close to me knew that, I would be incredibly angry. It made withholding the information from Katherine feel like treachery. I would hold back, though, until I had Alex back. I would not tell her now, only to have myself proved wrong later. We weren't out of the woods yet. Instead, I promised myself that as soon as I knew that Alex was safe, I would find a way to tell Katherine. She was her mother. It was not in me to let her continue what was left of her life believing that her daughter was dead, when she was alive.
I had turned across the lower end of Trafalgar Square down the Strand to the church of St Clement Danes, where I knew I could get access to the Way through the crypt, but then I stopped. I had become used to being fey, following their ways, adopting their methods, but there were other ways to find things.
I went north towards Drury Lane and the theatre district, looking for something that always popped up in the tourist areas: an Internet cafe.
The one I found can't have been there long, but even so it had the odour of stale sweat and the yellow stain of nicotine on the keyboards. A couple of youths were smoking outside as I entered and one of them followed me in to relieve me of the money for an hour's worth of Internet. I sat down and opened the screen on Google, typing in the letters B/BWPD. The full reference came up with nothing, but BWPD apparently stood for a number of things: Barrels of Water Per Day, a Boston PC support company, Black and White Polka Dot – none of it made any sense in the context of mental asylums. I branched out, trawling through the official websites for South London and Maudsley Health Trust, the sites for Broadmoor and Rampton secure hospitals, the Wikipedia pages for St Mary's Bethlehem and numerous sites on Bedlam at St George's Fields, where the Imperial War Museum was now housed.
I knew something had changed. When St George's Fields was handed over to the Imperial War Museum, the file references had altered. Sam said it was military and restricted access, but that in itself marked a shift in approach.