“Memo” This is not Boston—at least, not the Boston I know. All the street names are wrong and the buildings are stone and brick, not wood or concrete. Traffic drives on the left and the automobiles—there aren’t many—they’ve got chimneys, like steam locomotives. But the signs are in English and the roads are made of cobblestones or asphalt and it feels like Boston. Weird, really weird. It’s more like home than Niejwein, anyway.”
She carried on down the street, mumbling into the tie-clip microphone pinned inside her scarf. A brisk wind wheezed down the street, threatening to raise it from her head: She tugged down briskly, holding it in place.
“I see both men and women in public—more men than women. Dress style is—hmm. Victorian doesn’t describe it, exactly. Post-Victorian, maybe? Men wear cravats or scarves over high collars, with collarless double-breasted suits and big greatcoats. Hats all round, lots of hats, but I’m seeing suit jackets with yellow and blue stripes, or even louder schemes.” She strode on, past a baroque fire hydrant featuring cast-iron Chinese dragons poised ready to belch a stream of water. “Women’s costume is all tightly tailored jackets and hems down to the ground. Except some of the younger ones are wearing trousers under knee-length skirts. Sort of Oriental in style.” A woman pedaled past her on a bicycle, back primly upright. The bike was a black bone-shaker. “Hm. For cycling, baggy trousers and something like a Pakistani tunic. Everyone wears a hat or scarf.” She glanced left. “Shop prices marked in the windows. I just passed a cobbler’s with a row of metal lasts and leather samples on display and Jesus Christ.”
She paused and doubled back to stare into the small, grimy windows of the shop she’d nearly passed. A distant buzzing filled her ears. “A mechanical adding machine—electric motor drive, with nixie tubes for a display. That’s a divide key, what, nineteen-thirties tech? Punched cards? Forties? Wish I’d paid more attention in the museum. These guys are a long way ahead of the Gruinmarkt. Hey, that looks like an Edison phonograph, but there’s no trumpet and those are tubes at the back. And a speaker.” She stared closer. The price…“price in pounds, shillings, and pennies,” she breathed into her microphone.
Miriam paused. A sense of awe stole over her. This isn’t Boston, she realized. This is something else again. A whole new world, one that had vacuum tubes and adding machines and steam cars—a shadow fell across her. She glanced up and the breath caught in her throat. And airships, she thought. “Airship!” she muttered. It was glorious, improbably streamlined, the color of old gold in the winter sunshine, engines rattling the window glass as it rumbled overhead, pointing into the wind. I can really work here, she realized, excitedly. She paused, looking in the window of a shipping agent, Greenbaum et Pty, “gateways to the world.”
“Scuse me, ma’am. Can I help you with anything?”
She looked down, hurriedly. A big, red-faced man with a bushy moustache and a uniform, flat-topped blue helmet—oops, she thought. “I hope so,” she said timidly. Gulp. Try to fake a French accent? “I am newly arrived in, ah, town. Can you kind sir direct me to a decent and fair pawnbroker?”
“Newly arrived?” The cop looked her up and down dubiously, but made no move toward either his billy club or the brass whistle that hung on a chain around his neck. Something about her made up his mind for him. Maybe it was the lack of patching or dirt on her clothes, or the absence of obvious malnutrition. “Well now, a pawnbroker—you’ll not want to be destitute within city limits by nightfall, hear? The poorhouse is near to overflowing this season and you wouldn’t want a run-in with the bench, now, would ye?”
Miriam bobbed her head. “Thank you kindly, sir, but I’ll be well looked after if I can just raise enough money to contact my sister. She and her husband sent for me to help with the children.”
“Well then.” He nodded. “Go down Jefferson here, turn a left into Highgate. That’ll bring you to Holmes Alley. Don’t go down the Blackshaft by mistake, it’s an odious rookery and you’ll never find your way out. In Holmes Alley you can find the shop of Erasmus Burgeson, and he’ll set you up nicely.”
“Oh thank you,” Miriam gushed, but the cop had already turned away—probably looking for a vagrant to harass.
She hurried along for a block then, remembering the cop’s directions, followed them. More traffic passed on the road and overhead. Tractors pulling four or even six short trailers blocked the street intermittently, and an incongruous yellow pony trap clattered past. Evidently yellow was the interuniverse color of cabs, although Miriam couldn’t guess what Boston’s environmentalists would have made of the coal burners. There were shops here, shops by the dozen, but no department stores, nor supermarkets, or gas-burning cars, or color photographs. The advertisements on the sides of the buildings were painted on, simple slogans like BUY EDISON’S ROSE PETAL SOAP FOR SKIN LIKE FLOWER BLOSSOM. And there were, now she knew what to look for, no beggars.
A bell rang as Miriam pushed through the door of Erasmus Burgeson’s shop, beneath the three gold spheres that denoted his trade. It was dark and dusty, shelves racked high with table settings, silverware, a cabinet full of pistols, other less identifiable stuff—in the other side of the shop, rack after rack of dusty clothing. The cash register, replete with cherubim and gold leaf, told its own story: And as she’d hoped, the counter beside it displayed a glass lid above a velvet cloth layered in jewelry. There didn’t seem to be anybody in the shop. Miriam looked about uneasily, trying to take it all in. This is what people here consider valuable, she thought. Better get a handle on it.
A curtain at the back stirred as a gaunt figure pushed into the room. He shambled behind the counter and turned to stare at her. “Haven’t seen you in here before, have I?” he asked, quizzically.
“Uh, no” Miriam shuffled. “Are you Mr. Burgeson?” she asked.
“The same.” He didn’t smile. Dressed entirely in black, his sleeves and trousers thin as pipe cleaners, all he’d need would be a black stovepipe hat to look like a revenant from the Civil War. “And who would you be?”
“My name is Miriam, uh, Fletcher.” She pursed her lips. “I was told you are a pawnbroker.”
“And what else would I be in a shop like this?” He cocked his head to one side, like a parrot, his huge dark eyes probing at her in the gloom.
“Well. I’m lately come to these shores.” She coughed. “And I am short of money, if not in posessions that might be worth selling. I was hoping you might be able to set me up.”
“Posessions.” Burgeson sat down—perched—on a high, backless wooden stool that raised his knees almost to the level of the counter-top. “It depends what type of posession you have in mind. I can’t buy just any old tat now, can I?”
“Well. To start with, I have a couple of pieces of jewelry.” He nodded encouragingly, so Miriam continued. “But then, I have in mind something more substantial. You see, where I come from I am of not inconsiderable means, and I have not entirely cut myself off from the old country.”
“And what country would that be?” asked Burgeson. “I only ask because of the requirements of the Aliens and Sedition Act,” he added hastily.
“That would be—” Miriam licked her lips. “Scotland?”
“Scotland.” He stared at her. “With an accent like that,” he said with heavy irony. “Well, well, well. Scotland it is. Show me the jewelry.”