Eliza soon discovered the Goodemeade sisters were the sort of well-meaning meddlers who couldn’t see two people in conflict without wanting to heal the breach. That was made quite clear by their all-too-innocent suggestion that she take Dead Rick with her to find Dónall Whelan.
She refused, of course. The man who was supposed to pass judgment on him, this Prince of theirs, hadn’t yet gotten around to doing so; he was busy with other matters, they said. Trying to save their Onyx Hall. Until he decided on a punishment, she was forbidden to take her own vengeance—she still didn’t know how they’d wheedled such a promise out of her. Given that, the last thing she wanted was to spend time in the skriker’s company.
But that was before she wasted a week in the East End, trying and failing to locate Whelan. He wasn’t among the crowds of men seeking work at the docks. He wasn’t in a pub, pickling himself with whiskey. He wasn’t in the tiny room he rented above a butcher’s shop in Limehouse, either, and his rent was due to run out today. The landlord didn’t know and didn’t care where his tenant had gone; nobody did.
If there was a photograph with part of Owen in it, nobody knew where it was, and she couldn’t assume it would ever be found. Which meant she needed the fairy doctor’s help. Which meant she needed help finding him.
The skriker walked beside her in human form, not saying a word. That was how Eliza wanted it. There was nothing he could say to her that she wanted to hear, except for directions to where Whelan might be—and nothing he wanted to say, it seemed. But she couldn’t help sneaking glances at him as they made their way through the dockside streets. The hard face that had once been so familiar had hardly changed; it was perhaps a shade harder now, marked with cynical distrust, but he hadn’t aged, any more than Owen had. It felt unfair, that everyone else should have stood still, while years of her life ground away.
At the butcher’s shop, she led him up to Whelan’s room. A simple thrust of his shoulder did for the latch; then he paced around like the dog he sometimes was, bending to sniff the bedclothes, an empty bottle, a lewd photograph tacked to the wall. “You have his scent?” Eliza asked, and when he nodded, she said, “Find him, then.”
The faerie exhaled sharply, not quite a snort. “All of London to search in, and you think I can find one bloody man. My nose ain’t that sharp.”
He’d always sounded like a cockney, but these days his speech had a rougher edge: less colorful slang, more bitter swearing. “I know where he spends his time,” Eliza said. “You can track him—”
“If we’re lucky.” He stiffened, and she knew he’d noticed the same thing she had, that casual use of we. “Come on,” he growled, and shoved past her to the stairs.
A little way into the slow process of quartering the riverside districts, Eliza remembered there was something she wanted to hear from Dead Rick. “Last year, in October—when the railway was bombed. I saw you, didn’t I?”
She was trailing behind him, letting his nose do the work; she saw his shoulders tighten, and that was answer enough. “The Goodemeades told me about the Underground. I’m surprised ye fellows stopped at a few bombs. Why not go further? Why not kill everyone working on them, until nobody will do it anymore?”
He whirled suddenly enough that she almost ran into him. “Because there’s two kinds of people in the Onyx Hall,” he snarled, inches from her face. “The ones as are too soft-hearted to kill mortals, and the ones as don’t care a twopenny damn what ’appens to anybody else. The first keep thinking there’s got to be some other way, and the second are too busy getting their own to do anything useful.”
Eliza set her jaw. “And which kind are you?”
His mouth twisted with self-loathing humor. “The third kind. What gets buggered up the arse by the second.”
He started off again. After a moment, she followed. He didn’t remember anything, the little green-eyed faerie had said. In the library, Eliza had been too angry to think much about what he said and did, but observing him now, the difference was painfully obvious. His face might be the same, but the man beneath it had changed profoundly.
Or had he? They could make illusions to cover their real bodies; maybe they did the same with their behavior. It could have been an act, before, and only now was she seeing the real Dead Rick.
She didn’t think so, though. He’d always been such a bad liar. And the man he’d become was too raw for him to mask, even when he tried.
That makes two of us, Eliza thought.
They tried docks and pubs, boardinghouses and brothels. In desperation, Eliza pointed Dead Rick north, into Whitechapel; Whelan was a Galway man, and might have looked to others from that county for help.
They asked in all the quarters Eliza could think of, but with no luck. Not until they left one of the narrow back courts into which the poor Irish crowded, and Dead Rick stopped, then knelt without warning to sniff the base of a brick wall.
He gathered odd stares from those passing by. “What is it?” Eliza whispered, crouching over him.
The faerie grimaced. “Piss and puke. Might ’ave been ’im. Three days ago, would be my guess.” He straightened and scratched at the back of his neck with dirty fingernails. “’E don’t smell too good. Sick, I mean.”
Sick. Eliza grabbed Dead Rick’s arm, dragging him up Turner Street, following a hunch.
The Royal London Hospital lay a stone’s throw away on Whitechapel Road, across from the Jews’ cemetery. Its beds were filled with the sick poor, and more waited for the next that might open up; sometimes the nurses didn’t even have time to change the sheets before a patient took the place of a corpse. Fortunately, when Eliza gave her name as Whelan and claimed Dónall as her father, she discovered he wasn’t in the infectious ward. When she asked what ailed him, the nurse snorted. “Too much drink, not enough food, old age… he’ll recover or he won’t; there isn’t much we can do for him. But Father Tooley asked that we give him a bed, so.”
Father Tooley? Whelan hadn’t set foot in a church since coming to England, but as the priest had once said, it didn’t matter how far a sheep had strayed from the flock; it still needed a shepherd’s care.
They were directed to a third-floor ward, thick with the smells of chemicals and sickness. Eliza spotted Whelan along the left wall, but when she tried to hurry to his side, Dead Rick’s hand clamped around her arm like a vise. “Careful. ’E’s dying.”
She froze. “What? How can you tell?”
His hard mouth twisted in something that wasn’t a smile. “Skriker, ain’t I? Death omen. I know when a man’s about to snuff it.”
They’d said he wasn’t infectious—but doctors had been wrong before. “What’s killing him?”
“Who knows? I don’t see the way, only the when. Don’t touch ’im, is all.”
He released her arm, and Eliza went forward more carefully. Not that she’d been intending to throw her arms around Whelan in the first place, but now she kept a wary distance. “Mr. Whelan… Dónall Whelan, can you hear me?”
He didn’t look like a dying man, any more than usual. But he didn’t rouse at her voice, until she wrapped her shawl over her hand—she hadn’t had gloves since the workhouse—and touched his shoulder. A firmer shake brought his head rolling across his pillow, and he opened his rheumy eyes. At first she wasn’t sure he recognized her, but then he said, “You’re no nurse.”
“I’m not.” Eliza wet her lips. Damn that faerie. The questions she wanted to ask had all but flown her mind; all she could think was that the man in front of her was dying. “Has it come to such a bad pass, Dónall Whelan, that you’d be looking to the priests for help?”