“You are telling me that you don’t know where she is?” The man standing by the glass display case radiated disbelief, from his tensed shoulders to his drawn expression.
Normally the contents of the case—precious relics of the Clan, valuable beyond belief—would have fascinated him, but right now his attention was focused on the bearer of bad news.
“I told you she’d be difficult.” The duke’s secretary was unapologetic. He didn’t sneer, but his expression was one of thinly veiled impatience. “You are dealing with a woman who was born and raised on the other side; she was clearly going to be a handful right from the start. I told you that the best way to deal with her would be to co-opt her and move her in a direction she was already going in, but you wouldn’t listen. And after that business with the hired killer—”
“That hired killer was my own blood, I’ll thank you to remember.” Esau’s tone of voice was ominously low.
“I don’t care whether he was the prince-magistrate of Xian-Ju province, it was dumb! Now you’ve told Angbard’s men that someone outside the Clan is trying to kill her, and you’ve driven her underground, and you’ve ruined her usefulness to me. I had it all taken care of until you attacked her. And then, to go after her but kill the wrong woman by mistake when I had everything in hand … !”
“You didn’t tell us she was traveling in company. Or hiding in the lady Olga’s rooms. Nor did we expect Olga’s lady-in-waiting to get nosy and take someone else’s bait. We’re not the only ones to have problems. You said you had her as good as under control?” Esau turned to stare at Matthias. Today the secretary wore the riding-out garb of a minor nobleman of the barbarian east: brocade jacket over long woolen leggings, a hat with a plume of peacock feathers, and riding boots. “You think forging the old man’s will takes care of anything at all? Are you losing your grip?”
“No.” Matthias rested his hand idly on his sword’s hilt. “Has it occurred to you that as Angbard’s heir she would have been more open to suggestions, rather than less? Wealth doesn’t necessarily translate into safety, you know, and she was clearly aware of her own isolation. I was trying to get her under control, or at least frightened into cooperating, by lining up the lesser families against her and positioning myself as her protector. You spooked her instead, before I could complete the groundwork. You exposed her to too much too soon, and the result is our shared loss. All the more so, since someone—whoever—tried to rub her out with Lady Olga.”
“And whose fault is it that she got away?” Esau snarled quietly. “Whose little tripwire failed?”
“Mine, I’ll admit.” Matthias shrugged again. “But I’m not the one around here who’s blundering around in the dark. I really wanted to enlist her in our cause. Willingly or unwillingly, it doesn’t matter. With a recognized heir in our pocket, we could have enough votes that when we get rid of Angbard … well. If that failed, we’d be no worse off with her dead, but it was hardly a desirable goal. It’s a good thing for you that I’ve got some contingency plans in hand.”
“If the balance of power in the Clan tips too far toward the Lofstrom-Thorold-Hjorth axis, we risk losing what leverage we’ve got,” warned Esau. “Never mind the old bat’s power play. What did she think she was up to, anyway? If the council suspected …” He shook his head. “You have to get this back under control. Find her and neutralize her, or we likely lose all the ground we have made in the past two years.”
“I risk losing a lot more than that,” Matthias reminded him pointedly. “Why did your people try to kill her? She was a natural dissident. More use to us alive than dead.”
“It’s not for the likes of you to question our goals,” Esau glared.
Matthias tightened his grip on his sword and turned slowly aside, keeping his eyes on Esau the whole time. “Retract that,” he said flatly.
“I—” Esau caught his eye. A momentary nod. “Apologize.”
“We are partners in this,” Matthias said quietly, “to the extent that both our necks are forfeit if our venture comes to light. That being the case, it is essential that I know not only what your organization’s intended actions are, but why you act as you do—so that I can anticipate future conflicts of interest and avoid them. Do you understand?”
Esau nodded again. “I told you there might be preexisting orders. There was indeed such an order,” he said reluctantly. “It took time to come to light, that’s all.”
“What? You mean the order for—gods below, you’re still trying to kill the mother and her infant? After what, a third of a century?”
It was Esau’s turn to shrug. “Our sanctified elder never rescinded the command, and it is not for us to question his word. Once they learned of the child’s continued existence, my cousins were honor-bound to attempt to carry out the orders.”
“That’s as stupid as anything I’ve ever heard from the Clan council,” Matthias commented dryly. “Times change, you know.”
“I know! But where would we be without loyalty to our forefathers?” Esau looked frustrated for a moment. Then he pointed to the glass display case. “Continuity. Without it, what would the Clan be? Or the hidden families?”
“Without—that?” Matthias squinted, as against a bright light. A leather belt with a curiously worked brass buckle, a knife, a suit of clothes, a leatherbound book. “That’s not the Clan, whatever you think. That’s just where the Clan began.”
“My ancestor, too, you know.”
Matthias shook his head. “It wasn’t clever, meeting here,” he murmured.
“We’re safe enough.” Esau turned his back on the Founder’s relics. “The question is, what are we to do now?”
“If you can get your relatives to stop trying to kill her, we can try to pin the blame on someone else,” Matthias pointed out. “A couple of candidates suggest themselves, mostly because they have been trying to kill her. If we do that then we can go back to plan A, which you’ll agree is the most profitable outcome of this situation.”
“Not possible.” Esau draw a finger across his throat. “The elders spoke, thirty-three years ago.”
Matthias sighed. “Well, if you insist, we can play it your way. But it’s going to be a lot harder, now. I suppose if I can get my hands on her foster-mother that will probably serve as a lure, but it’s going to cost you—”
“I believe I can arrange a gratuity if you’d take care of this loose end for us. Maybe not on the same scale as owning your own puppet countess, but sufficient recognition of your actions.”
“Well, that would be capital. I’ll set the signs and alert my agents. At least here’s something we can agree on.”
“Indeed.”
Matthias opened the door into the outer receiving room of the cramped old merchant’s house. “Come on.”
Esau followed Matthias out of the small storeroom and down a narrow staircase that led out into the courtyard of the house. “So what do you propose to do once she’s dead?”
“Do?” Matthias stopped and stared at the messenger, his expression unreadable. “I’m going to see if I can salvage the situation and go right on as I was before. What did you expect?”
Esau tensed. “Do you really think you can take control of the Clan’s security—even from your current position—without being an actual inner family member and Clan shareholder?”
Matthias smiled, for a moment. “Watch me.”
Gathering twilight. Miriam hid from the road behind a deadfall half buried in snow while she stripped off her outer garments, her teeth chattering from cold as she pulled on a pair of painfully cold jeans. She folded her outfit carefully into the upper half of her pack, then stacked the disguise she’d started out wearing in the morning on top. Then she unfolded and secured the bike. Finally she hooked the bulky night-vision glasses around her face—like wearing a telescope in front of each eye, she thought—zipped the seam in the backpack that turned it into a pair of panniers, slung them over the bike, and set off.
The track flew past beneath her tires, the crackle of gravel and occasional pop of a breaking twig loud in the forest gloom. The white coating that draped around her seemed to damp out all noise, and the clouds above were huge and dark, promising to drop a further layer of fine powdery snow across the scene before morning.
Riding a bike wasn’t exactly second nature, but the absence of other traffic made it easier to get to grips with. The sophisticated gears were a joy to use, making even the uphill stretches at least tolerable. Seven-league boots, she thought dreamily. The other town, whatever it was called, not-Boston, was built for legs and bicycles. She’d have to buy one next time she went there, whenever that was. Despite her toast to the prospects of future business with Burgeson, she had her reservations. Poor Laws, Sedition Acts, and a cop who obligingly gave directions to a clearly bent pawnbroker—it added up to a picture that made her acutely nervous. It’s so complex! What did he mean, there’s no Scotland? Until I know what their laws and customs are like it’s going to be too dangerous to go back.
The miles spun by. After an hour and a half Miriam could feel them in her calf muscles, aching with every push on the pedals—but she was making good speed, and by the time darkness was complete the road dipped down toward the coast, paralleling the Charles River. Eventually she turned a corner, taking her into view of a hunched figure squatting by the roadside.
Miriam braked hard, jumped off the bike. “Brill?” she asked.
“Miriam?” Brill’s face was a bright green pool in the twilight displayed by her night goggles. “Is that you?”
“Yes.” Miriam walked closer, then flicked her goggles up and pulled out a pocket flashlight. “Are you okay?”
“Frozen half to death.” Brill smiled shakily. “But otherwise unharmed.”
A vast wave of relief broke over Miriam. “Well, if that’s all…”
“This cloak lining is amazing,” Brill added. “The post house is just past the next bend. I’ve only been waiting for an hour. Shall we go?”
“Sure.” Miriam glanced down. “I’d better change, first.” It was the work of a few minutes to disassemble the bike, pull on her outfit over her trousers, and turn the bike and panniers into a backpack disguised by a canvas cover. “Let’s get some dinner,” Miriam suggested.
“Your magic goggles, and lantern,” Brill coughed discreetly.
“Oh. Of course.” Together they fumbled their way through the darkness toward the promise of food and a bed, be it ever so humble.
Almost exactly twenty-four hours later, Paulette’s doorbell chimed. “Who is it?” she called from behind the closed door.
“It’s us! Let us in!” She opened the door. Brill stumbled in first, followed by Miriam. “Trick or treat?”
“Trick.” Paulette stood back. “Hey, witchy!”
“It is, isn’t it.” Miriam closed the door. “It itches, too. I don’t know how to put this discreetly—have you got any flea spray?”
“Fleas! Away with you!” Paulette held her nose. “How did it go?”
“I’ll tell you in a few minutes. Over a coffee, once I’ve made it to the bathroom—oh shit.” Miriam stared up the staircase at Brilliana’s vanishing feet. “Well at least that’s sorted.” She dropped her pack onto the carpet; it landed with a dull thump. “’Scuse me, but I am going to strip. It’s an emergency.”
“Wait right there,” said Paulie, hurrying upstairs.
By the time she returned, bearing a T-shirt and a pair of sweats from the luggage, Miriam had her boots off and was down to outer garments. “Damn, central heating,” she said wonderingly. “There’s nothing to make you appreciate it like three days in a Massachusetts winter without it. Well, two and a half.”
“Did you got where you wanted to go?” Paulie asked, pausing.
“Yeah.” Miriam cracked a wide, tired grin.
“Give me five, baby!”
High fives were all very well, but when Miriam winced Paulette got the message. “Use the living room,” she said. “Get the hell out of those rags and then go up to my bedroom, okay? You can use the bedroom shower.”
“You’re a babe, babe.” Miriam nodded. She pulled a face. “Oh shit. I think I’m coming on.”
“That’s no fun. Look, go. I’ll sort the mess out later, ’kay?”
An hour later Miriam—infinitely warmer and cleaner—sat curled at one end of Paulette’s living room sofa with a mug of strong tea. Brill, wrapped in a borrowed bathrobe, sat at the other end. “So tell me, how was your walk in the woods?” Paulette asked Brill. “Meet any bears?”
“Bears?” Brill looked puzzled. “No, and a good thing—” she caught Miriam’s eye. “Oh. No, it was uneventful.”
“Well then.” Paulie focused on Miriam. “You had more luck, huh? Not just a walk in the woods?”
“Well, apart from Brill half freezing to death while I was trying not to get arrested, it was fine.”
“Getting. Arrested.” Paulette picked up the teapot and poured herself a mug. “You’re not getting away with that, Beckstein. Didn’t they accept your press pass or something?”
“It’s Boston, but not as we know it,” Miriam explained. “Uh, about two miles southeast of here I found myself on the edge of town. They speak English and they drive automobiles, but that’s about as far as the similarities go.” She pulled out her dictaphone and turned the volume up: “Zeppelin overhead, with a British flag on it! Uh, four propellers, sounds like diesel engines. There goes another steam car. They seem to make them big deliberately, I don’t think I’ve seen anything smaller than a fifty-eight Caddy yet.”
Paulette closed her mouth with a visible effort. “Did you take photographs?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.” Miriam grinned and held up her wrist. “You’ll have them just as soon as I get my Casio secret agent watch plugged into the computer. I knew those Inspector Gadget toys would come in handy sooner or later.”
“Toys.” Paulette rolled her eyes.
“Well, now we’ve got a whole new world to not understand,” said Miriam. “Any constructive suggestions?”
“Yep.” Paulette put her mug down. “Before you go over again, girl, we work out what you’re going to do. You need a lawyer or business manager over there, right? And you need money, and somewhere to live, and we need to find a place on the far side that’s away from human habitation in Brill’s world and we can rent on our own side. Right? And we need to understand what you’re messing with before you get yourself arrested. So spill it!”
Miriam reached into her bag and pulled out two books then dumped them on the table with a bump. “History lesson time. Watch out for the one with the brown paper cover,” she warned. “It bites.”
Paulette opened mat one first, looked at the flyleaf, and sucked in her breath. “Communist?” she asked.
“Nope, it’s much weirder than that.” Miriam picked up the other book. “I’ll start with this one, you start with that one, then we’ll swap.”
Paulette glanced at the window. “It’s nearly eleven, for Pete’s sake! You want I should pull an overnighter?”
“No, that won’t be necessary.” Miriam put her book down and looked at her. “I’ve been meaning to raise this for a while. I’ve been staying here, and I didn’t mean to. I really appreciate you putting Brill up, but two guests is two too many and—”
“Shut up,” Paulette said fiercely. “You’re going to stay here till you’ve told me what you’ve seen and gotten your act together to move out properly! And hit the deadline,” she muttered under her breath.
“Deadline?” Miriam raised an eyebrow.
“The Clan summit,” Brill explained tonelessly. She yawned. “I told Paulie about it.”
“You can’t let them do it!” Paulette insisted.
“Do what?” Miriam blinked.
“Move to declare you incompetent and make you a permanent ward of whoever the Clan deems appropriate,” Brill explained. She looked puzzled. “Didn’t you know? That’s what Olga said Baron Oliver was muttering about.”
Iris raised the cup of coffee to her lips with both hands. She looked a little shaky today, but Miriam knew better than to make a fuss. “So what did you do next?” she asked.
“I went to bed.” Miriam leaned back, then glanced around. The level of background noise in the museum food court was high and all their neighbors seemed to be otherwise preoccupied. “What else could I do? Beltaigne is nearly five months away, and I’m not going to let the bastards stampede me.”
“But the other place, this new one—” Iris sounded distracted—”doesn’t it take you a whole day to go each way, even if you have somewhere to stay at the other end?”
“There’s no point going off half-cocked, Ma.” Miriam idly opened a tube of sugar crystals and stirred them into her latte. “Look, if Baron Hjorth wants to declare me incompetent, he’s going to have to come up with some evidence. He might shove it through if I’m not there to defend myself, but I figure the strongest defense I can get is proof that there’s a conspiracy out there—a conspiracy that murdered my birth-mother and is trying to murder me, too, not just the petty shit he and my—grandmother—are shoveling at me. A second-strongest defense is evidence that I may be erratic, but I’ve come up with something valuable. Now, the assassin’s locket takes me to this other world—call it world three—and I’ve got to wonder. Does this mean they’re not part of the Clan or families? They’re working on the other side and in world three, while the Clan works on the other side and here, call here world two and Niejwein is part of world one. I’m, I guess, the first member of the Clan to actually become aware of world three and be able to get over there. That means that I can see about finding whoever’s sending the killers—see defense one, above—or see about opening up a whole new trade opportunity—see defense two, above. I’m going to tie the whole story up with a bow and hand it to them. And mess up Baron Hjorth’s game into the bargain.” She rolled up the empty sugar tube into a tight little wad and threw it at the back of the booth.
“That sounds like my daughter,” Iris said thoughtfully. She grinned. “Don’t let the bastards realize you’ve got the drop on them until it’s too late for them to dodge.” She put the smile aside. “Morris would be proud of you.”
“Um.” Miriam nodded, unable to trust her tongue. “How have you been? How did you get away from them tonight?”
“Well, you know, I haven’t had much trouble with being under surveillance lately.” Iris sipped her coffee. “Funny how they don’t seem to be able to tell one old woman in a motorized blue wheelchair from another, isn’t it?”
“Ma, you shouldn’t have!”
“What, give some of my friends an opportunity for a little adventure?” Iris snorted and pushed her bifocals up her nose. Slyly: “Just because my daughter thinks she can go haring off to other worlds, running away from her problems—”
“It’s the source of my goddamn problems, not the solution,” Miriam interrupted.
“Well good, just as long as you understand that.” Iris met her eyes with a coolly unreadable expression that slowly moderated into one of affection. “You’re grown up now and there’s not a lot I can teach you. Just as well really, one day I won’t be around to do the teaching and it’d be kind of embarrassing if—”
“—Mother!”
“Don’t you ‘mother’ me! Listen, I raised you to face facts and deal with the world as it really is, not to pretend that if you stick your head in the sand problems will go away. I’m in late middle age and I’m damned if I’m not going to inflict my hard-earned wisdom on my only daughter.” She looked mildly disgusted. “Come to think of it, I wish someone had beaten it into me when I was a child. Pah. But anyway. You’re playing with fire, and I would really hate it if you got burned. You’re going to try and track down these assassins from another universe, aren’t you? What do you think they are?”
“I think—” Miriam paused. “They’re like the Clan and the families,” she said finally. “Only they travel between world one and world three, while the Clan travel between world one and world two, our world. I figure they decided the Clan were a threat a long time ago and that’s probably something to do with, with why they tried to nail my mother. All those years ago. And they’re smaller and weaker than the Clan, that much seems obvious, so I can maybe set up in world three, their stronghold, before they notice me. I think.”
“Ambitious.” Iris didn’t crack a smile. “What did I tell you when you were young, about not jumping to conclusions?”
“Um. You know better? Is there something you haven’t been telling me?”
Iris nodded sharply. “Can you permit your mother to keep one or two things to herself?”
“Guess so.” Miriam shrugged uncomfortably. “Can you give your daughter any hints?”
“Only this.” Iris met her gaze unflinchingly. “Firstly, do you really think you’d have been hidden from the families for all these years without someone over there covering your trail?”
“Ma—”
“I can’t tell you for sure,” she added, “but I think someone may have been watching over you. Someone who didn’t want you dragged into all this—at least not until you were good and ready to look out for yourself.”
Miriam shook her head. “Is that all? You think I’ve got a fairy godmother?”
“Not exactly.” Iris finished her coffee. “But here’s a ‘secondly’ for you to think about. Shortly after you surfaced, the strangers, these assassins, started hunting for you. To say nothing of the second bunch who tried to wipe out this Olga person. Doesn’t that suggest something? What about that civil war among the families that you told me about?”
“Are you trying to suggest it’s part of some sixty-year-old feud?” Miriam demanded. “Or that it isn’t over?”
“Not exactly. I’m wondering if the sixty-year-old feud wasn’t part of this business, if you follow my drift. Like, started by outsiders meddling for their own purposes.”
“That’s—” Miriam paused for thought—“Paranoid! I mean, why—”
“What better way to weaken a powerful enemy than to get it fighting itself?” Iris asked.
“Oh.” Miriam was silent for a while. “You’re saying that because of who I am—nothing more, just because of who my parents were—I’m the focus of a civil war?”
“Possibly. And you may just have reignited it by crawling out of the woodwork.” Iris looked thoughtful. “Do you have any better suggestions? Are you involved in anyming else that might explain what’s going on?”
“Roland—” Miriam stopped. Iris stared at her. “You said not to trust any of them,” Miriam continued slowly, “but I think I can trust him. Up to a point.”
Iris met her eyes. “People do the strangest things for money and love,” she said, a curious expression on her face. “I should know.” She chuckled humorlessly. “Watch your back, dear. And… call me if you need me. I don’t promise I’ll be there to help—with my health that would be rash—but I’ll do my best.”
The next morning Paulette arrived back at the house around noon, whistling jauntily. “I did it!” she declared, startling Miriam out of the history book she was working up a headache over. “We move in tomorrow!”
“We do?” Miriam shook her head as Brill came in behind Paulie and closed the door, carefully wiping the snow off her boots on the mat just inside.
“We do!” Paulette threw something at her; reaching out instinctively, Miriam grabbed a bunch of keys.
“Whereto?”
“The office of your dreams, madam chief high corporate executive!”
“You found somewhere?” Miriam stood up.
“Not only have I found somewhere, I’ve rented it for six months up front.” Paulette threw down a bundle of papers on the living room table. “Look. A thousand square feet of not-entirely-brilliant office space not far from Cambridgeport. The main thing in its favor is a downstairs entrance and a backyard with a high wall around it, and access. On-street parking, which is a minus. But it was cheap—about as cheap as you can get anything near the waterfront for these days, anyway.” Paulie pulled a face. “Used to belong to a small and not very successful architect’s practice, then they moved out or retired or something and I grabbed a three-year lease.”
“Okay.” Miriam sighed. “What’s the damage?”
“Ten thousand bucks deposit up front, another ten thousand in rent. About eight hundred to get gas and power hooked up, and we’re going to get a lovely bill from We the Peepul in a couple of months, bleeding us hard enough to give Dracula anemia. Anyway, we can move in tomorrow. It could really use a new carpet and a coat of paint inside, but it’s open plan and there’s a small kitchen area.”
“The backyard looked useful,” Brill said hesitantly.
“Paulie took you to see it?”
“Yeah.” Brill nodded. Where’d she pick that up from? Miriam wondered: Maybe she was beginning to adjust, after all.
“What did you think of it?” Miriam asked as Paulette hung her coat up and headed upstairs on some errand.
“That it’s where ordinary people work? There’s nowhere for livestock, not enough light for needlework or spinning or tapestry, not enough ventilation for dyeing or tanning, not enough water for brewing—” She shrugged. “But it looks very nice. I’ve slept in worse palaces.”
“Livestock, tanning, and fabric all take special types of building here,” Miriam said. “This will be an office. Open-plan. For people to work with papers. Hmm. The yard downstairs. What did you think of that?”
“Well. First we went in through a door and up a staircase like that one there, narrow—the royal estate agent, is that right? took us up there. There’s a room at the top with a window overlooking the stairs, and that is an office for a secretary. I thought it rather sparse, and there was nowhere for the secretary’s guards to stand duty, but Paulie said it was good. Then there is a short passage past a tiny kitchen, to a big office at the back. The windows overlooking the yard have no shutters, but peculiar plastic slats hung inside. And it was dim. Although there were lights in the ceiling, like in the kitchen here.”
“Long lighting tubes.” Miriam nodded. “And the back?”
“A back door opens off the corridor onto a metal fire escape. It goes down into the yard. We went there and the walls are nearly ten feet high. There is a big gate onto the back road, but it was locked. A door under the fire escape opens into a storage shed. I could not see into any other windows from inside the yard. Is that what you wanted to know?”
Miriam nodded. “I think Paulie’s done good. Probably.” Hope there’s something appropriate on the far side, in “world three,” she thought. “Okay, I’m going to start on a shopping list of things we need to move in there. If it works out, I’ll start ferrying stuff over to the other side—then make a trip through to the far side, to see if we’re in the right place.” She grinned. “If this works, I will be very happy.” And I won’t have to fork out a second deposit for somewhere more useful, she noted mentally.
“How was your reading?” Paulie asked, coming downstairs again.
“Confusing.” Miriam rubbed her forehead. “This history book—” she tapped the cover of the “legal” one—”is driving me nuts.”
“Nuts? What’s wrong with it?”
“Everything!” Miriam raised her hands in disgust. “Okay, look. I don’t know much about English history, but it’s got this civil war in the sixteen-forties, goes on and on about some dude called the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. I looked him up in Encarta and yes, he’s there, too. I didn’t know the English had a civil war, and it gets better: They had a revolution in 1688, too! Did you know that? I sure didn’t, and it’s not in Encarta—but I didn’t trust it, so I checked Britannica and it’s kosher. Okay, so England has a lot of history, and it’s all in the wrong order.”
She sat down on the sofa. “Then I got to the seventeen-forties and everything went haywire.”
“Haywire. Like, someone discovered a time machine, went back, and killed their grandfather?”
“Might as well have.” Miriam rolled her eyes. “The Young Pretender—look, I’m not making these names up—sails over from France in 1745 and invades Scotland. And in this book, he got to crown himself king in Edinburgh.”
“Young pretender—what did he pretend to be?”
“King. Listen, in our world, he did the same—then he marched on London and got himself spanked, hard, by King George. That’s George the first, not the King George the thingummy who lost the war of Independence.”
“I think I need an aspirin,” said Paulette.
“What this means is mat in the far side, England actually lost Scotland in 1745. They fought a war with the Scots in 1746, but the French joined in and whacked their fleet in the channel. So they whacked the French back in the Caribbean, and the Dutch joined in and whacked the Spanish—settling old scores—and then the Brits, while their back was turned. It’s all a crazy mess. And somewhere in the middle of this mess things went wrong, wrong, wrong. According to Bri-tannica, Great Britain got sucked into something called the Seven Years’ War with France, and signed a peace treaty in 1763. The Brits got to keep Canada but gave back Guadaloupe and pissed off the Germans, uh, Prussians. Whatever the difference is. But according to this looking-glass history, every time the English—not the Brits, there’s no such country—started getting somewhere, the king of Scotland tried to invade—there were three battles in as many years at some place called New Castle. And then somewhere in the middle of this, King George, the second King George, gets himself killed on a battlefield in Germany, and is succeeded by King Frederick, and I am totally confused because there is no King Frederick in Britannica.”
Miriam stopped. Paulette was looking bright, fascinated—and a million miles away. “That was when the French invaded,” she said.
“Huh?” Paulie shook her head. “The French? Invaded where?”
“England. See, Frederick was the crown prince, right? He got sent over here, to the colonies as a royal governor or something—‘Prince of the Americas’—because his stepmother the queen really hated him. So when his father died he was over here in North America—and the French and Scottish simultaneously invaded England. Whose army, and previous king, had just been whacked. And they succeeded.”
“Um, does this mean anything?” Paulette looked puzzled.
“Don’t you see?” demanded Miriam. “Over on the far side, in world three, there is no United States of America: Instead there’s this thing called New Britain, with a king-emperor! And they’re at war with the French Empire—or cold war, or whatever. The French invaded and conquered the British Isles something like two hundred and fifty years ago, and have held it ever since, while the British royal family moved to North America. I’m still putting it all together. Like, where we had a constitutional congress and declared independence and fought a revolutionary war, they had something called the New Settlement and set up a continental parliament, with a king and a house of lords in charge.” She frowned. “And that’s as much as I understand.”
“Huh.” Paulette reached out and took the book away from her. “I saw you look like that before, once,” she said. “It was when Bill Gates first began spouting about digital nervous systems and the net. Do you need to go lie down for a bit? Maybe it’ll make less sense in the morning.”
“No, no,” Miriam said absently. “Look, I’m trying to figure out what isn’t there. Like, they’ve had a couple of world wars—but fought with wooden sailing ships and airships. There’s a passage at the end of the book about the ‘miracle of corpuscular transsubstantiation’—I think they mean atomic power but I’m not sure. They’ve got the germ theory of disease and steam cars, but I didn’t see any evidence of heavier-than-air flight or antibiotics or gasoline engines. The whole industrial revolution has been delayed—they’re up to about the 1930s in electronics. And the social thing is weird. I saw an opium pipe in that pawnbroker’s, and I passed a bar selling alcohol, but they’re all wearing hats and keeping their legs covered. It’s not like our 1920s, at least not more than skin-deep. And I can’t get a handle on it,” she added frustratedly. “I’ll just have to go over there again and try not to get myself arrested.”
“Hmm.” Paulette pulled up a carrier bag and dumped it on the table. “I’ve been doing some thinking about that.”
“You have? What’s about?”
“Well,” Paulie began carefully, “first thing is, nobody can arrest you and hold you if you’ve got one of these lockets, huh? Or the design inside it. Brill—”
“It’s the design,” Brilliana said suddenly. “It’s the family pattern.” She glanced at Paulette. “I didn’t understand the history either,” she said plaintively. “Some of the men …” she tailed off.
“What about them?” Asked Miriam.
“They had it tattooed on their arms,” she said shyly. “They said so, anyway. So they could get away if someone caught them. I remember my uncle talking about it once. They even shaved their scalp and tattooed it there in reverse, then grew their hair back—so that if they were imprisoned they could shave in a mirror and use it to escape.”
Miriam stared at her in slack-jawed amazement. “That’s brilliant!” she said. “Hang on—” her hand instinctively went to her head. “Hmm.”
“You won’t have to shave,” said Paulie, “I know exactly what to do. You know those henna temporary tattoos you can get? There’s this dot-com that takes images you upload and turns them into tattoos, then sends them to you by mail order. They’re supposed to last for a few days. I figure if you put one on the inside of each wrist, then wear something with sleeves that cover it—”
“Wow.” Miriam instinctively glanced at the inside of her left wrist, smooth and hairless, unblemished except for a small scar she’d acquired as a child. “But you said you’d been thinking about something else.”
“Yup.” Paulette upended her shopping bag on the table. “Behold: a pair of digital walkie-talkies, good for private conversations in a ten-mile radius! And lo, a hands-free kit.”
“This is going to work,” Miriam said, a curious fixed smile creeping across her face. “I can feel it in my bones.” She looked up. “Okay. So tell me, Paulie, what do you know about the history of patent law?”
It took Miriam another day to work up the nerve to phone Roland. Before she’d gone back to Niejwein, to the disastrous plot and counterplot introduction to court life that had culminated in two attempts to murder her on the same night, they’d exchanged anonymous mobile phones. If she went outside she could phone him, either his voice mail or his own real-life ear, and dump all the unwanted complexities of her new life on a sympathetic shoulder. He’d understand: That was half the attraction that had sparked their whirlwind affair. He probably grasped the headaches she was facing better than anyone else, Brill included. Brill was still not much more than a teenager with a sheltered upbringing. But Roland knew just how nasty things could get. If I trust him, she thought wistfully. Someone had murdered the watchman and installed the bomb in the warehouse. She’d told Roland about the place, and then … correlation does not imply causation, she told herself.
In the end she compromised halfway, taking the T into town and finding a diner with a good range of exit options before switching on the phone and dialing. That way, even if someone had grabbed Roland and was actively tracing the call, they wouldn’t find her before she ended the call. It was raining, and she had a seat next to the window, watching the slug-trails of rain on the glass as her latte cooled while she tried to work up her nerve to call him.
When she dialed, the phone rang five times before he picked it up, a near-eternity in which she changed her mind about the wisdom of calling him several times. But it was too late: She was committed now. “Hello?” he asked.
“Roland. It’s me.”
“Hello, you.” Concern roughened his voice: “I’ve been really worried about you. Where are—”
“Wait.” She realized she was breathing too fast, shallow breaths that didn’t seem to be bringing in enough oxygen. “You’re on this side. Is anyone with you?”
“No, I’m taking a day off work. Even your uncle gives his troops leave sometimes. He’s been asking about you, though. As if he knows I’ve got some kind of channel to you. When are you going to come in? What have you been doing? Olga had the craziest story—”
“If it’s about the incident in her apartment, it’s true.” Miriam stopped, glanced obliquely at the window to check for reflections. There was nobody near her, just a barrista cleaning the coffee machine on the counter at the other side of the room. “Is Edsger around? He hasn’t gone missing or anything?”
“Edsger?” Roland sounded uncertain. “What do you know about—”
“Edsger. Courier on the Boston-New York run.” Quickly Miriam outlined her departure from the Clan’s holdings in the capital city Niejwein, her encounter with the courier on an Accela express. “Did he arrive alright?”
“Yes. I think so.” Roland paused. “So you’re telling me somebody tried to kill you in the warehouse as well?” A note of anger crept into his voice. “When I find out who—”
“You’ll do nothing,” Miriam interrupted. “And you’re not going to tell me you can provide security. There’s a mole in the organization, Roland, they’d work around you—and I’ve found out something more interesting. There’s a whole bunch of world-walkers you don’t know about, and they’re coming in from yet another world, where everything’s different. What we were talking about, the whole technology transfer thing, it can work there, too. In fact, that’s what I’m doing now, with Brill. The politics—do you know anything about Baroness Hildegarde’s interests? Olga said she’s going to try to get the Clan committee to declare me incompetent. Before that happens I want to be able to make her look like an idiot. I’m working on the other side, Roland, in the third world, building a front company. So I’m going to stay out of touch for quite a bit longer.”
“That makes sense. Can I see you?” he asked. A pause: “I really think we’ve got a lot to work out. I don’t know about you.” Another pause, “I was hoping we could …”
This was the hardest part. “I don’t think so,” Miriam heard herself saying. “I’d love to spend some time with you, but I’ve got so much to do. And there isn’t enough time to do it. I can’t risk you being followed, or Angbard deciding to reel me in too soon. I want to, but—”
“I get it.” He sounded distant.
“I’m not dumping you! It’s just I, I need some time.” She was breathing too fast again. “Later. Give me a week to sort things out, then we’ll see.”
“Oh. A week?” The distant tone vanished. “Okay, a week. I’ll wait, somehow. You’ll take care of yourself? You’re sure you’re safe where you are?”
“For now,” Miriam affirmed, crossing her fingers. “And I’ll have a lot more to tell you then, I’ll need your advice.” And everything else. The urge to drop her resolve, grab any chance to see him, was so strong she had trouble resisting. Keep it businesslike, for now. “I love you,” she said impulsively.
“Me too. I mean, I love you, too.” It came out in a tongue-tied rush, followed by a silence pregnant with unspoken qualifications.
“I’d better go,” she said at last.
“Uh. Okay, then.”
“Bye.” She ended the call and stared bleakly at the rain outside the window. Her coffee was growing cold. Now why did I really say that? She wondered, puzzled: Did I really mean it? She’d said those words before, to her husband—now ex-husband—and she’d meant them at the time. Why did this feel different?
“Damn it, I’m a fool,” she told herself gloomily, muttering under her breath so that the waitress at the far end of the bar took pains to avoid looking at her. I’m a fool for love, and if I don’t handle this carefully, I could end up a dead fool. Damn it, why did I have to take that locket in the first place?
The raindrops weren’t answering, so she finished her latte hurriedly and left.
They spent the next three days exercising Miriam’s magic credit card discreetly. Angbard hadn’t put a stop on it. Evidently the message had gotten through: Don’t bug me, I’m busy staying alive. A garden shed, a deluxe shooting hide, and enough gas-powered tools to outfit a small farm vanished into the trunk of Miriam’s rental car in repeated runs between Home Depot and Costco and the new office near Cambridge-port. Miriam didn’t much like the office—it had a residual smell of stale tobacco and some strange coffee-colored stains on the carpet that not even an industrial carpet cleaner could get rid of—but she had to admit that it would do.
They moved a couple of sofa beds into the rear office, and paid a locksmith to come around and beef up the door frame with deadbolts, and install an intruder alarm and closed-circuit TV cameras covering the yard and both entrances. A small fridge and microwave appeared in the kitchen, a television set and video in the front office. Paulette and Miriam groaned at each other about their aches and pains, and even Brill hesitantly joined in the bitching and moaning after they unloaded the flat-pack garden shed. “This had better be worth it,” Miriam said on day three as she swallowed a Tenolol tablet and a chaser of ibuprofen on the back of her lunchtime sub.
“You’re going across this afternoon?” asked Paulie.
“I’m going in half an hour,” Miriam corrected her. “First trip to see if it’s okay. Then as many short ones as I can manage, to ferry supplies over. I’ll take Brill through to help get the shed up and covered, then come back to plot expedition one. You happy with the shopping list?”
“I think so.” Paulette signed. “This isn’t what I was expecting when we got started.”
“I know.” Miriam grinned. “But I think this is going to work out. Listen, you’ve been going crazy with the both of us living on top of you for the past week, but once we’re gone we’ll be out of your hair for at least five days. Why don’t you kick back and relax? Get in some of that partying you keep moaning about missing?”
“Because it won’t be the same without you! I was planning on showing you some of the good life. Get you hitched up with a date, anyway.”
Miriam sobered. “I don’t need a date right now,” she said, looking worried—and wistful.
“You’re—” Paulette raised an eyebrow. “You still hooked on him?”
Miriam nodded. “It hasn’t gone away. We spoke yesterday. I keep wanting to see him.”
Paulette caught her arm. “Take it from me: don’t. I mean, really, don’t. If he’s for real, he’ll be waiting for you. If he isn’t, you’d be running such a huge risk—”
Miriam nodded, wordlessly.
“I figured that was what it was,” Paulie said softly. “You want him whether or not he’s messed up with the shits who’re trying to kill you or disinherit you, is that right?”
“I think he’s probably got his reasons,” Miriam said reluctantly. “Whatever he’s doing. And I don’t think he’s working for them. But—”
“Listen, no one is worth what those fuckers want to do to you. Understand?”
“But if he isn’t—” it came out as more of a whine than Miriam intended. She shook her head.
“Then it will all sort itself out, won’t it?” said Paulette. “Eventually.”
“Maybe.”
They broke off as the noise of the door opening downstairs reached them. Two pairs of eyes went to the camera. It was Brill, coming in from the cold: She’d been out shopping on foot, increasingly sure-footed in the social basics of day-to-day life in the twenty-first century. “I look at her, and I think she’ll be like you when she’s done some growing up,” Paulette commented quietly.
“Maybe.” Miriam stood up. “What’ve you got?” she called down the stairwell.
“Food for the trip.” Brill grinned. Then her smile turned thoughtful: “Do you have a spare gun?” she asked.
“Huh? Why?”
“There are wild animals in the hills near Hasleholm,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Oops.” Miriam frowned. “Do you really think it’s a problem?”
“Yes.” Brill nodded. “But I can shoot. He is very conservative, my father, and insisted I learn the feminine virtues—deportment, dancing, embroidery, and marksmanship. There are wolves, and I’d rather have a long gun for dealing with them.” Paulette rolled her eyes.
“Okay. Then I guess we’ll have to look into getting you a hunting rifle as soon as possible. In the meantime, there’s the pistol I took from the courier. Where did you stash it?”
“Back at Paulette’s home. But I really could use something bigger in case of wolves or bears,” Brill said seriously. She shoved her hair back out of the way and sniffed. “At least a pistol will protect me from human problems.”
“Deep joy. Try not to shoot any Clan couriers, huh?”
“I’m not stupid.” Brill sniffed again.
“I know: I just don’t want you taking any risks,” Miriam added. “Okay, kids, it’s time to move. And I’m not taking you through just yet, Brill.” She reached for her heavy hiking jacket, pulled it on, and patted the right pocket to check her own gun was in place. “Wish me luck,” she said, as she walked toward the back door and the yard beyond.
Miriam snapped into awareness teetering on the edge of an abyss. She flung herself sideways instinctively, grabbing for a tree branch—caught it, took two desperate strides as the ground under her feet crumbled, then felt her boots grip solid ground that didn’t crumble under her feet.
“Shit.” She glanced to her left. A large patch of muddy soil lay exposed in the middle of the snowscape, exposed on the crest of a steep drop to a half-frozen streambed ten feet below and twenty feet beyond what would be the side of the yard. “Oh shit.” She gasped for breath, icy terror forcing her to inhale the bitterly cold air. Horrified, she looked down into the stream. If we’d rented the next unit over, or if I’d carried Brill over—a ducking in this sort of weather could prove fatal. Or could I have come through at all? She glanced up. She’d been lucky with the tree, a young elm that grew straight and tall for the first six feet. The forest hereabouts was thin. I need to ask Brill what else she hasn’t thought to tell me about world-walking, she realized. Perhaps her mother was right about her being over-confident. A vague memory floated up from somewhere, something about much of Boston being built on landfill reclaimed from the bay. What if I’d tried this somewhere out at sea? she thought, and leaned against the tree for a minute or two to catch her breath. Suddenly, visions of coming through with her feet embedded in a wall or hovering ten feet above a lake didn’t seem comical at all.
She closed her locket and carefully pocketed it, then looked around. “It’ll do,” she muttered to herself. “As long as I avoid that drop.” She stared at it carefully. “Hmm.” She’d gone through about a foot away from the left-hand wall of their yard: The drop-off was steepest under the wall. The yard was about twelve feet wide, which meant—
“Right here.” She took out her knife and carved a blaze on the tree around head height. Then she dropped her backpack and turned around, slowly, trying to take in the landscape.
The stream ran downhill toward the river a quarter of a mile away, but it was next to invisible through the woods, even with the barren winter branches blocking less of the view than the summer’s profusion of green. In the other direction trees stretched away as far as she could see. “I could walk for miles in this, going in circles,” Miriam told herself. “Hmm.”
She carved another blaze on a tree, then began cautiously probing into the woods, marking trees as she went. After an hour she’d established that there was no sudden change in the landscape for a couple of hundred yards in two directions away from her little backyard. Sheer random chance had brought her through in nearly the worst possible place.
“Okay,” she told herself, squeezing her forehead as if she could cram the headache back inside the bones of her skull. “Here goes.” And this time, she pulled down her left sleeve and looked at the chilly skin on the inside of her wrist—pale and almost blue with cold, save for the dark green-and-brown design stippled in dye below the pulse point.
It worked.
That night, Miriam didn’t sleep well. She had a splitting headache and felt sick to her stomach, an unfamiliar nausea for one who didn’t suffer migraines. But she’d managed a second trip after dark, only four hours after the first, and returned after barely an hour with aching back and arms (from lifting the heavy shooting hide and a basic toolkit) and a bad case of the shivers.
Brilliana fussed over her, feeding her moussaka and grilled octopus from a Greek take-out she’d discovered somewhere—Brill had taken to exploring strange cuisines with the glee of a suddenly liberated gastronome—and readied her next consignment. “I feel like a Goddamn mule,” Miriam complained over a bottle of wine. “If only there were two of us!”
“I’d do it if I could,” Brill commented, stung. “You know I would!”
“Yes, yes… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just—I can carry eighty pounds on my back, just. A hundred and twenty? I can’t even pick it up. I wish I could take more. I should take up weight lifting …”
“That’s what the couriers all do. Why don’t you use a walking frame?” asked Brill.
“A walking—is this something the Clan does that I don’t know about?”
Brill shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said, “I never saw how they operate the post service. But surely—if we get a very heavy pack ready, and lift it so you can walk into it backwards, then just lock your knees, wouldn’t that work?”
“It might.” Miriam pulled a face. “I might also twist an ankle. Which would be bad, in the middle of nowhere.”
“What happens if you try to go through with something on the ground?” Brill asked.
“I don’t.” Miriam refilled her glass. “It was one of the first things I tried. If you jump on my back I can just about carry you for thirty seconds or so before I fall over—that’s long enough. But I tried with a sofa a while ago. All that happened was, I got a splitting headache and threw up in the toilet. I don’t know how I managed it the first time, sitting in a swivel chair, except maybe it was something to do with its wheels—there wasn’t much contact with the floor.”
“Oh, right.”
“Which says interesting things about the family trade,” Miriam added. “They’re limited by weight and volume in what they can ship. Two and a half tons a week. If we open up ‘world three’ that’ll go down, precipitously, although the three-way trade may be worth more. We’ve got to work out how to run an import/export business that doesn’t run into the mercantilist zero-sum trap.”
“The what?” Brill looked blank.
Miriam sighed. “Old, old theory. It’s the idea that there are only a finite quantity of goods of fixed value, so if you ship them from one place to another, the source has to do without. People used to think all trade worked that way. What happens is, if you ship some commodity to a place where it’s scarce, sooner or later the price drops—deflates—while you’re buying up so much of the supply that the price rises at the source.”
“Isn’t that the way things always work?” Brill asked.
“Nope.” Miriam took a sip of wine. “I’m drinking too much of this stuff, too regularly. Hmm, where was I? This guy called Adam Smith worked it out about two centuries ago, in this world. Turns out you can create value by working with people to refine goods or provide services. Another guy called Marx worked on Smith’s ideas a bit further a century later, and though lots of people dislike the prescription he came up with, his analysis of how capitalism works is quite good. Labor—what people do—enhances the value of raw materials. This table is worth more than the raw timber it’s made out of, for example. We can create value, wealth, what-have-you, if we can just move materials to where the labor input on them enhances their value the most.” She drifted off, staring at the TV set, which was showing a talk show with the volume muted. (Brill said it made more sense that way.) “The obvious thing to move is patents,” she murmured. “Commercially valuable ideas.”
“You think you can use the talent to create wealth, instead of moving it around?” Brill looked puzzled.
“Yes, that’s it exactly.” Miriam put her glass down. “A large gold nugget is no use to a man who’s dying of thirst in a desert. By the same token, a gold nugget may be worth a lot more to a jeweler, who can turn it into something valuable and salable, than it is to someone who just wants to melt it down and use it as coin. Jewelry usually sells for more than its own weight in raw materials, doesn’t it? That’s because of the labor invested in it. Or the scarcity of the end product, a unique work of art. The Clan seems to have gotten hung up on shipping raw materials around as a way of making money. I want to ship ideas around, instead, ideas that people can use to create value locally—in each world—actually create wealth rather than just cream off a commission for transporting it.”
“And you want to eventually turn my world into this one, Brilliana said calmly.
“Yes.” Miriam looked back at her. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing, do you think?”
Brill gestured at the TV set. “Put one of those, showing that, in every peasant’s house? Are you kidding? I think it’s the most amazingly wonderful thing I’ve ever heard of!” She frowned. “My momer would say that’s typical of me, and my father would get angry and perhaps beat me for it. But I’m right, and they’re wrong.”
“Ah, the self-confidence of youth.” Miriam picked up her glass again. “Doesn’t the idea of, like, completely wiping out the culture of your own people worry you? I mean, so much of what we’ve got here is such complete shit—” She stopped. Brill’s eyes were sparkling—with anger, not amusement.
“You really think so? Go live in a one-room hut for a couple of years, bearing illiterate brats half of whom will die before they’re five! Without a fancy toilet, or even a thunder-mug to piss in each morning. Go do that, where the only entertainment is once a week going to the temple where some fat stupid priest invokes the blessings of Sky Father and his court on your heads and prays that the harvest doesn’t fail again like it did five years ago, when two of your children starved to death in front of your eyes. Then tell me that your culture’s shit!”
Miriam tried to interrupt: “Hey, what about—”
Brill steamed right on. “Shut up. Even the children of the well-off—like me—grow up living four to a room and wearing hand-me-downs. We are married off to whoever our parents think will pay best bride-price. Because we’re members of the outer families we don’t die of childbed fever—not since the Clan so graciously gave us penicillin tablets and morphine for the pain—but we get to bear child after child because it’s our duty to the Clan! Are you insane, my lady? Or merely blind? And it’s better for us in the families than for ordinary women, better by far. Did you notice that within the Clan you had rights? Or that outside the Clan, in the ordinary aristocracy, you didn’t? We have at least one ability that is as important, more important, than what’s between our legs: another source of status. But those ordinary peasants you feel such guilt for don’t have any such thing. There’s a better life awaiting me as a humble illegal immigrant in this world than there is as a lady-in-waiting to nobility in my own. Do you think I’d ever go back there for any reason except to help you change the world?”
Taken aback, Miriam recoiled slightly. “Ouch,” she said. “I didn’t realize all that stuff. No.” She picked up her wine glass again. “It’s post-colonial guilt, I guess,” she added by way of explanation. “We’ve got a lot of history here, and it’s really ugly in parts. We’ve got a long tradition of conquering other people and messing them up. The idea of taking over and running people for their own good got a very bad name about sixty years ago—did anyone tell you about the Second World War? So a lot of us have this cringe reflex about the whole idea.”
“Don’t. If you do what you’re planning, you couldn’t invade and conquer, anyway. How many people could you bring through? All you can do is persuade people to live their lives a better way—the one thing the families and the Clan have never bothered trying to do, because they’re swimming desperately against the stream, trying to hold their own lives together. It takes an outside view to realize that if they started building fabulous buildings and machines like these at home they wouldn’t be dependent on imported luxuries from the world next door. And they never—” her chest heaved—”let us get far enough away to see that clearly. Because if we did, we might not come back.”
She looked depressed.
“You don’t want to go back?” asked Miriam. “Not even to visit, to see your family and friends?”
“Not really.” It was a statement of fact. “This is better. I can find new friends here. If I go there, and you fail—” she caught Miriam’s gaze. “I might never be able to come back here.”
For a moment, looking at this young woman—young enough to be at college but with eyes prematurely aged by cynicism and the Clan’s greedy poverty of riches—Miriam had second thoughts. The families’ grip on their young was eggshell-thin, always in danger of bursting. If they ever got the idea that they could just take their lockets or tattoos or scraps of paper and leave, the Clan would be gone within a generation. Am I going to end up making this family tyranny stronger? she wondered. Because if so, shouldn’t I just give up now …? “I won’t fail you,” she heard herself saying. “We’ll fix them.”
Brill nodded. “I know you will,” she said. And Miriam nodded right back at her, her mind awash with all the other family children, her distant relatives—the siblings and cousins she’d never known, might never have known of, who would live and die in gilded poverty if she failed.
A woman dressed in black stepped out of the winter twilight.
She looked around curiously, one hand raised to cover her mouth. “I’m in somebody’s garden by the look of things. Hedge to my left, dilapidated shed in front of me—and a house behind. Can’t be sure, but it looks a mess. The hedge is wildly overgrown and the windows are boarded up.”
She glanced around, but couldn’t see into the neighboring gardens. “Seems like an expensive place.” She furtively scratched an arrowhead on the side of the shed, pointing to the spot she’d arrived on, then winced. “This light is hurting my head. Ow …” She hitched her coat out of the grayish snow then stumbled toward the house, crouching below the level of the windows.
She paused. “It looks empty,” she muttered to the dictaphone. “Forward ho.” She walked around to the front of the house, where the snow was banked in deep drifts before the doors and blank-eyed wooden window shutters. Nobody had been in or out for days, that much was clear. There was a short uphill driveway leading to a road, imposing iron gates chained in front. “Damn. How do I get out?” She glanced round, saw a plaque on the front of the house—BLACKSTONES, 1923. A narrow wooden gate next to the pillar supporting one of the cast-iron gates was bolted on the inside. Miriam waded toward it, shivering from the snow, shot the bolt back, and glanced round one final time to look at the house.
It was big. Not as big as the palace in Niejwein, or Angbard’s fortress, but bigger than anything she’d ever lived in. And it was clearly mewed up, shutters nailed across those windows that weren’t boarded, gates chained tight. She grinned, gritting her teeth against the cold. “Right, you’re mine.” Then she slipped through the wooden door and onto the sidewalk. The street here was partially swept. On the other side of it lay an open field in the middle of what was dense forest in world one and downtown Cambridge in world two. She could see other big town houses on the other side of the field, but that didn’t matter. She turned left and began walking toward the crossroads she could see at the far corner of the quadrangle.
Her teeth were chattering by the time she reached the clock tower on the strange traffic circle at the crossroads. There was almost no traffic on this bitterly cold morning. A lone pony-trap clattered past her, but the only vehicles she saw out and about were strange two-deck streetcars, pantographs sparking occasionally as they whirred down the far side of the field and paused at a stand in the middle of the traffic circle. Miriam blinked back the instinctive urge to check her watch. What day is it? she wondered. A sign in heavy classical lettering at the empty tram stop answered her question: Sunday service only. Oh. Below it was a timetable as bemusingly exact as anything she’d seen at an airport back home—evidently trams from this stop ran into the waterfront and over something called Deny Bridge once every half hour on Sundays, for a fare of 3d, whatever that meant. She shivered some more and stepped inside the wooden shelter, then fidgeted with the handful of copper change that she had left. Second thoughts began to occur to her. Was it normal for a single woman to catch a tram, unaccompanied, on a Sunday? What if Burgeson’s shop was closed? What if—
A streetcar pulled up beside the shelter with a screech of abused steel wheels. Miriam plucked up her courage and climbed aboard. The driver nodded at her, then without warning moved off. Miriam stumbled, almost losing her footing before she made it into the passenger cabin. She sat down without looking around. The wooden bench was cold but there seemed to be a heater running somewhere. She surreptitiously examined her fellow passengers, using their reflections in the windows when she couldn’t look at them directly without being obvious. They were an odd collection—a fat woman in a ridiculous bonnet who looked like a Salvation Army collector, a couple of thin men in oddly cut, baggy suits with hats pulled down over their ears, a twenty-something mother, bags under her eyes and two quietly bickering children by her side, and a man in what looked like a Civil War uniform coming toward her, a ticket machine hung in front of his chest. Miriam took a deep breath. I’m going to manage this, she realized.
“I’m going to Highgate, for Holmes Alley. How much is it, please, and what’s the closest stand? And what’s this stop called?”
“That’ll be fourpence, miss, and I’ll call you when it’s your stop. This is Roundgate interchange.” He looked at her slightly oddly as she handed him a sixpence, but wound off a strip of four penny tickets and some change, then turned away. “Tickets, please.”
Ouch. Miriam examined the tickets in her hand. Is nothing simple? she wondered. Even buying streetcar tickets was a minor ordeal of anticipation and surprise. Brill did very well, she began to realize. Maybe too well. Hmm. That would explain why Angbard is letting me run…
The tram trundled downhill at not much better than walking pace, the driver occasionally ringing an electric bell, then stopping next to a raised platform. The houses were much closer together here, in terraces that shared side walls for warmth, built out of cheap red brick stained black from smoke. There was an evil smell of half-burned coal in the air, and chimneys belched from every roofline. She hadn’t noticed it in the nob hill neighborhood of Blackstones, but the whole town smelled of combustion, as if there’d been a house fire a block away. The air was almost acrid, a nasty sour taste undercutting the cold and coating her throat when she tried to breathe. Even the cloud above was yellowish. The tram turned into a main road, rattled around a broad circle with a snow-covered statue of a man on a horse in the middle, then turned along an alarmingly skeletal box-section bridge that jutted out over the river. Miriam, watching the waterfront through the gray-painted girders, felt a most unsettling wave of claustrophobia—as if she was being taken into police custody for a crime she hadn’t committed. She forced herself to shrug it off. Everything will be alright, she told herself.
The town center was almost empty compared to its state the last time she’d visited. It smelled strongly of smoke—chimneys on every side bespoke residents in the upstairs flats—but the shop windows were dark, their doors locked. A distant church bell clattered numbly. Scrawny pigeons hopped around near the gutter, exploring a pile of horse dung. The conductor tapped Miriam on the shoulder, and she started. “You’ll be wanting the next stop,” he explained.
“Thank you,” she replied with a wan smile. She stood up, waiting on the open platform as the stop swung into view, then pulled the string threaded through brass eyeholes that she’d seen the other passengers use. A bell dinged behind in the driver’s partition and he threw on the brakes. Miriam hopped off the platform, shook her coat out, hiked her bag up onto her shoulder, and stepped back from the tram as it moved off with a loud whirr and a gurgle of slush. Then she took stock of her surroundings.
Everything looked different in the chilly gloom of a Sunday morning. The shop fronts, comparatively busy last time she’d been here, looked like vacant eyes, and the peddlars hawking roast chestnuts and hand-warmers had disappeared. Do they have Sunday trading laws here? she wondered vaguely. That could be a nuisance—
Burgeson’s shop was closed, too, a wooden shutter padlocked into place across the front window. But Miriam spotted something she hadn’t noticed before, a solid wooden door next to the shop with a row of bell-pull handles set in a tarnished plaque beside it. She peered at them. E. Burgeson, esq. “Aha,” she muttered, and pulled the handle.
Nothing happened. Miriam waited on the doorstep, her toes freezing and feeling increasingly damp, and cursed her stupidity. She put her hand on the knob and yanked again, and this time heard a distant tinkling reward. Then the door scraped inward on a bare-walled corridor. “Yes?”
“Mr. Burgeson?” she smiled hopefully at him. “I’m back.”
“Oh.” He was dressed as he had been in the shop, except for a pair of outrageous purple slippers worn over bare feet. “You again.” A faint quirk tugged at the side of his upper lip. “I suppose you’ll be wanting me to open the shop.”
“If it’s convenient.”
He sniffed. “It isn’t. And this is rather irregular—although something tells me you don’t put much stock by regularity. Still, if you’d care to grace my humble abode with your presence and wait while I find my galoshes—”
“Certainly.”
She followed him up a tightly spiraling stone-flagged staircase that opened out onto a landing with four stout-looking doors. One of them stood open, and he went inside without waiting for her. Miriam began to follow, then paused on the threshold.
“Come on, come on,” he said irritably. “Don’t leave the door open, you’ll let the cold in. Then I’ll have to fetch more coal from the cellar. What’s keeping you?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said, stepping forward and shutting the door behind her. The hall had probably once been wide enough for two people to stand abreast in, and it was at least ten feet high, but now it felt like a canyon. It was walled from floor to ceiling with bookcases, all crammed to bursting. Burgeson had disappeared into a kitchen—at least Miriam supposed it was a kitchen—in which a kettle was boiling atop a cast-iron stove that looked like something that belonged in a museum. The lights flickered as the door closed, and Miriam abruptly realized that they weren’t electric. “I see you’ve got more books up here than you have down in the shop.”
“That’s work, this is pleasure,” he said. “What did you come to disturb my Sunday worship for, this time?”
“Sunday worship? I don’t see much sign of that around here,” Miriam let slip. She backed up hastily. “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t cause you any trouble?”
“Trouble, no, no trouble, not unless you count having the King Street thief-taker himself asking pointed questions about my visitor of the other morning.” His back was turned to her, so Miriam couldn’t see his expression, but she tightened her grip on her bag, as she suddenly found herself wishing that the pockets of her coat were deep enough to conceal her pistol.
“That wasn’t my doing,” she said evenly.
“I know it wasn’t.” He turned to face her, and she saw that he was holding a somewhat tarnished silver teapot. “And you’d taken the Marx, so it wasn’t as if it was lying around for him to trip over, was it? For which I believe I owe you thanks enough to cancel out any ill will resulting from his unwelcome visit.” He held up the pot. “Can I offer you some refreshment, while you explain why you’re here?”
“Sure.” She glanced in the opposite direction. “In there?”
“The morning room, by all means. I will be but a few moments.”
Miriam walked into Burgeson’s morning room and got a surprise. The room was perfectly round. Even the window frames and the door were curved in line with the wall, and the plaster moldings around the ceiling described a perfect circle twelve feet in diameter. It was also extremely untidy. A huge and dubious Chesterfield sofa with stuffing hanging out of its arms hulked at one side, half submerged beneath a flood of manuscripts and books. An odd-looking upright piano, its scratched lid supporting a small library, leaned drunkenly against the wall. There was a fireplace, but the coals in it barely warmed the air immediately in front of it, and the room was icy cold. A plate with the remnants of a cold lunch sat next to the fireplace. Miriam sat gingerly on the edge of the sofa. The sofa was cold too, so that it seemed to suck the heat right through her layers of heavy clothing.
“How do you take your tea?” Burgeson called. “Milk, sugar?”
He was moving in the hall. She slipped a hand into her bag and pulled out her weapon, and pointed its spine at him. “Milk, no sugar,” she replied.
“Very good.” He advanced, bearing a tray, and laid it down in front of the fireplace. There were, she noticed, bags under his eyes. He looked tired, or possibly ill. “What’s that?” He asked, staring at her hand.
“One good history book deserves another,” she said evenly.
“Oh dear.” He chuckled hoarsely. “You know I can’t offer you anything for it. Not on a Sunday. If the police—”
“Take it, it’s a gift,” she said impatiently.
“A gift?” From his expression Miriam deduced that the receipt of presents was not an experience wim which Erasmus Burgeson was well acquainted—he made no move to take it. “I’m touched, m’dear. Mind if I ask what prompted this unexpected generosity?” He was staring at her warily, as if he expected her to sprout bat wings and bite him.
“Sure,” she said easily. “If you would pour the tea before it gets cold? Is it always this cold here in, uh, whatever this city is called?”
He froze for a moment, then knelt down and began pouring tea from the pot into two slightly chipped Delft cups. “Boston.”
“Ah, Boston it is.” She nodded to herself. “The cold?”
“Only when a smog notice is in effect.” Burgeson pointed at the fire. “Damned smokeless fuel ration’s been cut again. You can only burn so much during a smog, or you run out and then it’s just too bad. Especially if the pipes burst. But when old father smog rolls down the Back Bay, you’d rather not have been born, lest pipes of a different kind should go pop.” He coughed for effect and patted his chest. “You speak the King’s English remarkably well for someone who doesn’t know a blessed thing. Where are you from, really?”
She put the book down on the heap on the sofa. “As far as I can tell, about ten miles and two hundred years away,” she said, feeling slightly light-headed at the idea of telling him even this much.
“Not France? Are you sure you don’t work for the dauphin’s department?” He cocked his head on one side, parrotlike.
“Not France. Where I come from they chopped his head off a long time ago.” She watched him carefully.
“Chopped his head off? Fascinating—” He rose on one knee, and held out a cup to her.
“Thank you.” She accepted it.
“If this is madness, it’s a most extraordinary delusion,” he said, nodding. “Would you be so good as to tell me more?”
“In due course. I have a couple of questions for you, however.” She took a decorous sip of the tea. “Specifically, taking on trust the question of your belief in my story, you might want to contemplate some of the obstacles a traveler from, um, another world, might face in creating an identity for themselves in this one. And especially in the process of buying a house and starting a business, when one is an unaccompanied female in a strange country. I don’t know much about me legal status of women here other than that it differs quite significantly from where I come from. I think I’m probably going to need a lawyer, and possibly a proxy. Which is why I thought of you.”
“I see.” Burgeson was almost going cross-eyed in his attempts to avoid interrupting her. “Pray tell, why me?”
“Because an officer of the law recommended you.” She grinned. “I figure a fence who is also an informer is probably a safer bet than someone who’s so incompetent that he hasn’t reached a working accommodation with the cops.” There were other reasons too, reasons connected with Miriam’s parents and upbringing, but she wasn’t about to give him that kind of insight into her background. Trust went only so far, after all.
“A fence—” He snorted. “I’m not dishonest or unethical, ma’am.”
“You just sell books that the Lord Provost’s Court wants burned,” she said, with an amused tone. “And the police recommend you. Do I need to draw a diagram?”
He signed. “Guilty as charged. If you aren’t French, are you sure you aren’t a Black Chamber agent playing a double gamer’
“What’s the Black Chamber?”
“Oh.” Abruptly he looked gloomy. “I suppose I should also have sold you an almanac.”
“That might have been a good idea,” she agreed.
“Well, now.” He brushed papers from the piano stool and sat on it, opposite her, his teacup balanced precariously on a bony knee. “Supposing I avoid saying anything that might incriminate myself. And supposing we take as a matter of faith your outrageous claim to be a denizen of another, ah, world? Like this one, only different. No le Roi Française, indeed. What, then, could you be wanting with a humble dealer and broker in secondhand goods and wares like myself?”
“Connections.” Miriam relaxed a little. “I need to establish a firm identity here, as a woman of good character. I have some funds to invest—you’ve seen the form they take—but mostly … hmm. In the place I come from, we do things differently. And while we undoubtedly do some things worse, everything I have seen so far convinces me that we are far, far better at certain technical fields. I intend to establish a type of company that as far as I can tell doesn’t exist here, Mister Burgeson. I am limited in the goods I can carry back and forth, physically, to roughly what I can carry on my back—but ideas are frequently more valuable than gold bricks.” She grinned. “I said I’d need a lawyer, and perhaps a proxy to sign documents for my business. I forgot to mention that I will also want a patent clerk and a front man for purposes of licensing my inventions.”
“Inventions. Such as?” He sounded skeptical.
“Oh, many things.” She shrugged. “Mostly little things. A machine for binding documents together in an office that is cheap to run, compact, and efficient—so much so that where I come from they’re almost as common as pens. A better design of brake mechanism for automobiles. A better type of wood screw, a better kind of electric cell. But one or two big things, too. A drug that can cure most fulminating infections rapidly and effectively, without side effects. A more efficient engine for aviation.”
Burgeson stared at her. “Incredible,” he said sharply. “You have some proof that you can come up with all these miracles?”
Miriam reached into her bag and pulled out her second weapon, one that had cost her nearly its own weight in gold, back home, a miniature battery-powered gadget with a four-inch color screen. “When I leave, you can start by looking at that book. In the meantime, here’s a toy we use for keeping children quiet on long journeys where I come from. How about some light Sunday entertainment?” And she hit the “start” button on the DVD player.
Three hours and at least a pint of tea later, Miriam stepped down from a hackney carriage outside the imposing revolving doors of the Brighton Hotel. Behind her, the driver grunted as he heaved her small trunk down from the luggage rack—”if you’re going to try to pass in polite society you’ll need one, no lady of quality would travel without at least a change of day wear and her dinner dress,” Burgeson had told her as he gave her the trunk—”and you need to be at least respectable enough to book a room.” Even if the trunk had been pawned by a penniless refugee and cluttered up a pawnbroker’s cellar for a couple of years, it looked like luggage.
“Thank you,” Miriam said as graciously as she could, and tipped the driver a sixpence. She turned back to the door to see a bellhop already lifting her trunk on his handcart. “I say! You there.”
The concierge at the front desk didn’t turn his nose up at a single woman traveling alone. The funereal outfit Burgeson had scared up for her seemed to forbid all questions, especially after she had added a severe black cap and a net veil in place of her previous hat. “What does milady require?” he asked politely.
“I’d like to take one of your first-class suites. For myself. I travel with no servants, so room service will be required. I will be staying for at least a week, and possibly longer while I seek to buy a house and put the affairs of my late husband in order.” I hope Erasmus wasn’t stringing me along about getting hold of a new identity, she thought.
“Ah, by all means. I believe room fourteen is available, m’lady. Perhaps you would like to view it? If it is to your satisfaction…”
“I’m sure it will be,” she said easily. “And if it isn’t you’ll see to it, I’m sure, won’t you? How much will it be?”
He stiffened slightly. “A charge of two pounds and eleven shillings a night applies for room and board, ma’am,” he said severely.
“Hmm.” She sucked on her lower lip. “And for a week? Or longer?”
“I believe we could come down from that a little,” he said, less aggressively. “Especially if provision was made in advance.”
“Two a night.” Miriam palmed a huge, gorgeously colored ten-pound note onto the front desk and paused. “Six shillings on top for the service.”
The concierge smiled and nodded at her. “Then it will be an initial four nights?” he asked.
“I will pay in advance, if I choose to renew it,” she replied tonelessly. Bastard, she thought angrily. Erasmus had primed her with the hotel’s rates. Two pounds flat was the norm for a luxury suite: This man was trying to soak her. “If it’s satisfactory,” she emphasized.
“I’ll see to it myself.” He bowed, then stepped out from behind his desk. “If I may show you up to your suite myself, m’lady?”
Once she was alone in the hotel suite, Miriam locked the door on the inside, then removed her coat and hung it up to dry in the niche by the door. “I’m impressed,” she said aloud. “It’s huge.” She peeled off her gloves and slung them over a brass radiator that gurgled beneath the shuttered windows, then unbuttoned her jacket and collar and knelt to unlace her ankle boots—her feet were beginning to feel as if they were molded to the inside of the damp, cold leather. Chilblains as an occupational hazard for explorers of other worlds? she thought whimsically. She stepped out of her shoes then carried them to the radiator, stockinged feet feeling almost naked against the thick pile of the woolen carpet.
Dry at last, she walked over to the sideboard and the huge silver samovar, steaming gently atop a gas flame plumbed into the wall. She poured a glass full of hot water and dunked a sachet of Earl Grey tea into it. Finally, gratefully, she plopped herself down in the overstuffed armchair opposite the bedroom door, pulled out her dictaphone, and began to compose a report to herself. “Here I am, in Suite fourteen of the Brighton Hotel. The concierge tried to soak me. Getting a handle on the prices is hard—a pound seems to be equivalent to about, uh, two hundred dollars? Something like that. This is an expensive suite, and it shows; it’s got central heating, electric lights—incandescent filaments, lots of them, dim enough you can look right at them—and silk curtains.” She glanced through the open bathroom door. “The bathroom looks to be all brass and porcelain fittings and a flushing toilet. Hmm. Must check to see what their power distribution system’s like. Might be an opportunity to sell them electric showers.”
She sighed. “Tomorrow Erasmus will fix me up with a meeting with his attorney and start making inquiries about that house. He also said he’d look into a patent clerk and get me into the central reading library. Looks like their intellectual property framework is a bit primitive. I’ll need to bring over some more fungibles soon. Gold is all very well, but I’m not sure it isn’t cheaper here than it is back home. I wonder what their kitchens are short of,” she added, brooding.
“Damn. I wish there was someone to talk to.” She clicked off the little machine and put it down on the sideboard, frowning. Whether or not Erasmus Burgeson was trustworthy was an interesting question. Probably he was, up to a point—as long as he could sniff a way to put one over on the cops who were enforcing his unwilling cooperation. But he was most clearly a bachelor, and there was something uncomfortable, slightly strained about him when she was in his presence. He’s not used to dealing with women, other than customers in his shop, she decided. That’s probably it.
In any event, her head ached and she was feeling tired. Think I’ll leave the dining room for another day, she decided. The bed seemed to beckon. Tomorrow would be a fresh start…
The following morning, Miriam awakened early. It was still semi-dark outside. She yawned at her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she brushed her hair. “Hmm. They wear it long here, don’t they?” It would just have to do, she thought, as she dressed in yesterday’s clothes once more. She carefully sorted through her shoulder bag to make sure there was nothing too obtrusively alien in it, then pulled her boots on.
She paused at the foot of the main staircase, poised above the polished marble floor next to the front desk. “Can I help you, ma’am?” a bellhop offered eagerly.
She smiled wanly. “Breakfast. Where is it?” The realization that she’d missed both lunch and dinner crashed down on her. Abruptly she felt almost weak from hunger.
“This way, please!” He guided her toward two huge mahogany-and-glass doors set at one side of the foyer, then ushered her to a seat at a small table, topped in spotless linen. “I shall just fetch the waiter.”
Miriam angled her chair around to take in the other diners as discreetly as possible. It’s like a historical movie! she thought. One set in a really exclusive Victorian hotel, except the Victorians hadn’t had a thing for vivid turquoise and purple wallpaper and the costumes were messed up beyond recognition. Men in Nehru suits with cutaway waists, women in long skirts or trousers and wing-collared shirts. Waiters with white aprons bearing plates of—fish? And bread rolls? The one familiar aspect was the newspaper. “Can you fetch me a paper?” she asked after the bellhop.
“Surely, ma’am!” he answered, and was off like a shot. He was back in a second and Miriam fumbled for a tip, before starting methodically on the front page.
The headlines in The London Intelligencer were bizarrely familiar, simultaneously tainted with the exotic. “Speaker: House May Impeach Crown for Adultery”—but no, there was no King Clinton in here, just unfamiliar names and a proposal to amend the Basic Law to add a collection of additional charges for which the Crown could be impeached—Adultery, Capitative Fraud, and Irreconsilience, whatever that was. They can impeach the king? Miriam shook her head, moved on to the next story. “Morris and Stokes to hang,” about a pair of jewel thieves who had killed a shopkeeper. Farther down the page was more weirdness, a list of captains of merchantmen to whom had been granted letters of marque and reprise against “the forces and agents of the continental enemy,” and a list of etheric resonances assigned for experimentation by the Teloptic Wireless Company of New Britain.
A waiter appeared at her shoulder as she was about to turn the page. “May I be of service, ma’am?”
“Sure. What’s good, today?”
He smiled broadly. “The kippers are most piquant, and if I may recommend Mrs. Wilson’s strawberry jam for after? Does ma’am prefer tea or coffee?”
“Coffee. Strong, with milk.” She nodded. “I’ll take your recommendations, please. That’ll be all.”
He rustled away from her, leaving her puzzling over the meaning of a story about taxation powers being granted by The-King-In-Parliament to the Grand Estates, and enforcement of the powers of printing rights by the Royal Excise. Even the addition of a powerful dose of coffee and a plate of smoked fish—not her customary start to the day, but nevertheless remarkably edible on an empty stomach—didn’t make it any clearer. This place is so complex! Am I ever going to understand it? she wondered.
She was almost to the bottom of her coffee when a different bellhop arrived, bearing a silver platter. “Message for the Widow Fletcher?” he asked, using the pseudonym Miriam had checked in under.
“That’s me.” Miriam took the note atop the platter—a piece of card with strips of printed tape gummed to it. MEET ME AT 54 GRT MAURICE ST AT 10 SEE BATES STOP EB ENDS. “Ah, good.” She glanced at the clock above the ornate entrance. “Can you arrange a cab for me, please? To Great Maurice Street, leaving in twenty minutes.”
Folding her paper she rose and returned to her room to retrieve her hat and topcoat. The game’s afoot, she thought excitedly.
By the time the cab found its way to Great Maurice Street she’d cooled off a little, taking time to collect her thoughts and begin to work out what she needed to do and say. She also made sure her right glove was pulled down around her wrist, and the sleeve of her blouse was bunched up toward the elbow. Not that it was the ideal way to make an exit—indeed, it would wreck her plans completely if she had to escape by means of the temporary tattoo of a certain intricate knot—but if Erasmus had decided to sell her out to the constabulary, he’d be sorry.
Great Maurice Street was a curving cobblestoned boulevard hemmed in on either side by expensive stone town houses. Little stone bridges leapt from sidewalk to broad front doors across a trench which held two levels of subterranean windows. The street and sidewalks had been swept free of snow, although huge piles stood at regular intervals in the road to await collection. Miriam stepped down from the cab, paid the driver, and marched along the sidewalk until she identified number 54. “Charteris, Bates and Charteris,” she muttered to herself. “Sounds legal.” She advanced on the door and pulled the bell-rope.
A short, irritated-looking clerk opened the door. “Who are you?” he demanded.
Miriam stared down her nose at him. “I’m here to see Mr. Bates,” she said.
“Who did you say you were?” He raised a hand to cup his ear and Miriam realized he was half-deaf.
“Mrs. Fletcher, to see Mr. Bates,” she replied loudly.
“Oh. Come in, then, I’ll tell someone you’re here.”
Lawyers’ offices didn’t differ much between here and her own world, Miriam realized. There was a big, black, ancient-looking electric typewriter with a keyboard like a church organ that had shrunk in the wash, and there was an archaic telephone with a separate speaking horn, but otherwise the only differences were the clothes. Which, for a legal secretary in this place and time—male, thin, harried-looking—included a powdered wig, knee breeches, and a cutaway coat. “Please be seated—ah, no,” said the secretary, looking bemused as a tall fellow dressed entirely in black opened the door of an inner office and waggled a finger at Miriam: “This is His Honor Mr. Bates,” he explained. “You are … ?”
“I’m Mrs. Fletcher,” Miriam repeated patiently. “I’m supposed to be seeing Mr. Bates. Is that right?”
“Ah, yes.” Bates nodded congenially at her. “If you’d like to come this way, please?”
The differences from her own world became vanishingly small inside his office, perhaps because so many lawyers back home aimed for a traditional feel to their furnishings. Miriam glanced round. “Burgeson isn’t here yet,” she observed disapprovingly.
“He’s been detained,” said Bates. “If you’d care to take a seat?”
“Yes.” Miriam sat down. “How much has Erasmus told you?”
Bates picked up a pair of half-moon spectacles and balanced them on the bridge of his nose. His whiskers twitched, walruslike. “He has told me enough, I think,” he intoned in a plummy voice. “A woman fallen upon hard times, husband dead after years abroad, papers lost in an unfortunate pursuit—I believe he referred to the foundering of the Greenbaum Lamplight, a most unpleasant experience for you, I am sure—and therefore in need of the emollient reaffirmation of her identity, is that right? He vouched for you most plaintively. And he also mentioned something about a fortune overseas, held in trust, to which you have limited access.”
“Yes, that’s all correct,” Miriam said fervently. “I am indeed in need of new papers—and a few other services best rendered by a man of the law.”
“Well. I can see at a glance that you are no Frenchie,” he said, nodding at her. “And so I can see nothing wrong with your party. It will take but an hour to draw up the correct deeds and post them with the inns of court, to declare your identity fair and square. Erasmus said you were born at Shreveport on, ah, if I may be so indelicate, the seventh of September, in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and sixty nine. Is that correct?”
Miriam nodded. Near enough, she thought. “Uh, yes.”
“Very well. If you would examine and sign this—” he passed a large and imposing sheet of parchment to her—”and this—” he passed her another, “we will set the wheels of justice in motion.”
Miriam examined the documents rapidly. One of them was a declaration of some sort; asserting her name, age, place of birth, and identity and petitioning for a replacement birth certificate for the one lost at sea on behalf of the vacant authorities of—”Why are the authorities of Shreveport not directly involved?” she asked.
Bates looked at her oddly. “After what happened during the war there isn’t enough left of Shreveport to have any authorities,” he muttered darkly.
“Oh.” She read on. The next paper petitioned for a passport in her name, with a peculiar status—competent adult. “I see I am considered a competent adult here. Can you just explain precisely what that entails?”
“Certainly.” Bates leaned back in his chair. “You are an adult, aged over thirty, and a widow; there is no man under whose mantle your rights and autonomy are exercised, and you are deemed old enough in law to be self-sufficient. So you may enter into contracts at your own peril, as an adult, until such time as you choose to remarry, and any such contracts as you make will then be binding upon your future husband.”
“Oh,” she said faindy, and signed in the space provided. Better not marry anyone, then. She put the papers back on his desk then cleared her throat. “There are some other matters I will want you to see to,” she added.
“And what might those be?” He smiled politely. After all, the clock was ticking at her expense.
“Firstly.” She held up a finger. “There is a house that takes my fancy; it is located at number 46, Bridge Park Lane, and it appears to be empty. Am I right in thinking you can make inquiries on my behalf about its availability? If it’s open for lease or purchase I’d be extremely interested in acquiring it, and I’ll want to move in as soon as possible.”
Bates sat up straight and nodded, almost enthusiastically. “Of course, of course,” he said, scribbling in a crabbed hand on a yellow pad. “And is there anything else?” he asked.
“Secondly.” She held up a second finger. “Over the next month I will be wanting to create or purchase a limited liability company. It will need setting up. In addition, I will have a number of applications for patents that must be processed through the royal patent office-—I need to locate and retain a patent agent on behalf of my company.”
“A company, and a patents agent.” He raised an eyebrow but kept writing. “Is there anything else?” he asked politely.
“Indeed. Thirdly, I have a quantity, held overseas, I should add, of bullion. Can you advise me on the issues surrounding its legal sale here?”
“Oh, that’s easy.” He put his pen down. “I can’t, because it’s illegal for anyone but the crown to own bullion.” He pointed at the signet nng he wore on his lett hand. No rule against jewelry, of course, so long as it weighs less than a pound. But bullion?” He sniffed. “You can perhaps approach the mint about an import license, and sell it to the crown yourself—they’ll give you a terrible rate, not worth your while, only ten pounds for an ounce. But that’s the war, for you. The mint is chronically short. If I were you I’d sell it overseas and repatriate the proceeds as bearer bonds.”
“Thank you.” Miriam beamed at him ingratiatingly to cover up the sound of her teeth grinding together. Ten pounds for an ounce? Erasmus, you and I are going to have strong words, she thought. Scratch finding an alternative, though. “How long will this take?” she asked.
“To file the papers? I’ll have the boy run over with them right now. Your passport and birth certificate will be ready tomorrow if you send for them from my office. The company—” he rubbed his chin. “We would have to pay a parliamentarian to get the act of formation passed as a private member’s bill in this sitting, and I believe the going rate has been driven up by the demands of the military upon the legislature in the current session. It would be cheaper to buy an existing company with no debts. I can ask around, but I believe it will be difficult to find one for less than seventy pounds.”
“Ouch.” Miriam pulled a face. “There’s no automatic process to go through to set one up?”
“Sadly, no.” Bates shook his head. “Every company requires an act of parliament; rubber-stamping them is bread and butter for most MPs, for they can easily charge fifty pounds or more to put forward an early day motion for a five-minute bill in the Commons. Every so often someone proposes a registry of companies and a regulator to create them, but the backbenches won’t ever approve that—it would take a large bite out of their living.”
“Humph.” Miriam nodded. “Alright, we’ll do it your way. The patent agent?”
Bates nodded. “Our junior clerk, Hinchliffe, is just the fellow for such a job. He has dealt witii patents before, and will doubtless do so again. When will you need him?”
Miriam met Bates’s eye. “Not until I have a company to employ him, a company that I will capitalize by entirely legal means that need not concern you.” The lawyer nodded again, eyes knowing. “Then—let’s just say, I have encountered some ingenious innovations overseas that I believe may best be exploited by patenting them, and farming out the rights to the patents to local factory owners. Do you follow?”
“Yes, I think I do.” Bates nodded to himself, and smiled like a crocodile. “I look forward to your future custom, Mrs. Fletcher. It has been a pleasure to do business with such a perceptive member of the frail sex. Even if I don’t believe a word of it.”
Miriam spent the rest of the morning shopping for clothes. It was a disorienting experience. There were no department or chain stores: Each type of garment needed purchasing from a separate supplier, and the vast majority needed alterations to fit. Nor was she filled with enthusiasm by what she found. “Why are fashion items invariably designed to make people look ugly or feel uncomfortable?” she muttered into her microphone, after experiencing a milliner’s and a corsetiere’s in rapid succession. “I’m going to stick to sports bras and briefs, even if I have to carry everything across myself,” she grumbled. Nevertheless, she managed to find a couple of presentable walking suits and an evening outfit.
At six that evening, she walked through the gathering gloom to Burgeson’s shop and slipped inside. The shop was open, but empty. She spent a good minute tapping her toes and whistling tunelessly before Erasmus emerged from the back.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said distractedly. “Here.” He held out an envelope.
Miriam took it and opened it—then stopped whistling. “What brought this on?” she asked, holding it tightly.
His cheek twitched. “I got a better price than I could be sure of,” he said. “It seemed best to cut you in on the profits, in the hope of a prosperous future trade.”
Miriam relaxed slightly. “I see.” She slid the envelope into a jacket pocket carefully. The five ten-pound notes in it were more than she’d expected to browbeat out of him. “Is your dealer able to take larger quantities of bullion?” she asked, abruptly updating her plans.
“I believe so.” His face was drawn and tired. “I’ve had some thinking to do.”
“I can see that,” she said quietly. Fifty pounds here was equivalent to something between three and seven thousand dollars, back home. Gold was expensive, a sign of demand, and what did that tell her? Nothing good. “What’s the situation? Do you trust Bates?”
“About as far as I can throw him,” Erasmus admitted. “He isn’t a fellow traveler.”
“Fellow traveler.” She nodded to herself. “You’re a Marxist?”
“He was the greatest exponent of my faith, yes.” He said it quietly and fervently. “I believe in natural rights, to which all men and women are born equal; in democracy: and in freedom. Freedom of action, freedom of commerce, freedom of faith, just like old Karl. For which they hanged him.”
“He came to somewhat different conclusions where I come from,” Miriam said dryly, “although his starting conditions were dissimilar. Are you going to shut up shop and tell me what’s troubling you?”
“Yes.” He strode over and turned the sign in the door, then shot the bolt. “In the back, if you please.”
“After you.” Miriam followed him down a narrow corridor walled in pigeon holes. Parcels wrapped in brown paper gathered dust in them, each one sprouting a plaintive ticket against the date of its redemption—graveyard markers in the catacombs of usury. She kept her hand in her right pocket, tightening her grip on the small pistol, heart pounding halfway out of her chest with tension.
“You can’t be a police provocateur,” he commented over his shoulder. “For one thing, you didn’t bargain hard enough over the bullion. For another, you slipped up in too many ways, all of them wrong. But I wasn’t sure you weren’t simply a madwoman until you showed me that intricate engine and left the book. He stepped sideways into a niche with a flight of wooden steps in it, leading down. “It’s far too incredible a story to be a flight-of-the mind concoction, and far too … expensive. Even the publisher’s notes! The quality of the paper. And the typeface.” He stopped at the foot of the stairs and stared up at her owlishly, one hand clutching at a load-bearing beam for support. “And the pocket kinomagraph. I think either you’re real or I’m going mad,” he said, his voice hollow.
“You’re not mad.” Miriam took the steep flight of steps carefully. “So?”
“So it behooves me to study this fascinating world you come from, and ask how it came to pass.” Erasmus was moving again. The cellar was walled from floor to ceiling in boxes and packing cases. “It’s fascinating. The principles of enlightenment that your republic was founded on—you realize they were smothered in the cradle, in the history I know of? Yes, by all means, the Parliamentary Settlement and the exile were great innovations for their time—but the idea of a republic! Separation of Church and State, a bill of rights, a universal franchise! After the second Leveler revolt, demands for such rights became something of a dead issue here, emphasis on the dead if you follow me … hmm.” He stopped in a cleared space between three walls of crates, a paraffin lamp hanging from a beam overhead.
“This is a rather big shop,” Miriam commented, tightening her grip on the gun.
“So it should be.” He glanced at her, saw the hand in her pocket. “Are you going to shoot me?”
“Why should I?” She tensed.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “You’ve obviously got some scheme in mind, one that means someone no good, whatever else you’re doing here. And I might know too much.”
Miriam came to a decision and took her hand out of her pocket—empty.
“And I’m not an innocent either,” Erasmus added, gesturing at the crates. “I’m glad you decided not to shoot. Niter of glycerol takes very badly to sudden shocks.”
Miriam took a deep breath and paused, trying to get a grip on herself. She felt a sudden stab of apprehension: The stakes in his game were much higher than she’d realized. This was a police state, and Erasmus wasn’t just a harmless dealer in illegal publications. “Listen, I have no intention of shooting anyone if I can avoid it. And I don’t care about you being a Leveler quartermaster with a basement full of explosives—at least, as long as I don’t live next door to you. It’s none of my damn business, and whatever you think, I didn’t come here to get involved in your politics. Even if it sounds better than, than what’s out there right now. On the other hand, I have my own, uh, political problems.”
Erasmus raised an eyebrow. “So who are your enemies?”
Miriam bit her lip. Can I trust him this far? She couldn’t see any choices at this point but, even so, taking him into her confidence was a big step. “I don’t know,” she said reluctantly. “They’re probably well-off. Like me, they can travel between worlds—not to the one in the book I gave you, which is my own, but to a much poorer, medieval one. One in which Christianity never got established as the religion in Rome, the dark ages lasted longer, and the Norse migration reached and settled this coast, as far inland as the Appalachians, and the Chinese empire holds the west. These people will be involved in trading, from here to there—I’m not sure what, but I believe ownership of gold is something to investigate. They’ll probably be a large and prosperous family, possibly ennobled in the past century or two, and they’ll be rich and conservative. Not exactly fellow travelers.”
“And what is your problem with them?”
“They keep trying to kill me.” Now she’d said it, confiding in him felt easier. “They come from over here. This is their power base, Erasmus. I believe they consider me a threat to them. I want to find them before they find me, and order things in a more satisfactory manner.”
“I think I see.” He made a steeple of his fingers. “Do you want them to die?”
“Not necessarily,” she said hesitantly. “But I want to know who they are, and where they came here from, and to stop their agents trying to kill me. I’ve got a couple of suspicions about who they are that I need to confirm. If I’m correct I might be able to stop the killing.”
“I suggest you tell me your story then,” said Erasmus. “And we’ll see if there’s anything we can do about it.” He raised his voice, causing her to start. “Aubrey! You can cease your lurking. If you’d be so good as to fetch the open bottle of port and three glasses, you may count yourself in for a long story.” He smiled humorlessly. “You’ve got our undivided attention, ma’am. I suggest you use it wisely …”
Back at the hotel a couple of hours later, Miriam changed into her evening dress and went downstairs, unaccompanied, for a late buffet supper. The waiter was unaccountably short with her, but found her a solitary small table in a dark corner of the dining room. The soup was passable, albeit slightly cool, and a cold roast with vegetables filled the empty corners of her stomach. She watched the well-dressed men and few women in the hotel from her isolated vantage point, and felt abruptly lonely. Is it just ordinary homesickness? she wondered, or culture shock? One or two hooded glances came her way, but she avoided eye contact and in any event nobody attempted to engage her in conversation. It’s as if I’m invisible, she thought.
She didn’t stay for dessert. Instead she retreated to her room and sought solace with a long bath and an early night.
The next morning she warned the concierge that she would be away for a few days and would not need her room, but would like her luggage stored. Then she took a cab to the lawyer’s office. “Your papers are here, ma’am,” said Bates’s secretary.
“Is Mr. Bates free?” she asked. “Just a minute of his time.”
“I’ll just check.” A minute of finger twiddling passed. “Yes, come in, please.”
“Ah, Mr. Bates?” She smiled. “Have you made progress with your inquiries?”
He nodded. “I am hoping to hear about the house tomorrow,” he said. “Its occupant, a Mr. Soames, apparently passed away three months ago and it is lying vacant as part of his estate. As his son lives in El Dorado, I suspect an offer for it may be received with gratitude. As to the company—” He shrugged. “What business shall I put on it?”
Miriam thought for a moment. “Call it a design bureau,” she said. “Or an engineering company.”
“That will be fine.” Bates nodded. “Is there anything else?”
“I’m going to be away for a week or so,” she said. “Shall I leave a deposit behind for the house?”
“I’m sure your word would be sufficient,” he said graciously. “Up to what level may I offer?”
“If it goes over a thousand pounds I’ll have to make special arrangements to transfer the funds.”
“Very well.” He stood up. “By your leave?”
Miriam’s last port of call was the central library. She spent two hours there, quizzing a helpful librarian about books on patent law. In the end, she took three away with her, giving her room at the hotel as an address. Carefully putting them in her shoulder bag she walked to the nearest main road and waved down a cab. “Roundgate Interchange,” she said. I’m going home, she thought. At last! A steam car puttered past them, overtaking on the right hand side. Back to clean air, fast cars, and electricity everywhere.
She gazed out of the cab’s window as the open field came into view through the haze of acrid fog that seemed to be everywhere today. I wonder how Brill and Paulie have been? she thought. It’ll be good to see them again.
It was dusk, and nobody seemed to have noticed the way that Miriam had damaged the side door of the estate. She slunk into the garden, paced past the hedge and the dilapidated greenhouse, then located the spot where she’d blazed a mark on the wall. A fine snow was falling as she pulled out the second locket and, with the aid of a pocket flashlight, fell headfirst into it.
She staggered slightly as the familiar headache returned with a vengeance, but a quick glance told her that nobody had come anywhere near this spot for days. A fresh snowfall had turned her hide into an anonymous hump in the gloom a couple of trees away. She waded toward it—then a dark shadow detatched itself from a tree and pointed a pistol at her.
“Brill?” she asked, uncertainly.
“Miriam!” The barrel dropped as Brill lurched forward and embraced her. “I’ve been so worried! How have you been?”
“Not so bad!” Miriam laughed, breathlessly. “Let’s get under cover and I’ll tell you about it.”
Brill had been busy; the snowbank concealed not only the hunting hide, but a fully assembled hut, six feet by eight, somewhat insecurely pegged to the iron-hard ground beneath the snow. “Come in, come in,” she said. Miriam stepped inside and she shut the door and bolted it. Two bunks occupied one wall, and a paraffin heater threw off enough warmth to keep the hut from freezing. “It’s been terribly cold by night, and I fear I’ve used up all the oil,” Brill told her. “You really must buy a wood stove!”
“I believe I will,” Miriam said thoughtfully, thinking about the coal smoke and yellow sulfurous smog that had made the air feel as if she was breathing broken glass. “It’s been, hmm, three days. Have you had any trouble?”
“Boredom,” Brilliana said instantly. “But sometimes boredom is a good thing. I have not been so alone in many years!” She looked slightly wistful. “Would you like some cocoa? I’d love to hear what adventures you’ve been having!”
That night Miriam slept fitfully, awakening once to a distant howling noise that raised the hair on her neck. Wolves? she wondered, before rolling over and dozing off again. Although the paraffin heater kept the worst of the chill at bay, there was frost inside the walls by morning.
Miriam woke first, sat up and turned the heat up as high as it would go, then—still cocooned in the sleeping bag—hung her jeans and hiking jacket from a hook in the roof right over the heater. Then she dozed off again. When she awakened, she saw Brill sitting beside the heater reading a book. “What is it?” she asked sleepily.
“Something Paulie lent me.” Brill looked slightly guilty. Miriam peered at the spine: The Female Eunuch. Sitting on a shelf next to the door she spotted a popular history book. Brill had been busy expanding her horizons.
“Hmm.” Miriam sat up and unzipped her bag, used the chamber pot, then hastily pulled on the now-defrosted jeans and a hiking sweater. Her boots were freezing cold—she’d left them too close to the door—so she moved them closer to the heater. “You’ve been thinking a lot.”
“Yes.” Brilliana put the book down. “I grew up with books; my father’s library had five in hoh’sprashe, and almost thirty in English. But this—the style is so strange! And what it says!”
Miriam shook her head. Too much to assimilate. “We’ll have to go across soon,” she said, shelving the questions that sat at the tip of her tongue—poisonous questions, questions about trust and belief. Brill seemed to be going through a phase of questioning everything, and that was fine by Miriam. It meant she was less likely to obey if Angbard or whoever was behind her told her to point a gun at Miriam. Searching her bag Miriam came up with her tablets, dry-swallowed them, then glanced around. “Anything to drink?”
“Surely.” Brill passed her a water bottle. It crackled slightly, but most of the contents were still liquid. “I didn’t realize a world could be so large,” Brill added quietly.
“I know how you feel,” Miriam said with feeling, running fingers through her hair—it needed a good wash and, now she thought about it, at least a trim—she’s spent the past four weeks so preoccupied in other things that it was growing wild and uncontrolled. “The far side is pretty strange to me, too. I think I’ve got it under control, but—” she shrugged uncomfortably. Private ownership of gold is illegal so there’s a black market in it, but opium and cocaine are sold openly in apothecary shops. Setting up a company takes an act of Parliament, but they can impeach the king. “Let’s just say, it isn’t quite what I was expecting. Let’s go home.”
“Alright.”
Miriam and Brill pulled their boots and coats on. Brill turned off the heater and folded the sleeping bags neatly, then went outside to empty the chamber pot. Miriam picked up her shoulder bag, and then went outside to join Brill on the spot she’d marked on her last trip. She took a deep breath, pulled out the locket with her left hand, took all of Brill’s weight on her right hip for a wobbly, staggering moment that threatened to pull her over, and focused—
On a splitting headache and a concrete wall as her grip slipped and Brill skidded on the icy yard floor. “Ow!” Brill stood up, rubbing her backside. “That was most indelicately done.”
“Could be worse.” Miriam winced at the pain in her temples, glanced around, and shook her head to clear the black patches from the edge of her vision. There was no sign of any intrusion, but judging by the boxes stacked under the metal fire escape—covered with polythene sheeting against the weamer—Paulette had been busy. “Come on inside, let’s fix some coffee and catch up on the news.”
The office door opened to Miriam’s key and she hastily punched in the code to disable the burglar alarm. Then she felt the heat, a stifling warmth that wrapped itself around her like a hot bath towel. “Wow,” she said, “come get a load of this.”
“I’m coming! I’m coming!” Brill shut and locked the door behind her and looked around. “Ooh, I haven’t been this warm in days.’ She hastily opened her jacket and untied her boots, the better to let the amazing warmth from the under-floor heating get closer to her skin.
“You’ll want to use the shower next,” Miriam said, amused. “I could do with it too, so don’t be too long.” The shower in the office bathroom was cramped and cheap, but better than the antique plumbing arrangements on the far side. “I’ll make coffee.”
Miriam found her mobile phone in the front room. Its battery had run down while she’d been gone, so she plugged it in to recharge. She also found a bunch of useful items—
Paulette had installed a brand new desk telephone and modem line while she’d been away—and a bunch of paperwork from the city government.
She was drinking her coffee in the kitchen when the front door opened. Miriam ducked out into the corridor, hand going to her empty jacket pocket before she realized what the reaction meant. “Paulie!” she called.
“Miriam! Good to see you!” Paulette had nearly jumped right out of her skin when she saw Miriam, but now she smiled broadly. “Oh wow. You look like you’ve spent a week on the wild side!”
“That’s exactly what I’ve done. Coffee?”
“I’d love some, thanks.” There was someone behind her. “In the front office, Mike, it needs to come through under the window,” she said over her shoulder. “We’re putting a DSL line in here,” she told Miriam. “Hope you don’t mind?”
“No, no, that’s great.” She retreated back into the small kitchenette, mind blanking on what to do next. She’d been thinking about a debriefing session with Paulie and Brill, then a provisioning trip to the universe next door, then a good filling lunch—but not with a phone company installer drilling holes in the wall.
Paulette obviously had tilings well in hand here, and there was no way Miriam was going to get into the shower for a while. She stared at the coffee machine blackly for a while. Maybe I should go and see Iris, she decided. Or… hmm. Is it time to call Roland again?
“Miriam. You’ve going to have to tell me how it’s going.” Paulette waited in the kitchen doorway.
“In due course.” Miriam managed a smile. “Success, but not so total.” Miriam sobered up fast. “At your end?”
“Running low on money—the burn rate on this operation is like a goddamn start-up,” Paulette complained. “I’ll need another hundred thousand to secure all the stuff you left on the shopping list.”
“And don’t forget the paycheck.” Miriam nodded. “Listen, I found one good thing out about the far side. Gold is about as legal there as heroin is here, and vice versa. I’m getting about two hundred pounds on the black market for a brick weighing sixteen Troy ounces, worth about three thousand, three five, dollars here. A pound goes a lot further than a dollar, it’s like, about two hundred bucks. So three and a half thousand here buys me the equivalent of forty thousand over there. Real estate prices are low, too. The place I need to buy on the far side is huge, but it should go for about a thousand pounds, call it equivalent to two hundred grand here. In our own Boston it’d be going for upwards of a million, easily. But gold is worth so much that I can pay for it with five bars of the stuff—about eighteen thousand dollars on this side. I’ve found an, uh, black-market outlet who seems reasonably trustworthy at handling the gold—he’s got his angles, but I know what they are. And it is amazingly easy to set up a new identity! Anyway, if I play this right I can build a front as a rich widow returning home from the empire with a fortune and then get the far side money pump running.”
“What are you going to carry the other way?” Paulette asked, sharply.
“Not sure yet.” Miriam rubbed her temples. “It’s weird. They sell cocaine and morphine in drugstores, over the counter, and they fly Zeppelins, and New Britain is at war with the French Empire, and their version of Karl Marx was executed for Ranting—preaching democracy and equal rights. With no industrial revolution he turned into a leveler ideologue instead of a socialist economist. I’m just surprised he was born in the first place—most of the names in the history books are unfamiliar after about eighteen hundred. It’s like a different branch in the same infinite tree of history; I wonder where Niejwein fits in it… let’s not go there now. I need to think of something we can import.” She brooded. “I’ll have to think fast. If the Clan realizes their drug-money pump could run this efficiently they’ll flood the place with cheap gold and drop the price of crack in half as soon as they learn about it. There’s got to be some other commodity that’s valuable over here that we can use to repatriate our profits.”
“Old masters,” Paulette said promptly.
“Huh?”
“Old masters.” She put her mug down. “Listen, they haven’t had a world war, have they?”
“Nope, I’m afraid they have,” Miriam said, checking her watch to see if she could take another pain killer yet. “In fact, they’ve had two. One in the eighteen-nineties that cost them India. The second in the nineteen-fifties that, well, basically New Britain got kicked out of Africa. Africa is a mess of French and Spanish colonies. But they got a strong alliance with Japan and the Netherlands, which also rule most of northwest Germany. And they rule South America and Australia and most of East Asia.”
“No tanks? No H-bombs? No strategic bombers?”
“No.” Miriam paused. “Are you saying—”
“Museum catalogues!” Paulie said excitedly. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot while you’ve been gone. What we do is, we look for works of art dating to before things went, uh, differently. In the other place. Works that were in museums in Europe that got bombed during World War Two, works that disappeared and have never been seen since. You get the picture? Just one lost sketch by Leonardo .. .”
“Won’t they be able to tell the difference?” Miriam frowned. “I’d have thought the experts would—” she trailed off.
“They’ll be exactly the same age!” Paulette said excitedly. “They’d be the real thing, right? Not a hoax. What you do is, you go over with some art catalogues from here and when you’ve got the money you find a specialist buyer and you buy the paintings or marbles or whatever for your personal collection. Then bring them over here. It’s about the only thing that weighs so little you can carry it, but is worth millions and is legal to own.”
“It’ll be harder to sell,” Miriam pointed out. “A lot harder to sell.”
“Yeah, but it’s legal,” said Paulie. She hesitated momentarily: “unless you want to go into the Bolivian marching powder business like your long-lost relatives?”
“Um.” Miriam refilled her coffee mug. “Okay, I’ll look at it.” Miriam Beckstein, dealer in fine arts, she thought. It had a peculiar ring to it, but it was better than Miriam Beckstein, drug smuggler. “Hmm. How’s this for a cover story? I fly over to Europe next year, spend weeks trolling around out there in France and Germany and wherever the paintings went missing. Right? I act secretive and just tell people I’m investigating something. That covers my absence. What I’ll really be doing is crossing to the far side then flying right back to New Britain by airship. Maybe I’ll come home in the meantime, maybe I can work over there, whatever. Whichever I do, it builds up a record of me being out of the country, investigating lost art, and I use the travel time to read up on art history. When I go public over here, it’s a career change. I’ve gone into unearthing lost works of art and auctioning them. Sort of a capitalist version of Indiana Jones, right?”
“Love it.” Paulie winked at her. “Wait till I patent the business practice, ‘a method of making money by smuggling gold to another world and exchanging it for lost masterpieces’!”
“You dare—” Miriam chuckled. “Although I’m not sure we’ll be able to extract anything like the full value of our profits that way. I’m not even sure we want to—having a world to live in where we’re affluent and haven’t spent the past few decades developing a reputation as organized criminals would be no bad thing. Anyway, back to business. How’s the patent search going?”
“I’ve got about a dozen candidates for you,” Paulie said briskly. “A couple of different types of electric motor that they may or may not have come up with. Flash boilers for steam cars, assuming they don’t already have them. They didn’t sound too sophisticated but you never know. The desk stapler—did you see any? Good. I looked into the proportional font stuff you asked for, but the Varityper mechanism is just amazingly complicated, it wouldn’t just hatch out of nowhere. And the alkaline battery will take a big factory and supplies of unusual metals to start making. The most promising option is still the disk brake and the asbestos/resin brake shoe. But I came up with another for you: the parachute.”
“Parachute—” Miriam’s eyes widened. “I’ll need to go check if they’ve invented them. I know Leonardo drew one, but it wouldn’t have been stable. Okay!” She emptied the coffeepot into her and Paulette’s mugs, stirred in some sugar. “That’s great. How long until the cable guy is done?”
“Oh, he’s already gone,” Paulette said. “I get to plug the box in myself, don’t you know?”
“Excellent.” Miriam picked up her mug. “Then I can check my voice mail in peace.”
She wandered into the front office as Brill was leaving the shower, wrapped in towels and steaming slightly. A new socket clung rawly to the wall just under the window. Miriam dropped heavily into the chair behind the desk, noticing the aches of sleeping on a hard surface for the first time. She picked up her phone and punched in her code. Paulette intercepted Brill, asking her something as she led her into the large back office they’d begun converting into a living room.
“You have two messages,” said the phone.
“Yeah, yeah.” Miriam punched a couple more buttons.
“First message, received yesterday at eleven-forty two: Miriam? Oh, Sky Father! Listen, are you alright? Phone me, please.” It was Roland, and he didn’t sound happy. Anguish rose in her chest. Roland—she didn’t let the thought reach her tongue. “It’s urgent,” he added, before the click of the call ending.
“Second message, received yesterday at nine-twelve: Miriam, dear? It’s me.” Iris, she realized. There was a pause. “I know I haven’t been entirely candid with you, and I want you to know that I bitterly regret it.” Another, much longer pause and the sound of labored breathing. Miriam clutched the phone to her ear like a drowning woman. “I’ve … something unexpected has come up. I’ve got to go on a long journey. Miriam, I want you to understand that I am going to be alright. I know exactly what I’m doing, and it’s something I should have done years ago. But it’s not fair to burden you with it. I’ll try to call you or leave messages, but you are not to come around or try to follow me. I love you.” Click.
“Shit!” Miriam threw the mobile phone across the room in a combination of blind rage and panic. She burst out of her chair and ran for the back room, grabbed her jacket and was halfway into her shoes by the time Paulette stuck a curious head out of the day room door. “What’s going on?”
“Something’s happened to Iris. I’m going to check on her.”
“You can’t!” Paulette stood up, alarmed.
“Watch me,” Miriam warned.
“But it’s under—”
“Fuck the surveillance!” She fumbled in her bag for the revolver. “If the Clan has decided to go after my mother I am going to kill someone.”
“Miriam—” it was Brill—“Paulie and I can’t get away the way you can.”
“So you’d better be discreet about the murder business,” said Paulette. She fixed Miriam with a worried stare. “Can you wait two minutes? I’ll drive.”
“I—yes.” Miriam forced herself to unclench her fists and take deep, steady breaths.
“Good. Because if it is the Clan, rushing in is exactly what they’ll expect you to do. And if it isn’t, if it’s the other guys, that’s what they’ll want you to do, too.” She swallowed. “Bombs and all. Which is why I’m going with you. Got it?”
“I—” Miriam forced herself to think. “Okay.” She stood up. “Let’s go.”
They went.
Paulette cruised down Iris’s residential street twice, leaving a good five-minute interval before turning the rental car into the parking space at the side of her house. “Nothing obvious,” she murmured. “You see anything, kid?”
“Nothing,” said Miriam.
Brill shook her head. “Autos all look alike to me,” she admitted.
“Great … Miriam, if you want to take the front door, I’m going to sit here with the engine running until you give the all-clear. Brill—”
“I’ll be good.” She clutched a borrowed handbag to her chest, right hand buried in it, looking like a furtive sorority girl about to drop an unexpected present on a friend.
Miriam bailed out of the car and walked swiftly to Iris’s front door, noticing nothing wrong. There was no damage around the lock, no broken windows, nothing at all out of the usual for the area. No lurking Dodge vans, either, when she glanced over her shoulder as she slipped the key into the front door and turned it left-handed, her other hand full.
The door bounced open and Miriam ducked inside rapidly, with Brill right behind her. The house was empty and cold—not freezing with the chill of a dead furnace, but as if the thermostat had been turned down. Miriam’s feet scuffed on the carpet as she rapidly scanned each ground floor room through their open doors, finishing in Iris’s living room—
No wheelchair. The side table neatly folded and put away. Dead flowers on the mantlepiece.
Back in the hall Miriam held up a finger, then dashed up the stairs, kicking open door after door—the master bedroom, spare bedroom, box room, and bathroom.
“Nothing,” she snarled, panting. In the spare bedroom she pulled down the hatch into the attic, yanked the ladder down-but there was no way Iris could have gotten up there under her own power. She scrambled up the ladder all the same, casting about desperately in the dusty twilight. “She’s not here.”
Down in the ground floor hallway she caught up with Paulette, looking grave. “Brill said Iris is gone?”
Miriam nodded, unable to speak. It felt like an act of desecration, too monstrous to talk about. She leaned against the side of the staircase, taking shallow breaths. “I’ve lost her.” She shut her eyes.
“Over here!” It was Brill, in the kitchen.
“What is it—”
They found Brill inspecting a patch of floor, just inside the back door. “Look,” she said, pointing.
The floor was wooden, varnished and worn smooth in places. The stains, however, were new. Something dark had spilled across the back doorstep. Someone had mopped it up but they hadn’t done a very good job, and the stain had worked into the grain of the wood.
“Outside. Check the garbage.” Miriam fumbled with the lock then got the door open. “Come on!” She threw herself at the Dumpsters in the backyard, terrified of what she might find in them. The bins were huge, shared with the houses to either side, and probably not emptied since the last snowfall. The snow was almost a foot deep on top of the nearest Dumpster. It took her half a minute to clear enough away to lift the lid and look inside.
A dead man stared back at her, his face blue and his eyes frozen in an expression of surprise. She dropped the lid.
“What is it?” asked Paulette.
“Not Iris.” Miriam leaned against the wall, taking deep breaths, her head spinning. Who can he be? “Check. The other bins.”
“Other bins, okay.” Paulette gingerly lifted the lids, one by one—but none of them contained anything worse than a pile of full garbage bags which, when torn, proved to contain kitchen refuse. “She’s not here, Miriam.”
“Oh thank god.”
“What now?” asked Paulie, head cocked as if listening for the sound of sirens.
“I take another look while you and Brill keep an eye open for strangers.” Steeling herself, Miriam lifted the lid on the bin’s gruesome contents. “Hmm.” She reached out and touched her hand to an icy cold cheek. “He’s been dead for at least twelve hours, more likely over twenty-four.” A mass of icy black stuff in front of the body proved to be Iris’s dish towels, bulked up by more frozen blood than Miriam could have imagined. She gingerly shoved them aside, until she saw where the blood had come from. “There’s massive trauma to the upper thorax, about six inches below the neck. Jesus, it looks like a shotgun wound. Saw a couple in the ER, way back when. Um … sawed-off, by the size of the entry wound, either that or he was shot from more than twenty yards away, which would have had to happen outdoors, meaning witnesses. His chest is really torn up, he’d have died instantly.” She dropped the wadding back in front of the body. He was, she noted distantly, wearing black overalls and a black ski mask pulled up over his scalp like a cap. Clean-shaven, about twenty years old, of military appearance. Like a cop or a soldier—or a Clan enforcer.
She turned around and looked at the back door. Something was wrong with it; it took almost a minute of staring before she realized—
“They replaced the door,” she said. “They replaced the fucking door!”
“Let’s go,” Paulette said nervously. “Like right now? Anywhere, as long as it’s away? This is giving me the creeps.”
“Just a minute.” Miriam dropped the Dumpster lid shut and went back inside the house. Iris phoned me when the shit hit the fan, she realized distantly. She was still alive and free, but she had to leave. To go underground, like in the sixties. When the FBI bugged her phone. Miriam leaned over Iris’s favorite chair, in the morning room. She swept her hand around the crack behind the cushion; nothing. “No messages?” She looked up, scanning the room. The mantlepiece: dead flowers, some cards … birthday cards. One of them said 32 TODAY. She walked toward it slowly, then picked it up, unbelieving. Her eyes clouded with tears as she opened it. The inscription inside it was written in Iris’s jagged, half-illiterate scrawl. Thanks for the memories of treasure hunts, and the green party shoes, it said. “Green party shoes?”
Miriam dashed upstairs, into Iris’s bedroom. Opening her mother’s wardrobe she smelled mothballs, saw row upon row of clothes hanging over a vast mound of shoes—a pair of green high-heeled pumps near the front, pushed together. She picked them up, probed inside, and felt a wad of paper filling the toes of the right shoe.
She pulled it out, feeling it crackle—elderly paper, damaged by the passage of time. A tabloid newspaper page, folded tight. She ran downstairs to where Brill was waiting impatiently in the hall. “I got it,” she called.
“Got what?” Brill asked, her voice incurious.
“I don’t know.” Miriam frowned as she locked the door, then they were in the back of the car and Paulie was pulling away hastily, fishtailing slightly on the icy road.
“When your mother phoned you,” Paulie said edgily, “what did she say? Daughter, I’ve killed someone? Or, your wicked family has come to kidnap me, oh la! What is to become of me?”
“She said.” Miriam shut her eyes. “She hadn’t been entirely honest with me. Something had come up, and she had to go on a journey.”
“Someone died,” said Brill. “Someone standing either just outside the back door or just inside it, in the doorway. Someone shot them with a blunderbuss.” She was making a singsong out of it, in a way that really got on Miriam’s nerves. Stress, she thought. Brill had never seen a murder before last week. Now she’s seen a couple in one go, hasn’t she? “So someone stuffed the victim in a barrel for Iris, went out and ordered a new door. Angbard’s men will have been watching her departure. Probably followed her. Why don’t you call him and ask about it?”
“I will. Once we’ve returned this car and rented a replacement from another hire shop.” She glanced at Brill. “Keep a lookout and tell me if you see any cars that seem to be following us.”
Miriam unfolded the paper carefully. It was, she saw, about the same fateful day as the first Xeroxed news report in the green and pink shoebox. But this was genuine newsprint, not a copy, a snapshot from the time itself. Most of it was inconsequential, but there was a story buried halfway down page two that made her stare, about a young mother and baby found in a city park, the mother suffering a stab wound in the lower back. She’d been wearing hippy-style clothes and was unable to explain her condition, apparently confused or intoxicated. The police escorted her to a hospital with the child, and the subeditor proceeded to editorialize on the evils of unconventional lifestyles and the effects of domestic violence in a positively Hogarthian manner. No, Miriam thought, they must have gotten it wrong. She was murdered, Ma told me! Not taken into hospital with a stab wound! She shook her head, bewildered and hurting. “I’ll do that. But first I need some stuff from my house,” she said, “but I’m not sure I dare go there.”
“What stuff?” asked Paulie. Miriam could see her fingers white against the rim of the steering wheel.
“Papers.” She paused, weighing up the relative merits of peace of mind and a shotgun wound to the chest. “Fuck it,” she said shortly. “I need to go home. I need five minutes there. Paulie, take me home.”
“Whoa! Is that really smart?” asked Paulette, knuckles tightening on the steering wheel.
“No.” Miriam grimaced. “It’s really not smart. But I need to grab some stuff, the goddamn disk with all your research on it. I’ll be about thirty seconds. We can ditch the car immediately afterwards. You willing to wait?”
“Didn’t you say they’d staked you out?”
“What does that mean?” Brill asked, confused. “What are you talking about?”
Miriam sighed. “My house,” she said. “I haven’t been back to it since my fun-loving uncle had me kidnapped. Roland said it was under surveillance so I figured it would be risky. Now—”
“It’s even more risky,” Paulette said vehemently. “In fact I think it’s stupid.”
“Yes.” Miriam bared her teeth, worry and growing anger eating at her: “But I need that disk, Paulie, it may be the best leverage I’ve got. We don’t have time for me to make millions in world three.”
“Oh shit. You think it may come to that?”
“Yeah, ‘oh shit’ indeed.”
“What kind of disk?” Brill asked plaintively.
“Don’t worry. Just wait with the car.” Miriam focused on Paulette’s driving. The answer will be somewhere in the shoebox, she thought, desperately. And if Angbard had my ma snatched, I’ll make him pay!
Familiar scenery rolled past, and a couple of minutes later they turned into a residential street that Miriam knew well enough to navigate blindfolded. A miserable wave of homesickness managed to penetrate her anger and worry: This was where she belonged, and she should never have left. It was her home, dammit! And it slid past to the left as Paulette kept on driving.
“Paulie?” Miriam asked anxiously.
“Looking for suspicious-acting vehicles,” Paulie said tersely.
“Oh.” Miriam glanced around. “Ma said there was a truck full of guys watching her.”
“Uh-huh. Your mother spotted the truck. What did she miss?”
“Right.” Miriam spared a sideways glance: Brill’s head was swiveling like a ceiling fan, but her expression was more vacant than anything else. Almost as if she was bored. “Want to drive round the block once more? When you get back to the house stop just long enough for me to get out, then carry on. Come back and pick me up in three minutes. Don’t park.”
“Um. You sure that you want to do this?”
“No, I’m not sure, I just know that I have to.”
Paulie turned the corner then pulled over. Miriam was out of the car in a second and Paulette pulled away. There was virtually nobody about—no parked occupied vans, no joggers. She crossed the road briskly, walked up to her front door, and remembered two things, in a single moment of icy clarity. Firstly, that she had no idea where her house keys might be, and secondly, that if there were no watchers this might be because—
Uh-oh, she thought, and backed away from the front step, watching where her feet were about to go with exaggerated caution. A cold sweat broke out in the small of her back, and she shuddered violently. But fear of trip wires didn’t stop her carefully opening the yard gate, slipping around the side of the house, and up to the shed with the concealed key to the French doors at the back.
When she had the key, Miriam paused for almost a minute at the glass doors, trying to get her hammering heart under control. She peered through the curtains, thoughtfully. They’ll expect me to go in the front, she realized. But even so… She unlocked the door and eased it open a finger’s width. Then she reached as high as she could, and ran her index finger slowly down the opening, feeling for the faint tug of a lethal obstruction. Finding nothing, she opened the door farther, then repeated the exercise on the curtains. Again: nothing. And so, Miriam returned to her home.
Her study had been efficiently and brutally strip-searched. The iMac was gone, as were the boxes of CD-ROMs and the zip drive and disks from her desk. More obviously, every book in the bookcase had been taken down, the pages riffled, and dumped in a pile on the floor. It was a big pile. “Bastards,” she said quietly. The pink shoebox was gone, of course. Fearing the worst she tiptoed into her own hallway like a timid burglar, her heart in her mouth.
It was much the same in the front hall. They’d even searched the phone books. A blizzard of loose papers, lay everywhere, some of them clearly trampled underfoot. Drawers lay open, their contents strewn everywhere. Furniture had been pulled out from the walls and shoved back haphazardly, and one of the hall bookcases leaned drunkenly against the opposite wall. At first sight she thought that the living room had gotten off lightly, but the damage turned out to be even more extensive—her entire music collection had been turned out onto the floor, disks piled on a loose stack.
“Fuck.” Her mouth tasted of ashes. The sense of violation was almost unbearable, but so was the fear that they’d taken her mother and found Paulie’s research disk as well. The money-laundering leads were in the hands of whoever had done this to her. Whoever they were, they had to know about the Clan, which meant they’d know what the disk’s contents meant. They were a smoking gun, one that was almost certainly pointing at the Clan’s east coast operations. She knelt by the discarded CD cases and rummaged for a minute—found The Beggar’s Opera empty, the CD-ROM purloined.
She went back into the front hall. Somehow she slithered past the fallen bookcase, just to confirm her worst fear. They’d strung the wire behind the front door, connecting one end of it to the handle. If she hadn’t been in such a desperate hurry that she’d forgotten her keys, the green box taped crudely to the wall would have turned her into a messy stain on the sidewalk. Assassin number two is the one who likes Claymore mines, she reminded herself edgily. The cold fear was unbearable and Miriam couldn’t take any more. She blundered out through the French doors at the back without pausing to lock them, round the side of the house, and onto the sidewalk to wait for Paulie.
Seconds later she was in the back of the car, hunched and shivering. “I don’t see any signs of anything going on,” Paulie said quietly. She seemed to have calmed down from her state at Iris’s house. “What do you want to do now? Why don’t we find a Starbucks, get some coffee, then you tell us what you found?”
“I don’t think so.” Miriam closed her eyes.
“Are you alright?” Brill asked, concern in her voice.
“No, I’m not alright,” Miriam said quietly. “We’ve got to ditch the car, now. They trashed the place and left a trip-wire surprise behind the front door. Paulie, the box of stuff my mother gave me was gone. And so was the disk.”
“Oh—shit. What are we going to do?”
“I—” Miriam stopped, speechless. “I’m going to talk to Angbard. But not until I’ve had a few words with Roland.” She pulled an expression that someone who didn’t know her might have mistaken for a smile. “He’s the one who told me about the surveillance. It’s time to clear the air between us.”