But there were significant differences from Henryk’s idea of hospitality, despite the primitive amenities and unwanted expectations. Her bedroom door had a lock, but she had her own key. The afternoon after her arrival, trying to dispel the anxiety and claustrophobia of being Helge again, she’d ventured from her room to look around the grand hall and the main rooms of the estate. When she’d returned she found the battered suitcase she’d borrowed from Erasmus sitting beside the canopy bed. A quick inspection with shaking hands revealed her laptop and the revolver Burgeson had given her. And not only had they let her keep the locket James Lee had given her—Brill had winked, and given her a second, smaller locket on a gold bracelet. None of these things were of any immediate use, but collectively they conveyed a powerful message: The trap has a key, and you are not a prisoner.
She’d sat on the bed, holding the laptop and shaking, carefully stifling her sobs of relief lest the servants waiting outside take fright. When she’d calmed down sufficiently to function again, she checked over the small pistol, reloading it with ammunition from its case. She let the hammer down on an empty cylinder, and slid it into a pouch she’d found cunningly stitched inside the cuff of her left sleeve; I can make this work, she told herself. I’ve got to make this work. The one common drawback of both her own plan, and her mother’s, was that they depended on her living as the Countess Helge voh Thorold d’Hjorth. Not playacting in fancy dress, but actually being a lady of the Gruinmarkt—at least unless and until Iris’s hastily improvised junta secured its grip on power, or the US military figured out a way to claw a hole in the wall between the worlds. Which could happen tomorrow—or in ten years’ time.
The alternatives were all worse: a gamble on the questionable mercies of the DEA’s witness protection scheme, an even riskier gamble on Erasmus and his ruthless political allies. Between her mother’s Machiavellian proposal and the naïve optimism of the young progressive faction, there was at least some room for her to get a grip on events. “As long as Henryk doesn’t rise from the dead I’ll be alright,” she muttered under her breath. (Keep telling yourself that, mocked her inner skeptic. They’ll find some other way to screw you. . . .)
If Roland were still alive, and had actually been the knight in shining armor he’d looked like at first, she wouldn’t have to sort everything out for herself. But first he’d disappointed her, then he’d died trying to live up to her expectations, and now there was nothing to do but press on regardless. No more heroes, she resolved. I’m going to have to do this all on my own again, damn it. Which, semirandomly, reminded her of the old song. “What do I have to do to get a CD player in here?” she asked herself, and managed a croak of laughter.
A tentative voice piped up somewhere behind her, near the door: “Milady, are you alright?”
Miriam—Helge—turned her head. “I am—well,” she managed in her halting hochsprache. “What is it?”
The servant, a maid of the bedchamber—evidently of a higher status than a common or garden serving woman—studiously ignored her reddened eyes. “Milady? I beg you to receive a visitor downstairs?” The maid continued for another sentence, but Helge’s hochsprache was too patchy to catch more than a feminine prefix and an implication of status.
“In a, a minute.” Helge reached for one of the canopy posts and levered herself upright. “Speak, tell, her I will see them.” She took a step towards the heavy oak dresser with the water jug and bowl that stood in for a sink. The door closed behind her. “Ouch.” She’d kept the ankle boots she’d acquired in New London because they fit her feet better than any shoes in milady’s wardrobe, but she’d been wearing them all day and her feet were complaining. She examined her face ruefully in the precious aluminum-framed mirror. “I’m a mess,” she told it, and it winced, agreeing. “Better clean up.”
Five minutes later, Helge closed her door and marched onto the landing at the head of the grand staircase, a wide wooden platform that circled the inside wall of the central hall. She gripped the handrail tightly as she descended. It wouldn’t do to fall downstairs, I might lose the baby. She tried not to succumb to the fit of dark humor: She had a feeling that if she aired that particular joke she might scare people. Not, she was determined, that she was going to bond even remotely with the kid. That would be too much like collusion. I wonder who wants to see me?
The butler, or equerry or whatever, was waiting at the foot of the stairs with a gaggle of maidservants lined up behind him. “Milady.” He bowed, almost sweeping the floor. “Her ladyship awaits you in the green lounge.”
Miriam nodded acknowledgement. Who? Two unfamiliar servants waited outside the door he indicated, standing at ease with almost military precision. “Introduce me,” she said.
“Aye, milady.” The equerry walked towards the door, which opened before him. “This is Lady Thorold—”
“We’ve met,” said Helge. She swept past the startled equerry.
Olga met her halfway in a hug. “Helge! You look well. Have they been looking after you?”
“Well enough so far.” She hugged Olga back, then took a deep breath and stepped aside to look at her. With her hair up, wearing an embroidered riding habit, Olga almost looked like the blond ingenue Miriam had mistaken her for when they’d first met, almost a year ago. “You’re looking good yourself.” She took another deep breath, feeling the knot of anxiety begin to loosen. “But how have you been? Brill tried to bring me up to date on some of the details, but . . .”
“It has been difficult.” Olga looked slightly pained for a moment, then her brows wrinkled into a thunderous frown. “But leave that for later! I come to see you, and I find you in a yokel’s barn with peasants for attendants and no guards for your back—how long have you been left alone here?”
“Oh, I’ve only been here since this morning—”
“Only this morning? Well then, I probably need not execute anyone just yet—”
“Wait!” She held up a hand. “Brill was sorting things out for me. What are you going on about?”
“It was Lady d’Ost?” Olga’s anger faded. “She told me about your . . . arrangement. She left you here?”
“Yeah. But she was supposed to be back later in the day. Think she ran into trouble?”
“Possibly.” Olga walked over to the heavy oak sideboard that stood against one wall and opened a small valise to pull out a CB handset. “I’ll just check. One-two, one-two. Stefan, wer’ ist?” A burst of crackling hochsprache answered her. Miriam didn’t even try to follow the conversation, but after a minute’s back and forth Olga was content to shove the radio back in her bag. “My men will ask, when they finish walking the perimeter. It could be just one of those things. . . .” Olga shrugged, delicately. “But we cannot leave you here without a staff, especially once the servants work out who you are. At a minimum you need your own ladies-in-waiting—at least two of them, to supervise the servants and look to your needs. I am able to detach Lady Brilliana from other duties, so she can serve, again. . . . Then you need a lance of guards under a suitable officer, and a communications officer with a courier or two at his disposal. I’d be happier if we could add a doctor or at least a properly trained paramedic, a coachman and two grooms, and either a full kitchen staff or at least a poison-taster. The full household we can leave until later, this is an essential minimum—”
“Olga.” Miriam—shoving Helge out of her mind—took a deep breath. “Why?”
“Why?” Olga raised an eyebrow. “Because you’re carrying the heir, dear. We have a special word for a woman who does that. We call her the queen.”
“This glorious nation of ours was not built by the landed gentry or the bastard sons of George; it was built by the sweat and love of men like you. And its future is in your hands.”
Erasmus squinted at the faces behind the fulminating glare of the limelights as the scripted applause rolled on, trying to hold an impassive expression of determination on his face. “Thank you, citizens! And long live the commonwealth!”
The applause grew louder, sounding genuinely enthusiastic. Hungry men clinging to their best hope of a solid meal, a cynical corner of his mind observed as he bowed his head, then stepped back from the lectern and walked to the back of the stage to make way for the next speaker.
“I thought that was well enough received,” he told the fellow on the bench seat behind the backstage curtain. “What do you think?”
Ronald Smith, the Assistant Commissioner for Justice, nodded thoughtfully. “A good tub-thumping rant doesn’t go amiss,” he conceded. “Who’s on next?”
“Brian MacDougal.” Burgeson frowned as he sat beside Smith. “Which means he’ll harangue them for three hours on the price of flour while their stomachs are rumbling.”
“I ought to go back to the front bench.” Smith showed no sign of moving.
“I ought to go back to the office.” Burgeson’s frown deepened. “There’ll be new slanders and rumors from the Patriot Club to rebut before the congress is over, if I don’t mistake myself. . . .”
“No, you don’t.” Smith fumbled in his coat pocket for a while before pulling out a villainously stained clay pipe. “They’re getting ready for something big. I can feel it in my bones. We’ll have to break some heads before long, or they’ll be electing a king to ride us like nags. Francis or Sir Hubert, most likely.” Both of whom were popular with the elitist thugs of the Patriot Club and their opportunist redshirted street runners—the shirts were dyed to conceal the bloodstains of their victims, as Burgeson had announced in one of his more lurid editorials, and for once he was making none of it up.
“They’ll break the assembly if they do that.”
“The assembly’s doomed anyway, Erasmus. As long as Sir Adam sticks to his and our principles and the New Club continue to demand amnesty for John Frederick, there’s going to be no compromise, and the taller the debate grows, the more bitter its fruit will be.”
“You sound as if you want to compromise. Or am I misunderstanding you?”
Smith grunted as he fumbled with his lighter. “No, I believe there will be a compromise, eventually, whether we want it or no; the only question is, whose terms will it favor? The alternative is open strife, and as that would only benefit our enemies . . .”
He pulled the trigger. Sparks snapped and fell into the barrel of his pipe.
“I think you underestimate our resources and our prowess,” Erasmus murmured as Smith drew on his weed. “We have a majority of the navy behind us.” The rigid stratification and harsh discipline of the service, combined with a recent decline in the quality of rations and an influx of conscripts, had turned the navy into a tinderbox of pro-Leveler sentiment. “In fact, I think we’d have a majority of the people behind us, if the assembly would get round to holding the elections we were promised for our support.” Erasmus smiled thinly. “We know we hold the people’s mandate, that’s why they’re carrying on this rearguard action in the popular committees. And the sooner we stop gassing at each other and patting ourselves on the back”—his nod towards the front of the stage, where citizen MacDougal had commenced his peroration on the price of bread, took in the invisible audience of party delegates—“the better. This is what did for us the last time round, and if we don’t seize the day it’ll do for us—”
He paused. A messenger boy was tiptoeing towards them, eyes wide. “Citizen Burgeson?” he piped quietly.
“Yes, lad?”
“Electrogram from the Westminster Halls!” He held the message slip out, stiff-armed.
“Hmm.” Burgeson took the message and read it as fast as he could in the backstage twilight. Then he pocketed it and rose. “It has been good to talk to you, citizen Smith, but I’m needed elsewhere.” He smiled faintly. “Do keep me informed as to the substance of citizen MacDougal’s bakery, will you?” Then he turned to the messenger boy: “Go tell the postmaster to signal that I’m on my way.”
Burgeson emerged blinking from the basement of the commandeered theater where the party caucus was in full swing. Two militiamen in the gray and green uniform of the Freedom Riders challenged him. “Citizen Burgeson. Please tell Citizen Supervisor Philips that I am ready to leave on urgent business and require transport.”
“Sir!” One of the guards hurried off; the other stood by. Erasmus pointedly ignored the solecism: Ex-soldiers generally made the best militiamen, even when their political awareness wasn’t up to scratch, and with the opposition boasting of two redshirts for every Freedom Rider the Party could muster, only a fool would make an issue of a slip of the tongue.
Presently the guard returned with Supervisor Philips following behind him. Philips, tall, stoop-shouldered, and quavery of voice, wouldn’t normally have been Erasmus’s idea of a military commander: He reminded him of a praying mantis. (But these weren’t normal times, and Philips was, if nothing else, politically sound.) “Ah, citizen Burgeson. What can I do for you?”
Erasmus suppressed a twitch. Drawing himself up to his full height, he said: “I am summoned to the Westminster Halls by Sir Adam.”
“Interesting.” He could almost see the gears meshing in Philips’s mind. “We’ll have to avoid the Central Canal and Three Mile Lane, the redshirts are smashing up shop windows and working themselves up.” The gears spun to a conclusive stop: “Citizen, please follow me. Meng, go tell Stevens to send the armored car round to the front steps. He’s to follow with the motorcycle detachment. Gray, stand guard until I send someone to relieve you.” Erasmus fell in behind Philips. “I should like you to ride in the car for your own safety, citizen. Unless you feel the need to arrange a provocation?”
“No provocations today.” Erasmus smiled humorlessly, mentally reviewing the message that had dragged him away from the interminable speeches of the party faithful: COME AT ONCE TO DISCUSS PATRIOTS WITHDRAWL FROM ASS BREAK NEED TO RESPOND BREAK. “But there’ll be plenty of provocations tomorrow.”
Miriam was still vibrating from Olga’s arrival two hours later, when the Lady Brilliana d’Ost arrived with all the ceremony due to a lord’s daughter, and a small army of servants, stewards, armed guards, and other retainers besides. They can’t mean it, Miriam kept telling herself: I’m no queen! She’d met His Majesty King Alexis a number of times, and his mother the dowager queen, but there’d been an empty space in that family tree for some years before Egon pulled his hostile takeover bid. She’d acquired from King Alexis a vague sense of what it was to be a monarch: much like being the CEO of a sprawling, huge, corporation with an activist and frequently hostile board. And the angle that if you screwed up, being fired took on a whole new and alarming meaning.
Olga had dragged her on a tour of the house and its grounds—sucking two bodyguards along in her wake, and using her walkie-talkie to warn other outer guards of their progress—and had tried explaining a huge inchoate bundle of protocol to her, in between showing her round an orchard patrolled by peacocks and a huge selection of outbuildings that evidently made this site suitable for a temporary royal presence—but most of it went right past her head. Too much, too fast: Miriam was still trying to come to terms with her mother’s sudden reemergence at the center of a web of diplomacy, and the huge imposition of being pregnant, much less with the whole question of her status here, to grapple with anything else.
In the end, she’d just raised a hand. “Olga. Stop. This is too much for me, right now.”
“Too much.” Olga paused. “Helge. You need to know this. What is—”
“Back to the house. Please?”
Olga peered at her. “You’re not feeling too good?”
“I am way overloaded,” she admitted. “I’m not ready for this, for any of it. Mom’s plan. You’re part of it, right?”
“Back to the house,” Olga said firmly, taking her in hand. “Yes,” she confirmed as they walked, “I have the honor of conspiring with her, as do you. But we are relying on you for so much. If you are overloaded, let me help?”
Miriam sighed. “I’m not sure I can. Being pregnan
t? That wasn’t in my plans. Mom’s conspiracy? Ditto. Now you want me to be a queen, which is way outside my comfort zone: It’s the kind of job that drives people to an early grave. And then there’s the other stuff.”
“Other stuff?”
“Don’t bullshit me, Olga. Angbard didn’t pick you just because of your bright smile and fashion sense. You must have gotten my report through Brill. I did meet Mike Fleming in the palace! And he told me—”
“Yes, we know.” Olga paused while one of their silent escorts opened the orchard gate for her. “It is a very bad situation, Helge, and I would be lying if I said it was entirely under control. You have been told what happened to Egon’s men?”
“Yes.” Miriam followed Olga through the gate. “Which means it’s only a matter of time. It could all explode in our faces tomorrow, or next month.”
“Absolutely. Your uncle—while he lay sick, he told me we needed to put your business plan into action, that it was the only way. But my word carries little weight with the likes of Julius or your grandam. If your mother’s conspiracy works, we’ll see. But we are riding on a tumbrel with a broken wheel—time is scarce, so we must pursue all our options at once lest we find ourselves treading on air. You as the mother to the heir—that helps. If not with the old aristocracy, then with our own conservatives—they recognize the heir, it was their own scheme! And there are other materials that his grace told me to entrust to you, when I can recover them—they are another. We might be able to hold the Gruinmarkt yet, should the American scientists fail to unravel our talent. It could take them years, not months. And we will still need to defeat them in covert battle and recover our hostages from them.”
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