The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1)

by Charles Stross

  She put the recorder down for a couple of minutes while she soaped herself all over, trying to scrub away the sweat and stress.

  ‘Personal File: Roland. He’s too damn smooth.’ She paused, biting her upper lip. ‘Reminds me of the college jocks, same kind of clean-cut hunky outdoors thing, except he’s painfully polite and doesn’t smell of beer or cigarettes. And he’s trying to hide something. First cousin, which means, um. I have no idea what that means in the context of this extended Clan-family structure thing, except he treats me like I’m made of eggshells and soap bubbles. Great class, behaves like a real gentleman, then again, he’s probably a gold-plated bastard under the smooth exterior. That, or Uncle Angbard is trying to throw us together for some reason. And he is a tough cookie. Right out of The Godfather. Trust him as far as you can throw him.’

  She leaned back farther. ‘Next Memo: sexual politics. These people are basically medievals in suits. And tonight they were just medievals. Olga is the giveaway, but the rest of it is pretty hard to miss. Better not talk about Ben or the divorce, or the kid, they might get weird. Maybe I can qualify as an aged spinster aunt who’s too important to mess with, and they’ll leave me alone. But if they expect me to lie back and act like a – a countess, someone’s going to be in trouble.’ And it could be me, she admitted. Stuck in a strange land with weird and stifling customs, under guard the whole time –

  ‘Memo: The locket is not unique. Duke Angbard owns its twin. He gave it back to me to keep and talked about a doppelgängered house. And the family trait. Which means they know all about it – and about how it works and how you use them. Hmm. Find out what they know before you start messing.’

  There was a lot to think about. ‘Most kids sometimes play make-believe, that they’re actually the long-lost prince or princess of a magical kingdom. Not Ruritania with poison-tasters, armed guards, and Dallas reruns as the height of sophisticated after-dinner entertainment.’ She hummed tunelessly. ‘I wonder where they get the money to pay for the toys?’ Something Paulette had said was trying to surface, but she couldn’t quite remember what.

  The bathtub drained and Miriam caught herself yawning as she toweled herself dry. ‘Maybe it’ll all go away in the morning,’ she told herself.

  ECONOMICS LESSON

  Miriam jolted awake with her eyes open and a strong sense of panic. Incoherent but unpleasant dreams dogged her: goggled soldiers looming over her bed, limbs moving through molasses, too slow, too slow . . .

  The bed was too big, much too big. She groped for the side of it, floundering across cold white sheets like an arctic explorer.

  ‘Aagh.’ She reached open air, found herself looking down at the floor from an unaccustomed height. Her arm hurt, her mouth tasted horrible – something had obviously died in it the night before, and she ached everywhere but especially in a tight band across her forehead. ‘Mornings!’ The air was distinctly cold.

  Shivering, she threw the comforter off and sat up, then jumped.

  ‘What are you doing in here!’ she squeaked, grabbing the covers.

  ‘Excuse, ma’am – we required to attend?’ The maid’s accent was thick and hard to make out: English clearly wasn’t her first language, and she looked shocked, though whether it was at Miriam’s nakedness or her reaction to her presence wasn’t clear.

  ‘Well.’ Miriam held her breath for a moment, trying to get her heart under control. ‘You can just wait outside the door. I’ll be up in a minute.’

  ‘But how is you to be dress?’ asked the woman, a rising note of unhappiness in her voice.

  ‘I’ll take care of that myself.’ Miriam sat up again, this time holding the bedding around her. ‘Out. I mean, right out of my chambers, all of you, completely out! You can come back in half an hour. And shut the door.’

  She stood up as the door clicked shut, her heart still pounding. ‘How the hell do they manage?’ she wondered aloud. ‘Jesus, royalty!’ It came out as a curse.

  It had never occurred to her to sympathize with the Queen of England before, but the idea of being surrounded by flunkies monitoring her every breath gave her a sinking feeling in her stomach. I’ve got to get away from this for a while, she realized. Even if I can’t avoid them in the long term, they’ll drive me mad if I don’t get some privacy.

  Domestic servants were something that had passed out of the American middle-class lifestyle generations ago. Just the idea of having to deal with them made Miriam feel as if she was about to break out in hives.

  Right. I’ve got to get away for a bit. How? Where? Miriam glanced at the bedside table and saw temporary escape sitting there, next to her dictaphone. Ah. A plan! She approached the huge chest of drawers and rummaged through it, hunting clothes. Ten minutes later she was dressed in urban casual – jeans, sneakers, sweater, leather jacket. Someone had helpfully installed some of her bags in the bottom of a cavernous wardrobe, and her small reporter’s briefcase was among them, preloaded with a yellow pad, pens, and some spare tapes and batteries.

  She poked her nose around the bedroom door cautiously. No, there was nobody lurking in ambush. It worked! She told herself. Five minutes in the bathroom and she was ready to activate her plan. Ready, apart from a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, anyway.

  ‘Damn. I’ll need money.’ She ransacked the reception room in haste, hunting for her personal effects, and found them in a closed bureau of exquisite workmanship – her wallet, driving license, credit cards, and house keys. Either the servants didn’t dare tamper with the private possessions of a relative of the duke – or they didn’t know what they were. She found some other items in the bureau that shook her – her snub-nosed pistol and a box of ammunition that she didn’t remember buying. ‘What is this?’ she asked herself before putting the gun in her jacket pocket. She kept her hand around it. If what she was planning didn’t work . . . well, she’d jump that hurdle when she reached it.

  They’re treating me as family, she realized. Adult, mature, sensible family, not like Olga the ditz. Servants and assassins crawling out of the woodwork, it was a whole different world.

  Carefully not thinking too hard about the likely consequences of her actions, Miriam walked to the center of the reception room between sofa and fireplace, snapped open her locket with her left hand, and focused on the design inside.

  ‘Owww!’ She stumbled slightly and cradled her forehead. Vision blurred, and everything throbbed. ‘Hell!’ She blinked furiously through the pounding of her abruptly upgraded headache. The room was still there: bureau, chairs, fireplace –

  ‘I wondered how long you’d take,’ Roland said from behind her.

  She whirled, bringing her gun to bear, then stopped. ‘Jesus, don’t do that!’

  Roland watched her from the sofa, one hand holding a pocket watch, the other stretched out along the cushioned back. He was wearing a sports jacket and chinos with an open-necked shirt, like a stockbroker on casual Friday.

  The sofa was identical to the unoccupied one in the suite she’d just left – or so close as to be its twin. But Roland wasn’t the only different feature of the room. The quality of light coming in through the window was subtly altered, and some items had appeared on the side table, and the bedroom door was shut. ‘This isn’t the same apartment,’ she said slowly, past the fog of headache. ‘It’s a doppelgänger, right? And we’re on the other side. My side.’

  Roland nodded. ‘Are you going to shoot me or not?’ he asked. ‘Because if you aren’t, you ought to put that away.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She lowered the pistol carefully and pointed it at the floor. ‘You startled me.’

  Roland relaxed visibly. ‘I think it’s safe to say that you startled me, too. Do you always carry a gun when you explore your house?’

  ‘I hope you’ll excuse me,’ she said carefully, ‘but after waking up in bed with a stranger leaning over me for the second time in as many days, I tend to overreact a little. And I wasn’t sure how the duke would respond to me going walkabout.’
r />   ‘Really?’ He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘No shit.’ She glanced around. The bathroom door was closed – she needed some Tylenol or some other painkiller bad. ‘Do you keep hot and cold running servants on this side, too?’

  ‘Not many; there’s a cook and some occasional cleaning staff, but mostly this is reserved for Covert Operations, and we pay much more attention to secrecy. Over here it’s a . . . a safe house, I guess you’d call it, not a palace. I take it you haven’t eaten – can I invite you to join me downstairs for breakfast?’

  ‘As long as I don’t have to dress for it,’ she said, checking then pocketing her gun. She picked up her briefcase. ‘I dug the lecture about not being able to hide, I don’t want you to misunderstand me. But there are some things I really need to do around town today. Assuming I’m not under house arrest?’

  Roland shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘I can answer for your security, in any case. Will you be able to do your stuff if I come along?’

  Miriam looked out of the window and took a deep breath. ‘Well.’ She looked at him again. ‘I guess so.’ Damn, there goes my chance to warn Paulie. ‘Is it really that risky?’

  ‘Breakfast first.’ He was already heading for the door. He added, over his shoulder, ‘By now news of your arrival will have leaked out and junior members of at least two of the other families will be desperate, absolutely desperate. But they don’t know what you look like so you probably don’t need a permanent bodyguard yet. And once your position is secure, they won’t be able to touch you.’

  ‘“Breakfast,”’ she said, ‘“first.”’

  *

  There was a kitchen on the ground floor, and there was nothing medieval about it. With its stainless-steel surfaces, huge chest freezer, microwave ovens, and gas range, it could have been the back of a restaurant. The dining room attached to it didn’t look anything like Angbard’s private apartment, either. It reminded Miriam more of a staff room at an upmarket consultant’s office. A couple of guys in dark suits nodded at Roland from a table, but they were finishing up cups of coffee and they cleared out as soon as he offered her a seat.

  ‘Tell me, what did you think of, uh, Olga?’

  While she tried to puzzle out what he meant by that question, a waitress appeared, notepad poised. ‘What’s on the menu this morning?’ Miriam asked.

  ‘Oh, anything you’d like.’ She smiled breezily. ‘Coffee, we have a whole range of different types at present. Eggs, bacon, sausages, granola, breakfast cereal, juice – whatever.’

  ‘Double espresso for me,’ said Roland. ‘Rye sourdough toast, extra-mature thick-peel marmalade, unsalted butter. Two fried eggs, sunny-side up.’

  ‘Hmm. A large cappuccino for me, I think,’ said Miriam. ‘Can you manage a Spanish omelet?’

  ‘Sure!’ Miss Breezy grinned at her. ‘With you in five minutes.’

  Miriam blinked at her receding back. ‘Now that is what I call service.’

  ‘We take it seriously around here,’ Roland said dryly.

  ‘You run this household like a company.’ Miriam frowned. ‘In fact, this is a family business, isn’t it? That’s what you’re in.’ She paused. ‘Interuniversal import/export. Right?’

  ‘Right.’ He nodded.

  ‘And you’ve been doing it for hundreds of years.’

  ‘Right you are,’ he said encouragingly. ‘You’re figuring it out for yourself.’

  ‘It’s not that hard.’ The distinctive noise of a coffee percolator made her raise her head. ‘How do you think last night went?’

  ‘I think – ’ he watched her examining him. ‘Do you know you’ve got a very disquieting stare?’

  ‘Yes.’ She grinned at him. ‘I practice in the mirror before I go in to an interview. Sometimes it makes my victims give away more than they intended to. And sometimes it just gives them bad dreams afterward.’

  ‘Eeh. I can see you’d be a bad enemy, Miss Beckstein.’

  ‘Miz, to you.’ She paused. The waitress was back, bearing a tray laden with coffee, milk, and a sugar bowl.

  ‘Call if you need anything more,’ she reassured them, then disappeared again.

  Roland’s eyes narrowed as he looked at her. ‘You remind me of when I was at college,’ he said.

  ‘You were at college?’ she asked. ‘Over here, I mean?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ He picked up his espresso and spooned a small quantity of brown sugar crystals into it.

  ‘The girls don’t seem to get that treatment,’ she pointed out sharply.

  ‘Oh, but some of them do,’ he replied, blowing on his coffee. ‘At least, these days, this generation. Olga is a throwback – or, rather, her father is. I’m not sure quite what the duke was trying to prove, inviting you to dine with us, but he said something about culture shock earlier. He’s a perceptive old coot, gets hold of some very unexpected ideas and refuses to let them go. He was testing you. Seeing how you comport yourself in a formal setting. Also seeing if you’d break under stress or how you’d hold up in public by using an audience he could silence if the need arose.’

  ‘A-ha.’ She took a first sip of her coffee. ‘So what did you study?’

  ‘As an undergrad, economics and history. Before Harvard, my parents sent me to Dartmouth,’ he said quietly. ‘I think I went a bit crazy in my first couple of years there. It’s very different over here. Most of the older generation don’t trust the way everything has changed since 1910 or so. Before then, they could kid themselves that the other side, this America, was just different, not better. Like the way things were when our first ancestor accidentally stumbled upon a way to visit a town in New England in 1720 or so. But now they’re afraid that if we grew up here or spent too much time we’d never want to come home.’

  ‘Sort of like defecting diplomats and athletes from the old Communist Bloc,’ Miriam prodded.

  ‘Exactly.’ He nodded. ‘The Clan’s strength is based on manpower. When we go back, you and me, we’ll have to carry some bags. Every time we cross over, we carry stuff to and fro. It’s the law, and you need a good reason to flout it. There’s a post room: You’re welcome to come and go at will as long as you visit it each time to carry post bags back and forth.’

  ‘A post room,’ she echoed.

  ‘Yes, it’s in the basement. I’ll show you it after – ah, food.’

  For a few minutes they were both too busy to talk. Miriam had to admit that the omelet she’d ordered was exceptionally good. As she was draining her coffee, Roland took up the conversation again. ‘I’m over here to run some business errands for the Boss today. I hope you don’t mind if I take a few minutes out while you’re doing whatever it is you were planning to do?’

  ‘No, I mean, be my guest – ’ Miriam was nonplussed. ‘I’m not sure,’ she added after a moment. ‘There are a few things I needed to do, starting with, well, just seeing that I’m allowed out and about, know what I mean?’

  ‘Did you have any concrete plans?’ Roland looked interested.

  ‘Well,’ she leaned back and thought. ‘I have – had, before all this landed on me – a commission to write a feature for a magazine. Nothing hard, but I’ll need my iMac to write it on. And I must write it, if I don’t want to vanish off the face of the earth, career wise.’ She tried a smile. ‘Got to keep my options open. I’m a working girl.’

  Roland nodded. ‘I understand. And after that?’

  ‘Well. I was thinking about going home. Check my answering machine, make sure everything’s okay, reassure the neighbors that I’m all right, that kind of thing.’ Make sure they haven’t found Paulie’s CD-ROM. Try to get a message to her to keep her head down. ‘I don’t have to stay for long,’ she added hastily. ‘I’m not thinking about running away, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  Roland frowned thoughtfully. ‘Is it just your mail and phone that you need? Because if so, it would be a lot safer just to divert everything. We’ve got a telephone switch in the subbasement and we can slam your
domestic subscriber lines right over. But it would be a good thing if you avoided your home for the next few days. I can send someone around if there’s anything you need, but – ’ he shrugged.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Because.’ He put his butter knife down. ‘We, uh, when there’s a succession crisis or a war within the Clan, things can get very messy, very fast.’ He paused for a moment, then rushed on: ‘I wouldn’t want to risk anyone getting a clean shot at you.’

  Miriam sat very still, blood pounding in her ears. ‘Does that mean what I think it means?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes – your house is a target. We have it under surveillance, but accidents can always happen, someone can miss something, and you might be walking into a booby trap. Tripwires inside the front door. It won’t be secure until we’ve doppelgängered it, which might take some time because it’s way out in the sticks on this side, and we’d need to fortify the area to stop anyone crossing over inside your living room. It took days for us to find you, even with the office chair in the forest as a marker. But you might not be so lucky next time.’

  ‘Oh.’ Miriam nodded to herself, absorbing this new and unwelcome fact. So you found me by the chair? ‘What about my mother?’