The Hidden Family

Agreements

Almost exactly two weeks later, Miriam sat in front of a mirror in the Brighton Hotel, brushing her hair and pulling a face. It’s definitely getting longer, she thought. Damn that hairdresser! She’d drawn the line at a wig, but even shoulder-length hair was considered eccentrically short by Boston polite society, and a reputation for eccentricity was something Miriam didn’t want to cultivate—it would happen anyway, and could only get in her way. But she hadn’t had hair even this long since she was a teenager. Bloody nuisance, she thought affectedly, then snorted with amusement. This place is getting to me. Even the way they talk!

The house purchase was going ahead, the conveyancing papers and legal to-ing and fro-ing well in hand. Erasmus had taken delivery of no less than ten pounds of twenty-three carat gold, an immense amount by any standard—back in Cambridge it would have paid Miriam’s salary at The Weatherman for almost a year—and had warned his shadowy compatriots to expect much larger amounts to start flowing soon, “from a sympathetic source.” His stock had risen. Meanwhile, Miriam had taken pains to quietly slip into at least two meetings of the Friendly Party to keep an eye on where the money was going. When she’d left money on the collecting tray, it had been with a sense that she was doing the right thing.

The Levelers, despite official persecution (and the imprisonment of many of their leading lights for sedition), had a political agenda she thought she understood, one not too alien from her own. High upon it was a bill of rights; the universal franchise (granting women the vote here for the first time); equal rights regardless of age, race, and sex; and separation of Church from state. That the imperial government didn’t take such things for granted gave Miriam one source of comfort; if she was going to get her start here by smuggling contraband gold to fund radicals, at least they were radical democrats. The ironies in the similarity between her activities and the Clan’s own business model didn’t leave her untouched. She consoled herself with two thoughts: Smuggling gold to undermine a despotic monarchy wasn’t in the same moral league as being the main heroin connection for the East Coast, and she intended to switch to a different business model just as soon as she could.

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.”

“I’d like to know how you propose to produce the material in sufficient volume to achieve that,” said Sir Durant. “There’s a big difference between a laboratory experiment and—”

“I’m not going to,” Miriam butted in. “You are.” She stopped smiling.

“That’s what this meeting is about.”

“If I disagree?” He raised his glass. Miriam caught Bates shrinking back in his chair out of the corner of her eye.

“You’re not the only big fish in the pond.” Miriam leaned back and stifled a yawn. “Excuse me, please, I find it rather hot in here.” She met Sir Durant’s gaze. “Alfred, if man is to travel faster, he will have to learn to stop more efficiently first, lest he meet with an unfortunate accident. You made your fortune by selling pneumonic wheels—” tires, she mentally translated.

“If you pause to consider the matter, I’m sure you’ll agree that cars that travel faster and stop harder will need more and better pneumonics, too. I’m prepared to offer you a limited monopoly on the new brake material and a system that will use it more efficiently than wheel brakes or band brakes—in return for a share in the profits. I’m going to plow back those profits into research in ways to improve automotive transport. Here and now—” she laid a fingertip on the table for emphasis—“there is one car for every thirty-two people in New Britain. If we can make motoring more popular, to the point where there is one car for every two people—” she broke off.

“Not very ambitious, are you?” Sir Durant asked lightly, eyes gleaming. At the other side of the table Bates was gaping at her, utterly at a loss for words.

Many thoughts collided in Miriam’s mind at that moment, a multivehicle pileup of possible responses. But the one that found its way to her lips was, “not hardly!” She picked up her glass, seeing that it was nearly empty, and raised it. “I’d like to propose a toast to the future of the automobile: a car for every home!”

Miriam was able to rent premises for her company in a former engineering shop on the far side of town. She commuted to it by cab from the hotel while she waited for Bates to process the paperwork for her house purchase. She was acutely aware of how fast the luxury accommodation was gobbling her funds, but there didn’t seem to be a sensible alternative—not if she wanted to keep up the front of being a rich widow, able to entertain possible investors and business partners in style. Eventually she figured she’d have to buy a steam car—but not this year’s model.

The next morning she had a quick shower, dressed in her black suit and heavy overcoat, then hailed a cab outside without lingering for breakfast. The air was icy cold but thankfully clear of smog. As the cab clattered across tram rails and turned toward New Highgate, she closed her eyes, trying to get her thoughts in order.

“Two weeks,” she told herself, making a curse of it. She’d been here for six nights already and it felt like an eternity. Living out of suitcases grew old fast and she’d shed any lingering ideas of the romance of travel back when she was covering trade shows and haunting the frequent flyer lounges. Now it was just wearying, and even an expensive hotel suite didn’t help much. It lacked certain essential comforts—privacy, security, the sensation of not being in public the whole time. She was getting used to the odd clothing and weird manners but doubted she’d ever be comfortable with it. And besides, she was missing Roland, waking sometimes from vague sensual dreams to find herself alone in a foreign city. “Seven more days and I can go home!” Home, to her own damn house, if she could just lean on Angbard a bit harder—failing that, to the office, where she could lock the door, turn on the TV, and at least understand everything she was seeing.

The cab arrived. Miriam paid the driver and stepped out. The door to the shop was already unlocked, so she went straight in and opened up the office. It was small but modern, furnished in wood and equipped with electric lamps, a telephone, and one of the weird chord-key typewriters balanced precariously on one of the high, slanted writing desks. It was also freezing cold until she lit the gas fire. Only when it was blazing did she go through the mail then head for the lab.

The lab was a former woodworking shop, and right now it was a mess. Roger had moved a row of benches up against one wall, balanced glass-fronted cabinets on top of them, and made enthusiastic use of her line of credit at an instrument maker’s shop. The results included a small potter’s kiln—converted into a makeshift furnace—and a hole in the ceiling where tomorrow a carpenter would call to begin building a fume cupboard. Roger was already at work, digging into a wooden crate that he’d manhandled into the center of the floor. “Good morning to you,” said Miriam. “How’s it going?”

“I’ll tell you when I get into this,” Roger grunted. He was in his late twenties, untidy even in a formal three-piece suit, and blessed with none of the social graces that would have allowed him to hang onto his job when the Salisbury Works had shed a third of their staff three months earlier. Rudeness concealed shyness; he’d been completely nonplussed by Miriam at first, and was still uneasy in her presence.

“That’ll be the chrysotile from Union Quebecois,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

“It should be. If they haven’t sent us rock salt by mistake again.” He laid down his crowbar and straightened up panting, his breath steaming in the cold air.

“If they have, they’ll pay for it.” She grinned. “Go make yourself a pot of tea, I don’t want you freezing to death on the job.”

“Um, yes, Ma’am.” Roger shuffled toward the other back room—the one Miriam intended to have converted into that luxury, a kitchen and indoor toilet block for the work force—that currently held only a cast-iron wood stove, a stack of lumber, and a kettle. He gave her a wide berth, as if being female in the workplace might be contagious. Miriam watched his back disappear before she knelt to pick up the crowbar, and went around the lid of the crate levering out the retaining nails. Men. She laid the crowbar down and dusted her skirt off before he returned, bearing a chipped mug containing some liquid as dark as coffee.

“I think you’ll find it easier to open now,” Miriam remarked, laying one hand on the lid. “What have you got in mind for resin processing this week?”

“I was thinking about the vulcanization process,” Roger muttered. “I want to see how varying the sulfate concentration affects the stiffness of the finished mixture.”

“I was asking about resins,” Miriam pointed out. “In particular, the epoxide sample I suggested you look into on Thursday. Have you done anything with it yet?”

“Um, I was getting to it.” Roger glanced at her face then looked away bashfully.

“That’s why I suggested a timetable,” said Miriam. “You can estimate how long each batch will take to run; you already do that for yourself, don’t you? Put the timetable on the blackboard and I won’t have to keep asking you the same questions.”

“Oh, alright then.” He nodded.

“I wanted the epoxide sample running as soon as possible because we have a possible customer,” she added.

“A customer?” He brightened visibly.

“Yes, a customer.” She kept her face sober. “But we won’t have them if we don’t have a suitable product, will we? They’re going to want an extensive range of samples in about four weeks time, for their own materials testing people. That’s why I want you to get on to the epoxide-based samples as soon as possible. If you time the kiln runs right, you can probably put your sulfate experiments through at the same time. Just as long as they don’t hold up the epoxide.”

“Oh, right. I’ll do it that way, then,” he said, almost carelessly. And he would. She’d met Roger’s type before, hammering keyboards into submission in dot-com start-ups. He’d work overnight if he had to, without even noticing, just to get the product ready to meet the deadline—as long as he had a target to aim for. All this thrashing about with rubber and vulcanization processes was just a distraction.

“I’m going to be in the office today,” she added. “I’ve got an idea to work on. The carpenter will be in here tomorrow to work on the fume cupboard, and then the kitchen. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t happen to know any model engineers looking for work? I have some mechanical assemblies to get started.”

“Mechanical—” he almost went cross-eyed. “Why?”

“A better way of applying this wonderful high-friction material to the task of stopping a moving vehicle,” she pointed out. “You think this high-friction compound will work well if you just clamp it to a pneumonic? It’ll work—right until the rubber wall of the wheel wears through and it blows out. What we need is a hub-mounted disk bolted to the wheel with a block of brake material to either side, which can be clamped or released by hydraulic calipers, balanced to apply force evenly. With me so far?”

“Um, I think so.” He looked abstracted. “I, I don’t know any model artificers. I’m sorry. But I’m sure you’ll find someone.”

“Oh I think I will, indeed I do.” She headed back to the office, leaving Roger wrestling a ten-kilogram lump of very high-grade rock wool onto his workbench.

The day passed in a blur. Miriam had rigged a travel transformer for her laptop, which she kept in a locked drawer in the office along with an inkjet printer and a small digitizer tablet. The CAD software was a pain to use with such a small screen, but far better than the huge draftsman’s board and ink pens in the far corner of the room. Between calls she lost herself in an extruded 3D model of a brake assembly—one of her own invention, crude but recognizable as the ancestor of late twentieth-century disk brakes. Another file awaited her attention—steel radial bands for reinforcing tires. The idea was sound, but she kept having to divert into her physics and engineering textbooks. Her calculus was rustier than she was willing to admit, and she was finding some of the work extremely hard.

But perfection didn’t matter. Getting there first mattered. Get there first and just-good-enough and you could buy the specialists to polish the design to perfection later. This was the lesson Miriam had learned from watching over the shoulders of her Silicon Valley colleagues, and from watching a myriad of biotech companies rise and fall—and it was the lesson she intended to shove up New Britain’s industrialists so hard it made them squeak.

One o’clock. Miriam blinked, suddenly dizzy. Her buttocks ached from the hard stool, she was hungry, and she needed the lavatory. She stood up and put the notebook PC away, then headed for the toilet—an outhouse in the backyard. Afterwards she slipped out the front door in search of lunch. Of such elements were a working day made.

In the public environment of the hotel, or the lab, she cut an eccentric, possibly scandalous figure. On the streets she was just another woman, better dressed than most, hurrying about her errands. Anonymity of a kind: Treasure it while you can, she told herself as she lined up at a street corner where a baker’s boy had set up a stand to sell hot bacon rolls. It won’t last.

She returned to the office and had been busy for an hour—phoning her lawyer, then calling a commercial agent at what passed for a recruiting house—when there was a peremptory knock on the side window. “Who’s there?” she demanded, standing up to open it.

“Police. Inspector Smith at your service.” A bushy moustache and a suspicious, beefy face stood behind an imposing warrant card with a crown and heraldic beasts cavorting atop it chased her in through the open window.

“Homeland Defense Bureau. Are you Mrs. Fletcher?”

“Uh, yes.” Flustered, Miriam tried to pull herself together. “How can I be of service?”

“I’d like a word with you if I may.”

“Ah, do come in, then.” Miriam hurried to open the door. Shit, what did I do wrong? She wondered. There was a deep hollow icy feeling in her stomach as she hauled the door open and smiled, ingratiatingly. “What can I do for you, officer?” she asked, leaving the door and retreating behind the front desk.

“Ah, well.” He nodded, then remembered his manners and took his hat off.

Bizarre, thought Miriam, fascinated as a bird facing a snake. To her surprise she realized that she wasn’t frightened for herself—only for her plans, which depended on continuity and legality for their success.

“Been in business long?” asked the Inspector.

“No,” she said, tight-lipped. “This is a new venture.”

“Ah well.”

He looked around slowly. Luckily she’d put the computer away before lunch, and everything was much as it should be in an office. He moved to shove the door closed. “Don’t do that,” Miriam said quickly.

“Alright.” He found the one comfortable chair in the office—a wooden swivel chair too low to work at the writing desks—and looked her in the eyes. “How long have you known Erasmus Burgeson?”

“Huh?” Miriam blinked. “Not long. A few weeks?”

“I see.” Smith nodded portentiously. “How did you come to know him?”

“Is this an official investigation?”

“I’m asking the questions. How did you come to know him?”

“Uh.” Miriam considered her options. Not official, she decided. “If this isn’t an official investigation, why should I tell you?”

“Because.” He looked irritated. “Little lady, if you don’t want to cooperate while it’s unofficial, I can go away and waste my time making it official. And then you’ll have to cooperate, and it will be the worse for you because I won’t have to knock on your door polite, like. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly.” She didn’t smile. “I first met Erasmus Burgeson because one of your own officers directed me to him when I asked if he knew where I could find a pawnbroker. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Ah, well.” Smith looked even more annoyed now, but not in her direction. “You wouldn’t happen to know which officer this would be?”

“Hmm. He’d have been on duty in Highgate Close on, um, the morning of Saturday the sixteenth. I think he thought I might be lost. That might be enough for you to find his notebook.”

“Humph. So you asked for a pawnbroker and he gave you directions to Burgeson. Is that all? Why did you want a pawnbroker in the first place?”

The Inspector’s blunt manner was beginning to annoy Miriam. But that’s what he wants, she realized suddenly: He wants me to make a slip. Hmm. “I arrived on the India Line ship Vespasian that morning, after a crossing from Ceylon,” she told him, very deliberately keeping to her story—the Vespasian had indeed docked that day, with some passengers aboard, but was conveniently halfway across the Atlantic by now. “I was so preoccupied with packing my posessions and getting ashore that I forgot to ask the purser to convert my scrip to honest currency. In addition, clothing suitable for the climate of Ceylon is inadequate here. So I thought a sensible first step would be to find a pawnshop and exchange an old pair of earrings and a small pearl necklace for a decent wool suit and the wherewithal to find a hotel room and cable my banker.”

All of which was, very remotely, true—and indeed Erasmus had arranged, for a fee and by way of a friend of a fellow traveler, for the purser of the Vespasian to find a passenger of her name in the ship’s manifest should anyone ask—but it was only as Miriam spun it out in front of Smith’s skeptical gaze that she realized how thin a tale it sounded. If she was in Smith’s shoes she could punch holes in it with very little effort. But Smith simply nodded. “I see,” he said. “Your husband left you adequately provided for, didn’t he?”

Miriam nodded. “Indeed.” Keep it close. Make him dig.

“And so you dabble in manufacturing.” It wasn’t phrased as a question, so Miriam didn’t answer. She just sat tight wearing a politely interested expression, wishing for the phone to ring or something to disturb the silence that stretched out uncomfortably.

“I said, you dabble in manufacturing.”

“I do not ‘dabble’ in anything, Mr. Smith,” Miriam finally stated in her iciest tone. “You’re a police officer. You can go ask the patent office questions—I’m sure Mr. Sagetree will be able to tell you whether there is any merit in the applications I filed last week. The first three, Inspector, of the many I have in mind.”

“Ah. I stand corrected.” Smith leaned back in his chair. “Well then, may I rephrase? Do you have any opinion of Burgeson’s business? Does he strike you as in any way at all being odd?”

Miriam shook her head and allowed an irritated expression to cross her face. “He’s a pawnbroker,” she said. “He’s a very literate pawnbroker with a good line in conversation, but I imagine sitting in the back of a shop gives him a lot of time to read, don’t you?”

“A literate pawnbroker. So this would explain why you have visited his establishment on three occasions?”

Shit, shit, shit—“The first time, as I’ve told you, I needed money and suitable attire. The second time—let me see, on my first visit I had noticed a hat that was not then out of hock. I went back to see if it was available, and also to redeem my earrings and necklace. On the third occasion—well, he’d shown me some of the antiquarian books various of his customers pawned when they fell upon hard times. I confess I was quite partial to a couple of them.” She forced a smile. “Is that a crime?”

“No.” Inspector Smith stood, unfolding smoothly to a good six feet. He was a huge, imposing man, overweight but built like a rugby player, and now she noticed that his nose had been broken, although it had set well. “But you should be careful who you associate with, Mrs. Fletcher. Some people question Mr. Burgeson’s patriotism and devotion to the Crown, you know. He keeps strange company, and you would not want to be taken for one among them.”

“Strange company?” She looked up at Smith.

“Strangers.” He wore a peculiar tight, smug expression. “Frenchies, some of ’em. And papists. Uppity women suffragists, too.” Miriam glanced past his shoulder then looked away hastily. Roger was leaning in the laboratory doorway, one hand behind his back. I don’t need this, she thought to herself.

“He hasn’t done anything to hang himself yet,” Smith continued, “but there’s always a first time.” He nodded to himself. “I see my job as ensuring there isn’t a second, if you catch my drift. And that the first ’appens as soon as possible.”

Miriam looked past him. “Roger, go back to your workbench,” she called sharply.

Roger turned and shuffled away, bashfully. Inspector Smith shook himself, the spell broken, and glanced over his shoulder.

“Huh. Another bad ’un, I shouldn’t be surprised.” Smith smirked at Miriam. “Wouldn’t want anything to ’appen to him, would you? I really don’t know what the world’s coming to, a single woman running a business full of strapping young men. Huh. So, let’s see. The question is, are you a good citizen?”

“Of course I’m a good citizen,” Miriam said tightly, crossing her arms.

“I really don’t see what your point is.”

“If you’re a good citizen, and you were to learn something about the personal habits of a certain pawnbroker—” The inspector paused, brow wrinkled as if he’d just caught himself in an internal contradiction: “casting no aspersions on your reputation, if you follow me, ma’am.” Another pause.

“But if you happened to know anything that would be of interest, I’m sure you’d share it with the police…”

“I’ve got a business to run, inspector,” Miriam pointed out coldly.

“This business pays taxes which ultimately go to pay your wages. You are getting in the way. I’m a law-abiding woman, and if I find out anything you need to know you will be the first to hear of it. Do I make myself understood?”

“Ah, well.” Smith cast her a sly little glance. “You will, as well, won’t you? Huh.” He paused in the doorway. “If you don’t you’ll be bleeding sorry,” he hissed, and was gone like a bad smell.

“Oh shit,” Miriam whispered, and sat down heavily in the swivel chair he’d vacated. Now the immediate threat was past, she felt weary, drained beyond belief. The bastard!

“Uh, ma’am?”

“Yes, Roger.” She nodded tiredly. “Listen. I know you meant well, but, next time—if there is a next time—stay out of it. Leave the talking to me.”

“Uh, yes.” He ducked his head uncertainly. “I meant to say—”

“And leave the fucking crowbar behind. Have you any idea what they’ll do to you for attacking a Police Inspector with a crowbar?”

“Ma’am!” His eyes bulged—at her language, not the message.

“Shit.” She blinked. “Roger, you’re going to have to get used to hearing me curse like a soldier if you work for me for any length of time. At least, you’ll hear it when the bastards are attacking.” She caught his eye. “I’m not a lady. If I was, I wouldn’t be here, would I?” she added, almost plaintively. And that’s for sure, more than you’ll ever know.

“Ma’am.” He cleared his throat, then carefully pretended not to have heard a single word. “It’s about the furnace. I’ve got the first epoxide mixture curing right now, is that what you wanted?”

“Yes!” she exclaimed, relief forcing its way out of her in a shout.

“That’s what I wanted.” She began to calm down. A thought occurred to her.

“Roger. When you go home tonight, I’d like you to post a letter for me. Not from the pillar box outside, but actually into the letter box of the recipient. Will you do that?”

“Um.” He blinked. “Would it be something to do with the King’s man as called, just now?”

“It might be. Then again it might not. Will you?”

“Yes,” he said firmly. “Don’t like those folks. Not at all.”

After he retreated to his workbench Miriam sat down in front of the manual typewriter and threaded some paper into it—then paused. They can identity typewriters by their typeface, can’t they? she remembered. Sort of like a fingerprint. And they lift messages off used ribbons, too. She pulled out the notebook computer and briefly tapped out a note, then printed it on the battery-powered inkjet printer she’d brought over with her. Let them try and identify that.

She took care to pull on her gloves before feeding the paper in, and before folding it and putting it in the envelope, leaving no fingerprints to incriminate. Then she addressed it and sealed it. If they were tailing Roger or had staked out Burgeson’s shop it was just too bad—nothing she could do would help—but if they were still looking for information she doubted things would have gone that far. Besides which, Erasmus had agreed to make inquiries on her behalf: If the inspector nailed him for sedition, there’d go her most fruitful line of inquiry in pursuit of the hidden enemies who’d murdered her birth mother and tried to kill her.

It was only on her way home, having given the anonymous tip to Roger, that she realized she’d stepped over the line into active collusion with the Leveler quartermaster.