No answer, but the door was unlatched when she tried the handle. “I’m coming in,” Eliza said, and opened it enough to peer through.
With fog and the grimy canvas window, the interior was gloomy as a tomb. Slowly Eliza’s eyes adjusted, and then she made out the figure sitting in the room’s one chair, near the smoldering hearth on the far wall. Right where I left her, four months ago. “Mrs. Darragh, ’tis Eliza,” she repeated, and came in.
The woman stared dully at the floor, hands loose in her lap as if she could not be troubled to do anything with them. The dim light was kind to her face, smoothing away some of the lines that had carved themselves there, but her hopeless expression made Eliza’s heart ache. The loss of Owen had broken his mother, and she’d never mended since.
Eliza left the door open a crack, for the light, and came to crouch at Mrs. Darragh’s feet. All the chatter she’d planned faded in the woman’s presence: it just wasn’t possible to say Oh, how well you look today, or anything else so false and cheerful. What good would it do? Nothing would raise her spirits, save one.
“Mrs. Darragh,” she murmured, taking the older woman’s slack hands in her own, “I’ve come to tell you good news, I have. I’ve almost caught him. The faerie.”
No reply. Eliza pressed her lips together, then went on. “I told you I saw him, last October? Followed him to Mansion House Station, and saw the others there, getting on the train to Charing Cross. He came from near Newgate, though, and that’s where I’ve been—waiting there, hoping to see him again, or another one. But I’m after finding something better. There’s a society in Islington; I’ll be going there in a few days to see if they know anything. Once I catch a faerie—any faerie—I’ll make it talk. I’ll make it tell me how to find Owen. And then I’ll go after the bastards who took him, and I’ll make them give him up, and I’ll bring your son back to you.”
The hands trembled in her grasp. Mrs. Darragh’s lower lip quivered, too, and she had the despairing expression of a woman who could not even summon the energy to cry.
“I will,” Eliza insisted, tightening her grip. Not too hard; the bones felt birdlike in her hands, as if they’d snap. “I haven’t abandoned him. Or you. I—”
The brightening of the room was her warning, and the cold air that swept in with it. “Haven’t abandoned her?” a sharp voice said from behind. “Odd way you have of showing it, Eliza O’Malley, vanishing without so much as a word.”
She didn’t rise from her crouch, or let go of Mrs. Darragh’s hands, but only turned her head. Maggie Darragh stood in the entrance, a heel of bread gripped in one fist, other palm flat against the door. Her battered bonnet shadowed her face, but Eliza didn’t need to see it to imagine her expression.
“You made it clear you didn’t want me around,” Eliza said.
Maggie made a disgusted sound and shoved the door away, so that it rebounded off the wall and swung a little back. “Not clear enough, I suppose, for here you are again, whispering your poison in her ears.”
The hands pulled free of Eliza’s, Mrs. Darragh tucking them in beneath her elbows, hugging her body. In the greater light, the pitiful ragged state of her dress was revealed. “Poison?” Eliza said. “It’s hope I bring, which is more than anyone else can be troubled to give her.”
Maggie’s laughter sounded like the cawing of a crow. “Hope, you call it, that makes Ma cry, and never an Owen to show for it. He’s dead, you stupid fool, dead or run off. Or are you still too much in love with him to admit it?”
Contempt weighted down the word love. They’d barely been grown, Eliza and Owen; just fourteen years of age. Too young for Father Tooley to marry them, though everybody knew that was where it would end. But it wasn’t love that made Eliza say, “He didn’t run off. I know who took him. And I’m going to bring him back.”
“You’ve had seven years,” Maggie said cruelly. “What are you waiting for?”
Eliza flinched. In a whisper, she said, “Not quite seven.” Not until October. Sometimes she felt like there was a clock ticking where her heart should be, marking off the hours and days and years. Running out of time. When the seven years were up, would Owen come back to them? Or would he be lost for good, beyond any hope of rescue?
Not the latter. She would never let it happen. She’d only let the years slip by because she had no clues, no lead to follow; it had been so easy to wonder if she imagined it all, as Maggie thought. But she didn’t wonder anymore. She knew they were real, and she had their scent. She would keep hunting until she caught one, and forced it to tell her what she wanted to know.
“Get out,” Maggie said, and Eliza could hear the angry tears in her voice. “We’ve troubles enough without you bringing more around. Leave Ma to mourn her son as she should.”
Eliza rose, wincing as her knees protested. “I don’t want to bring ye two any trouble, Maggie; you must believe me. Whatever Fergus has been saying about me, I’m no Fenian. I love Ireland as much as the next woman, and God knows it would be grand to get the English boot off our necks—but it isn’t my home; London is. I would never do anything to this city, not for a country I’ve never even seen, and not if it means blowing up innocent people, you may be sure. I didn’t leave Whitechapel because I was guilty. I did it because I thought I might be able to find Owen.”
Maggie stood silent for a moment, digging her fingers into the heel of bread. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, if not friendly. “Get out, Eliza. We can’t live in the past, and there’s no future worth speaking of. Stop dancing it in front of us, like it’ll do me or Ma any good. Just leave us be.”
And that hurt worse than any of it—the hopelessness, the defeated line of Maggie’s shoulders. They’d had such bright dreams, when Owen and Eliza were young, and now they’d been reduced to this ash. That, as much as Owen himself, was what the faeries had stolen from them.
Eliza fumbled blindly in her pocket, grabbed everything there. A little over a shilling in small coins: everything she’d saved, except what she needed to fill her barrow tomorrow, and her doss money for tonight. Those, she always kept in her shoe. She spilled it out onto the bedside table, next to the unlit stub of a candle. “God keep ye safe, Maggie, Mrs. Darragh,” Eliza said, and slipped out before pride could overcome need enough for her friend to protest.
Riverside, London: March 10, 1884
Rank moisture made the stone slick under Dead Rick’s feet. The area always smelled of damp; in the Onyx Hall’s twisted reflection of London above, this was the waterfront, the areas corresponding to the bank of the Thames. Distance from the wall had preserved it against the crumbling caused by the wall’s destruction, but the iron gas mains that ran alongside the new sewers brought their own kind of decay.
As the growing foulness underfoot proved. Dead Rick picked his way carefully, but it didn’t help him when the walls suddenly trembled around him, and the floor jerked beneath his feet; his heel slipped in something softly disgusting, and only a quick clutch at the wall saved him. He waited there, every muscle tense, until the shaking had stopped.
Train. Mostly they went unfelt, even though iron rails ran through the ground all the way from Blackfriars to Mansion House. The Onyx Hall’s enchantments—what remained of them—protected against that disruption; the palace might lie beneath London, but that didn’t mean the engines of the underground railway came charging in and out of their chambers. But this, one of the surviving entrances to the Hall, lay near where the line to Blackfriars Station crossed the buried River Fleet, and so the tremors came through more often.