Opening Acts

by SFnovelists

  *** ***

  Whitechapel, London: March 4, 1884

  The shift was vivid, as the street's name changed from Fenchurch to Aldgate High Street to Whitechapel Road. In less than a mile, Eliza passed from one London to another, from the grand counting-houses and respectable shops of the City to the plain brick buildings and narrow back courts that, until a few months ago, she had called home.

  She'd argued with herself all yesterday about coming back. A run of good days had given her money for last night's doss and tonight's, with enough left over to buy new wares to sell, but a day spent not working was one day closer to starvation. Selling as she went would have gotten her run off by the costers who worked this area, though, and besides, she didn't want anything linking her to the woman who sold hot buns and other oddments around the City. So her barrow was in the keeping of a woman in St. Giles who could hopefully be trusted not to sell it the moment Eliza's back was turned, and Eliza herself had taken a day's holiday. A risk, yes-but no more so than returning to Whitechapel in the first place.

  "You've got a nerve on you, Eliza O'Malley, showing your face openly around here."

  The call came from the doorway of a rag-and-bone shop at the corner of George Yard. Eliza had gone on three more steps before she realized she could stop: it was no longer necessary, or useful, to pretend she was Elizabeth Marsh, good English costerwoman. Those who would give her trouble here already knew who she was.

  So she stopped, turning, and saw Fergus Boyle leaning in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest and one foot on the box he'd apparently been carrying. He grinned when she faced him. "Gave you a fright, did I?"

  Her skin was still tingling from the sudden jolt of hearing her name, after months of playacting as someone else. The accustomed accents, though, rose to her lips with no difficulty at all. "Get you gone, Fergus Boyle; haven't you anything better to do with yourself than bedevil me?"

  "With you vanishing the way you did? I don't." With his foot he shoved the box to the wall, out of harm's way. Eliza stood her ground as he came closer. "You should hear the stories. Some think you've been slung in gaol, like your aul da. The ones who think you're cautious say you went to America, never mind how you'd pay for the journey. I put my money on you hiding with the Fenians. Did you and your friends have anything to do with that dynamite at Victoria Station the other day?"

  "I'm no Fenian," Eliza said, casting a wary glance across the people on the street. The bobbies hardly cared enough to keep order in Whitechapel, but since last year the new Special Irish Branch kept a lively ear out for any whisper of sedition.

  "Sure," Boyle said, grinning in a way she didn't like. "You had nothing to do with Charing Cross last fall. You just happened to see the bomb in time to throw it out the back of the train. Pure chance, that was."

  Not chance at all-but what could she tell him? That the Charing Cross and Praed Street bombings hadn't been Fenian jobs, not completely? That they'd had help from faeries? Boyle was descended from good County Roscommon stock, the son of a farmer's daughter and a fellow from the next farm over; they'd brought their stories with them when they came to London during the Great Hunger. He believed in fairies, right enough. But they were creatures you left milk for on the back step, to keep them from witching your cows or tangling your children's hair in the night. Not city-dwelling goblins who bombed railways.

  As for telling him why she'd followed a faerie onto the Underground…she'd tried that before, near on seven years ago. Not Fergus Boyle, but other people. And none of them had listened.

  "I can't stay long," she said, knowing he'd take her changing the subject as proof that he was right. "What is it you want? Just to tell me I've got a nerve on me?"

  "Not staying long, is it? And what have you to hurry back to?" Boyle stepped even closer, so that he loomed over her. "Or is it that you're afraid the Special Branch boyos will catch you?"

  Eliza shoved him, hard, at the point on his shoulder that would spin him back a step. "Sure I have better things to do with my time than spend it talking with the likes of yourself."

  Fergus' mocking grin faded a hair. "Ach, you're not going to trouble Mrs. Darragh, are you?"

  "I'm not."

  She'd always been a good liar, but Boyle still looked at her suspiciously. "Good. Maggie's been glad to see the back of you-says her aul ma got upset when you were around."

  Now it was Eliza's turn to look suspicious. "When did you and Maggie Darragh get on such close terms, that you'd be knowing what she's thinking?"

  He grinned more broadly, and Eliza sighed. She knew perfectly well that Maggie didn't want her around, and was prepared for that; if she had to dodge Fergus Boyle, though, then this would be even more difficult. But she refused to abandon Mrs. Darragh-not when she was the only hope the woman had left.

  Best to distract him with a believable lie. "Unlike some people," Eliza told him, "I have a care for my soul. I'm off to confession-that's a thing we do in church, that is, as I'm sure you've never heard of it." And lying about that is the least of the things I'm going to Hell for.

  Boyle looked dubious. Fortunately, Eliza saw a stick-thin girl crouching over the crate behind him. "You might want to be watching that, you might," Eliza said mildly, with a nod of her head; then she slipped away while Boyle was busy clouting the girl over the ear.

  Her heart beat too fast as she hurried down Whitechapel Road, weaving through the carts and the filthy fog. Four months and more since she'd been here, and it wasn't long enough. Boyle was right: what if some fellow from the Special Irish Branch remembered her face? She hadn't been stupid enough to tell them she was the one who threw the bomb from the Charing Cross train; they'd never believe she did it to save the people in the third-class carriage. More than seventy people were hurt that same night, when the other bomb exploded on a train leaving Praed Street. But Eliza was Irish; just being there was almost enough to hang her, and touching the bomb would be more than enough.

  That was why she'd done her best to vanish, hiding behind the gift for mimicry and play-acting that had always amused Owen so much. With the bloody Irish Republican Brotherhood and their friends in America constantly making trouble, it wasn't safe to be Irish in London right now. And even less safe to be Eliza O'Malley.

  Boyle was right: the cautious thing to do would be to scrape together enough money, somehow, to go elsewhere. America, or Ireland, or at least another city. Liverpool, perhaps. But even if she could give up her search, Eliza was London-born; she'd never known another home. God help her, she even missed the dirty, cramped slums of Whitechapel, so much more familiar than the stuffy businesses of the City.

  Not that she had any romantic illusions about the area. It was a sink of vice and crime, filled with the cast-off poor of every race, with tails doing customers in back alleys for tuppence a fuck and gangs taking by threat or violence what little money other folk had managed to earn. But as she passed the narrow alleys and courts Eliza heard familiar accents, and sometimes even the Irish language itself, in raucous and friendly exchange. She pulled her shawl closer about her face and hurried onward, head down, to avoid being seen by anyone else she knew-or seeing them herself. That would just make it all the harder to leave again.

  Mrs. Darragh and her daughter lived in a single room in a court off Old Montague Street, with a piece of canvas tacked over the window where the glass had been broken out. At least, they had when Eliza was last here; what if they'd moved on? Boyle wouldn't have told her. If he and Maggie had some kind of understanding, he might have even helped them into better lodgings.

  She knocked at the door, leaning close to listen. No footsteps sounded in response, which at least told her Maggie wasn't there. She knocked again. "Mrs. Darragh? 'Tis Eliza O'Malley."

  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, a
nd then she made out the figure sitting in the room's one chair, near the smouldering 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's yourself back 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.

  WITH FATE CONSPIRE is now available at:

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  About the Author

  Marie Brennan is the author of the Onyx Court series of London-based historical faerie fantasies: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and the upcoming With Fate Conspire. She has published more than thirty short stories in venues such as On Spec, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the acclaimed anthology series Clockwork Phoenix. More information can be found on her website, Swan Tower.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this collection are fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  All works within this collection are Copyright 2005 - 2011 by their respective authors.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  First electronic edition July 2011