Miriam checked her appearance in the mirror. With earrings and a pearl choker and the right haircut and dress she could just about pass, but she still felt she was walking a knife-edge in maintaining appearances. New Britain seemed to take class consciousness almost as seriously as the feudal nobility of the Gruinmarkt. It was depressing, and the need to dive into the detail work of setting up a business here left her no time to pursue casual friendships. When she had time to think about it, she realized she was lonely. But at least she had the option of going home in a few more days. That was more than Brill had. Or Iris, wherever she was.
As she locked the jewel box, there was a knock at the door. A bellhop bobbed to her outside. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but you have a visitor.” He offered Miriam a card on a silver tray. Miriam nodded. “Please show Sir Alfred Durant to my table in the dining room. I have been expecting him, and I will join him shortly. I’m also expecting a Mr. Humphrey Bates. If you’d care to see they are offered an aperitif first.”
Miriam left her room and headed downstairs, outwardly calm but inwardly tense. Paradoxically, some things were easier to do over here. The primitive state of the corporate scene made it relatively easy to mount an all-out assault on the captains of industry, for which she was deeply grateful. (An SEC-approved due diligence background check such as she’d have faced at home would have smashed through her public identity as if it was made of wet cardboard.) But other things were harder to fake. People judged your trustworthiness by a whole slew of social indicators, your class background, and the way you spoke and dressed. The equivalent of a dark suit and a PowerPoint presentation would get you precisely nowhere unless you were a member of the right clubs or had been to the correct finishing school. If you were an outsider, you needed a special edge—and you needed to be at least twice as good.
She’d spent most of the day running scenarios for how this meeting could play, ranging from the irredeemably bad to the unexpectedly good. She’d gotten her story prepared, her answers ready, her lawyer in attendance, and just about everything—except her hair—straight. Now all that remained was to see if Sir Durant would bite…or whether he’d turn out to be an inveterate snob, or an overbred twit whose business was run for him by self-effacing middle-class technicians.
She’d reserved the Hanover Room off the back of the carvery downstairs. Most restaurants in this city were associated with hotels, and the Brighton’s was a very expensive, very exclusive one. As she came through the door, two men rose. One of them was the lawyer, Bates, and the other—she smiled at him and dipped her head briefly. “You must be Sir Alfred Durant?” she asked. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
“A pleasure, ma’am,” he said, in a hoarse, slightly gravelly voice. Durant was thin and tall, imposing but with a hauteur that spoke more of a weary self-confidence than of arrogance. His eyes were soft, brown, and deceptively tired-looking. “Please, you must call me Alfred. Mr. Bates has been pinning my ears back with stories about you.”
“Indeed.” Miriam’s expression acquired a slightly fixed, glassy overtone as she nodded to her lawyer. “Well, and have you arrived in good health? Has anyone offered you a drink? I say, waiter—”
The waiter hurried over. “Yes, milady?”
Durant raised an eyebrow. “Gin and tonic for me,” he said slowly—or was it melancholia? He likes people to think he drives from the back seat, Miriam noted. Watch this one.
“A sweet Martini for me,” Bates added. Next to Sir Durant he was short, plump, and somewhat overeager.
“Certainly.” Miriam relaxed slightly. “A sherry, please,” she added. “If you’d like to come in, I believe our table is waiting…?”
The scandalous overtones of a single woman entertaining two gentlemen to dinner in a closed room were mildly defused by her black dress and rumored widowhood. Bates had confirmed that there were no unsalubrious rumors about Sir Durant’s personal life—or at least none she need worry about. Miriam concentrated on being a perfect hostess while pumping Durant for information about himself, and keeping Bates from either drying up or running off at the mouth. Durant was not the most forthcoming of interview subjects, but after the soup she found a worthwhile button to press, and triggered a ten-minute monologue on the topic of car-racing. “It is without doubt the wooden track that makes it so exciting,” Durant droned over the salmon steak—expensively imported by airship from the north—“for with the embankment of the course, and the addition of pneumonic wheels, they get up to the most exhausting speeds. There was the time old Timmy Watson’s brakes failed on the inside straight toward the finish line at Yeovilton—”
After the best part of two hours, both Bates and Sir Durant were reclining in their chairs. Miriam felt bloated and silently cursed the etiquette that prevented her from leaving the table for a minute, but the last-minute addition of an excellent glass of vintage port seemed to have helped loosen Alfred up. Especially after Miriam had asked a couple of leading questions about brake shoe manufacture, which veered dangerously close to discussing business.
“You seem to me to be unusually interested in brakes,” Sir Durant said, cupping his glass in one hand and staring at her across the table with the expression of a well-fed and somewhat cynical vulture. “If you’ll pardon me for saying this, it’s a somewhat singular interest in one of the fairer sex.”
“I like to think I have lots of singular interests.” Miriam smiled. Patronizing old bastard. “I have spent much of my time traveling to far places and I’m afraid my education in the more feminine arts may be a little lacking. Business, however, is another matter.”
“Ah, business.” Bates nodded knowingly, and Miriam had to actively resist the temptation to kick him under the table.
“Business.” Durant, too, nodded. “I noticed your purchase of a company—was it by any chance Dalkeith, Sidney and Fleming?—with interest. A fine engineering venture, once upon a time.”
Miriam nodded. “I like to get my hands dirty. By proxy,” she added, glancing at Bates. “It’s something of a hobby. My father taught me never to take anything for granted, and I extended the lesson to the tools in his workshop.”
“I see.” Durant nodded. “I found the, ah, samples you sent me most interesting.”
“Good.” When she smiled this widely, Miriam’s cheeks dimpled: She hated to be reminded of it, but there was no escaping the huge gilt-framed mirror hanging above the sideboard opposite. Is that rouged harpy in the evening dress really me? “That was the idea.”
“My men applied one of the samples to a test brake engine. The results were precisely as your letter promised.”
“Indeed.” Miriam put her glass down. “I wouldn’t waste your time, Alfred. I don’t like to mince words. I’m a woman in a hurry, and I wanted to get your attention.”
“Can you provide more samples?” His stare was penetrating.
“Yes. It will take about a month to provide them in significant quantities, though. And the special assembly for applying them.” It had taken a week to get the chrysotile samples in the first place, and longer to set up the workshop, have them ground to powder, and set into the appropriate resin matrix. Epoxide resins were available here, but not widely used outside the furniture trade. Likewise, asbestos and rock wool—chrysotile—could be imported from Canada, but were only really used in insulating furnaces. The young industrial chemist Miriam had hired through Bates’s offices, and the other three workers in her makeshift research laboratory, were initially startled by her proposal, but went along with it. The resulting grayish lumps didn’t look very impressive, and could certainly do with much refinement, but the principle was sound. And she wouldn’t be stopping with asbestos brakes—she intended to obsolesce it as rapidly as she’d introduced it, within a very few years, once she got her research and development department used to a steady drip feed of advanced materials from the other world. “The patents are also progressing nicely, both on the brake material and on the refinements we intend to apply to its use.” She smiled, and this time let her teeth show. “The band brake and the wheel brake will be ancient history within two years.”