The hall was a hollow cube, the walls supporting a wide staircase that meandered upward past three more floors beneath a ceiling glazed with a duke’s fortune in lead crystal. Other rooms barely smaller than aircraft hangars opened off to either side, their windows open to admit the last of the evening sunlight. Discreet servants were already moving around the edges, lighting lamps and chandeliers. Others, bearing platters loaded with finger food, moved among the guests. More youngbloods, looking slightly anxious without their swords. Clusters of women in silks and furs, glittering with jewelry, enthusiastic girls shepherded by cynical matrons, higher orders attended by their ladies-in-waiting. Countess Helge paid barely any attention to her own retinue beyond a quick check that Lady Kara and Lady Souterne and Kara’s maid Jenny and Souterne’s maid whoever-she-was were following. “I’m sure there are more interesting people for you to wait upon,” she said quietly, pitching her voice so that only Huw might hear it over the chatter of conversations around them. “I’m just a boring dried-up old countess with poor manners and a sideline in business journalism.”
“Ha-ha. I don’t think so. Your ladyship is modest beyond reproach. Would your ladyship care for an aperient?” He snapped his fingers at a servant bearing a salver laden with glasses.
“Obviously my company is so boring that it’s driving you to drink already,” she said with a smile.
“Milady?” He held a glass out for her.
“Thank you.” Helge accepted the offered glass and sniffed. Sherry, or something not unlike it. A slight undertone of honeysuckle. Would they serve fortified wines here? “You were looking for me,” she said, gently steering him back toward the far side of the hall and the garden party beyond. “Are you going to keep me on tenterhooks, wondering why?”
Huw sniffed, his nostrils flaring. “I do confess that you would have to ask her grace the duchess for an explanation,” he said blandly. “It was at her urging that I made myself available. I’m sure she has her reasons.” He smiled, trying for urbanity and coming dangerously close to a smirk. “Perhaps she thought that a, ah, ‘boring dried-up old countess with poor manners and a sideline in business journalism’ might need a young beau on whose arm she might lean, thereby inducing paroxysms of jealousy among the youngsters who feel themselves snubbed, or among those pullets who would imagine her a rival for their roosters?”
He repeated me word-perfect, she thought, so astonished that she forgot herself and half-drained her glass instead of sipping from it. (It was a dry sherry, or something very similar. Too dry for her taste.) He looks like a chinless wonder with a line of witty patter but he’s got a memory like a computer. She raised one eyebrow at him. “I’m not in the market,” she said, slowly and clearly.
“I beg your pardon?” He sounded genuinely confused, so that for a moment Helge almost relented. But the setup was too perfect.
“I said, I’m not in the marriage market,” she repeated. “So I’m no threat to anyone.” With some satisfaction she noticed his cheeks flush. “Nice wine. Fancy another one?” If I’m going to be a boring dried-up old countess with poor manners I might as well make the most of it, she resolved. Otherwise the evening promised to drag.
“I think I will,” he said hesitantly. “I beg your pardon, I intended no disrespect.”
“None taken.” She finished her glass. Better drink the next one more slowly.
“Her grace observed that you were looking for gentles with an interest in the sciences,” Huw commented, half-turning to snag a fresh glass so that she had to strain to hear him. “Is that so?”
Oh. The penny dropped and Miriam felt like kicking Helge for a moment. Trying to be two people at once was so confusing! “Maybe,” she said guardedly. “I’m thinking about trying to get a discussion group going. Just people talking to each other. Why do you ask?”
He shrugged. “I was hoping—well. I’m going stale here. You know about the heightened security state, I believe? I don’t know much about your background—I was forced to interrupt my studies and return here.” He grimaced. “It’s summer recess on the other side, so I’m not losing much ground—except access to the labs and to the college facilities—but if it goes on much longer I’m going to have to take a year out. And you’re right in one supposition, my father’s been pressing me to complete my studies and settle down, take a wife, and accept a postal rank. It’s only the generosity of the debatable society that’s allowed me to keep working on my thesis this far.”
“Uh-huh.” Miriam, wearing the Helge identity like a formal dress, steered her interviewee around a small knot of talkative beaux and through a wide-open doorway, through a state dining room where a table set for fifty waited beneath a chandelier loaded with a hundred candles. “Well, I don’t know that I could say anything on your behalf that would help you—but if it’s any consolation, I know the feeling. We’re cut off and isolated here. For all that we’re a social elite, the intellectual climate isn’t the most stimulating. I was hoping to find people who’d be interested in helping organize a series of monthly lectures and weekly study group meetings. What were—are—you studying?”
“I’m midway through a master’s in media arts and sciences,” Huw admitted, sounding slightly bashful about it. “Working on fabrication design templates.”
“Oh.” It sounded deathly boring. Miriam switched off as they threaded their way around a gaggle of female courtiers attending on some great lady. “What does that involve? What college did you say you were studying at?”
“The MIT Media Lab. We’re working on a self-contained tool kit for making modern electronic devices in the field—I say! Are you all right?”
Miriam wordlessly passed him her glass then fumbled with a silk handkerchief for a few seconds. “I’m. Okay. I think.” Apart from the aftereffects of wine inhalation. She dabbed at her sleeve, but the worst seemed to have missed it. “Tell me more . . .”
“Sure. I’m doing a dissertation project on the fab lab—it’s a workbench and tool kit that’s designed to do for electronics what a blacksmith’s forge or a woodworking shop does for iron-mongery or carpentry. You’ll be able to make a radio, or an oscilloscope, or a protocol analyzer or computer, all in the field. Initially it’ll be able to make all of its own principal modules from readily available components like FPGAs and PCB stock—we’re working with the printable circuitry team who’re trying to use semiconductor inks in bubble-jet printers to print on paper, for example. I was looking into some design modularity issues—to be blunt, I want to be able to take one home with me. But there’s a long way to go—”
By the time they fetched up in the huge marquee at the rear of the palace, two drinks and forty-something invitations later, Miriam was feeling more than a little light-headed. But her imagination was running full tilt; Huw had taken to the idea of monthly seminars like a duck to water and suggested half a dozen names of likely participants along the way, all of them young inner family intellects, frustrated and stifled by the culture of conservativism that infused the Clan’s structures. Most of them were actively pursuing higher education in America, but had been blocked off from their studies by the ongoing security alert. Most of them were names she’d never heard of, second sons or third daughters of unexceptional lineage—not the best and the brightest whose dossiers Kara was familiarizing her with. Huw knew them by way of something he called the debating society, which seemed to be a group of old drinking buddies who occasionally clubbed together to sponsor a gifted but impecunious student. It was, Miriam reflected, absolutely typical of the Clan that the sons and daughters with an interest in changing the way their society worked were the ones who were furthest from the levers of power, their education left to the grace and charity of dilettantes.