Changelings at Court

by Ken Altabef

  “Fair enough,” agreed Meadowlark. He tossed her the bundle.

  “Deepgrave most foul. Most foul, not fair. I wouldn’t—”

  The rest of her remarks were lost in the frenzy of her carnal delight. Meadowlark decided not to stick around to hear anything more.

  Chapter 14

  “They must be round here somewhere,” Threadneedle said.

  The night was chill and damp, a light drizzle leaving the cobblestones slick with mud. Nora glanced up and down the street. There were fewer streetlights here in Spitalfields than she was used to at Covent Garden, but her eyesight had always favored the dark.

  He added in a low voice, “Come, let’s walk a few more blocks.”

  No one noticed them as they walked along. Threadneedle, disguised as a lamplighter, moved anonymously along the streets, from rich to poor, dragging his five-step ladder behind him. In this identity he travelled unmolested through any part of town without question. The lowly lamplighter was beneath anyone’s notice and much too poor a target for robbery.

  Nora followed close behind, playing the lamplighter’s smudge-faced apprentice. She’d given herself the appearance of a ten-year-old boy dressed in trousers and a jacket of coarse drugget wool. She looked the perfect beggar, but couldn’t help dressing up the dirty gray jacket with a touch of bright scarlet trim. Secret agents, she thought, must have scarlet trim.

  They turned down another narrow, muddy street. All the weavers’ houses looked as if they’d been hastily built, with crooked lintels and corners that came up not quite square. The shops were already closed, and only a few dim candles burned in upper story windows.

  “This is the place,” whispered Threadneedle, the lamplighter. “Cavendish uses a gang of young boys to carry out his shady errands for him. They’re hard boys, most of them escaped from Lemmon Street workhouses or the cotton mills in Whitechapel.”

  “I understand,” she said, practicing a young boy’s voice.

  “Be sure that you do. Cavendish is always looking for new street boys, but you must be careful.”

  She tipped her little woolen cap at him.

  “They like to fight. Don’t take any unnecessary chances.”

  He looked her hard in the eyes. Even concealed beneath the grimy features of the lamplighter, with his greasy hair and yellowed teeth, she recognized the noble lines of her friend and protector. She saw through his disguises, both physical and emotional; he was worried about her. But she recognized also that he had faith in her talents. Altogether she found it a very attractive combination.

  “Don’t worry,” she whispered.

  Threadneedle glanced quickly around to see that no indigents were loitering about, close enough to see him in the gloom. Then, with his eyes still locked with Nora’s, he transformed. The coarse features of the ugly lamplighter reformed into the refined and dashing gentryman, Richard Templeton. The smudged apron and blackened sleeves gave way to a fine velvet jacket and immaculate cuffs. He flashed Templeton’s dashing smile, as if to put himself better into character, then winked at her before shouting, “Come back here! Thief! Thief!

  Nora dropped her cask of lamp oil and took off at a run.

  She had met with Threadneedle several nights during the past week, after taking her final curtain call as Titania on the Menagerie’s floorboards. If she was to assist him in his work, Threadneedle insisted, she must learn to hold a glamour for much longer than a few minutes on stage or through a post-performance dinner with adoring patrons after the show.

  “It takes a certain extra effort,” he’d said, “to maintain a whole-body illusion.”

  “I can last for almost an hour,” she’d informed him.

  He smiled. “Then we shall have to exercise those particular muscles a bit more, won’t we?”

  Her training occasioned long walks through London’s busy streets and dinners in various neighborhoods. Nora and Threadneedle assumed diverse roles during these sojourns—sometimes playing a young married couple in Soho, sometimes secret lovers making a nervous rendez-vous along the banks of the Thames at Charing Cross. But all their adoring glances and low talk was only play-acting. She enjoyed much more their dinner conversation, where they remained still in character, but spoke about their real lives.

  The faery spy regaled her with tales of his adventures across Europe. He always spoke with a lively, excited tone that reflected his lust for life and adventure, and made even the most mundane tale more enjoyable than the inane table talk she endured on dates with her actor friends. In sharp contrast to Thurston, Threadneedle’s stories were real, not pompous posturing and playacting. He recounted a swashbuckling incident aboard a naval ship attacked by the notorious pirate Draven ‘The Raven’ Ketch. Nora listened with great interest, for this villain was known to the Grayson family from a personal encounter ten years ago. Threadneedle spoke as poetically about the pirate as her father did; Eric regarded him as the devil incarnate, even though Ketch had rescued him from torture and imprisonment years ago.

  Threadneedle was always poetic. He was extremely well-read and apparently quite fond of the theatre. He frequently quoted verses from the significant playwrights of the age, many of which were new to Nora. He made no secret of his admiration for her talents as an actress, but she assumed this to be just more flattery. He was a pretty smooth fellow and excelled at that too.

  One night they posed as the Count and Countessa d’Argent, taking supper in a Mayfair café. The count had a long, thin, delicately-boned face, his brow sharp, his jawline strong. His skin was free of pockmarks and blemishes but subtle character lines wrinkled his forehead and framed the corners of his eyes. His hair was long and straight, pulled back with a thong at the nape. But he was still Threadneedle, through and through.

  When, just as dessert was being served, his hand warmly covered hers under the table, she felt the illusion slipping away. The Countessa flushed green.

  “Control,” he said. “Your control must be unshakable.”

  She forced the hot blood from her cheeks, and they resumed their chat and crème brûlée.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “One hundred and six.”

  “Oh. Really? You don’t look a day over ninety.”

  He smiled handsomely. “A steady diet of danger tends to keep one young at heart.” A common thread ran through all of his disguises, Nora realized. It was not so much in the physical appearance but the character, the attitude. It was in the jaunty tilt of his head, the timing of his smile, the way his eyes roved the room, never resting, unless they had settled on someone in particular, in which case they probed deeply. She thought she could pick him out in a crowd, no matter the glamour. And in that way he had allowed her to become dangerous to him.

  And yet in all this time she had not yet seen his real face.

  “You must have known quite a few women…”

  “And men.”

  Her eyebrows went up. She hadn’t considered the possibility. She knew the faeries could change sex every so often if they chose. She wondered if he had embraced his male lovers as a man or a woman, but dared not ask. “Which do you prefer?”

  “Men or women?”

  “No. Mortal or faery?”

  “What difference? Love is between two souls, and our souls are all the same.”

  “Are they?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’ve been in love?” she asked.

  “Every day. Who wouldn’t be?” He threw up his hands. “With so many choices. French widows, jaded Countesses, eager barmaids, even fresh-faced young actresses…”

  That last, she thought was meant especially for her. And she did feel a flutter, she had to admit. For a faery? A hundred and six years old? It was preposterous. And yet it seemed more real than…

  Was her romance with Thurston real? Who could tell with theatre people—false faces and role players all? Thurston said his lines, poetry straight out of Romeo and Juliet, but Nora always had the sense that it wasn�
�t real. He recited the most trite and phony complements and Anne Meadows, not Nora Grayson, smiled back. When she sat to donner with Thurston, they were both play-acting.

  It was completely different with Threadneedle. He was smooth and coy, but also indefatigably honest. She felt like Nora Grayson when she sat across from him, even while he was urging her to be false. With Threadneedle all the emotions were real, even though he wore a false face. Because he’s honest about being false. Such twisted logic made her head spin.

  “You must be unshakable,” he repeated when they had returned to his rooms on Pennington Street. They had no worries of a nosy landlady disapproving of their meetings; Threadneedle, as Mr. Richard Templeton, owned the entire building.

  “The problem with your glamours,” he explained, “is that you are not at ease doing them. You harbor too much resentment at being a faery—”

  “Half faery.”

  “Yes, half. Half. This resentment is holding you back. Your glamours are stiff and uncomfortable and it shows.”

  “Well,” she said defensively, “I can’t help it.”

  He thought for a moment. “Let me show you something that may help you. Something very few people have ever seen.”

  Before her eyes, he reverted to his faery form. His skin turned green, just one shade darker than her mother’s. His nose was slender, long and slightly hooked, his eyebrows pencil-thin and highly arched. His ears were sharply pointed and went almost to his temples. In him Nora saw all the characteristics she normally despised, but she felt no revulsion. She recognized the person she had come to know in those faery features, something noble and beautiful, the soul of her friend Threadneedle.

  “What do you think?”

  She didn’t know how to answer; she didn’t want to tell him.

  “Now let’s see you do me.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  Threadneedle laughed, realizing she’d taken his request as an illicit proposal for sex. “Do me,” he repeated. “Take my shape. Put my face on as your glamour.”

  She hesitated. Playing Titania on stage was bad enough, she didn’t want to put on the face of a real faery. She didn’t want to be a faery. But she supposed she could be him for a few minutes. Threadneedle. That wouldn’t be so bad. “Why practice this? You wouldn’t have me impersonate a fae?”

  “You never know. It’s good practice. And besides, I want to see how you view me.”

  He was too charming to refuse. She made the transition, then asked, “How am I doing?”

  “I doubt I’m really so very good looking as all that.”

  “Perhaps it is your soul I am seeking to mimic, not just your deceptive face.”

  He laughed. “Bravo, Miss Grayson. Now hold that shape for as long as you can.”

  He slapped her across the face. The glamour slipped away like water through a sieve.

  “No. No,” he said. “You must be unshakeable. No matter what happens. Your life may depend upon it. Try it again.”

  She resumed his shape, perhaps a little less handsome this time, but that was unfair. He had struck her to prove a point, perhaps an important lesson that might save her life one day.

  He locked eyes with her and stared her down for what seemed an eternity. She maintained the faery illusion, becoming more comfortable with the ears, and all the rest of it. But it was appearance only. She wasn’t comfortable being a faery. She never would be.

  He reached over and touched her lightly on the cheek. She held her shape, not going to be fooled this time.

  He went further, tracing his fingertips along the curve of her jaw, a light feather touch. She held. He traced down the side of her neck and then ran his fingertips along the lateral of her collarbone. He held her gaze and she fought to remain control. Even as a faery he was very handsome. She couldn’t believe she was thinking what she was thinking just now. She should concentrate on holding the shape, keep her mind on the matter at hand.

  His fingertips did not travel all the way to her shoulder. Instead they dropped straight down, tracing now the outside curve of her breast. Her heart beat faster but she kept the shape. It was a test; she would not fail. When his fingertips rounded the underside of her breast she pushed his hand away.

  “That’s distraction enough for one day, I think.”

  “Agreed. But we aren’t done. Let’s move on to something else. Do you think you can imitate a child?”

  And so they had found themselves come to Spitalfields, with Richard Templeton, in high color, shouting after her. “Come back! Come back here you mangy rascal!”

  Nora ran down the street the way Threadneedle had shown her—not straight down the middle but to the side, skittering and hopping along the rubbish piled near the buildings—keeping mostly out of sight wherever possible. Sort of like a cockroach.

  He flushed her straight toward a pair of boys, crouched in the alley, either picking in the dirt or playing at dice. They saw her coming, thought her a boy on the run, and disappeared into the turn of the alley, moving also quite a bit like little cockroaches.

  The lamp at the end of the street had already burned out, if it had ever been lit at all. Nora followed the boys blindly round the corner. They were ready and waiting. The older boy, who could not have been more than ten, grabbed her oil-stained coat. He wore a dirty thrummed cap, knitted from so many loose, frazzled ends of yarn it resembled a short multicolored wig.

  “Hey, what’s it all about?” he demanded.

  Nora didn’t answer.

  “You picked some cove’s pocket, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  Another fiery yell from Templeton argued otherwise. He was apparently still in pursuit.

  “Here,” said the boy in the knitted cap. “Come this way. And remember who it was saved your scrawny little neck.

  Chapter 15

  “Thank you, Geoffrey,” Theodora said as the elderly cook set the plate of boiled ham on the table.

  “Will you be needing anything else, Ma’am?”

  “No. Thank you.” She raised a crystal water goblet to her lips. Then she paused, tilting the goblet toward the empty place where Eric should be sitting, were he not still occupied in London. “Good luck, my darling. Home soon.”

  As she sipped the cool water, she felt the eyes boring into her again.

  The eyes. That damn painting. The eyes of Griffin Grayson.

  Whoever had painted the huge portrait of her husband’s grandfather, had done an impressive job of it. The artist had captured his trademark sardonic half-sneer perfectly. The steely hair, the square shoulders, the black death-shroud Puritan suit jacket. And worse of all those mean eyes—that uncompromising, judgmental gaze.

  It was all his fault. Whatever ills were befalling the Grayson family now, they were all because of Griffin. When the faeries had caused his illegitimate daughter’s death, Lord Griffin had taken his revenge in the cruelest, most devastating means imaginable. Faery mothers killed in their beds and their children murdered in their sleep. Iron musket balls soaked in St John’s wort, vicious hunting hounds, faery mounds set aflame, his great iron bell tolling each bloody death. She recalled the screams in the night, blue eldritch fire, and hordes of faeries running like animals as they were driven into the hills.

  She stabbed her knife down into the hard wood of the dining table. Griffin’s table. Cut from the heart of a tree three hundred years old. As hard and unyielding as stone.

  The point of the knife barely scratched the surface of the sturdy oak.

  Her gaze wandered back up to the portrait. Damn it, the old man seemed so smugly satisfied with his legacy of pain and death. She would not have it any more. She just wouldn’t.

  She rushed to the wall. The panting was too heavy to move. She struggled with the frame and couldn’t lift it from its hook. But she would. She would. She did not have to be gentle.

  “Ma’am?” asked Geoffrey. The old steward had come back to re-fill her coffee.

  “Help me get this down.”


  “Is something the matter?”

  “Now!”

  “Very well, very well,” the old cook muttered to himself, though his tone did not match the sentiment exactly. Still, he added his feeble strength to Theodora’s and it was enough. The huge portrait came loose from the hook and clattered to the floor. One corner of the mahogany frame split apart.

  “Ma’am?”

  Theodora pushed Geoffrey aside. She dragged the portrait behind her, wrestling it across the hall toward the door to the rear garden. She shoved the door open with her shoulder and hauled the painting outside. The frame caught on the door hinge and splintered the mahogany molding.

  She stumbled on a flagstone, tripping over her own feet. She felt like she was dragging a dead body, or worse yet, a thing that wasn’t quite dead. Her wrist caught at an awkward angle and twisted painfully.

  “Damn it!”

  She threw the whole mess down on the cobbled patio and stomped on it. The canvas broke loose from the frame and she tore at it with her fingers but could not rip the heavy canvas. She should have brought the knife. It didn’t matter. She took a corner of the painting between her teeth and pulled, tearing off a thin strip at last. The figure’s shoulder tore away. She spit out the torn edge. The crusted paints tasted bitter in her mouth.

  She chomped down again and tore half the face away. There was poetic justice in this, she thought. Because she had been there. She had been one of the seven—the faeries who had tricked Griffin’s dogs into tearing him apart in the front courtyard of Grayson Hall.

  She went at the painting some more, ripping, tearing, snarling.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Oh, what is it now?” She whirled around expecting to see Geoffrey again. But it was not the elderly cook who stood behind her. It was Gregory Hardison, one of the Changed Men. He was staring at her intently. But of course he had no other way to stare. On the night he had been changed by the warping effects of the Chrysalid, Hardison had developed large round eyes of yellow and black, which looked very much like those of a barn owl. He also had a beard of thorny brambles that was impossible to shave away. He used hedge clippers to shape it into a sort of a van dyke.