Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.
—Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit
CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
Map
Prologue
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Dramatis Personae
By Marie Brennan
Copyright
PROLOGUE
The Onyx Hall, London: January 29, 1707
The lights hovered in midair, like a cloud of unearthly fireflies. The corners of the room lay in shadow; all illumination had drawn inward, to this spot before the empty hearth, and the woman who stood there in silence.
Her right hand moved with absent surety, coaxing the lights into position. The left hung stiff at her side, a rigid claw insufficiently masked by its glove. Without compass or ruler, guided only by bone-deep instinct, she formed the lights into a map. Here, the Tower of London. To the west, the cathedral of St. Paul’s. The long line of the Thames below them, and the Walbrook running down from the north to meet it, passing the London Stone on its way; and around the whole, touching the river on both sides, the bent and uneven arc of the city wall.
For a moment it floated before her, brilliant and perfect.
Then her fingertip reached up to a northeastern point on the wall, and flicked a few of the lights away.
As if that had been a summons, the door opened. Only one person in all this place had the right to interrupt her unannounced, and so she stayed where she was, regarding the newly flawed map. Once the door was closed, she spoke, her voice carrying perfectly in the stillness of the room. “You were unable to stop them.”
“I’m sorry, Lune.” Joseph Winslow came forward, to the edge of the cool light. It gave his ordinary features a peculiar cast; what would have seemed like youth in the brightness of day—more youth than he should claim—turned into strange agelessness under such illumination. “It is too much in the way. An impediment to carts, riders, carriages, people on foot … it serves no purpose anymore. None that I can tell them, at least.”
The silver of her eyes reflected blue as she traced the line of the wall. The old Roman and medieval fortification, much patched and altered over the centuries, but still, in its essence, the boundary of old London.
And of her realm, lying hidden below.
She should have seen this coming. Once it became impossible to crowd more people within the confines of London, they began to spill outside the wall. Up the river to Westminster, in great houses along the bank and pestilential tenements behind. Down the river to the shipbuilding yards, where sailors drank away their pay among the warehouses of goods from foreign lands. Across the river in Southwark, and north of the wall in suburbs—but at the heart of it, always, the City of London. And as the years went by, the seven great gates became ever more clogged, until they could not admit the endless rivers of humanity that flowed in and out.
In the hushed tone of a man asking a doctor for what he fears will be bad news, Winslow said, “What will this do to the Onyx Hall?”
Lune closed her eyes. She did not need them to look at her domain, the faerie palace that stretched beneath the square mile enclosed by the walls. Those black stones might have been her own bones, for a faerie queen ruled by virtue of the bond with her realm. “I do not know,” she admitted. “Fifty years ago, when Parliament commanded General Monck to tear the gates from their hinges, I feared it might harm the Hall. Nothing came of it. Forty years ago, when the Great Fire burned the entrances to this place, and even St. Paul’s Cathedral, I feared we might not recover. Those have been rebuilt. But now…”
Now, the mortals of London proposed to tear down part of the wall—tear it down, and not replace it. With the gates disabled, the City could no longer protect itself in war; in reality, it had no need to do so. Which made the wall itself little more than a historical curiosity, and an obstruction to London’s growth.
Perhaps the Hall would yet stand, like a table with one of its legs broken away.
Perhaps it would not.
“I’m sorry,” Winslow said again, hating the inadequacy of the words. He was her mortal consort, the Prince of the Stone; it was his privilege and duty to oversee the points at which faerie and mortal London came together. Lune had asked him to prevent the destruction of the wall, and he had failed.
Lune’s posture was rarely less than perfect, but somehow she pulled herself even more upright, her shoulders going back to form a line he’d come to recognize. “It was an impossible task. And perhaps an unnecessary one; the Hall has survived difficulties before. But if some trouble comes of this, then we will surmount it, as we always have.”
She presented her arm to him, and he took it, guiding her with formal courtesy from the room. Back to their court, a world of faeries both kind and cruel, and the few mortals who knew of their presence beneath London.
Behind them, alone in the empty room, the lights drifted free once more, the map dissolving into meaningless chaos.
PART ONE
February–May 1884
I behold London; a Human awful wonder of God!
—William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion
Oh City! Oh latest Throne! where I was rais’d
To be a mystery of loveliness
Unto all eyes, the time is well nigh come
When I must render up this glorious home
To keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers
Shall darken with the waving of her wand;
Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts,
Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand,
Low-built, mud-walled, Barbarian settlement,
How chang’d from this fair City!
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Timbuctoo”
A great town is like a forest—that is not the whole of it that you see above ground.
—Mr. Lowe, MP, address at the opening of the Metropolitan Railway, reported in the Times, January 10, 1863
Given enough time, anything can become familiar enough to be ignored.
Even pain.
The searing nails driven through her flesh ache as they always have, but those aches are known, enumerated, incorporated into her world. If her body is stretched upon a rack, muscles and sinews torn and ragged from the strain, at least no one has stretched it further of late. This is familiar. She can disregard it.
But the unfamiliar, the unpredictable, disrupts that disregard. This new pain is irregular and intense, not the steady torment of before. It is a knife driven into her shoulder, a sudden agony stabbing through her again. And again. And again.
Creeping ever closer to her heart.
Each new thrust awakens all the other pains, every bleeding nerve she had learned to accept. Nothing can be ignored, then. All she can do is endure. And this she does because she has no choice; she has bound herself to this agony, with chains that cannot be broken by any force short of death.
Or, perhaps, salvation.
Like a patient cast down by disease, she waits, and in her lucid moments she prays for a cure. No physician exists who can treat this sickness, but perhaps—if she endures long enough—someone will teach himself that science, and save her from this terrible death by degrees.
So she hopes, and has hoped for longer than she can recall. But each thrust brings the knife that much closer to her heart.
One way or another, she will not have to endure much more.
The monster city seethed with life. Its streets, like arteries both great and small, pulsed with the flow of traffic: hackneys and private carri
ages, omnibuses bursting with riders inside and out, horse trams rattling past on their iron rails. People on foot, on horseback, on the improbable wheels of bicycles. On the river, ships: forests of masts and steam funnels, skiffs hauling cargo to and fro, ferries spilling passengers onto piers that thrust out from the stinking foreshore. Trains thundered in from the suburbs and back out again, the population rising and falling, as if the city breathed.
The air that filled its lungs was humanity, of countless different kinds. The high and the low, glittering with diamonds or the tears of despair, speaking dozens of languages in hundreds of accents, living cheek by jowl, above and below and beside one another, but occupying entirely different worlds. The city encompassed them all: living and dying, they formed part of the great organism, which daily threatened to strangle on its simultaneous growth and rot.
This was London, in all its filth and glory. Nostalgic for the past, while yearning to cast off the chains of bygone ages and step forward into the bright utopia of the future. Proud of its achievements, yet despising its own flaws. A monster in both size and nature, that would consume the unwary and spit them out again, in forms unrecognizable and undreamt.
London, the monster city.
The City of London: February 26, 1884
“Hot buns! A farthing apiece, warm you on a cold morning! Will you buy a bun, sir?”
The cry rose into the air and was lost among others, like one bird in a flock. A burst of steam from the open cut alongside Farringdon Road heralded the arrival of a subterranean train; a minute later, the station above disgorged a mass of men, joining those carried into the City by the power of their own feet. They shuffled along Snow Hill and up onto Holborn Viaduct, yawning and sleepy, their numbers sufficient to stop carriages and omnibuses when they flooded across the street crossings.
A costerwoman’s voice had to be strong, to make itself heard above the voices and footsteps and the church bells ringing seven o’clock. Filling her lungs, Eliza bellowed again, “Hot buns! Hot from the oven! Only a farthing apiece!”
One fellow paused, dug in his pocket, handed over a penny. The four buns Eliza gave in exchange had been hot when she collected her load an hour ago; only the close-packed mass of their fellows had preserved any heat since then. But these were the clerks, the ink-stained men who slaved away in the City’s halls of business for long hours and little pay; they wouldn’t quibble over the truth of her advertising. By the time their wealthier betters came in to work, three hours or so from now, she would have sold her stock and filled her barrow with something else.
If all went well. Good days were the ones where she traced the streets again and again, with new wares every round: laces for boots and stays, lucifers, even larks one time. Bad days saw her peddling cold, stale buns at sundown, with no comfort save the surety that at least she would have something to eat that night. And sometimes a doss-house keeper could be persuaded to take a few as payment, in exchange for a spot on his bench.
Today was beginning well; even a bun of only moderate warmth was a pleasant touch on a cold morning like this one. But chill weather made men sullen in the afternoon and evening, turning up their collars and shoving their hands into pockets, thinking only of the train or omnibus or long walk that would take them home. Eliza knew better than to assume her luck would hold.
By the time she reached Cheapside, following the crowds of men on their way to the countinghouses, the press in the streets was thinning; those still out were hurrying, for fear their pay would be docked for lateness. Eliza counted her coins, stuck an experimental finger among the remaining buns, and decided they were cold enough that she could spare one for herself. And Tom Granger was always willing to let her sit a while with him.
She retraced her steps to the corner of Ivy Lane, where Tom was halfheartedly waving copies of The Times at passersby. “You’ll never sell them with that lazy hand,” Eliza said, stopping her barrow alongside.
His grin was as crooked as his front teeeth. “Wait ’til tomorrow. Bill says we’ll ’ave exciting news then.”
“Oh?” Eliza offered him a bun, which he accepted. “Scandal, is it?”
“Better. There’s been another bombing.”
She had just taken a large bite; it caught in her throat, and for a moment she feared she would choke. Then it slid down, and she hoped that if Tom saw her distress, he’d chalk it up to that. “Where?”
Tom had already crammed half the bun in his own mouth. His answer was completely unintelligible; she had to wait while he chewed enough to swallow. “Victoria Station,” he said, once he could speak more clearly. “Right early this morning. Blew the booking office and all ’alfway to the moon. Nobody ’urt, though—pity. We sells more papers when there’s dead people.”
“Who did it?”
He shrugged, then turned away to sell a paper to a man in a carpenter’s flannel coat. That done, he said, “Harry thinks it was a gas pipe what blew, but I reckon it’s the Fenians again.” He spat onto the cobblestones. “Fucking micks. They sells papers, I’ll give ’em that, but ’em and their bleeding bombs, eh?”
“Them and their bleeding bombs,” Eliza echoed, staring at the remnants of her bun as if it needed her attention. She had lost all appetite, but forced herself to finish anyway. I missed it. While I slept tied to a bench, he was here, and I missed my chance.
Tom rattled on about the Irish, allowing as how they were devilish strong buggers and good at hard labor, but one paddy had come up the other day, bold as you please, and tried to get papers to sell. “Me and Bill ran ’im off right quick,” Tom said.
Eliza didn’t share his satisfaction in the slightest. While Tom spoke, her gaze raked the street, as if frantic effort now could make up for her failure. Too late, and you know it. What would you have done anyway, if you’d been here last night? Followed him again? Much good that did last time. But you missed your chance to do better. It took her by surprise when Tom left off his tirade and said, “Three months, it’s been, and I still don’t get you.”
She hoped her stare was not as obviously startled as it felt. “What do you mean?”
Tom gestured at her, seeming to indicate both the ragged clothing and the young woman who wore it. “You. Who you are, and what you’re doing ’ere.”
She was suddenly far colder than could be explained by the morning air. “Trying to sell buns. But I think I’m about done in for these; I should go for fried fish soon, or something else.”
“Which you’ll bring right back ’ere. Maybe you’ll go stand around the ’ospital, or the prison, but you’ll stick near Newgate as long as you can, so long as you’ve got a few pennies to buy supper and a place to sleep. Them fine gents like to talk about lazy folks as don’t care enough to earn a better wage—but you’re the only one I’ve ever met where it’s true.” Tom scratched his neck, studying her in a way that made her want to run. “You don’t drop your aitches, you ain’t from a proper coster family—I know they runs you off sometimes, when you steps on their territory—in short, you’s a mystery, and ever since you started coming ’ere I’ve been trying to work you out. What’s around Newgate for you, Elizabeth Marsh, that you’ll spend three months waiting for it to show up?”
Her fingers felt like ice. Eliza fumbled with the ends of her shawl, then stopped, because it only drew attention to how her hands were shaking. What was there to fear? No crime in hanging about, not so long as she was engaged in honest work. Tom knew nothing. So far as he was aware, she was simply Elizabeth Marsh, and Elizabeth Marsh was nobody.
But she hadn’t thought up a lie for him, because she hadn’t expected him to ask. Before her mind could settle down enough to find a good one, his expression softened to sympathy. “Got someone in Newgate, ’ave you?”
He jerked his chin westward as he said it. Newgate in the specific sense, the prison that stood nearby. Which was close enough to a truth—if not the real truth—that Eliza seized upon it with relief. “My father.”
“Thought it
might be an ’usband,” Tom said. “You wouldn’t be the first mot walking around without a ring. Waiting for ’im to get out, or ’oping ’e won’t?”
Eliza thought about the last time she’d seen her father. Four months ago, and the words between them weren’t pretty—they never were—but she’d clean forgotten about that after she walked out of the prison and saw that familiar, hated face.
She shrugged uncomfortably, hoping Tom would let the issue drop. The more questions she answered, the more likely it was that he’d catch a whiff of something odd. Better to leave it at a nameless father with an unnamed crime. Tom didn’t press, but he did pick up one of his newspapers and begin searching through a back page. “’Ere, take a look at this.”
The piece above his ragged fingernail was brief, just two short paragraphs under the header MR. CALHOUN’S NEW FACTORY. “Factory work ain’t bad,” Tom said. “Better than service, anyway—no missus always on you, and some factories pay more—and it would get you out of ’ere. Waiting around won’t do you no good, Lizzie, and you keeps this up, sooner or later your luck’ll go bad. Workhouse bad.”
“Ah, you’re just trying to get rid of me,” Eliza said. It came out higher than usual, because of the tightness in her throat. Tom was just useful; his corner was the best one to watch from. She never intended more than that—never friendship—and his kindness made her feel all the more guilty about her lies.
But he was right, as far as it went. She’d been in service before, to an Italian family that sold secondhand clothes in Spitalfields. Being a maid-of-all-work, regardless of the family, was little better than being a slave. Lots of girls said factory work was preferable, if you could get it. But abandoning Newgate …
She couldn’t. Her disobedient eyes drifted back to the advertisement anyway. And then she saw what lay below, that Tom’s hand had covered before.
With Fate Conspire Page 1
