"That's not all, is it?"
(Long pause.) "No."
"Then...?"
"I very much fear that Helge will not return willingly. She may want to go to ground on her own-or she might make overtures to the lost cousins. Worse, she might go back to her compulsive digging. She stumbled across a project that is not yet politically admissible: if she exposes it before the council, it could do immense damage. And worst of all, she might seek to obtain a copy of the primary knot and use it to return to her own Boston, then contact the authorities. They will believe her if she goes to them, and she is in a position to do even more damage than Matthias if she wants."
(Pause.) "You want me to kill her if she's turned traitor."
"I don't want you to kill her. However, it is absolutely vital that she be prevented from defecting to the new agency the Americans have set up. She could do us immense-immeasurable-damage if she did, and I would rather see her dead than turned into a weapon against us. Do you see now why I warned that you might see this as a conflict of loyalty?"
(Long pause.) "Oh yes, indeed, sir." (Pause.) "If I say no, what happens'?"
"Then I will have to send someone else. I don't know who, yet-we are grievously shorthanded in this task, are we not? Likely it will be someone who doesn't know her well, and doesn't care whether she can be salvaged." (Pause.) "I am not sending you to kill her, I am sending you to salvage her if at all possible. But I will not send you unless you are prepared to do your duty to the Clan, should it be necessary. Do you swear to me that you will do so?"
"I- yes, your grace. My liege. I so swear: I will do everything in my power to return Lady Helge voh Thorold d'Hjorth to your custody, alive. And I will take any measure necessary to prevent her adding her number to our enemies. Any-" (Pause.) "-measure."
"Good. Your starting point is inconveniently located-she will have crossed over near the palace, from Nicjwcin-but I am sure you are equal to the task of hunting her down. You may draw any necessary resources from second security directorate funds; talk to the desk officer. Harald is running things today. You'll want a support team for the insertion, and a disguise."
"I have a working cover identity on the other side already, sir. Was there anything else I should know?"
"Oh yes, as a matter of fact there is. It nearly slipped my mind. Hmm."
"Sir?" (Pause.) "Your grace?"
"Ah. Definitely a problem." (Pause.) "The arrangement with Creon... before the betrothal, she was visited more than once by Doctor ven Hjalmar. At the behest of Baron Hcnryk, I thought, but when I made inquiries I discovered it had been suggested by none other than Patricia."
"Patricia? What's she doing suggesting-hey, isn't Ven Hjalmar the fertility specialist?"
"Yes, Brilliana, and the treatment he subjected the countess Helge to is absolutely unconscionable: but I believe it was intended as insurance against the Idiot being unable to... you know. Be that as it may, he did it. Consequently, you have about twelve weeks to find Helge and bring her back. After that time... well, you know what happens to women who world-walk while they're pregnant, don't you?"
END TRANSCRIPT
Chapter 5
It was a warm day in New London, beneath the overcast. A slow onshore breeze was blowing, but the air remained humid and close beneath a stifling inversion layer that trapped the sooty, smelly effusions of a hundred thousand oil-burning engines too close to the ground for the comfort of tired lungs.
Two figures walked up the street that led away from Hogarth Villas, arm in arm: a tall, stooped man, his hair prematurely graying, and a woman, her shoulder-length black hair bundled up beneath a wide-brimmed sun hat. The man carried a valise in his free hand. They were dressed respectably but boringly, his suit clean but slightly shiny at elbows and seat, her outfit clearly well worn.
"Where now?" Miriam asked as they reached the end of the row of brick villas and paused at the curb, waiting for a streetcar to jangle and buzz past with a whine of hot electric motors. "Are we going straight back to Boston, or do you have business to attend to first?"
"Come on." He stepped out into the street and crossed hastily.
She followed: "Well?"
"We need to take the Northside 'car, three miles or so downtown." He was staring at a wooden post with a streetcar timetable pasted to a board hanging from it. "Then a New Line car to St. Peter's Cross. I think there's a salon there." He glanced sidelong at her hair. "By the time we've got that out of the way-well, unless we find a mail express, I don't think we'll get back to Boston tonight, so I suggest we take a room in one of the station hotels and entrain at first light tomorrow."
"Right." She shrugged, slightly uncomfortably. "Erasmus, when I crossed over, I, um, I didn't bring any money..."
He glanced up and down the street, then reached into an inner pocket and withdrew a battered wallet. "One, two-all right. Five pounds." He curled the large banknotes between bony fingertips and slipped them into her hand. "Try not to spend it all at once."
Miriam swallowed. One pound-the larger unit of currency here-had what felt like the purchasing power of a couple of hundred dollars back home. "You're very generous."
He smiled at her. "I owe you."
"No, you- " She paused, trying to get a grip on the sense of embarrassed gratitude. "Are you still taking the tablets?"
"Yes. It's amazing." He shook his head. "But that's not what I meant. I still owe you for the last consignment you sold me." A shadow crossed his face. "You needn't worry about money for the time being. There are lockouts and beggars defying the poor laws on every other street corner. Nobody has money to spend. If I was truly dependent on my business for a living I would be as thin as a sheet of paper by now."
"There's no money?" She took his arm again. "What's the economy doing?"
"Nothing good. We're effectively at war, which means there's a blockade of our Atlantic trade and shipping raiders in the Pacific, so it's hit overseas trade badly. His majesty dismissed parliament and congress last month, you know. He's trying to run things directly, and the treasury's near empty: we'll likely as not be stopped at the Excise bench as we arrive in Boston, you know, just to see if there's a silver teapot hiding in this valise that could be better used to buy armor plate for the fleet."
"That's not good." Miriam blinked, feeling stupid. How not good? she wondered uneasily. "Is the currency deflating?"
"I'd have said yes, but prices are going up too. And unemployment." Burgeson smiled humorlessly. "This war crisis is simply too damned soon after the last one, and the harvest last year was a disaster, and the army is overstretched dealing with civil disorder-they mean local rebellions against the lax inspectorate-on the great plains and down south." It took Miriam a moment to remember that down south didn't mean the southern United States- it meant the former Portuguese and Spanish colonies that the New British crown had taken by force in the early nineteenth century, annexing to the empire around the time they'd been rebelling against their colonial masters across the ocean in the world she'd grown up in. "And the price of oil is going up. It's doubled since this time last year."
Miriam blinked again. The dust and the smelly urban air were getting to her eyes. That, and something about Burgeson's complaint sounded familiar... "How's the government coping?" she asked.
He chuckled. "It isn't: the king dismissed it. We're back into the days of fiat reale, like the way King Frederick the Second ran things during the civil war." He noticed her expression and did a double take. "Seventeen ninety-seven to eighteen hundred and four," he murmured. "I can find you a book on it if it interests you. Long and the short is, there was a war across the Atlantic and the states of Carolina, Virginia, and Columbia tried to rebel against the Crown, in collusion with the French. They nearly mustered a parliamentary majority for secession, too: invited in a French pretender to take their crown. So Frederick dissolved the traitor parliament and went through the plantation states with fire and the sword. He wasn't merciful, like your, ah, Mister Lincoln. Frederick was not stupid, though: he recognized the snares of unencumbered absolute power, and he reconvened the estates and allowed them to elect a new parliament-once he'd gibbeted the traitors every twenty feet along the road from Georgetown to New London." "That's martial law, isn't it?"