At a bronze-bound door, Irrith stopped, and faced him with a most peculiar expression. It looked like sorrow, turned into a smile. “The first time we met,” she said, “was two hundred years ago, I think. Something like that, anyway. You were part of the Onyx Court before I was, and fought in a war, on the Queen’s side. You mostly spent your time in the Crow’s Head, drinking and playing dice, but I paid you once to help me steal something from the mortals, and after that we were friends. Once I decided to stay in London, you showed me all your favorite bits, and taught me to like coffee.” Her smile brightened into real amusement, for an instant. “Tried to teach me to like gin, too, but nobody can do the impossible.
“I know that’s not very much. If you could stay longer, I’d tell you more, but really—how do you boil two hundred years down into something you can say? So instead I’ll say this: If there’s anything I can do to help you remember, all you have to do is ask.”
Ask. Not bribe, or pay, or bargain. She might as well have been speaking a foreign language, the words sounded so alien to his ears.
Dead Rick didn’t know how to answer it. He clung instead to the familiar. “If you ’ear anything about Chrennois—” How could she get word to him, without Nadrett finding out?
Irrith clapped him on the shoulder, with something more like a natural grin. “I’ll figure something out. Or somebody here will; we have a few sneaky sorts. If you get a message with the words ‘British Museum’ in it, that’s from me.”
He nodded. And then he turned his back on the Academy and left, before yearning could persuade him to stay.
Rose House, Islington: June 6, 1884
Any young lady who had recently suffered an outrage at the hands of a lunatic Irish maid might have been forgiven the desire to stay in bed. Indeed, that impulse was not so much forgivable as required; surely her nerves would demand the chance to recuperate, and in the meantime such bruising as she had suffered would have an opportunity to heal, before anyone saw her disfigured.
Louisa did not care a fig for her bruises, and the longer she stayed in bed, the more she would have to enchant Mrs. Kittering, who showed a most regrettable persistence in shaking off the persuasions laid upon her. Hearn, the Kitterings’ coachman, was more easily managed; as for the drunken maid Mary Banning, she did not even need enchantment. Sherry sufficed for her silence. With conveyance and escort thus arranged, Louisa set out for a spa west of the city, and went instead to Islington.
It was better for her health than any spa could have been. While the mead from which the Goodemeade sisters took their name might not be able to cure everything—a pistol ball to the head, for example, was beyond its powers—Louisa felt worlds better after downing a mug with unladylike enthusiasm. Mortals could keep their foul-smelling and fouler-tasting patent medicines; she would take faerie mead any day, and twice on Fridays.
Some of the effect, she admitted privately, might be credited to her surroundings. Brownies were very, very good at creating comfort, and the sisters had spent several hundred years perfecting it in their hidden home. Louisa was convinced the sisters had invented the notion of stuffing chairs hugely full of padding long before mortals ever thought of it. Rose House always smelled of good, clean things, herbs and flowers and fresh-baked bread, with never a hint of the coal-smoke stink of the world outside their door. And the hospitality, of course, was unmatched. But even had Rose House been a dirty hole furnished only with benches and rushlights, Louisa would have basked in its shelter. Some deep-seated part of her soul still could not quite believe that she was safe in the mortal world; spending so many days there without pause had set her skin to crawling with nervousness.
All of which the Goodemeades, with their splendid care for others’ well-being, seemed to sense. They held their questions back until Louisa had finished the mead and gave a satisfied sigh.
Then Rosamund pounced.
With the flat, disbelieving tone of one who knows the answer and does not expect to be surprised, she said, “What have you done?”
She had the decency to refrain from using a name. The sisters were far from stupid; undoubtedly they remembered a certain human girl who came to a few meetings of the London Fairy Society, and spoke to a certain faerie after the first one. They probably even knew that faerie had come to the meetings in hope of something particular, and it wasn’t just bread. Rosamund might not be able to see the face that lay behind the changeling’s mask, but that wasn’t necessary for her to guess what name that face had formerly borne.
But the woman who was now Louisa Kittering would not have been able to answer to that name, not without losing what she’d gone to such great lengths to gain. So, in gratitude for Rosamund’s discretion, she answered as meekly as she could. Not the question itself; that too was dangerous. Instead she addressed Rosamund’s actual concern. “It’s the only way I could see to stay. It isn’t enough to have a mortal who regularly tithes bread; that person could die, or go away, and besides, eating too much of their food is dangerous, even when it has been tithed. What kind of life would it be anyway, with no more shelter than what you can put in your mouth?”
Gertrude spoke with obvious sympathy. “You didn’t want to leave London.”
“That doesn’t justify—”
Rosamund snapped her mouth shut on the words that almost came out. Louisa hastened to add, “She begged me for it! The girl had a wild spirit; she felt trapped in her life, doomed to a future she didn’t want, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to go through all that running away would require. They would have tried to hunt her down—likely succeeded—and in a way, I suspect she was too soft-hearted to inflict that wound herself.”
“So instead you’ll do it for her.”
Louisa shrugged, seeing no point in denying it. “If I choose to vanish—” She said if, but meant when. The notion of protecting Myers from Nadrett, once in her mind, had not left; she might not even wait for her face to heal before seeking him out. Who knew but that Nadrett might snatch him, while she waited around for the bruises to fade? “I’m far better able to escape their hunt than she was. And I do not care if I cause someone heartache.”
“That’s the problem,” Rosamund said. “This is how it always goes with this kind of thing; the ones who suffer are the family. They don’t understand what’s happened, and you can’t explain it to them.”
Gertrude laid a hand on her arm. “Rose, two souls have been made happy by this—yes, perhaps other souls have been made unhappy, but from the sound of it, that would have happened even if everyone stayed where they were. The girl is free, and—”
She paused, looking at their guest, who gave the name by which they must call her now. “Louisa.”
“Louisa is safe.” Gertrude fixed her with a sharp look. “The girl is safe, too, I hope. Does she have money?”
“Yes. It’s real, too.” Taken from the sale of her better jewels. The absence of which was covered for now, but eventually the deception would be found out. Louisa had half-considered blaming it on the mad Irish maid, but the notion pricked her conscience—and reminded her of why she’d come. It wasn’t to hear a lecture from the Goodemeades.