With Fate Conspire

by Marie Brennan

  “Because we’d ’ave priests waving crosses in our faces, blokes shoving us into cages for raree-shows, little girls wanting us to dance in the bloody flowers for ’em. We’re a part of London? So’s the rats. Even the Irish and the Jews would be lining up to kick us.”

  Cyma had started giggling at his complaint about the flowers, and was having trouble stopping; she said something half-intelligible about nobody going to church any longer, but Dead Rick didn’t listen. The trouble was, he wanted to agree with her. Wanted to charge up into the streets and shred anybody who threatened his territory, the Onyx Hall. Bare his teeth and say, This place is mine, until the mortals backed down, showed throat, left him in peace.

  Stupid whelp. It ain’t your territory. It belongs to the ones strong enough to ’old it—and they don’t care a toss about defending it, not against the bastards upstairs. Curs like you get kicked to the gutters, by both sides.

  His thoughts must have shown on his face, for Cyma reached out and took him unexpectedly by the shoulders, too tight for him to easily twist away. “Dead Rick—I’ll help you if I can. When the time comes.”

  “’Ow?” he growled, hearing his own rough voice as if it came from a great distance. Nobody touched him, except to hurt him; he wasn’t at all sure that Cyma wasn’t doing the same, to something other than flesh. “You ain’t going to be ’ere, are you?”

  “I—I’ll find a way. If what I’m doing works … I’ll come back and tell you. Maybe see if I can help you do the same thing. I promise, I’ll explain everything then. And I’ll ask Yvoir about the compounds; you don’t have to pay me. Is that enough that you’ll forgive me for leaving? Just a little bit?”

  He had to get free of her hands, and free of this room, with its gentle smoke beckoning him to let down his guard, relax, slip into oblivion. “Sure. A bit. Just keep it quiet. You’ve got your secrets, and I’ve got mine.”

  She seemed about to say more, and would not let him go. His heart beating too hard against his ribs, Dead Rick resorted to changing his shape; Cyma exclaimed and flinched back from the shifting of his skin and bones beneath her hands. A dog once more, he fled into the shadows, stumbling around lost before a breath of cleaner air from the curtains guided him to his escape.

  Memory: August 13, 1878

  She entered the room in perfect silence, well cloaked by charms. The man in the bed, one Frederic William Henry Myers, did not stir; this had been a bad night, one of several in a row, and he’d helped himself to sleep with brandy.

  She’d been waiting for such a night to come. The dreams of mortals were more easily influenced when their hearts were troubled; a man at peace offered her little chance to work this art. Fortunately, the closest Myers came to peace was at the bottom of a bottle, and that created its own kind of opening.

  Cyma drew back the curtain, letting the light of the full moon fall upon her target’s face. He stirred slightly, and she waited, allowing him to settle; only when he was quiet did she move again, across the carpeted floor to the side of his bed, where she laid a feather-light touch upon his temple.

  For weeks she’d sampled his dreams, sifting from them the face and voice and manner she needed. They were more valuable than photographs, for her purposes; Cyma’s interest was not in what the woman had actually looked like, but rather how Myers had seen her. She’d gathered more information than strictly necessary, perhaps; his mind would fill in any gaps or errors she might make, so long as they weren’t too jarring. But it had been ages since she had this kind of freedom to walk among mortals, protected by their bread, and she could not resist stretching it out for as long as possible.

  Which brought her to this night. Closing her eyes, Cyma lifted one foot from the floor, then the other, until she floated above Myers in his bed.

  She was not the best at this. But she was good enough, and she owed Nadrett a debt.

  Beneath her, Myers dreamt of Annie Marshall. His cousin’s wife, who drowned herself two years ago. Not nearly enough time for the grief to fade. In his dreams, Myers could do as he had never done in life: profess his love for Annie, kiss her lips, touch the flesh he’d only ever imagined. The hard part was not making him dream of Annie; it was making him dream of something other than their unconsummated love.

  But Cyma was nothing if not determined. Fear had that effect, even on a faerie. Nadrett had sent her to do this; Nadrett held her debt. Why Nadrett wanted a pet spiritualist, Cyma didn’t know, and didn’t ask. All that mattered was creating the vulnerability in Myers, the belief that his dead inamorata had a message she wanted him to hear. Mediums had not been able to contact Annie on his behalf, though not for lack of trying; but the woman might come to him in dreams.

  So she gave herself the face, the voice, the manner of Annie Marshall, and she told Myers what Nadrett wanted the man to hear. That there were people who could help him; that he must seek them out, and they would give him the proof he so ardently desired, proof that the spirit could persist after death. That her suicide meant neither that she was gone from him forever, nor that she had been damned to some tormenting hell. He would have all the reassurances he could want, so long as he found the strangers and shared with them what he knew.

  Tears streamed down Myers’s sleeping face, as the moon’s light carried Cyma into the defenseless realms of his mind.

  He wasn’t the first man Nadrett had sent her to pursue. But with this one, she was sure, she would find success. He was the perfect target: a scholar of spiritualism, keeping company with similarly learned friends, but wounded at heart as the others were not. Once Nadrett had him, surely the master would be satisfied, and Cyma’s debt would be repaid.

  She might even be free as soon as next month.

  She believed it, as Myers believed in the ghost of Annie Marshall, and for the same reason. Because the hope kept her going, however impossible it might be.

  Adelaide Road, Primrose Hill: April 6, 1884

  The lowering of the gas lights had given the room a chill, tomblike aspect. Outside, the night was shrouded in fog, the moon playing hide-and-seek among the clouds. Wind rattled the shutters from time to time, and created a faint moaning in the chimney. It was, in short, a poet’s notion of what a night for a séance should be like.

  Cyma hoped it would inspire the medium to her best efforts. Mrs. Iris Wexford was typical of the breed: the wife of a vicar in Aylesbury, past her childbearing years, and bored senseless by her respectable life. She held fast to the conviction that spiritualism was the cure for Christianity’s ills, that it vindicated instead of disproving the Bible, as some claimed.

  Like most of her kind, she was probably a charlatan. But Frederic Myers had great hopes for her, and so Cyma was here.

  She fancied it was fate, encountering him again. Once Myers had been thoroughly ensnared by his dreams, Nadrett had taken over all dealings with the man, closing Cyma out. Without bread to protect her, she had no way to visit him, and so in time Myers had faded from her thoughts: one more mortal caught up in faerie matters, not likely to emerge intact.

  Or for that matter, to emerge at all. That Frederic Myers was still a free man, not someone’s mad slave in the Goblin Market—or dead—told her Nadrett had not yet let go of him, not entirely. In which case it would have been far safer for Cyma to keep her distance. She was almost free of Nadrett at last, and had no desire to trap herself again. But Myers had intrigued her, with his melancholy grief and undying hope of seeing his lost love again, and she could not pass up the chance to see what path he followed now.

  Much the same as when she first knew him, it seemed. Testing mediums, hoping to find one who could communicate with the late Annie on his behalf. He sat now around the table with his friends Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick, and various others Cyma didn’t know; unlike those first two, they were not members of the new Society for Psychical Research. She had joined them as one “Miss Harris,” and now sat with her attention more on Myers than Mrs. Wexford. He had not changed: still the same tremulous eag
erness in his wide eyes, his slightly parted lips, as Mrs. Wexford’s head sagged to touch the back of her chair.

  In a husky voice, the medium said, “I feel the other world draw near!”

  Miss Harris, of course, was not cynical in the slightest about these things; Miss Harris had her own ghosts she desperately wanted to see. A dead fiancé, most particularly, for whom she still pined. It gave her and Mr. Myers something in common. But Cyma, beneath her human mask, was impatient. In her time haunting Myers, she’d seen more than enough bored housewives go through similar acts—even exposed a few frauds, when they annoyed her too much—and her initial excitement had long since worn away. She endured this tedium only for the renewed connection to Myers, which she might make use of once she was free of Nadrett.

  Then tedium fled, without warning, and every hair on the back of Cyma’s neck stood to attention. “A child,” Mrs. Wexford whispered. “A boy child—oh, he’s like a little angel.”

  On the other side of the table, one of the sitters, an elderly woman whose name Cyma had forgotten, pulled her hands free of the circle and clasped them over her mouth, tears springing to her eyes. Sidgwick, who sat to the woman’s right; immediately turned a suspicious gaze upon her; he was far less credulous than Myers, and knew such movements were often used as cover for tricks. His wife Eleanor kept her attention on Mrs. Wexford, in case the upset woman was a diversion for the medium instead.

  But if those two had any tricks planned, they could save themselves the effort. Cyma knew when she was in the presence of a genuine ghost.

  Mrs. Wexford shuddered, then began to speak in a high-pitched voice. From the conversation that ensued between the medium and the crying old woman, Cyma gathered that this was the lady’s firstborn son, lost years ago, when infection from a rotted tooth spread to his brain. Next to her, she felt Myers heave a silent sigh. Once again, his lost love had failed to appear.

  Cyma wondered how the mediums did it—how they called up particular spirits, long since gone. Regular apparitions were one matter, and the recently dead another; both were decidedly less common than they had been in centuries past, but contacting them had never been difficult for those with skill. The little boy’s spirit, however, must have moved on. How had Mrs. Wexford summoned him back? One of countless mysteries about the human soul, whose answers she could not fathom. Cyma was no Academy philosopher, but sometimes she understood what intrigued them so.

  Her interest sharpened as something formed in the air behind Mrs. Wexford. Its shape was vague, but it was the right size to be a little boy. Cyma held her breath, teeth sunk deep into her lip. True visitations were rare; true physical manifestations might as well have been unicorns. Real, but almost never seen in this day and age. Myers had found himself a true medium after all.

  Upon that thought, his hand slipped from her grasp. He and Sidgwick had promised this first sitting would not be any kind of formal test—too many mediums grew nervous and failed to produce anything at all when they knew scientists would be examining their every move—but it seemed Myers’s curiosity had overcome him, for he crossed the intervening distance in two quick strides and reached his hand out for the manifestation taking shape in the air.

  It vanished with a startled jerk, and Mrs. Wexford’s eyes flew open. “I—what—”

  She seemed genuinely disoriented, which happened sometimes. The old woman who’d lost her son burst into tears; Eleanor Sidgwick comforted her, while her husband bent over Mrs. Wexford, explaining what had occurred.

  Cyma rose and went to Myers’s side, curious. “Was it truly physical?”

  “For a moment,” he said distantly, still looking where the ghost had been. “I felt it, so briefly…”

  Mrs. Wexford might be able to summon dear Annie for him. Cyma frowned at the notion, and spoke again, to keep Myers’s thoughts on matters scientific. “What are such things made of? Is it some coagulation of the air, a curdling that results from the ghost’s presence?”

  Myers came back to himself with a sigh that said his thoughts had gone exactly where she guessed. “No one knows for certain. It felt gauzy against my fingers—”

  “Usually it is gauze.” Sidgwick had joined them. He gave his friend a sympathetic, pitying look. “You know such things are so often faked.”

  “Often, yes—but always?” Myers shook his head, rubbing his fingertips together as if he could still feel the substance. “I see no wires, Henry, nor mirrors. I believe this one was real.”

  Cyma laid a supportive hand on his arm and smiled up into his sad eyes. “As do I. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

  “You had a theory about the stuff, didn’t you, Frederic?”

  “Did I?” Myers shrugged at his friend. “I don’t recall.”

  Sidgwick tapped one finger against the bridge of his nose, eyes closed in thought. “Ectoplasm, you suggested we should call it. Some kind of emanation from the ghost itself—you never told me the details. Spirit made physical, or some such; a thumb in the eye of the materialists, you said. But you never wrote the article you promised.”

  They began wrangling amiably about the Proceedings of their society. Cyma didn’t attend to any of it. Spirit made physical. It was one of the basic discoveries of the Galenic Academy last century, that in faerie realms, spirit and matter were the same thing; faerie bodies were a particular configuration of the four classical elements that made up their spirits, intermixed with the aether that permeated their world. Was it somehow possible for human spirits to achieve a similar unity?

  She could ask in the Academy—but that might be a very dangerous thing, if it touched on Nadrett’s business.

  Cyma knew she should keep silent. You’re almost free of him; knowing will only put you in danger. But encountering Myers last month, after not seeing him for so long—she couldn’t let this go.

  Sidgwick went to crank up the gas lights, thoroughly breaking the mood; there would be no more raising of ghosts for now. Experimentally, Cyma said, “I recall reading an interesting theory once, from someone in the Theosophical Society. You’re familiar with their notion of the astral plane?” Myers nodded. “I do not agree with them on the matter of spirits, of course; clearly the souls of the departed do sometimes stay near to comfort those they leave behind. It is not all trickery on the part of the medium. But what if some of it is indeed trickery, as they suggest—on the part of something else?”

  His fingers had begun to pull at his beard in a gesture she recognized very well. “Madame Blavatsky’s ‘spooks, elementaries, and elementals,’ you mean. Lower principles cast off by human spirits on their way to a higher existence.”

  “Not precisely,” Cyma said, hoping she could invent well enough to keep Myers from dismissing her entirely. What she was about to say was pure balderdash; the point was to see what he said in response. “There is, after all, a long-standing association in folklore between faeries and the spirits of the dead. Is it possible that the spiritual realm—the astral plane, as the theosophists would have it—is in fact shared by those two classes of being? And when a medium is deceived, it is by a creature we might in other contexts term a ‘faerie’?”

  She was watching very closely as she said it, recording every movement of eye and brow and mouth. Goblins did sometimes deceive mediums, it was true, but only as an occasional lark. Myers pursed his lips, then shook his head. “I confess, I’ve never given the possibility much thought. It is an interesting theory, at least.”

  Not a single twitch, not the slightest spark of recognition.

  He doesn’t remember.

  Myers had given the possibility some thought, in the days before Cyma handed him over to Nadrett. It was why her master had wanted the man, though what purpose such an erroneous idea could serve, she didn’t know. Did Nadrett think this “spiritual realm” or “astral plane” was Faerie itself? Or did he think to extend his control over such a place?

  That question was far too dangerous for Cyma to allow it to remain in her mind. Myers had consid
ered such things, and now did not remember; that meant Nadrett had taken the memory from his mind. Just like he’d done to Dead Rick, though in this case, the removal appeared more precise. Myers was not broken like the skriker.

  Perhaps because Nadrett still had use for Myers’s knowledge. After all, he’d let the man walk free, back to his friends in the Society for Psychical Research.

  I should get away from him. Cyma was suddenly cold in a way that had nothing to do with the séance. She murmured something inane when Myers took his leave, going to coax Mrs. Wexford into trying again; after a paralyzed moment of standing where the manifestation had been, she slipped out the door and asked the footman to fetch her a cab.

  She was almost free of Nadrett. Not even for Frederic William Henry Myers would she trap herself again.

  White Lion Street, Islington: April 11, 1884

  Eliza smoothed the bodice of her borrowed dress with nervous hands. “Borrowed” might be the wrong word; Ann Wick didn’t know she’d taken it. But the wages she’d saved so far weren’t enough to buy a respectable dress—something that wouldn’t instantly advertise her as somebody’s maid—so she’d sneaked this one from a hook in the room they shared, and changed into it once she was away from Cromwell Road. It wasn’t stealing, not when she intended to put it back.

  Thus disguised, she was going to attend a meeting of the London Fairy Society.

  It was the best she could think of to do. A fortnight of working for the Kitterings had gotten her no further than those few stolen minutes of nosing through Miss Kittering’s things; she’d uncovered nothing about faeries, and had no further opportunities to speak to the daughter. So, a month later, she was back where she had been before—but this time, with more preparation.

  She would never have dared show her face at the meeting, except that she knew Louisa Kittering wouldn’t be present. Mrs. Kittering had decided to host a dinner party tonight, with the Honorable Mr. Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes in attendance. The row between mother and daughter had been audible two floors in either direction, and when Miss Kittering lost, Eliza had gone promptly to Mrs. Fowler with news that her mother was gravely ill. That had sparked a second row, nearly as fierce as the first, for with the missus planning this dinner party, the housekeeper needed every servant on hand. But Eliza was a good deal more stubborn than Miss Kittering, and had generally been a good enough worker that Mrs. Fowler was not eager to sack her; and Eliza had sworn she would quit if she were not permitted to go.