by Emma Newman
She managed to slip past most of the guests without drawing their attention—sometimes it was useful being very petite—and headed out of the main doors. Carriages were still arriving, bringing guests who were stretching the boundaries of what was considered fashionably late. As she looked for her cousin, Lucy couldn’t help but admire the beauty of Oxenford’s reflected buildings surrounding the small road around the camera. The lawn had been reflected too, no doubt to make some sort of statement about wealth, and its dull green made her miss the sunshine.
“Lucy!” Edwin stepped out from behind a carriage sporting a huge grin, waving to her.
Her heart leapt at the sight of him and she ran over to let him gather her in his arms and spin her around. “Jeez, am I glad to see you,” she said as he set her down and held her at arm’s length.
“Well, don’t you look the fancy lady?” he said, and she laughed. The sound of his American accent was the sound of home and she felt a horrendous pang of homesickness that brought tears to her eyes. She hugged him again, fiercely, until it passed.
“You look well,” she said.
His eyebrows shot up. “What kinda accent is that?”
She shrugged. “Survival British,” she replied, and enjoyed his chuckle. “What happened to you? You were supposed to be in Londinium this morning.”
“Yeah, I thought taking the plane over would be faster. Bad weather in Philly, so I missed my connection. Ended up having to stay over and fly today. I couldn’t get a message to you, sorry about that.” He looked at the Radcliffe Camera. “So that’s where the ball is?” He gave a low whistle. “Mom would go nuts for this place.”
“Whatever you do, don’t say a word about how old it is. It’s like the most colonial thing you can say.”
“Oh, I can think of plenty more things to say that are more colonial than that!” Edwin said, with that grin she’d missed so much. The one that promised the most delicious mischief. “How about ‘Wow, do you seriously consider your wife to be your property?’”
“Shush!” Lucy said, looking around them to see if anyone had heard.
“No, no, I got it: ‘The United States has been doin’ just fine without the Brits for quite a while now.’ Or I could just say ‘Ya know, Patroons are really kinda passé now, doncha think?’ Aw, Luce, don’t tell me you lost your sense of humour!”
Lucy took his hands and squeezed them tight. “It’s been a long time since I really laughed.”
Edwin kissed the knuckles on her right hand, then on her left. “I know it’s been tough for you, kiddo. I could tell from your letters. From what you didn’t say.”
She looked into his big brown eyes, saw the love in them. How soothing to be looked at by someone who genuinely loved her. “I couldn’t be sure who else would read them.”
He nodded, understanding. “I’m here now, cuz.” He frowned at a couple climbing out of a nearby carriage who stared at him as they straightened their clothes. “I get the feeling they don’t get many black men coming to these balls of theirs.”
“Seriously, it’s worse than we thought here,” Lucy whispered. “A lot worse.”
Concerned, he looked back down at her. “I’m not gonna like it here, am I?”
She shook her head. “I almost told you not to come, but…”
“Hey,” he said softly. “It’s okay. When you left, I told you that if you ever needed me, I’d be there. You need me. I’m here.”
Lucy’s eyes welled up before she could stop them. “It’s so hard.”
“I know.”
“It’s just awful here.”
“I know.”
“And I’m getting nowhere. All the things Mom and Dad suggested, and your mom and dad, I tried them all. None of it worked.”
“Have you had a chance to get to the Patroon?”
She shook her head. “No. He married us and then I saw him at a ball once, but there were dozens of people there. It was impossible to get him alone.”
“Okay, well, then we go back to the drawing board. Maybe we forget about the Patroon. Go straight for our patron. That was always Plan B, right?”
Lucy bit her lip. “It was Plan A at one point, remember?”
Edwin nodded. “Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “But we all thought that getting you into Albion, right into the lion’s den, was just too good a chance to pass up. Were we wrong?”
Lucy shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Shit, we were wrong.” Edwin grimaced. “I never wanted them to send you here.”
“It’s okay.” Lucy did her best to smile. “I’m fine. Especially now you’re with me.”
“So the new plan, once we’re done, is to kill your husband and you come back to California, right?”
Sometimes it was hard to tell when Edwin was kidding. “No,” Lucy said firmly, just in case he was serious. “None of this is his fault. Tom is…I think he could be better than he is. He just needs a bit of time.”
“Why do I have the feeling we’re not going to get along?”
Lucy was about to reassure him when she saw George Reticulata-Iris climb out of a recently arrived carriage to turn around and help his wife and daughter out after him. All three of them looked incredibly grim-faced, and a feeling of dread settled in Lucy’s stomach.
“Who are they?” Edwin asked.
“The parents of the Chancellor of Oxenford,” Lucy replied as George Iris noticed her. He said something to his wife and then headed over. “Good evening, Mr Reticulata-Iris,” she said with a smile.
“Good evening,” he said, the frown not lifting from his face.
“May I present my cousin, Edwin Californica-Papaver? Edwin, this is George Reticulata-Iris, of Aquae Sulis.”
George looked momentarily confused and then shook Edwin’s hand. “A pleasure.” He looked back to Lucy. “May I have a word in private? I have some grave news.”
Edwin clasped his hands behind his back to stroll around the lawn as George gently steered her away. “I’m afraid there’s no easy way to put this. Charles Papaver was found dead earlier this evening, in his home. He…” George swallowed, ashen-faced. “He took his own life.”
Lucy clamped a hand over her mouth. She’d seen her father-in-law less than a fortnight ago, at Elizabeth’s wedding, and all had seemed well. “Oh my God!”
George rested a hand on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry. If there’s anything we can do…”
“How is Isabella? Is someone with her?” Had she found her husband dead? Lucy couldn’t imagine how awful that would be.
The look on George’s face flickered between discomfort and embarrassment. “You didn’t know. Oh dear. Lucy, Isabella left Charles a few days ago. She hasn’t been seen since. That’s why he…”
All Lucy could do was stand there for a few moments. She hadn’t been close to Charles, far from it; he wasn’t the sort of man one could even be close to. And knowing about how he beat Cathy—well, she’d never really wanted to get to know him. But the thought of his being so distressed that he’d resorted to suicide shook her to the core. She’d never known anyone who had died in the Nether. “Who…found him?”
“One of the servants. It was shortly before we were due to go over for sherry before coming here. We assisted the staff and the Censor has been informed.”
Lucy didn’t want to ask the question that came to mind, but once it had, she had to know. “How did he…”
George swallowed. “He shot himself with a service revolver. The one he kept from the First World War, I believe.”
She started shivering. How was Tom going to—“Oh, Tom!” she said. “He’s at the ball! He doesn’t know!”
“Would you like me to inform him?”
“No, I will. I’ll…I’ll go and fetch him now. And Elizabeth is there, too. She’ll need to be told. I’ll find her as well.”
“William can break it to Catherine,” George said.
“But they aren’t here yet,” Lucy said, to George’s evident surprise. “Thank you
for telling me, Mr Iris. If you’ll excuse me, I need to find my husband.”
• • •
Sam yawned as the car pulled up outside one of the hotels he owned in Chester. He hadn’t been sleeping well, and the meeting he was about to have was only one of the reasons why. He still wasn’t used to the different distribution of worries in his role as Lord Iron. So many things that would have stressed him out before were nothing now. So many things he used to be utterly ignorant of were now keeping him awake at night.
Faced with the pressure to do something as ridiculous as unleashing the Fae upon a world with the internet and reality television, he had to prove to Beatrice that it was possible to temper the behaviour of the Elemental Court. The fact that he himself wasn’t like them didn’t seem to be enough to satisfy her. He had to admit that if he was the only one, things weren’t going to change fast enough for either of them to be satisfied. But writing off the entirety of the Elemental Court without even trying seemed like madness.
He had given up on Copper; when a guy sends assassins to kill you in your own bed, there’s no coming back from that. Earlier that day he’d visited Susan, his former employee, and made it clear to her that he knew she’d helped Copper. He didn’t feel good about threatening a woman—even if it was only with legal action—but he had to make it clear he knew what she’d done. He’d told her in no uncertain terms that his people were keeping a very close eye on her. She knew, more than many, just how good they were.
Now he was gearing up to meet Mazzi and he was nervous. If he could change the behaviour of just one other member of the Elemental Court, there was hope.
There was a dusting of snow on the pavement and on the shoulders of the doorman waiting to let him into the hotel. Des was waiting in the lobby. “Your guest is five minutes away, sir. If you’ll follow me.” It was the usual polished-marble-and-swanky-lighting affair that he’d come to expect from the hotels he’d inherited from his predecessor: as posh as it was energy inefficient. It was on a long list of properties that were going to be overhauled in the next three months. For now, he just had to grin and bear it, consoling himself with the memory that his new staff benefits packages and wage scales had been implemented there. The staff certainly looked happier.
The small conference room was on the ground floor, with the files in the security boxes he’d locked himself and put into Des’s car. The projector screen was already pulled down and ready to use, and coffee and his favourite chocolates were there too. He popped one into his mouth and moved the remainder so the space wasn’t obvious, with a grin at Des, who’d seen what he’d done.
Des left him to his nerves and mental rehearsal. Sam sat and then stood up again, too wired to stay still. He went to the window and looked into the tiny courtyard with its ventilation ducts and bird droppings slowly being hidden by the snow. He wondered if Cathy was enjoying the weather. She was never far from his thoughts. He didn’t want her to leave, but he couldn’t say that. He didn’t want to be the kind of arsehole that had plagued her life before.
A knock on the door made him jump. Des opened it and said, “Lady Nickel is here.”
Sam nodded, left the window to stand near the table, and realised he hadn’t unlocked the boxes. Shit! With trembling hands he managed to get two of them open before Mazzi arrived at the doorway.
“Hi, Sam,” she said with a business-like smile.
“Come in. Coffee?”
“Please.” She wore a green trouser suit, her long fingernails painted to match. She set her briefcase on the table, glanced at the boxes and the projector screen, and then accepted the cup from him. “So, you wanted to see me. Is this about Copper?”
“Sort of,” Sam said, picking up the projector’s remote control. He knew Des was next door with the laptop, ready. “You don’t agree with what I’ve done.”
She leaned back in the chair, folding her arms. “I thought we’d had a moment of understanding, down in those caves. You seemed to get it. When I saw what you did to Copper after that, it felt like a punch in the guts.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve been trying to bring you into the fold, Sam. And you threw it back in my face. Copper might not be the nicest man on Earth, but he’s one of the Court, and we’ve got to stick together.”
“Why?”
“Because…” She scowled. “Stop acting like a goddamn child! You know why. We have a lot of power and we influence a lot of people’s lives. If we start attacking each other, nothing good will come of it.”
He wanted to make a snide comment about the fact that Copper had already attacked him, but he didn’t want to lose focus on the real reason for the meeting. “Did you see the stuff I released about his mines?”
She sipped her coffee, remaining silent. Sam pressed the button on the remote. On the screen appeared an image of a river with dead fish floating on the surface and clumped at the shore. He changed the image to a close-up of a cluster of dead fish showing the smears of chemicals in the water. Then a third image of a man with brown skin, wearing ragged overalls and no shoes, dragging a net through the water as part of a woefully underfunded local clean-up. Then another shot of a different river, running orange through a forest. Then another of cars on fire partially crashed into a wire security fence.
Mazzi sighed. “If you’re trying to turn me against Copper you’ve got to try harder than this.”
“You don’t recognise these pictures?”
She shook her head.
“They were sent to you in a report a couple of years ago by a Mr Neugent of Pin PR. There were about fifty of them, along with details on how the local youths were throwing firebombs into your nickel mine in Brazil when a spill killed over a thousand fish in the local river. The report covered the strategies that were going to be employed to reduce the harmful impact on your company’s image.” He clicked the button again, showing a page of the report with a portion highlighted.
We’ve ensured that the environmentalist groups that usually report on this area have been suitably distracted. One group has obtained the attached images but we have persuaded them that it would be in their best interests to only release them to a particular news contact under our control. They believe it will be run as an exposé in the local area. It will in fact be buried and featured as a minor column article in the lowest-circulation newspaper. The information about the spill has reached international news aggregators but we have taken steps to delay its reporting in the western press to ensure that the local unrest will have been brought under control and downplayed by local law enforcement by the time anyone significant arrives.
Sam glanced at Mazzi’s face, her eyes bright in the glow from the projector screen. No change in expression. He clicked the button again. It showed a man’s leg, mangled beyond recognition, only identifiable as his limb by virtue of the fact that it was attached to him. Then another of a pair of hands, covered in burns, followed swiftly by another man’s leg, this time with a deep gouge in the thigh.
“These pictures never made it to the press, of course. Nor to any of the local agencies that are supposed to monitor industrial accidents. Or any of the international watchdogs that your operations are obliged to submit data to. These came from the doctor working at that same mine. He was found dead a couple of months later. Hanged himself. Apparently. I guess the details didn’t even make it out of the local police report. If it was ever written. I’m not sure if that information reached you, in fairness. Maybe you just skimmed that bit of the report. You get so many, after all.”
Mazzi looked at him. “What do you hope to achieve here? Are you showing me these to warn me that I’m next after Copper?”
Sam chucked the remote onto the table, turning to face her fully. “Jesus fucking wept, Mazzi. I’m showing you these to see if you give a shit.”
“It’s very sad, of course,” she said, with a voice that suggested it was about as sad as a fly being smashed against a windscreen. “But if you’re hoping for tears or promise
s of—”
“I’m hoping for a shred of fucking humanity!” Sam shouted. She bristled and he held his hands up. “I’m sorry. I’m looking for a sign of…of anything that might suggest you could care about another human being.”
“Do you want me to cry? To make promises that I’ll change things? Are you that naive about the way the world works?”
Sam rubbed the back of his neck, feeling constricted by his suit jacket. “I want to understand why you can just let this stuff happen and not lose sleep over it. Nothing about the way you and your company have handled any of the disasters you’re responsible for suggests that. All I’ve seen is the usual scapegoat sacking, the same old CEOs making some bullshit statement before they got another cushy job. I mean, Jesus, it’s the most depressing shit I have ever read and I don’t have to live through it like those people have. I’m lucky to be depressed by it! I could be one of those poor bastards being destroyed by it!”
“No, you couldn’t,” Mazzi said, taking another sip of the coffee. “Those people only take those jobs because they haven’t bettered themselves. They could strive for more but they don’t. Why should everyone else feel bad about the fact that they’ve let themselves slip to the bottom of the pile?”
Sam felt any reasonable responses fly from his mind. How could he deal with a complete absence of compassion? He rested his face in his hands, elbows propped up on the table, trying to sift out a useful thing to say from his internal raging.
“I wonder how you would have done in that man’s village,” he finally said. “Where the only jobs are the ones offered by your mine, because all of the other things they used to do to survive were trashed by your company. The land was sold from under them. The farms they used to live off were taken from them by a corrupt official, paid off by your people. There are no alternatives, short of packing up and leaving. To go where? The Rio slums? Would you want to take your kids there?”
