Cromwell Road, South Kensington: April 11, 1884
She saw no one outside when she arrived, and hesitated for just an instant, wondering. Had Miss Kittering gone elsewhere? If she’d come here, and already gone inside, there was nothing Eliza could do for her; by now she’d certainly been caught.
Then she saw a furtive shape dodging from shadow to gaslight shadow, toward the servants’ entrance on Queensberry Place.
Eliza couldn’t be both fast and quiet. She ran, and the furtive shape did, too, throwing herself down the steps to the area. Eliza caught her halfway down, with a grip hard enough to bruise.
Miss Kittering drew breath to scream, until Eliza clapped her other hand over the young lady’s mouth. “Hush, you stupid girl,” she hissed, half her attention on the servants’ door. “Unless you want them out here, before you’ve had a chance to save yourself from what’s waiting inside.”
The struggling stilled. When Eliza was sure Miss Kittering had calmed, she lifted her hand, and the young lady turned to face her.
Standing on a higher step put her at eye level with Miss Kittering, who licked her lips and tried to regain a measure of dignity. “What do you think you’re doing, grabbing me like that? You have no right to treat me this way; I’ll—”
Her voice was far too loud; the basement would be full of servants, swarming like ants in a kicked hill, and if Eliza didn’t stop her Miss Kittering would bring them all out to investigate. But she held an advantage: whatever secrets Miss Kittering might keep, she was a sheltered soul. Eliza, on the other hand, was a daughter of London’s Irish slums. Brendan Hennessy, a petty criminal she’d known in Whitechapel, had once told her people weren’t much different from dogs: the one who came out on top wasn’t necessarily the bigger or the stronger, but the one who growled louder, bit harder, and scared the other into submission.
Brendan Hennessy ended up hanged in Newgate for his growling and biting, and maybe Eliza would end the same way. But it was worth the risk, for Owen’s sake.
She seized hold of Miss Kittering’s shoulders, ignoring the young lady’s indignant squeak. “You’ll close your mouth and listen, you will. You’ve gone and sneaked out, without your mother’s permission, and her with no idea why… sure I could spin her such a tale, it would turn her hair white. A spiritualist meeting, it could be—even a secret lover—”
Miss Kittering went even more rigid. She might not want to marry that baron’s son, but if she lost her reputation, she’d be lucky to get any marriage at all.
“Or,” Eliza went on, before the girl could find her tongue, “I could be telling her something more respectable. It won’t save you the thrashing, and that’s the truth of it—but ’tis better than you’d have otherwise.”
The girl licked her lips again. She had no ability to hide her nerves; how had she evaded her mother’s control for this long? “Why… why would you do that?”
Thank Heaven for sheltered idiots, who don’t see a chance for power when it’s in their hands. But Miss Kittering didn’t know Eliza had told her own lies tonight; she was entirely vulnerable.
Eliza showed her teeth in a smile, and not a friendly one. “Because you’ll be helping me in return, you will. I—”
She didn’t get a chance to say anything more. The servants’ door opened to reveal Ann Wick, bracing a bin of refuse against her hip. The housemaid gaped at them, and Eliza seized Miss Kittering’s arm once more, stepping behind the young woman to hide Ann’s borrowed dress. With an effort, she summoned something more like her usual false demeanor. “She followed me,” Eliza said in a brisk tone, dragging the girl down the stairs. “Heard my mum was sick, and wanted to help; but as soon as she came, I turned around and marched her right home again. We shouldn’t bother Mrs. Kittering, I think, Mrs. Fowler can tell me what to do with the silly chit.”
Miss Kittering, blessedly, had the sense to keep her mouth shut.
The Goblin Market, Onyx Halclass="underline" April 11, 1884
Under the cool glow of a faerie light, the carte de visite in front of Dead Rick assumed an otherworldly aura. Who the stern-faced woman depicted in it was, he had no idea; it didn’t much matter. Her image fascinated him. The photograph was shoddy work, nothing to the sharp detail of a daguerreotype, but that very vagueness allowed him to spin a hundred stories about her. She was an upper-class wife, devoting all her time to the pressing question of what pattern her china should bear. She was a suffragist, campaigning to extend the vote to women. She was a frustrated bluestocking, more interested in books than a lady’s pursuits.
All he knew of her was that she was reaclass="underline" that she had lived, and sat for a photographer’s portrait, and given the resulting cards to her friends.
Proof of her existence. I should be lucky to leave so much behind.
The stone of his hidden refuge trembled faintly beneath him. A train, perhaps, or just one of the periodic tremors that shook the Onyx Hall. Dead Rick held his breath, waiting to see if it would grow stronger, but after a few seconds it subsided. As if the tremor had been a bell at the door, the voice spoke.
“What have you learned?”
Dead Rick stuffed the carte de visite into his waistcoat pocket and pushed his back against the wall. Even though he’d summoned the stranger, burying the bone near the pavilion in the old garden, it still made him uneasy to have anyone else sharing this space. Even if that someone else was just words in the air.
He said, “I knows a few things. But afore I go telling you anything, I need some proof.”
“Proof of what?”
“That you can get my memories back.”
The silence that followed sounded a great deal like a suppressed sigh. He could hear the stranger’s irritation echoing in his next words. “Haven’t we been through this before?”
“You told me something I didn’t know, and I think it’s true. But there’s lots of ways you might ’ave learned it. That don’t mean you can get my memories back. Do you know where Nadrett keeps them?” Dead Rick’s crossed arms were pressing in hard enough to make his ribs hurt. “Do you even know what they look like?”
It would be so easy for someone to play him. Dead Rick almost wished the stranger had never come to offer him hope; it made it that much harder to endure his life under Nadrett’s heel. Hope kept him from sinking into the blinding embrace of despair. It meant he had to keep fighting. But he couldn’t make himself give it up, and anybody who knew that could use it to lure him into damn near anything.
The voice was silent for long enough that Dead Rick wondered if it had been a bluff after all, and so easily called. Then came the answer: “Pieces of glass.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, before any tears could escape. It didn’t stop his ears, though, and the memory of sharp, shattering sound. When Nadrett wanted to punish Dead Rick, or just to remind him of the chain around his neck, he broke one of the stolen memories. The wisp of light that escaped was too vague for any detail to be made out, but it carried something—not quite a scent—that told Dead Rick it was his own.
Lost forever.
Through his teeth, he asked the question that really mattered. “Do you know ’ow to put them back?”
This time, the hesitation was much briefer. “No.”
Dead Rick slammed his hand against the floor, hard enough to bruise. “Then what fucking use are you to me?”