With Fate Conspire (35 page)

Lights burst across Eliza’s vision, and she realized she was pressing her fingers against her eyeballs, just to have something to see.

Something other than the ghost.

“Leave me alone,” she whispered, forgetting her resolve not to talk to the dead woman. Or to the figment of her imagination, whichever it was. “You want me to kill myself, as you did, and I won’t. I
won’t.
” A laugh caught in her throat—a laugh or a sob, she couldn’t tell which.

Maybe it would be better to feign madness. Then she might be sent to Bedlam. She’d seen an article in the newspaper once, praising Bedlam for being a model of civilized, enlightened treatment for the mad—far better than a workhouse, anyway. But no, that would never happen; Mrs. Kittering would put a stop to it. Just as she’d prevented Eliza from being sent to the new women’s prison in Brixton, where she might have been able to keep an ounce of dignity. Instead it was hard labor in the Kensington workhouse, and confinement as mentally unsound.

“Please.” It was her own voice, whispering again, and then repeating itself more loudly. “Please. I won’t try to escape again. Just take me away from her—” Then she remembered that she must keep silent, that every word she spoke might keep her in here longer.

When she heard the footsteps outside, she cringed, thinking they had come to punish her for talking. When the door opened, the flood of light made her whimper in pain; it was far more than a single candle. And then she heard a voice, actually
speaking
to her, for the first time since they shoved her back into the cell. A voice that didn’t belong to the dead.

“Come on, then. Somebody wants to see you.”

A rough hand grabbed the sleeve of her smock. Eliza did not resist. The woman was taking her out of the cell; that was all that mattered. Bringing her back to the world of light and sound—bringing her back to the
world
.

By the time she felt fresh air on her face, her eyes had recovered enough for her to see. She was being marched across to the main building, past workhouse men who could be trusted with the labor of keeping the grounds tidy. What could they want her for?
Please, Mary Mother of God, don’t let them be taking me back to the justice, to ask for more time. If they’ve only brought me out to throw me back in again …

The main building was not a place where she spent much time; only the best of the workhouse inmates were given duties here, where visitors might see them. The matron hustled her through quickly, into a nearly empty room, containing only two things: an ordinary chair, and a much heavier one with shackles on its arms. Eliza swallowed a whimper as they were closed around her wrists.
It’s better than the cell. Anything’s better than the cell.
Then the matron left, and Eliza had just enough time to wonder what was going on before a man walked in.

He was a round-faced fellow, not much older than she, with alert eyes beneath heavy dark brows. Both whiskers and hair were closely trimmed, and he wore a stern-looking suit, everything buttoned into place. In one hand he carried a leather case, which he set down at his side when he took the chair across from Eliza, and opened to reveal a sheaf of papers. These he took out, but did not look at; they sat forgotten in his hand as he studied her.

Eliza stared back mutely, wondering who he was. Then he spoke, and a shock of familiarity washed over her. The accents of western Ireland, which she had heard before.

“Elizabeth White,” he said. “Formerly a housemaid to the Kittering family of Cromwell Road, in South Kensington.
Alias
Elizabeth Marsh, formerly a costerwoman.
Alias
Elizabeth Darragh, a drunkard seen in Newgate.
Alias
Elizabeth O’Malley, aged twenty-one years, of Whitechapel.”

God help me—it’s the Special Branch man.

She barely kept that behind her teeth. He knew who she was; the last thing she needed was to give away that she’d spied on him when he came to Cromwell Road. Eliza licked her lips and said, “Who are you?”

“Police Sergeant Patrick Quinn.” He folded his hands over the papers he held, continuing to study her. “You’ve been a hard woman to track down, Miss O’Malley.”

Not half hard enough.
“Why did you bother?”

He gave her a pitying look. “I work for the Special Irish Branch, Miss O’Malley. As you’ve likely guessed. So let’s pass over the bit where you pretend you don’t know why I’m here.” Now he did look down at the papers, thumbing through them briefly. “In October of last year, you were seen running out of Westminster Bridge Station, after a bomb went off on the train from Charing Cross.”

“I had nothing to do with that.”

“So you told Constable McCawley, when he questioned yourself a few days later. You claimed to be chasing somebody. The real culprits.”

Eliza closed her eyes. She still didn’t know whether it had been a mistake, telling the peeler even that much of the truth. At the time, it seemed like the right idea; after all, she needed to give some reason for why she’d been running that didn’t make it look like she’d been fleeing after dropping the bomb. Not until she had repeated her story several times did she find out that nobody else at Charing Cross had seen the people she was chasing.

Not people: faeries. And that’s why nobody saw them.

She should have said that to McCawley, let him write her off as a lunatic. It would have been harmless enough then. Saying it to Quinn now, though, would only trap her more thoroughly in the workhouse. Opening her eyes, Eliza said, “I don’t know any more now than I did then. If you’ve come to ask those questions over again, you might as well just read your papers there, because they’ll say everything I know.”

To her surprise, Quinn nodded. “No doubt. It’s new questions I’ve come with, about the new bombings.”

“I wasn’t at Victoria Station,” Eliza said immediately, remembering Tom Granger’s news, months before.

Those thick brows drew a little together. “Not Victoria Station. More recent than that. I mean the four on the thirtieth of May.”

Four?
She couldn’t hide her startlement. Then she tried to remember when she’d attacked the changeling. Her thoughts were sluggish with cold and isolation; she couldn’t recall.

Until Quinn refreshed her memory. “You were arrested the next day.”

“Not for that!” Eliza protested. “I hit the Kitterings’ daughter.”

“Yes, I know.” Of course he knew; that would have been the easiest thing to learn about her. Far more disturbing was his ability to put that together with her other deeds—especially the ones in Newgate. As if to remind her of that, Quinn said, “One of the bombs was found before it could do harm; the other three went off a little after nine in the evening on the thirtieth. Around two the following morning, Constable Mason found you drunk and disorderly in Newgate. Do you deny that was yourself?”

Not much point in trying, not when she’d foolishly given her name as Darragh. The police kept damnably good notes on everything; they would have a record of Owen’s disappearance, even if they never did anything about it. And therefore a record of her complaints. “That was me,” Eliza admitted. “But I had nothing to do with those bombs. I didn’t even know about them until you told me.”

More glancing through the papers in his hand. “According to the housekeeper, Mrs. Fowler, your evening off was supposed to be June second, the following Monday. But on the morning of the thirtieth, you demanded to be given that night off instead.”

How much did he
have
on those sheets? None of that had been part of her trial for assault; he must have questioned Mrs. Fowler himself. And probably the Kitterings, too. “I’d heard some bad news,” Eliza said, giving the first explanation that came to mind. “I wasn’t much minded to spend the whole day doing chores for nobs.”

“What sort of bad news?”

Her wrists pulled against the shackles of her chair, involuntarily. She felt as if she’d been staked out for his target practice. If she tried to lie, he’d catch her out; good as she’d become, she doubted she was any match for this man with his friendly face and too-sharp eyes.

But she could hide behind something like the truth. “You know about Owen Darragh.”

“Your childhood love. Disappeared seven years ago.”

Hearing the word “love” from his mouth made her want to snarl, but she confined herself to a nod. “I’d heard a rumor. Thought I might be able to find out what happened to him. But it didn’t come to anything.”

From a pocket inside his coat, Quinn drew out a pencil and a small notebook. Bracing the latter against his knee, he scribbled a few words, while Eliza watched in dread. “What was this rumor?”

Would he never stop asking questions?
Of course not.
“What do you care?” she asked, her tone deliberately nasty, to distract him. “I went to the police when he was taken, and do you know what they told me? That the Irish are an unreliable race, we are, and I shouldn’t be surprised if he abandoned his mother and sister and me. That he’d probably gone to America, or fallen drunk into the river and drowned. And nobody bothered to search.”

Quinn’s pencil stopped. After a pause, he tucked it back inside his notebook, set the notebook and papers on the floor. Then he leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees and looking her straight in the eye. “They may have said that, but do you think I would? About my own people? I was born in Castlecarra, Ballyglass, and lived there ’til I was near twenty, I did. We’ve drunkards aplenty, and unreliable sorts, but sure your lad wasn’t one of them. And they did search, you know. Gave up because there was nothing to find. But if you’ve new evidence, I’ll pass it to the fellows in the C.I.D., and see what they can do with it.”

The distraction wasn’t working as she’d hoped it would. Eliza wished he
could
help—but what could she do? Tell him to arrest Louisa Kittering for impersonating a human? “Ballyglass,” she said, and laughed bitterly. “You’re Irish-born, and yet yourself and your mates in the Special Branch spend yer time hunting Irish for the English.”

Quinn’s expression darkened. “You think I should let them go? Twelve people were hurt in the explosion at the Junior Carlton Club. Several servants at Sir Watkin Williams’s house, one of them badly. Two coachmen and a police constable at Scotland Yard. If a boy hadn’t spotted the parcel at the foot of Nelson’s Column, the fourth bomb would have caught even more people in Trafalgar Square. And that’s just one night’s work; Praed Street hurt more than seventy last autumn. I should turn a blind eye, just because ’tis Irish lads who do the deed?”

“You know what they’re fighting for.”

“And I know this is a devil of a bad way to do it. Parnell’s working for home rule in the Parliament now, and that might do some good—but not if there’s another Clerkenwell outrage, or more murders in Phoenix Park. Your lads poison half the world against them, when they go killing people like that.”

Eliza shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “They aren’t my lads.”

“Aye, you were a babe in your mother’s arms when they blew up Clerkenwell. But now—”

“No, I mean—” She caught herself. What was she doing? All but spitting in Fergus Boyle’s face when he accused her of allying herself with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, then turning around and defending them to Quinn. It made a bad preface for what she said next. “I’m no Fenian.”

As she feared, he didn’t believe her. “We know you’ve been helping them.”

“I have not!”

“I understand being loyal to family, Miss O’Malley. But you have to see that there are things more important than kin.”

He said it so seriously, and yet she had no idea what he meant. “They’re Americans, aren’t they? No kin of mine.”

“But your father is.”

It felt like the chair dropped two inches without warning; her hands clutched the arms for balance. “My father’s in Newgate.”

Quinn didn’t bother to glance at his notes. “Not since the twenty-ninth of May.”

She couldn’t let go of the chair. James O’Malley, out of prison at last. If she’d been in Whitechapel, she would have known. But she’d done her best to hide from her own world, and so it fell to a police constable to tell her about the only family she had left.

Out on the twenty-ninth. On the thirtieth, Eliza asked for the night off, and then four bombs appeared around London.

She’d been visiting him in Newgate, the night she chased the faeries to Charing Cross.

“I haven’t seen him,” she whispered. “You must believe me.” Surely her shock was proof enough. But Quinn just sat there, looking at her, until she asked the question eating away at her heart like acid. “Was he there? Did my da help them?”

“We have a man who says ye both did.”

It wasn’t true. At least for herself, it wasn’t; she knew
that
beyond a sliver of doubt. In which case, who would—

Boyle.
Like a slap to the face, she remembered Father Tooley warning her at Easter.
Fergus Boyle’s been spreading trouble.
Did he hate her that much, to point a finger at her when the Special Branch boys came calling?

For Maggie’s sake, he might. And that thought was bitter as poison, that
Maggie
might hate her so much, when they’d been sister-close in the years before Owen was stolen. But now she and her mother were tottering on the brink of starvation, and that made a woman harsh. Maggie could have told them, or told Boyle to do it. Or he’d done it of his own will, to make sure Eliza would never come to trouble the Darraghs again.

“Tell me what you know,” Quinn said, very softly, “and I’ll do what I can for you. No lass should be caught in a place like this.”

The gentleness of his voice startled her. Why such sympathy, such kindness? Then Eliza sniffled, reflexively, and realized she was crying. And Quinn, not knowing her thoughts about Maggie, thought it was guilt that sent the tears down her face.

With the remnants of anger in her belly, she considered—ever so briefly—telling him to look into Fergus Boyle. That was a man she wouldn’t mind seeing locked away; whatever Maggie’s state, she could do better than him. But no: that would make her as bad as him, turning Irish over to the English for no better reason than hate. Quinn at least had a purpose for what he did that went beyond his own feelings.