Wiping his brow, Hodge said, “Where the ’ell did you go? Bonecruncher ’ere said you was there one minute, gone the next.”
“Ran into an old friend,” Irrith said, with her usual breezy unconcern. “And I heard a very interesting rumor. If somebody had a passage to Faerie—here, I mean, or somewhere nearby; not off in a foreign country—how much would people pay to use it?”
“It don’t exist.”
“Pretend for a moment that it did.”
The rest of the raiding party looked just like Hodge felt. Skeptical, baffled, hopeful, confused. “Depends on who’s buying,” Hodge said, after a moment’s thought. “The ones as think they can manage ’ere wouldn’t go if the price was dear—but the desperate ones, they’d pay anything.”
Dame Segraine said, “Oaths, even. All those refugees in the night garden, the Goblin Market—they’d swear fealty to anyone who could promise them safety.”
Irrith dropped heavily into a chair. “That’s what I was afraid of. According to my little bird, Nadrett might have something of the sort up his sleeve.”
Cries of dismay burst from the others, rising above their exhaustion. Having any Goblin Market boss in control of a passage to Faerie would be bad enough, but Hodge would choose Hardface or Lacca—maybe even Valentin Aspell—over Nadrett. “How could he?” Sir Cerenel asked, in a tone that suggested the answer he wanted to hear was, He can’t. “There’s nothing near London, not anymore; we would know if there were. They were destroyed years ago, and it’s not as if we can make—”
He cut off abruptly, a sudden expression of hope fading into horror. Peregrin swore, then asked, “Is that even possible?”
“I’ll ask the Academy,” Hodge said, grim and cold. The means to make a passage to Faerie… that could save any number of lives.
In the right hands.
“I say we avoid the whole problem,” Bonecruncher said, fingering the guns he was never without. His eyes flamed brighter. “Kill that bastard now, like we’ve always wanted to.”
“But if he has something useful—”
“Bonecruncher, if we go after Nadrett we’ll be dead before we get ten steps—”
Hodge thumped the arm of his chair, and got silence. “We ain’t going to kill Nadrett. If ’e does ’ave some way to make a passage, we need to know about it, and get it away from ’im.”
“Small chance of that,” Peregrin said. “For the same reason we can’t kill him. Nadrett’s too powerful in the Market.”
“And anybody who knows anything is surely sworn not to tell,” Segraine added.
A thoughtful smile began to grow through Hodge’s weariness. “Maybe not. Remember La Madura?” Their grins said they certainly did; the Spanish nymph had spent no little time in Hodge’s bed, before he lost the strength for such exercise, and Sir Adenant escorted her to a safer land than London. “She told me something interesting. So far as she knowed, nobody in ’is gang swears any oaths.”
It got him an array of disbelieving looks. Then Irrith’s eyes widened, and she said, “Ash and Thorn. He’s an oathbreaker?”
They were rare, so far as Hodge knew. Faerie oaths were more than just words; they bound their speakers to obey. Breaking one was all but impossible. Any faerie who managed it found he could no longer swear oaths—or receive them. One’s word, given to a fellow who didn’t keep his own, was meaningless.
Someone else could accept oaths on his behalf—a trusted lieutenant, perhaps—but that would require Nadrett to trust his ally. And he wouldn’t want to draw attention to his oathbroken status by such measures, anyway.
Bonecruncher growled low in his throat. “No wonder he’s such a ruthless bastard. He’s got nothing but fear to keep them in line with.”
“Lucky for us, frightened people ain’t the same thing as loyal,” Hodge said. “Irrith, who’s your little bird with the rumor?”
The sprite frowned, fingers twisting about each other. “I’d… rather not say. I think there’s something odd going on there.”
If it was someone in the Market, “odd” probably meant “bad.” But he’d let it pass for now. “Well, can you try to find out more? Maybe nose out somebody in Nadrett’s gang that might turn on ’im, since they ain’t bound by oaths?”
She nodded, and the bands around the Prince’s heart relaxed a notch. Locked carefully away in another room was a stockpile of bread, in preparation for the final collapse. When that day came, he would do his best to ensure that every faerie here had enough to see them clear of London. But if he could give them a path to true safety instead, in Faerie itself…
It was a Goblin Market rumor, one of the most untrustworthy things in the world. The hope was too great to ignore, though.
Sighing, Hodge levered himself to his feet. “Get to that, then. The rest of you, let’s ’elp Amadea with the kids you brought back.”
St. Anne’s Church, Whitechapeclass="underline" April 13, 1884
Mrs. Fowler might be a stout evangelical, but no one in the Kittering family itself felt any deep religious sentiment. The family attended church regularly because it was the respectable thing to do; some of the servants didn’t even bother with that much. Eliza herself had never been reliable about going to Mass—mostly because she was either working, or too exhausted from work to bother.
But six months and more away from the familiar ground of her parish created a weight of longing that finally broke her common sense. Special Irish Branch was looking for Fenians in South Kensington; going from there to a Catholic church for Easter Mass was very nearly the stupidest thing Eliza could do, short of walking into Scotland Yard and cursing the peelers out in Irish. She knew that, and she didn’t care. She wanted the comforts of the familiar. So she asked for, and received, permission to visit her supposed mother for Easter Sunday, and went back to Whitechapel.
With precautions, of course. She left Cromwell Road before dawn, when the streets of South Kensington were almost completely deserted, and walked along the edge of Hyde Park, up Piccadilly, before plunging into the tangled quarters of Soho. Skirting Seven Dials—as bad a district as Whitechapel, and more dangerous for being unfamiliar to her—she paused in a back alley of Holborn to change into the clothing she’d bought from a secondhand shop, an old-fashioned full-skirted dress with an equally old-fashioned bonnet. It made her look like an old woman, and that suited her very well.
Thus disguised, she took the long way around the City, bending north through Clerkenwell and Shoreditch. Nearly seven miles in total, and the sun was well up when the familar rose window of St. Anne’s came into view.
By then she was hardly alone on the street. Nowadays it was lawful to worship in a Catholic church, even if the English wished no one would; and Easter drew out many people who found more frivolous uses for all the other Sundays in the year. It was easy for Eliza to lose herself in the crowd. If there were any Special Branch men doing the same, out of uniform, they shouldn’t recognize her in these old clothes. And if they’d managed to follow her from South Kensington, without her noticing, they were better than anyone gave them credit for.
Eliza’s throat tightened at the first notes of the choir’s entrance chant. The priests began their procession down the aisle, robed in their Easter vestments, followed by the deacons and the altar boys. That’s Biddy McManus’s youngest boy, Eliza thought, seeing that one of them was much shorter than the others—and that was her undoing.