“Ambitious.” Iris didn’t crack a smile. “What did I tell you when you were young, about not jumping to conclusions?”
“Um. You know better? Is there something you haven’t been telling me?”
Iris nodded sharply. “Can you permit your mother to keep one or two things to herself?”
“Guess so.” Miriam shrugged uncomfortably. “Can you give your daughter any hints?”
“Only this.” Iris met her gaze unflinchingly. “Firstly, do you really think you’d have been hidden from the families for all these years without someone over there covering your trail?”
“Ma—”
“I can’t tell you for sure,” she added, “but I think someone may have been watching over you. Someone who didn’t want you dragged into all this—at least not until you were good and ready to look out for yourself.”
Miriam shook her head. “Is that all? You think I’ve got a fairy godmother?”
“Not exactly.” Ms finished her coffee. “But here’s a ‘secondly’ for you to think about. Shortly after you surfaced, the strangers, these assassins, started hunting for you. To say nothing of the second bunch who tried to wipe out this Olga person. Doesn’t that suggest something? What about that civil war among the families that you told me about?”
“Are you trying to suggest it’s part of some sixty-year-old feud?” Miriam demanded. “Or that it isn’t over?”
“Not exactly. I’m wondering if the sixty-year-old feud wasn’t part of this business, if you follow my drift. Like, started by outsiders meddling for their own purposes.”
“That’s—” Miriam paused for thought—“Paranoid! I mean, why—”
“What better way to weaken a powerful enemy than to get it fighting itself?” Ms asked.
“Oh.” Miriam was silent for a while. “You’re saying that because of who I am—nothing more, just because of who my parents were—I’m the focus of a civil war?”
“Possibly, And you may just have reignited it by crawling out of the woodwork.” Ms looked thoughtful. “Do you have any better suggestions? Are you involved in anything else that might explain what’s going on?”
“Roland—” Miriam stopped. Ms stared at her. “You said not to trust any of them,” Miriam continued slowly, “but I think I can trust him. Up to a point.”
Iris met her eyes. “People do the strangest things for money and love,” she said, a curious expression on her face. “I should know” She chuckled humorlessly. “Watch your back, dear. And…call me if you need me. I don’t promise I’ll be there to help—with my health that would be rash—but I’ll do my best.”
The next morning Paulette arrived back at the house around noon, whistling jauntily. “I did it!” she declared, startling Miriam out of the history book she was working up a headache over. “We move in tomorrow!”
“We do?” Miriam shook her head as Brill came in behind Paulie and closed the door, carefully wiping the snow off her boots on the mat just inside.
“We do!” Paulette threw something at her; reaching out instinctively, Miriam grabbed a bunch of keys.
“Where to?”
“The office of your dreams, madam chief high corporate executive!”
“You found somewhere?” Miriam stood up.
“Not only have I found somewhere, I’ve rented it for six months up front.” Paulette threw down a bundle of papers on the living room table.
“Look. A thousand square feet of not-entirely-brilliant office space not far from Cambridgeport. The main thing in its favor is a downstairs entrance and a backyard with a high wall around it, and access. On-street parking, which is a minus. But it was cheap—about as cheap as you can get anything near the waterfront for these days, anyway.” Paulie pulled a face. “Used to belong to a small and not very successful architect’s practice, then they moved out or retired or something and I grabbed a three-year lease.”
“Okay.” Miriam sighed. “What’s the damage?”
“Ten thousand bucks deposit up front, another ten thousand in rent. About eight hundred to get gas and power hooked up, and we’re going to get a lovely bill from We the Peepul in a couple of months, bleeding us hard enough to give Dracula anemia. Anyway, we can move in tomorrow. It could really use a new carpet and a coat of paint inside, but it’s open plan and there’s a small kitchen area.”
“The backyard looked useful,” Brill said hesitantly.
“Paulie took you to see it?”
“Yeah.” Brill nodded. Where’d she pick that up from? Miriam wondered: Maybe she was beginning to adjust, after all.
“What did you think of it?” Miriam asked as Paulette hung her coat up and headed upstairs on some errand.
“That it’s where ordinary people work? There’s nowhere for livestock, not enough light for needlework or spinning or tapestry, not enough ventilation for dyeing or tanning, not enough water for brewing—” She shrugged. “But it looks very nice. I’ve slept in worse palaces.”
“Livestock, tanning, and fabric all take special types of building here,” Miriam said. “This will be an office. Open-plan. For people to work with papers. Hmm. The yard downstairs. What did you think of that?”
“Well. First we went in through a door and up a staircase like that one there, narrow—the royal estate agent, is that right? took us up there. There’s a room at the top with a window overlooking the stairs, and that is an office for a secretary. I thought it rather sparse, and there was nowhere for the secretary’s guards to stand duty, but Paulie said it was good. Then there is a short passage past a tiny kitchen, to a big office at the back. The windows overlooking the yard have no shutters, but peculiar plastic slats hung inside. And it was dim. Although there were lights in the ceiling, like in the kitchen here.”
“Long lighting tubes.” Miriam nodded. “And the back?”
“A back door opens off the corridor onto a metal fire escape. It goes down into the yard. We went there and the walls are nearly ten feet high. There is a big gate onto the back road, but it was locked. A door under the fire escape opens into a storage shed. I could not see into any other windows from inside the yard. Is that what you wanted to know?”
Miriam nodded. “I think Paulie’s done good. Probably.” Hope there’s something appropriate on the far side, in “world three,” she thought. “Okay, I’m going to start on a shopping list of things we need to move in there. If it works out, I’ll start ferrying stuff over to the other side—then make a trip through to the far side, to see if we’re in the right place.” She grinned. “If this works, I will be very happy.” And I won’t have to fork out a second deposit for somewhere more useful, she noted mentally.
“How was your reading?” Paulie asked, coming downstairs again.
“Confusing.” Miriam rubbed her forehead. “This history book—” she tapped the cover of the “legal” one—“is driving me nuts.”
“Nuts? What’s wrong with it?”
“Everything!” Miriam raised her hands in disgust. “Okay, look. I don’t know much about English history, but it’s got this civil war in the sixteen-forties, goes on and on about some dude called the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. I looked him up in Encarta and yes, he’s there, too. I didn’t know the English had a civil war, and it gets better: They had a revolution in 1688, too! Did you know that? I sure didn’t, and it’s not in Encarta—but I didn’t trust it, so I checked Britannica and it’s kosher. Okay, so England has a lot of history, and it’s all in the wrong order.”