FORCED
ACCULTURATION
The ferret was waiting outside with two men-at-arms. They handcuffed her wrists behind her back, then marched her back down the narrow staircase and out to a walled courtyard at the rear of the building where a carriage was waiting. The windows were shuttered, screens secured with padlocks. Miriam didn’t resist as they loaded her in and bolted the door. What would be the point? Henryk was right about one thing—she’d screwed up completely, and before she tried to dig her way out of this mess it would be a good idea to think the consequences of her actions through very carefully indeed.
The carriage was small and stuffy and threw her around as it wandered interminably along. The noise of a busy street market reached her, muffled by the shutters. Then there was shouting, the clangor of hammers on metal. Smith Alley, she thought. Every time the carriage swayed across a rut in the cobblestone road surface it lurched from side to side, throwing her against the walls. It stank of leather, and stale sweat, and fear.
After a brief eternity the carriage lurched to a halt, and someone unlocked the door. The light was harsh: blinking, Miriam tried to stretch the kinks out of her back and legs. “This way,” said the ferret.
It was another of those goddamn mansions with closed courtyards and separate servants’ quarters. Miriam panted as she tried to keep up, half-dazzled by the glare of daylight. The ferret’s two minions seized her by the elbows and half-dragged her to a small door. They propelled her up four flights of stairs—passing two servants who stood rigidly still, their faces turned to the wall so that they might not see her disgrace—then paused in front of a door. At least it’s not the cellar, Miriam thought bleakly. She’d already seen what the Clan’s dungeons looked like. The ferret paused and stared at her, then nodded minutely.
“These will be your quarters.” He glanced at the door. “You may consider yourself under house arrest. Your belongings will be moved here, once we have searched them. Your maidservants likewise, and you may continue your activities as before, with reservations. I will pay attendance in the outer chamber. You will not leave your quarters without my approval, and I will accompany you wherever you go. Any messages you wish to send you will give to me for approval. You will not invite anyone to visit you without my approval. If you attempt to disobey these terms, then”—he shrugged—“I stand ready to do my duty.”
Miriam swallowed. “Where are we?” she asked.
“Doppelgangered.” The ferret’s cheek twitched. Abruptly, he turned and pushed the door open. He stepped behind her and unlocked the cuffs. “Go on in.”
Miriam shuffled through the door to her new home, staring at the floor. It was rough-cut stone, with an intricate handwoven carpet laid across it. Behind her, the door scraped shut: there was a rattle of bolts. She looked up, across a waiting room—perhaps a little smaller than her chambers in Thorold Palace had been—at a window casement overlooking the walled courtyard they’d brought her in through.
So I’m under house arrest. “It could have been worse,” she told herself quietly. The place was furnished—expensively, by local standards—although there was no electric lighting in evidence. Doors led off to other rooms. The fireplace was about the size of her living room back in Cambridge, but right now it was unlit. “Where are the servants?” She was beginning to feel hungry: it was the stomach-stuck-to-ribs haven’t-eaten-for-days kind of hunger that sometimes came on after extreme stress. She walked over to the nearest door, opened it. A housemaid jumped to her feet from a stool just inside the doorway and ducked a deep curtsey.
“Do you know who I am?” Miriam asked.
The woman looked confused. “Myn’demme?”
Of course. “I am Countess Helge,” Miriam began in her halting hochsprache. “Where—what—is food here?” The woman looked even more confused. “I am—to eat—” she tried again, a sinking feeling in her heart. It was, she realized, going to be very hard to get anything done.
It took Miriam only an evening to appreciate how far her universe had shrunk. She had four rooms: a bedroom dominated by a huge curtained bed, the reception room, a waiting room that doubled as a dining area, and the outer vestibule. The ferret lived in the vestibule, so she avoided it. What lay beyond its external door, which was formidably barred, she had no idea. The only window with a view, in the reception room, overlooked the courtyard but was not high enough to see over the crenellated walls. This wasn’t a show house in the style of Thorold Palace, but a converted castle from an older, grimmer age. A window with a scenic view would have been an invitation to a crossbow bolt. The sanitary facilities were, predictably, primitive.
Three maidservants came when she tugged the bellpulls in the bedroom or the reception room. None of them spoke English, and they all seemed terrified of her. Or perhaps they were afraid of being seen talking to her by the ferret. She was forced to communicate in her halting hochsprache, but they weren’t much use when it came to getting language practice.
On the evening of her first day, after she’d picked over a supper of cold cuts and boiled Jerusalem artichokes, the ferret came and ordered her into the vestibule. “Wait here,” he said, and went back into the reception room, locking the door. Miriam worked her way into an anxious frenzy while he was gone, terrified that Baron Henryk had revisited his decision to leave her alive; a distant thumping on the other side of the door suggested structural changes in progress. When the ferret opened the door again and returned to his seat by the barred door, Miriam looked at him in disbelief. “Go on,” he said impatiently; “I told you your possessions would be moved in, didn’t I?”
There was a huge wardrobe in her bedroom now, and a dresser. Relieved, Miriam hurried to look through them—but there was nothing in the drawers or on the chest but the garments Mistress Tanzig had laboriously assembled for her. No laptop, no books, no Advil, no CD Walkman, nothing remotely reminiscent of American life. “Damn,” Miriam complained. She sat on the embroidered backless bench that served for a chair. “Now what?” Obviously Henryk’s security people considered anything that hinted of her original home to be suspect, and after a moment she couldn’t fault them. The laptop—if she’d had a digital camera she might have loaded a picture of the Clan sigil into it, then made her escape. Or she might have slid a Polaroid between the pages of a book. They’d made a clean sweep of her possessions, taking everything except that which a noblewoman of the Gruinmarkt might have owned—even her battered reporter’s notebook and automatic pencil were gone. Which left her with a wardrobe full of native costumes and a jewel box with enough ropes of pearls to hang herself with, but nothing that might facilitate her flight. Henryk really does expect me to revert to being Helge, she thought. She looked around in mild desperation. There was a strange book on the dresser. She reached for it, opened the leather cover: Notes towards a Hochsprache-Anglaische Grammarion it said, printed in an old-fashioned type. “Shit.” Succumbing to the inevitable, Miriam started reading her homework.
The next morning she wore a local outfit. Better get used to it, she thought resignedly. No more jeans and tees for slobbing about in. She was sitting on the bench by the window casement, staring out at the courtyard to relieve her eyes from studying the grammarion, when the door to the vestibule opened without warning. It was the ferret, with two unfamiliar maidservants standing behind him, and another man: avuncular-looking, with receding hair and spectacles and a beer gut. He was holding a large leather briefcase. “Milady voh Thorold d’Hjorth?” he said in a slightly creepy way that made Miriam take an instant dislike to him.