“And that makes everyone, at last,” said Aelius. “As my pressing need for a spot of breakfast has provided us a deadline, let’s be seated.”
Cassia took the chair to the right of the head, Aelius beside her, Fyfe beside him. Oren drew out the chair opposite Aelius and motioned for Ilsa to sit.
“This seat usually belongs to” – he indicated Eliot, in exile at the far end of the table. The boy was running a finger around the lip of his teacup. He didn’t appear to be listening. “Today, it can be yours.”
He took a seat on Ilsa’s left. The head of the table – Hester’s place, she assumed – remained empty, but so did the place to Ilsa’s right. Aelius had said this was everyone, but that couldn’t be. Someone else was missing.
“Now.” Oren had a notebook tucked under his arm, which he placed on the table, then he folded his hands and rested them on top in a precise and delicate motion. Ilsa couldn’t be sure, but she thought she heard Fyfe sigh. Aelius’s eyes went heavenward. “Before we start divulging all the sensitive details of our current situation to a girl from the Otherworld who is most likely a Changeling, who may or may not resemble the person we’re looking for, and who could easily, in fact, be part of a deceit of some kind, don’t you think we should at least attempt to establish her identity? We hired an outsider, after all – do we even have any way of verifying that Captain Fowler found her where he said he did?”
“You could ask me,” Ilsa said through gritted teeth. “Or you could go take a look. P’raps my friend’s dead body still marks the spot, depending what them other London constables are getting up to right ’bout now.” Perhaps they were ogling Martha like a curiosity. Perhaps they were poking at her with pens, or having their dogs sniff at her clothing. Perhaps the newspapers were there. They would print that she was a common thief. Tears stung Ilsa’s eyes, but she clenched her fists and held them back.
Aelius chuckled. “There’s an idea, lad. Would this Other-worlder’s body the captain spoke of be proof enough for you?”
“Actually,” said Oren, lacing his fingers. He turned to Ilsa. “I was hoping you could tell us where you have been all these years. I went to find Ilsa Ravenswood myself, when she was about a year and a half old, and I was told she had died of smallpox some months previously.”
“By Miss Mitcham,” said Ilsa quietly. “Lord Walcott’s old housekeeper.”
Oren turned to Cassia, a question in his eyes. But the Sorcerer gave a small shrug as if to say she would tell him after.
“Precisely. And now it appears I was lied to,” he said. “Do you have any idea why?”
The truth was on her tongue, but her breath wouldn’t force it out. What right did they have to let those things happen and then interrogate her about it? “Because she ain’t a good woman,” she managed.
“She had the certificate of death to prove it,” said Oren.
Ilsa turned on him. “I s’pose it was the St Genevieve Orphanage by the time you got there, weren’t it?”
“That’s right. She said she had been left the house in Walcott’s will and had considered it her God-given duty to use it to help the less fortunate.”
“And she had a bit of paper what proved a baby girl had died in a house full of cold, hungry babies. I don’t s’pect you’d understand, but it weren’t all that uncommon, sir.”
Oren nodded pensively. He didn’t appear moved by the grim realities of Ilsa’s childhood.
“There is a way you could prove your identity,” he said. “When I smuggled Ilsa Ravenswood to the Otherworld seventeen years ago, she had with her a toy. Can you tell us what it was?”
Yesterday, Ilsa might not have been able to answer. She did not treasure any memories from her early childhood, and the more time passed, the happier she was to see them fade. But one had snagged since coming through the portal, first when the captain told her what the Changelings called their militia, and repeatedly since.
“It was a wolf,” she said. She could see it in her mind’s eye now. She had loved it once. She had never realised it was a clue. “A wooden wolf what rattled.”
Oren’s face was unreadable. “And do you have it?” Ilsa shook her head. “Why not?”
“I ran away from the orphanage,” Ilsa said. She kept her voice even. “I escaped as a bird. I taught myself to shift enough that I could control it, but I din’t know how to carry a thing with me, like I can sometimes do now, if I stick it in my clothes.” Oren continued to study her, his expression inscrutable, and Ilsa felt her frustration rise. “If you don’t believe me, you can go look for yourself. It’s under a floorboard in the attic. I stashed it there, thinking I’d go back, only I never did.”
“You were there,” said Cassia. She was shaking her head. “When Oren was speaking to this woman… you were right there in the house?”
Ilsa nodded stiffly. “’Til I was nine.”
“And what about when you left the orphanage?” asked Fyfe. Ilsa glanced up, and he gave her an encouraging nod.
“I lived on the streets for a while,” she said into her lap. “I’d do magic tricks for change, like making myself disappear. Things I could do with my talents. Then a stage magician saw me at it one day. He was looking for an assistant. He’d wanted a young woman, I reckon, but he could tell I was doing something special. Something he needed.”
It had taken months for Ilsa and Blume to build the tentative trust that led to his confession: that he may have been talented and charismatic once, before the drink, but he wasn’t the secret of his own success. He had had a wife,
