Mrs. Chase had said nothing of that when she approached him at the April meeting about joining a second, more select group. Explanations had waited until he came to tea a week later—explanations, and a test; his reactions then, he suspected, had determined whether they would open the rose arch in the wall and admit him to the Goodemeades’ home below. He had passed, and thereby joined the real London Fairy Society.
It was not a topic he’d ever known much about. Myers’s notion of “fairies” owed a great deal to the sort of sentimental picture books published for children nowadays, with delicate winged creatures floating about flower gardens. Instead he found himself in an underground house furnished like an idyllic, rustic cottage, taking tea with a mixture of mortals and fae, none of whom were tiny and possessed of wings. The Goodemeades, while small, were plump, homespun creatures; Lady Amadea was the height of an ordinary woman and statuesque in her beauty. Another short fellow, by the name of Tom Toggin, had a face that could have belonged to some lady’s Chinese pug—though he assured Myers that goblins were often far uglier than he.
And then there were the mortals: men and women carefully selected by the Goodemeades, judged trustworthy enough to know the secret of the faeries’ presence in London. Myers made his greetings to them, then settled himself in a comfortable chair, waiting for the meeting to begin.
He caught Tom’s murmured question to Gertrude Goodemeade. “How many refugees do you think you could pack in here, if you had to?”
“It depends on how well they like each other,” she said—but her levity was a thin mask over real concern.
“I think Hodge is about ready to start—”
Footsteps on the stairs interrupted him. A slender faerie flamboyantly dressed like a carnival barker leapt into the room, struck a grand pose, and announced in a thick Irish accent, “Mistresses and masters, my lady Wilde!”
Startled, Myers rose with the others. The woman who entered was not the grand lady that introduction led him to expect; her shabby-genteel clothing, in widow’s black, spoke clearly of having fallen on hard times. She had the drooping look of a lush-bodied woman reduced by age and circumstance; though Myers judged her to be younger than Mrs. Chase, she moved like the older of the two. Tom hurried forward to help escort her to a chair.
“Lady Wilde?” Myers repeated, when they were introduced. She had not been here the previous month; he would have remembered. “The poetess? I did not know you were in London.”
“I have lived here for some years now,” she said, as he bent over her hand. “With my two sons.” Her own accent was a musical lilt next to her faerie companion’s thick brogue.
Myers bowed again. “I heard your name mentioned at one of the public Society meetings; I might have guessed you would be involved with its more private face. It is an honor to meet you, Lady Wilde.”
People settled into their seats once more. “Who else are we waiting for?” Lady Amadea asked. “You said there was another young woman you were considering—”
Rosamund shook her head. “Miss Baker, but unfortunately she didn’t come to last week’s public meeting. Next month, perhaps. We haven’t seen Miss Kittering again, either, so no decision yet as to whether we should invite her.”
“What about Cyma?” the Irish faerie fellow asked.
The Goodemeade sisters exchanged worried looks. “We haven’t seen her,” Gertrude said quietly. “Not since the earthquake.”
Earthquake? Myers saw his own confusion mirrored among several of the mortals in the room. Not Lady Wilde, though. Or any of the fae. Rosamund took a deep breath and spoke. “It’s time we shared a few things with the rest of you. It—well, it sounds terribly dramatic to say this is the ‘true purpose’ of our Society, particularly since nothing says we must have only one purpose, and all the others must be false. But there is something else Gertie and I had in mind, when we decided to begin these meetings, and given events elsewhere, the time for it has come.”
“The time to talk about it,” her sister corrected her.
Rosamund nodded. “Yes, of course. We don’t want to rush into anything.
“All of you—our human friends—know the difficulties we faeries face here in London. Religion isn’t so bad anymore; people aren’t as pious as they used to be, and it doesn’t hurt too badly if a man uses the name of divinity as a curse, without much believing in what it stands for. It’s still a problem, of course, but not nearly as much as iron is.”
Mrs. Chase had come quietly downstairs while they spoke, having presumably closed the parlor arch behind her. When Rosamund paused, Myers said guiltily, “I neglected to bring bread. But I will fetch some when we are done here, and tithe it upstairs before I leave.” Others echoed him.
“Thank you,” Rosamund said, and it sounded heartfelt. “But unfortunately, while bread helps, it can’t solve our problems.”
Gertrude gestured at the rustic comfort of their home. “Rose House isn’t the only place of this sort in London. There’s another one, much bigger than this, but it’s falling apart; all the changes in the City are destroying it. Soon enough, all the fae who live there now will have to go somewhere else. Out of London. Maybe out of this world entirely.”
“Flitting,” Lady Wilde said. “Collectors of folklore have been gathering the stories for years.”
Rosamund nodded. “But some folk are determined to stay. The two of us certainly are, and we’ll take in whoever we can. We know that someday, though, our house may face the same problem. Likely it will. So we have to think about what we can do to prevent that.”
She drew in a deep breath, then held it, as if unwilling to release the words it bore. Gertrude did it for her. “Rose and I have wondered for a long time now if maybe it wasn’t a mistake, keeping our presence here secret. What might have happened if we showed our faces, right from the start, and been a part of the city as it grew. An open part. We can’t go back and change that, of course—but there’s always the future, isn’t there? And we’re thinking of telling the world that we’re here.”
Again, none of the fae were surprised. It was, as Rosamund had said, a notion they had in mind when they formed this society. But among Myers’s fellow mortals…
“It has been done a bit in Ireland,” Lady Wilde said, while everyone else gaped. “When my late husband withdrew to Moytura and began collecting the local folklore, two Connemara faeries came to him and told him their stories. He never published them, and I myself have not yet decided what to do with the tales. But in Ireland, ’tis still common for people to know about the faeries nearby—if not as common as it once was.”
Myers found his tongue at last. “Are you not afraid that this might be even more dangerous to you?”
“Of course we are,” Gertrude said, with a touch of sharpness. “That’s why we’re being careful. The public meetings to see who’s interested, and then these private meetings for the ones we decide we can trust; and now we’re going to discuss it until we’re blue in the face.”
“And no matter what we decide, we aren’t doing anything yet,” Rosamund added. “Admitting our presence in London won’t save the Onyx Hall—that’s the other place we mentioned—and not everyone there thinks we should do this.” By the faint embarrassment in her tone, the opposition was in a clear majority. “But we intend to talk to the ones who do end up staying in London—especially the ones staying with us—and we’d like to be able to present them with a plan. Some notion of how this might be done, as safely as possible, with the best chance of success.”