Marie Brennan: With Fate Conspire

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’s 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 playacting 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.”