With Fate Conspire Read Free

and the words between them weren’t pretty—they never were—but she’d clean forgotten about that after she walked out of the prison and saw that familiar, hated face.
    She shrugged uncomfortably, hoping Tom would let the issue drop. The more questions she answered, the more likely it was that he’d catch a whiff of something odd. Better to leave it at a nameless father with an unnamed crime. Tom didn’t press, but he did pick up one of his newspapers and begin searching through a back page. “’Ere, take a look at this.”
    The piece above his ragged fingernail was brief, just two short paragraphs under the header MR. CALHOUN’S NEW FACTORY . “Factory work ain’t bad,” Tom said. “Better than service, anyway—no missus always on you, and some factories pay more—and it would get you out of ’ere. Waiting around won’t do you no good, Lizzie, and you keeps this up, sooner or later your luck’ll go bad. Workhouse bad.”
    “Ah, you’re just trying to get rid of me,” Eliza said. It came out higher than usual, because of the tightness in her throat. Tom was just useful; his corner was the best one to watch from. She never intended more than that—never friendship—and his kindness made her feel all the more guilty about her lies.
    But he was right, as far as it went. She’d been in service before, to an Italian family that sold secondhand clothes in Spitalfields. Being a maid-of-all-work, regardless of the family, was little better than being a slave. Lots of girls said factory work was preferable, if you could get it. But abandoning Newgate …
    She couldn’t. Her disobedient eyes drifted back to the advertisement anyway. And then she saw what lay below, that Tom’s hand had covered before.
     
LONDON FAIRY SOCIETY—A new association has formed in Islington, for the understanding of Britain’s fast-vanishing fairy inhabitants. Meetings the second Friday of every month at 9 White Lion St., 7 P.M.
    Eliza only barely kept from snatching the paper out of Tom’s hands, to stare at the words and see if they vanished. “May I?” she asked.
    She meant only to read it again, but Tom handed her the paper and flapped his hands in its wake. “Keep it.”
    The cold had gone; Eliza felt warm from head to toe. She could not look away from the words. Coincidence—or providence? It might be nothing: folk with money babbling on about little “flower fairies,” rather than faeries, the kind Eliza knew all too well. This new society might not know anything that could help her.
    But her alternative was waiting around here, with the fading hope that it would do her any good. Just because there’d been another bombing didn’t mean any of the people involved had been here; it could have been pure chance last October, spotting him in Newgate. She’d spent nearly every day here since then, and not caught so much as another glimpse. They were tricksy creatures, faeries were, and not easily caught. But perhaps this London Fairy Society could help her.
    “Thank you,” Eliza told Tom, folding the newspaper and stuffing it into the sagging pocket of her shawl.
    He shrugged, looking away in embarrassment. “Ah, it’s nothing. You feeds me buns enough; I owes you a newspaper’s worth, at least.”
    She wasn’t thanking him for the paper, but saying so would only make him more awkward. “I’d best be moving,” Eliza said. “These buns won’t sell themselves. But I’ll think about the factory, Tom; I will.” She meant it, too. It would be glorious to go back to something like normal life. No more of this hand-to-mouth existence, gambling everything on the hope of a second stroke of luck. After these three months, she’d even go back into service with the DiGiuseppes, just to know each night that she’d have a roof over her head.
    If a normal life was even possible anymore, after everything she’d been through. But that was a question for the future. First, she had to catch herself a faerie.
    Tom wished