“Oh, er, thanks. How nice of you.” She tried not to be disappointed that he had approached her not because he fancied her but because he wanted to give her the contact information of a friend of his. She didn’t know much about unions, but she had a notion they were something workers liked because it got them stuff. Or something. Hopefully Dexter would be able to fill her in.
Mortimer removed a pack that had been slung over his shoulder and said, “If you’ve got a minute, I think I have a few of my friend’s business cards in here. Somewhere…” He set the bag down on a table behind him, apologizing to the man and woman who were sitting there. The lady glared at him and the guy said something about how some people have no common courtesy, but they let him keep his bag on the table as Mortimer began to rummage around, removing a leather-covered notebook, an extra pair of shoes, and a brown sack of maybe food, before finally saying with a grin, “Aha! Here we go!” And his hand emerged from the pack with a stack of business cards. He rifled through the stack and handed her one.
Julianna glanced at it and read the home address of a Gretel Merriman. “Thanks very much,” she said as she realized it really was very nice of him to have flagged her down to help her out. Really, she thought, it was sort of better than him just coming over to partake in idle chitchat; his helpfulness told her that he was a considerate, kind sort of fella who had seen her and thought to give her some advice about her new job in the big city. “So, coal miners’ union?” she asked, hoping to keep him talking for a bit. For one thing, she was liking the idea of getting to know a little bit more about this particular citizen.
But for another thing, when he had been rifling through his pack, she had caught a glimpse within it of what she was almost sure was a silver box with an orange star on it; if she was right, the thing she was supposed to steal was not in his room but in the bag that was now on his back.
“Yep,” he said. “I’m a coal miner myself, so it’s a lot easier for me to get other miners interested than it is for the guys who come in from the city for a day or two to get recruits and then go on their way.” So that was why his voice was scratchy—he was a miner! Some sort of precursor to black lung was currently knocking about in his respiratory apparatus.
She found she didn’t really know what to ask next since she felt woefully under-informed about unions and didn’t want to look dumb. If only Dexter could tell her, but he was busy floating around the bar, eavesdropping on the customers. “I’d imagine so,” she said. “How long have you been mining?”
“Since I was ten. So twelve years.”
“Since you were ten? But mining is dangerous!” Right about then, Julianna noticed out of the corner of her eye that Galt was flapping his arms at her from behind the bar, behind Mortimer’s back. She studiously ignored him and kept her eyes on Mortimer’s handsome face, but she got the idea that Galt was pointing up toward the staircase, obviously wanting her to get on with searching Mortimer’s room.
Oblivious, Mortimer talked on, “Well, yes...it’s dangerous. But I was the oldest kid, and my dad was gone and I had six little brothers and sisters. So, really, I didn’t have a choice. The only other job for a guy in the north is logging, and that wasn’t an option because I was too little for most of the logging stuff. Besides,” he said with a sigh, “logging is every bit as dangerous as coal mining, just in different ways.”
“Wow.” Julianna gave him an awestruck look. The whole time she’d been frittering away her life down in the dungeon pursuing her hobbies and eating tasty food and getting tutored by the best teachers in whatever field she cared to learn about, Mortimer and tons of others like him had been out risking their lives in order to keep their families from starving. This was an awful lot to think about, and it made her sad. Really, really sad. “That is really, really sad.”
“And the saddest part is that it’s such a common story for the people in the northern villages. They are trapped in a cycle of poverty and ignorance, and the cycle will not be broken until people in power begin to care.” Those lines were taken pretty much verbatim from the usual speech he gave to prospective union members, so the words sounded slightly canned, but they were so applicable to the conversation that he just had to throw them in. He added, “Surely the same sort of stuff was happening where you’re from?” He seemed suddenly curious as to why she appeared not to have known about this apparently common story.
“Oh. Yes, of course. But each new sad story just sort of… affects me anew, I guess,” she improvised, summoning up some defensiveness. “Just because it’s a common story doesn’t mean I’m desensitized to it. I do have a heart.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“No, really. That was uncool of me.”
“Forget it.”
“Let me make it up to you,” he said, flashing a swoon-worthy smile. “Let me get you a drink when you’re done with work?” he asked, gesturing at her mop and cleaning stuff, which she had forgotten she’d been holding.
“That’d be nice,” she said, smiling back. “Sure.” Yay! Then she realized that, in order to keep up her pretense of being a maid, she had to now go do some cleaning even though the whole reason for her doing so was currently sitting in his pack. Curses. What a bother.
“Will you be done by three in the morning?” he asked. “I have to go out into the city and meet with a few people, but I should be back by then.”
“Sounds perfect!” she said with a grin.
He nodded and smiled another lovely smile, then strode out the door.
Julianna began to gather her things, but then it occurred to her that she should probably be following him if she really wanted to steal that box. Maybe fate would present her with an opportunity to swipe it, thus proving to those smugglers that she was brave enough to be a part of their operation. For, if she didn’t prove herself to them, they wouldn’t let her use their house as a way in and out of the city, and she wouldn’t be able to venture out of the castle walls anymore, and she would have no way to save the citizens from oppression and her family from rebellion.
Deciding she’d better get going fast, before she lost him out there in the city streets, she plunked her cleaning stuff all down by the door to the basement and scurried toward the front door, glancing at the bar long enough to wave a placating hand at Galt, who was staring at her in consternation.
Then Julianna ran out into the night, Dexter floating closely behind.
Julianna looked left, then right, and spotted Mortimer disappearing around the corner of a building right in front of the castle gates. Feeling quite sneaky like a spy from one of her novels, she flitted down the street after Mortimer, only slipping slightly in the muck before finding her footing.
“Why are we following this dude? Stalking is never the way to anyone’s heart. Believe me,” Dexter sagely doled out some hard-won advice.
“I’m not stalking him. He’s got the box in his pack. I’m going to try to get it somehow.” She gasped and flailed her arms wildly, catching her balance at the last moment.
“Oh, well that’s different,” he said. After a pause, he added doubtfully, “but how do you propose to do that?”
“How should I know?” she retorted. She was having a hard time staying upright on the slimy street as she tried to keep up with Mortimer’s pace, and it was making her grumpy. It would be hard to explain if she showed up back at the bar at three o’clock covered in mud when she was supposed to have been cleaning the inn that whole time. “An opportunity may present itself, though, and save me from having to somehow steal the thing while sitting across from him in a well-lit bar.”
“Want to hear my suggestion?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Wait until he’s on an empty stretch of street and hit him over the head with my brick.”
“I am not doing that,” she said flatly.
&nbs
p; “It’s what I’d have done in your place back when I was alive.”
“That doesn’t surprise me in the least. You must have been a horrible thug when you were flesh-and-blood.”
Dexter nodded his agreement.
Julianna saw her quarry stop in front of a heavily-bearded homeless man wearing a threadbare gray cape. Mortimer looked right and left in a casual, non-shifty manner, prompting Julianna to quickly swoop out of sight into the shadow of a parked wagon that she had been walking by. She was just congratulating herself on her artful maneuver when she noticed that Mortimer’s gaze had flown to her hiding place, and he was searching its shadows. “Do you think he saw me?” she asked Dexter nervously.
“I don’t think so. He probably just saw that silly dodge you did out of the corner of his eye, and the movement made him suspicious. Next time, just keep walking.”
“Hmm. Good point.” She assessed the situation for a moment. “Okay. Float on over there and eavesdrop, would you?”
Dexter obliged, and while Mortimer and the homeless fellow chatted, Julianna took a few moments to study her surroundings in more detail. She was still in the fancy part of town that had streetlights, so she could fairly easily see through the coal smoke. Across the street were three stores: a shoe repair place called the City Cobbler, an apparel place called Capes ‘N’ Caps, and a restaurant called Northwoods Buffet, which advertised “rustic peasant-inspired fare with a fun twist”. Maybe the fun twist was that the serving sizes were actually adequate portions to fill a belly, unlike the fare on the plates of the peasants in the real Northwoods of Fritillary.
There weren’t many people out on the streets anymore at this time of night, but still more than she would have expected. Everyone looked so faded and tired and troubled as they trudged about in the cold night doing whatever it was that commoners did with themselves. It was thoroughly depressing. After a few minutes of people-watching, Julianna became aware that there were voices conversing nearby. Two men. They were sitting on the bench of the wagon she was hiding behind, completely oblivious of her as she crouched in the shadows practically at their feet.
One was saying, “—can’t wait until this hunting party is finally over.”
“Clyde, so what if it means more trouble for us? It also means more money.”
“Not saying I don’t appreciate the money,” Clyde grumbled. “I’m just so tired of this. We pack up the wagon, bring it to the gates, get searched like we’re criminals planning to assassinate the Queen herself, go in and deliver our goods, get searched again on the way out as though we’ve kidnapped the Prince and are smuggling him out in one of our empty boxes, go home and start the whole process over again the next day.”
“Yeah,” his companion said, “but all I know is I got to buy my kids new coats and boots for the winter.”
Clyde’s response was lost in all the ruckus of the wagon starting, without warning, to creak and roll. Julianna’s hiding place was now in motion. Curses. She scooted along with it for a few paces, crouching low, but quickly drew stares doing that, and decided it would be best just to hide in a nearby doorway instead. Sneaking was hard.
After a while, Mortimer walked on down the street and out of the section of the city that was lit by streetlights. As she followed him at a conservative distance, flitting from shadow to shadow, Dexter joined her to report about his eavesdropping. “Hey,” he said. “Get this. He wasn’t talking about unions. I think he’s one of those rebels—he was saying some pretty bad stuff about your family.”
“Hmm,” Julianna mused. “That makes more sense. I was wondering why he was talking about unions with a homeless guy. Not like there are homeless unions.”
“That’s all you have to say? You’re not put off by the fact that he hates you royal types? He was talking about overthrowing your dad.”
She shrugged. As confusing as it was, she was actually kind of happy that he was a rebel. Trying not to think too much about that, she sneaked on after him.
Dear reader, right about now you may be thinking that we’ve been hearing an awful lot about Juliana, but not much about Warren. This is true, but it’s just because all he and Corrine are doing is sleeping, whereas Julianna is traipsing about the city spying on her crush.
But just in case you want an update:
Warren was fast asleep on his narrow little bed, cradling his banjo with his good arm, drooling a bit, and every so often muttering something about harpsichords. Across the room from him on her own narrow little bed, Corrine was sleeping as well, though not as soundly. She was restless, and every time she moved, her bed squeaked, making her toss and turn more and more, creating an irritating cycle of tossing and squeaking, tossing and squeaking, until finally she would wake up just a bit, lie still, and fall back asleep again. Only for the whole thing to start over a few minutes later.
A mouse scuttled across the floor and eyed Warren.
Warren drooled a bit more.
A floorboard creaked in the bar above, making him jump and mutter in his sleep.
Corrine thrashed about.
A bit of condensation dripped from the ceiling and onto the floor with a tiny splash.
There you go. Updated enough, I hope.
Chapter Eighteen
Nearly two hours of following Mortimer through the city as he met with two more homeless people and visited three apartments, and Julianna was beginning to think that tracking him in hopes of getting an opportunity to steal the box in his backpack had been a mistake. The plain fact is that if you are following a person in a covert manner, you cannot get close enough to reach into their backpack, unless you are in a big, noisy crowd. No big noisy crowds being on hand, Julianna was almost ready to throw in the towel and get back to the inn.
But, luckily for her, and unluckily for Mortimer, there was apparently at least one person in this city who didn’t share her belief that sneaking up on people from behind and hitting them over the head was wrong.
It happened when Julianna was waiting for Mortimer to leave an apartment building that he’d entered about fifteen minutes earlier. She was about a block away from the building, hiding in a shadowy doorway, having a whispered conversation with Dexter about unions. She had learned about them briefly from one of her tutors years ago, but her lessons had had a distinctly anti-union slant wherein all unions were horrible things that resulted in incompetent, lazy workers who wanted things like days off (thus producing fewer goods or services and decreasing the amount of money the Crown could make off of them through taxes) and excessive wages (money that the Crown could otherwise have claimed from the employers).
Dexter’s lessons had a distinctly pro-union slant wherein all unions were the best things ever, keeping The Man from inhumanly working his employees to the bone for as little money as possible, all while in the worst imaginable conditions. While she knew the truth was somewhere in between, she still figured it was worthwhile to listen to Dexter’s propaganda, since it was probably the same opinion held by the majority of the populace.
“So, you see, unions are the only way to keep your dratted family from working the citizens of this country into the ground until they’re doing nothing but slaving away until they day they finally collapse under the tyrannical iron fi—”
“Shh!” Julianna cut in, though of course she really didn’t need to shush a ghost.
The door of the building Mortimer had entered a bit ago had opened. Mortimer walked out. He turned around to say a few final words to whoever had walked him to the door, and then he started back down the street in her direction, probably now heading back toward the Dawdling Donkey after a long night of meeting with either union contacts, or rebels, or whatever.
She slid further back into the shadows and watched him approach. Then she saw someone sneaking out of another shadowy doorway and swooping quickly and silently up behind him. This person obviously intended to do more than follow
Mortimer—the person was approaching too fast and was raising their hand in the air over Mortimer’s head—Julianna caught a glimpse of something glinting in the person’s hand. Just before they brought the weapon down on Mortimer’s head, Julianna forgot all about how she was supposed to be sneaking, and she cried out, “Mortimer! Behind you!”
Mortimer startled at the sound of his name, then whirled around, but it was too late. There was a sickening thud, and he collapsed at his attacker’s feet.
“Idiot!” Dexter spat. “That person’s going to come after you now!”
Erg. She hadn’t thought of that. She hadn’t thought at all. Julianna stared in horror at the person, waiting to see what would happen next. She couldn’t run, so her best chance was to just stay in the shadows and hope that they didn’t know where her voice had originated from. She held her breath and didn’t move a muscle.
But the person only gave a quick glance in her direction, leaned down over Mortimer, reached into the lining of his coat, grabbed something out of his pocket, and scampered off. It all happened in the space of a few seconds.
She waited just a few seconds more to make sure the person wasn’t coming back, then she rushed over to Mortimer’s side and put a hand to his wrist. He had a pulse, and it seemed strong. But he was out cold.
“He alive?” Dexter asked.
She nodded distractedly, trying to think what to do next. She thought she saw blood matting his hair.
“Grab the box and get moving,” Dexter said.
Trying not to feel too guilty, she tugged Mortimer’s pack out from under him and rummaged around until she found the box. Sure enough, it was silver with an orange star. She transferred it to her bag, studying his handsome face the whole time, ready to dart away the moment he showed signs of waking.
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