Guardian

by A. J. Hartley

  White men. Downstairs there were at least as many blacks and Lani as there were whites, but up here, where it counted—

  “Through there,” said Bindi. “Report to Mr. Shyloh, the chief steward. He’ll give you your instructions. My lunch break is at eleven. If yours is in the same slot and you want some company, meet me at the Rainbow Courtyard. It’s nice there. Benches and so forth.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Good luck. And mind yourself. They’ll be watching. First day and all.”

  I nodded, and she went into an adjoining room with glass-paneled doors, turning the handles as if she were afraid of waking a sleeping child inside.

  I watched her go and thought quickly. Reporting to this Shyloh character as she had suggested would mean I would have to do some more creative lying just to stay in the building and could still be dismissed for not appearing in any employment records. Even without anyone spotting my subterfuge, I might find myself scrubbing kitchen counters or mopping floors under the watchful eye of a guard. All day. Learning nothing.

  I walked in the direction Bindi had indicated to me, trying to appear as if I knew where I was going. I passed a side table with a tray and a half dozen used glasses, then picked it up and carried it, so that it looked like I was doing something. The heavy, sound-muffling door at the end of the hall led to the back of a kitchen complex with access to a series of discrete canteens and private dining rooms. The place bustled with activity. Men and women chopped vegetables and stirred pots, while maids brushed and scoured and mopped around them, all under the watchful eye of a suited white man with an austere look and iron-gray hair.

  Mr. Shyloh, almost certainly.

  As I came in, he consulted a clipboard and spoke to a middle-aged black woman, who promptly scuttled away as he surveyed the kitchen like some medieval lord inspecting his troops before battle. I turned my back on him quickly, set the tray down on the first available surface, and left by the door I had come in by, desperately trying to communicate a sense of knowing purpose.

  “You!”

  I hesitated, considered just walking away as if he weren’t talking to me, but it was impossible.

  “You, girl by the door!”

  I turned slowly, shamefaced. The chief steward glared at me like an elderly lion.

  “Come here, girl,” he said.

  I took a breath and crossed the kitchen toward him.

  CHAPTER

  10

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN by putting that there?” the steward said as soon as I was close enough that he didn’t have to yell. A few glances shot in my direction then flicked just as quickly away for fear of getting involved. “I will not tolerate laziness. You don’t do your job, then someone else has to do it for you, and wastes time they could be spending on their own tasks.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, sensing that this was a familiar speech.

  “Used crockery and glassware go on that counter there by the sink,” he said, extending a long, bony finger. “Move it, before I dock your wages.”

  “Yes, Mr. Shyloh. Sorry, sir.”

  I picked up the tray and walked in the direction he was pointing, but he peered at me and my heart sank.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “Please you, sir, I’m new. Zora, sir.”

  “I didn’t hire you,” he said, flipping the pages of his clipboard. “Which section are you in?”

  “Please you, sir,” I said, inserting a little curtsy as I had seen the girls at the door give, “my paperwork was incomplete, so I was assigned to help Bindi in the Gentlemen’s Sitting Room.”

  “Bindi?”

  “Bindira,” I said, wishing I knew the girl’s last name.

  “Assigned by whom?”

  “Please you, sir, I didn’t catch the lady’s name.”

  “Lady? Mrs. Winterborne?”

  I saw no guile in his face. He didn’t look the type to use trickery when he could simply command.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I think that was it.”

  He sighed irritably. Mrs. Winterborne—whoever she was—had apparently crossed him before.

  “Then you’ve brought this to the wrong kitchen,” he snapped.

  I made to pick it up again, but he waved me away and turned his attention back to his clipboard.

  “Never mind that now, girl,” he said. “Get back to work.”

  For the smallest part of a moment, I faltered, hardly daring to believe my luck, but when he fixed me with his stare and said simply, “Well?” the spell broke, and I left. I did not look back till I had retraced my steps all the way to the sitting room where I had left Bindi, who was now dusting earnestly.

  She turned as the door closed behind me, and her eyes widened.

  “What are you doing here?” she hissed. “You get lost?”

  “They sent me to help you,” I said. “Didn’t have a space for me on the kitchen roster. Said I would get under their feet.”

  “Mr. Shyloh sent you to help me?”

  “Not by name exactly,” I conceded. “But your section, yeah. You couldn’t use a hand?”

  “Course I could!” she answered, grinning. “Never had a helper before. Give us a hand with this top rail. You’re taller than me.”

  She flipped me the duster, and I got to work on the painted wooden molding that ran around the door frame.

  A day of mindless, menial, and frequently backbreaking work began. I confess that as a steeplejack, and later as whatever I became under Willinghouse, I hadn’t thought much about the sheer tedium and relentlessness of being a cleaner, but I learned a good deal about it over the next few hours. We moved from the Gentlemen’s Sitting Room and dining hall, to a series of offices and committee rooms, dusting, sweeping, sponging and brushing upholstery, taking up rugs and carpets for beating, tidying desks, polishing wood and brass, and most vitally, mastering the art of discreetly vanishing the moment “someone important” arrived. It was exhausting, and though there was a kind of dull satisfaction in the completion of tasks that required more effort than skill, it felt like a maddening waste of my time.

  Willinghouse was sitting in jail, the prime minister was dead, and I was emptying litter baskets and making the smallest of small talk with Bindi. Used to working alone, the girl seemed glad of the company, though a silence would descend upon her like a cage whenever someone else arrived. But the more we talked, the more it became clear she had nothing useful to tell me and I, increasingly frustrated, felt a pang of guilt for misleading the girl.

  We took our lunch, purchased at the staff canteen, in the Rainbow Courtyard Bindi had mentioned. As she had said, it was a lovely spot, a kind of oasis in the formality of the Parliament House: small and enclosed on all sides by the tall brick walls and elaborate stone tracery of the windows. There were indeed benches, and young orange trees in planters. Their fruit hung like lamps on the boughs, making the whole place fresh and fragrant.

  “I can’t believe they are letting you work with me,” she said, between mouthfuls of a surprisingly good egg salad sandwich. “I’m getting through everything twice as fast.”

  “Twice?” I said, with a doubtful smile.

  “Well,” she confessed. “Almost. I’ll miss you tomorrow, that’s for sure. I hope they don’t have us lugging boxes and so forth around again.”

  “Boxes?”

  “Oh yes. Every time there’s a change in secretarial staff, crates of new belongings arrive, and who has to shift them? Us. Books, I understand, but paintings? Mirrors? I mean no disrespect, of course: doubtless they are doing worthy work for the city, but some of these chambers are better furnished than most people’s houses! Statues and lamps and who knows what! This last time there was a tea chest so heavy it took two of the footmen to move it, carrying it up on their shoulders like a coffin!”

  She shook her head in disbelief, and I made the sympathetic noises that seemed to be expected of me, until something about the word struck a chord in my memory.

  Tea che
st.

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “Two days ago.”

  “The day the prime minister was…”

  “Yes,” said Bindi, “but we’re not supposed to talk about that.”

  “What time?”

  She shrugged. “First thing,” she said. “Shyloh—I mean, Mr. Shyloh—says, ‘Get that thing upstairs!’ and me and Mashari Tula start to pick it up and nearly break our spines. ‘Oy!’ says Mashari—to Mr. Shyloh! Honest to all the gods—‘Oy!’ she says. ‘We can’t shift this. What’s in it? Lead bars?’ And he comes over like he’s about to give her a flick behind the ear, but as soon as he touches it, he sees what we mean and has to get two of the biggest lads from the cellar team, one of them was this big fella who looks like—”

  “Where did they take it?” I inserted, already guessing the answer.

  “What? Upstairs. Top floor gallery, up four flights of stairs, mind, and shoved it in the Roll Closet. Took them half an hour, and it wasn’t even something the Gentlemen were going to use! I mean, had it been going to a cabinet office or something, I could have understood it. That would mean it was important. But to lug the thing around just to bung it in a cupboard no one ever goes in? Where’s the sense in that?”

  Where indeed?

  * * *

  SINCE BINDI WAS AHEAD of schedule, I asked her to walk with me, figuring that two maids, one of whom was known, would be less suspicious than a single one who wasn’t. She could also get me a key to what I had taken to be a mere top-floor janitor’s chamber.

  “Do you have to sign for it, or ask someone?” I wondered aloud.

  “Nah,” she said, sounding remarkably like Tanish. “The Roll Closet is filed as Non Secure Space. Practically disused. That was why it was so weird, making those lads carry a chest all that way…”

  There were still guards all over the building. One of them winked at us as we passed. Bindi giggled. I gave her a look, and she shrugged.

  “What?” she said. “So long as they keep their hands to themselves, I don’t mind it.”

  We went via another of the building’s ubiquitous back stairs and found ourselves on the familiar circular gallery that ran around the base of the dome. There was no sentry on the closet door, though it was locked. Bindi opened it, then stood aside, watching me uneasily. I hadn’t been able to come up with a good reason for why I wanted to see that tea chest, and her attitude to me had shifted. She was quieter now, more watchful, and though I don’t think she was afraid of me, and she said nothing, she had started to wonder who I really was.

  The tiny sitting room-cum-closet was as I had left it, with one important difference. The stack of dusty books that had been sitting on top of the tea chest was now lying in a scattered heap behind it, as if someone had raised the lid without bothering to move them first. The lid appeared to be latched, and I wondered how Bindi would react to my forcing the lock, but when I ran a finger around the edge of the lid, it came up easily. Indeed, the latch on the outside appeared to be strictly decorative, the lock having no internal mechanism.

  The latch on the inside was another story entirely.

  It was a simple thing, a pair of hooks easily folded down but strong enough to make opening the chest from the outside impossible without breaking it. They proved my hunch accurate. The box had been heavy because there had been someone inside it.

  It was empty now, but as I shifted it in the low light from the doorway, I saw the smudges of footprints, a mingling of white and black powder. One of them looked like chalk and would, I was fairly sure, match the print I had seen on the dome outside. The other was soot from the chimney I had used to get out of here on my last visit, and that was almost as telling as the stack of books so carefully positioned on top of the tea chest when I had been here last and now thrown in disarray on the floor.

  The person who had killed Benjamin Tavestock had gone in and out of the great chamber through a portal in the top of the dome. But he or she couldn’t get on and off the roof in the middle of the day unseen by the crowds which surrounded the building. The killer had been carried into the building in a box, stowed up here until the moment was right, when he or she went up the chimney, onto the dome and down a rope, knife at the ready. When he was finished with the prime minister, moments before Willinghouse came in to find him, the killer had gone back up the rope to the roof, then down the chimney and back into the tea chest to wait out the alarm. That meant that he or she had still been in there when I took refuge from the guards in this very room and unwittingly used the same chimney through which the killer would escape after the sun—and the search—had gone down.

  I considered the room. For all its dust and debris, it had once been quite grand: the fireplace had an elaborate stone surround, there was intricately carved chair, shoe, and crown molding all round the room, and the cupboards on the walls—one large, one very small—were finely inlaid.

  “Why is this called the Roll Closet?” I asked.

  Bindi shrugged.

  “Used to be a proper office, before they gave it to the janitor, I mean. Seems odd to have a proper office up here, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” I said.

  Roll Closet, I mused, wondering what sense of roll was meant.

  Roll like a map or parchment? Or roll like roll call?

  That sounded more like it, because that meant a record of votes. The office had been assigned to someone whose job it was to track votes in the house? But then why up here and not in the main chamber? You couldn’t see or hear …

  I considered the inlaid cabinets, and an idea struck me. I clambered over an abandoned desk piled with boxes and pulled the smaller cabinet door open.

  But it wasn’t a cabinet. It was a tiny window, no more than a foot across. It had no glass, but the hatch door opened easily and silently, and through it I could see the main chamber below, empty now, but with a stained patch of carpet where Benjamin Tavestock had lain. A hundred years ago perhaps, some governmental officer had sat up here to tally the score when the House voted. The hatch was too small for even a child to crawl through, but it provided the perfect vantage point from which one might watch a show of hands.

  Or a murder.

  An idea occurred to me. I closed the little hatch and opened the larger cabinet beside it.

  It contained dozens of labeled rings.

  Bell pulls.

  So that was how the killer had ensured that Willinghouse had arrived just in time to take the blame for Tavestock’s death.

  “What?” said Bindi, considering me with mounting wariness as I set to scouring the inside of the long, coffin-like box and emerged with a card that had been slotted into a purpose-built bracket fastened to the timber.

  I read it.

  “Mr. Johannes Kepahler, Purveyor of Finest Luxorite, Crommerty Street.”

  Well now, I thought. Isn’t that interesting?

  “Who are you?” asked Bindi suddenly. “What are you looking for?”

  I gave her a reassuring smile and said simply, “Justice.”

  * * *

  WE HAD MADE IT all the way down to the back stairs and hallways of the lower level when we caught the sound of a confusion of raised voices, some of them clearly angry. We rounded the corner and found the previously deserted lobby packed with both serving staff and MPs, all under the watchful eye of some uneasy-looking dragoons. The suited parliamentarians were mainly shouting at each other, some dismissively gleeful, some outraged. The servants looked mainly baffled and worried, none more so than the daunting figure of Mr. Shyloh, who was trying to make himself heard above the hubbub.

  “Return your aprons and any cleaning supplies or other equipment to the kitchen stores!” he was saying. “Black and Lani only. White staff, you can stay and work as usual.”

  I gave Bindi a quick, startled look to see if this was some routine procedure I had not been told about, but it was clear from her face that she was as confused as I was. Seeing that this was no time to be reticent or
worried about being recognized, I shoved my way closer to the steward and said, “Mr. Shyloh? What is going on?”

  He turned to me, but his eyes slid over my face, distracted and—I was certain—upset.

  “All black and colored staff are to leave the building at once,” he said. “New security protocol. Turn in anything you don’t own in case you can’t come back.”

  “Can’t come back?” blurted Bindi, shocked. “I work here. I need this job.”

  “Not anymore you don’t,” said the chief steward darkly. “Or at least not until you see a post to that effect in the evening papers.”

  “What about our wages?” said Bindi. “We haven’t been paid this week!”

  “Termination has been backdated till the end of last month,” said Shyloh. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “How is this legal?” I demanded.

  The word caught the chief steward as bleakly comic, and he gave me a hard look.

  “When you can change the law,” he remarked, “legal is whatever you want it to be.”

  “The government passed this?” I said, incredulous. “When?”

  “This morning,” he said, too dazed by the proceedings to wonder why he was bothering to bandy words with a maid he didn’t even recognize. “Closed session of the newly formed coalition government on emergency security measures.”

  My blood ran cold.

  “Coalition?” I managed.