“Helge!” Olga beamed widely but refrained from hugging her, settling instead for brushing her cheek. “How charming to see you! A new creation, I see you’re working your seamstress’s fingers to the ivory. I suppose you didn’t come to join me on the range?”
“If only.” Helge sniffed. “It’s business, I’m afraid.” She took in Olga’s camo jacket and trousers. “Are you coming to tonight’s circus?”
“There’s enough time to prepare later,” Olga said dismissively. “I say, Master of Arms! You there! I’m going now, clean this up.” She handed the gun over, then turned back to her visitor. “It’s an excellent device, you really must try it one of these days,” she said, gesturing at the rifle. The range master and his apprentice were fussing with it, unloading the magazine and stripping out the barrel and receiver. “There’s a short version too, police forces use them a lot. I’m going to get them for my bodyguards.”
“Really.” Helge found it impossible not to smile at Olga’s enthusiasm—except when it was pointed right at her, so to speak, a situation that had only happened once, due to an unfortunate misunderstanding she was not keen to repeat. “Let’s walk. Somewhere quiet?” She glanced round, taking in the plethora of servants, from the range master and armorer and their assistants to her own bodyguard and butler and lady-in-waiting and Olga’s two impassive-faced mercenaries from the Kiowa nation.
Olga chuckled. “I’m hardly dressed for polite company.”
“So let’s avoid it. The water garden?”
Olga cocked her head on one side: “Yes, I do believe it will be nearly empty at this time of year.”
“So let’s go. Leave the escort at the edge, I want to talk.”
The water garden began near the far end of the firing range, where a carefully diverted stream ran underground through a steel-barred tunnel in the walls of the grounds and then through sinuous loops around cunningly landscaped mounds and hollows. Trees shaded it, and small conservatories and rustic lodges provided a retreat for visitors tired of the bustle and business of the great estate. However, it was designed for the lush spring or the fiery autumn, not the heat of summer. At this time of year the stream ran sluggish, yielding barely more than a trickle of water to damp down the mud, and most of the plants were either past their peak or not yet come to it.
Helge and Olga walked alongside the dry streambed on a brick path encrusted in yellow and brown lichen, Olga in her grass-stained camouflage fatigues, Helge in a silk gown fit for a royal garden party. Presently, when they passed the second turn in the path, Olga slowed her pace. “All right, be you out with it.”
“I’m—” Helge stopped, an expression of mild puzzlement on her face. “Let me be Miriam for a bit. Please?”
“My dear, you already are!”
“Huh.” Miriam frowned. “Well, that’s the problem in a nutshell, I suppose. Have you been over to the workshop lately?”
“Have I?” Olga rolled her eyes. “Your uncle’s been running me ragged lately! Me and Brilliana—and everyone else. I think he sent in Morgan du Hjalmar to do the day-to-day stuff in your workshop, and a couple of Henryk’s people to audit the organization for security, but honestly, I haven’t had time to keep an eye on it. It’s been a rat race! I’m lucky to have the time to attend the midsummer season, he’s working me like a servant!”
“I see.” Miriam’s tone was dry.
Olga looked at her sharply. “What is it?”
“Oh, nothing much: every time I ask if it’s safe for me to go over there and look in on my company I get some excuse from security like, ‘We can’t go there, the hidden family gangsters may not honor the ceasefire’ or ‘We think Matthias’s little friends may be looking for you there’ or ‘It isn’t safe.’ ” Miriam took a deep breath. “It feels like I’m being cut out, Olga, and they’re not even trying very hard to hide it. It’s insultingly obvious. I get to sit here in Thorold Palace practicing dance steps and hochsprache and court etiquette, and every time I try to make myself useful something comes up to divert me. From my own company! The one I set up in New Britain that’s showing a higher rate of profit growth than anything else the Clan’s seen in thirty years!”
“Profit growth from a very low baseline,” Olga pointed out, a little tactlessly.
“That’s not the point!” Miriam managed to keep her temper under control. “While they’re keeping me on the shelf under glass I can’t actually meet people and make deals and keep things moving! I’m isolated. I don’t know what’s going on. Hell, do you know what’s going on? Is Roger messing around with epoxides again or is he working on the process quality issue? Did Jeremiah sort out the delivery schedules? Who’s handling payroll? If it’s that man of Bates’s it’s costing us an arm and a leg. Well? Who’s minding the shop?”
Olga shook her head. “I’m sure Morgan was taking care of all that,” she said slowly, not meeting Miriam’s eyes. “Things are very busy.”
“Well, you’re actually going on-site,” Miriam pointed out. “If you don’t know what to look for, how should Morgan know? I’m the only person in the Clan who really knows what the company is good for or where everything goes, and if they’re keeping me away from it, there’s a good chance that—” She stopped.
Olga busied herself looking around the lower branches of the trees for the mockingbird that had been serenading them only a minute before.
“Why am I being frozen out?” asked Miriam.
“I couldn’t possibly comment,” Olga sang, almost tonelessly, an odd affectation she sometimes used when forced to deliver bad news, “because were I to repeat anything I heard from his excellency in the Security Directorate that would be an act of petty treason, not to say a betrayal of his trust in me—but has anything else happened to you lately?”
“Oh, lots.” Miriam’s voice sharpened. “Deportment lessons. Dancing lessons. A daily dossier of relatives and their family trees to memorize. How to ride a horse sidesaddle. How to address a prince, a pauper, or a priest of Sky Father. The use of reflexive verbs in hochsprache. More clothing than I’ve ever needed before, all in styles I wouldn’t have been seen dead in—or expected to see outside a museum or a movie theater. I’ve been getting a crash course.” She grimaced, then glanced sidelong at Olga. “I went to see Ma—Iris, I mean, her grace the duchess Patricia—this afternoon. She’s turned almost as stone-faced and Machiavellian as that dear grandmother of mine.”
“Really?” Olga chirped, just a little too brightly. “Did she have anything interesting to say?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact she did.” Miriam tapped one foot impatiently. “She asked me what I thought about marriage, Olga. She knows damn well what I think about marriage; she was there when I married Ben, and she was still there when the divorce came through, and that was over ten years ago. She knows about Roland.” Her voice wobbled slightly as she named him, and for a moment Miriam looked a decade older than her thirty-three years. “Ma’s frightening me, Olga, it’s as if something’s broken inside her and she’s decided it was all a mistake, running away, and she needs to conform to expectations.”