The Clan Corporate

by Stross, Charles

  “You are the Countess Helge voh Thorold d’Hjorth?” someone behind her shoulder asked in stilted English. She glanced round, her heart hammering in barely suppressed anger. While the jocks made sport she’d completely missed the other group that appeared to want something of her: two gentlemen with the bearing of bodyguards, shepherding four maids who clustered around a stooped figure, moving with exaggerated caution.

  “I—” Trapped between the two factions she summoned up Helge, who racked her brain for the correct form of response. “I am that one,” she managed, flustered.

  “Good. You are—” Then she lost him. The guard spoke too fast for her to track his words, syllables sliding into one another.

  She forced a smile, tense and ugly, then stole a glance back over her shoulder, lest one of Egon’s thugs was about to stick a knife in her back. But they were talking and joking about something else, their attention no longer focused on her like hunting dogs. “I beg your pardon. Please to repeat this?”

  The guard stepped around her. “I’ll take care of the boys,” he said quietly. Louder: “This is her royal highness, the Queen Mother. She would have words with you.”

  “I, ah—” hope she’s not as rude as her eldest grandson. Numb with surprise, Helge managed a curtsey. “Am it pleased by your presence, your royal high! Highness,” she managed before she completely lost her ability to stay in character.

  The stooped figure reached out a hand to her. “Rise.”

  Shit, she swore to herself. How much worse can it get? The one situation where I need backup—a royal audience—comes up twice, and what’s Kara doing? “Your majesty,” she said, bending to kiss the offered hand.

  The Queen Mother resembled Mother Theresa of Calcutta—if the latter had ever sported a huge Louis Quinze hairdo and about a hundred yards of black silk taffeta held together with large ruby- and sapphire-encrusted lumps of gold. Her eyes were sunken and watery with rheum, and her face was gaunt, the skin drawn tight over her beak of a nose. She looked to be eighty years old, but having been presented before her son, Miriam reckoned she couldn’t be much over sixty. “Rise, I said,” the Queen Mother croaked in hochsprache. Then in English: “You shall call me Angelin. And I shall call you Helge.”

  “I—” Miriam blanked for a moment. It was just one shock too many. “Yes, Angelin.” You’re the king’s mother—you can call me anything you like and I’m not going to talk back. She took a deep breath. (As Roland had put it, his majesty Alexis Nicholau III of the Kingdom of Gruinmerkt liked to collect jokes about his family—he had two dungeons full of them.) “What can I—I’m at your service—I mean—”

  The Queen Mother’s face wrinkled. After a moment Miriam realized she was smiling. At least she isn’t howling, “Off with her head!” “What you’re wondering is, why do I speak this language?” Miriam nodded mutely, still numb and shaken by the confrontation with Egon’s bravos. “It’s a long story.” The older woman sighed breathily. “Walk with me, please.”

  Angelin was stooped, her back so bent that she had to crane her neck back to see the ground ahead of her. And she walked at a painful shuffle. Miriam matched her speed, feeling knuckles like walnuts in an empty leather glove clutch at her arm. I’m being honored, she realized. Royalty didn’t stoop to using just anyone as a walking frame. After a moment a long-dormant part of her memory kicked into life: Ankylosing spondylitis? she wondered. If so, it was a miracle Angelin was out of bed without painkillers and antiinflammatory drugs.

  “I knew your mother when she was a little girl,” said the queen. Shuffle, pant. “Delightful girl, very strong-willed.” She said “I.” That means she’s talking personally, doesn’t it? Or is it only the reigning monarch who says ‘we’? If that applies here? Miriam puzzled as the queen continued: “Glad to see they haven’t drowned it out of her. Have they?”

  That seemed to demand a reply. “I don’t think so, your royal highness.” Shuffle.

  “Oh, they’ll try,” Angelin added unreassuringly. “Just like last time.”

  Like what? Miriam bit her tongue. Her head was spinning with questions, fear and anger demanding attention, and the small of her back was slippery-cold with sweat. Angelin was steering her toward a side door in the palace, and her ladies-in-waiting and guards were screening her most effectively. If Kara had noticed anything—but Kara wasn’t in sight and Miriam didn’t dare create a scene by looking for her. “Is there anything I can do for you?” Miriam asked, desperately looking for a tactful formula, something to help her steer the conversation toward waters she was competent to navigate.

  “Perhaps.” The door opened before them as if by magic, to reveal a small vestibule. Four more guards waited on either side of a thronelike chair. A padded stool sat before it. “Please be seated in our presence.” Two of the guards stepped forward to cradle the old queen’s shoulders, while a third positioned the stool beneath her. “Take the chair; I cannot use it.”

  Definitely some kind of autoimmune—Miriam forced herself to stop thinking. She sat down carefully, grateful for the support.

  “Leave us.” Angelin’s gimlet stare sent all but two of the guards packing. The last two stood in front of the door, their faces turned to the woodwork but their hands on the hilts of their swords. The Queen Mother looked back at Miriam. “It is seven years since Eloise died,” said Angelin. “And Alexis is not inclined to remarry. He’s got his heir, and for all his faults, lack of devotion to his wife’s memory is not one of them.”

  “Ah.” Miriam realized her fingers were digging into her knees, and she forced herself to let go.

  “You can relax. This is not a job interview; nobody is going to offer you the throne,” Angelin added, so abruptly that Miriam almost choked.

  “But I didn’t want—” She brought herself up fast. “I’m sorry. You, uh, speak English very well. The vernacular—”

  “I grew up over there,” said Angelin, then was silent for almost a minute.

  She grew up there? The statement was wholly outrageous, even though the individual words made sense.

  Eventually, Angelin began to speak again. “The six families have aspired to become seven for almost a century now. I was only eighteen, you know. Back in 1942. Last time the council tried to capture the throne. They didn’t want me siding with my braid lineage, so they had me brought up in secrecy, in America; it wouldn’t be the first time, or the last. They brought me back and civilized me then farmed me out to the third son when I came of age. Both his elder brothers subsequently died, in a hunting accident and of a fever, respectively. The council of landholders—the laandsknee—screamed blue murder and threatened to annul the marriage: but then the six started tearing each other’s guts out in civil war, and that was an end to the matter, for a generation.”

  The lamplight flickered and Miriam felt an icy certainty clutching at her guts. “You mean, the Clan?” she asked. “You’re a world-walker?”

  “I was.” Angelin’s eyes were dark hollows in the dim light. “Pregnancy changes you, you know. And I doubt I’d survive if I tried it, today. My old bones are not what they were. And I gather the other world has changed, too. But enough about me.” A withered flicker of a smile: “I know your grandmother. She swears by you, you know. Well, she swears about you, but that’s much the same: it means you’re in her thoughts. She’s pigheaded, too.”

  “I don’t see eye to eye with her,” Helge said tightly. The Duchess Hildegarde had once sent agents to kill or dishonor her, thinking her an imposter; since proven wrong, she had subsided into a resentful sulk broken only by expressions of disdain or contempt. What a loving family we aren’t.

  “She told me that herself,” the Queen Mother said dismissively. Her eyes gleamed as she looked directly at Helge. “I wanted to see you myself before I made my mind up,” she said.

  “Made your mind up?” Miriam could hear her voice rising unpleasantly, even though everything she’d learned as Helge told her she must stick to a cultivated awe in the royal persona
ge. “About what? I’ve just been threatened by your grandson—”

  “Don’t you worry about that.” Angelin sounded almost amused. “I’ll deal with Egon later. You may leave now. I won’t stand on ceremony. Thurman, show the lady out—”

  “What is this?” Miriam demanded plaintively.

  “Later,” said the Queen Mother, as one of the guards—Thurman—urged Helge toward the door. “The trait is recessive,” she added, slightly louder. “That means—”

  “I know what it means,” Miriam replied sharply.

  “We’ll talk later. Go now.” The Queen Mother looked away dismissively. The door closed behind Helge, stranding the younger woman at one side of a sprung dance floor where couples paced in circles around each other in complex patterns that defied interpretation. Miriam—at this moment she felt herself to be entirely Miriam, not even an echo of the social veneer that formed her alter ego Helge remaining to cover the yawning depths—took a ragged breath. She felt stifled by layers of artifice, suffocated by the social expectations of having to live as a noble lady: and now she had to put up with threats, innuendo, and hints from the royal family? She felt hot and cold at once, and her stomach hurt.

  The trait is recessive. The king was a carrier. That meant that each of his sons had a one in four chance of being a carrier. Have you thought about marriage? Obviously not from the right angle, because You’ve been too successful, too fast. Wasn’t Prince Egon—golden boy with a thousand-yard stare, watching her with something ugly in his eyes—already engaged to some foreign princess? Raised in secrecy. Might he be a carrier? I know your grandmother.

  “Lady Helge!” It was Kara, two maids in tow, looking angry and relieved simultaneously. “Where have you been? We were so worried!”

  “Hold this,” said Miriam, thrusting the empty glass at her. Then she darted outside as fast as she could, in search of a bush to throw up behind.

  TRANSLATED TRANSCRIPT BEGINS

  “Has the old goose been drinking too much, do you suppose?”

  “Hist, now! She’ll hear you!”

  “Oh don’t worry. She only understands one word in ten. It can’t be helped, I suppose. She grew up in fairyland, wearing trousers and chopping up dead men to understand how they work. They didn’t have time to teach her how to speak as well.”

  “What, you mean—” (shocked giggle) “—to the Crone?”

  “No, I don’t suppose she’s that stupid. But she’s one of the kind such as have a thoughtful temper. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of her, you know. Wait, here she comes—” (English) “—would you like another glass, ma’am?”

  (Click.)

  “Phew, there she goes again, bouncing after some stuffed-pants longhair. This one looks like he swallowed a ferret, look at the way he’s twitching.”

  “Raw with lust for the old goose.”

  “Hist! Is that your third glass?”

  “Who’s counting, madam? Listen, you have that one. Oh, over there! Don’t look, don’t be so obvious. Himself with the brown hair and the, um, isn’t he something?”

  “He—”

  (Click.)

  “Not as if my lady is stupid, but she is strange. Witchy-weird like any of the Six, but more so, if you follow me. Wears breeches and talks the Anglaische all the time except when she’s trying to learn. But she does it so badly! Look at the way she carries herself. Wagging tongues have it that she seduced Sieur Roland, but if something like that could seduce anything then I’m Queen of Summer Angels. What do you say, Nicky? Dried-up bluestocking or—”

  “Don’t underestimate her, she’s not stupid, even if she doesn’t understand much. She may not look like a lizard but she’s descended from a long lineage of snakes. Sieur Roland is dead, isn’t he, so I’m led to believe? Do you think she had something to do with that? Suck the man dry and cast aside his bones like a spider.”

  “Nicky! That’s disgusting!”

  “Not as disgusting as what that spotty lad wanted with you in the bedchamber when she was away.”

  “Don’t you go talking like that about me—”

  “Then don’t you go calling me disgusting, miss.”

  (Sigh.) “I’m not calling you disgusting.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I didn’t call you a whore, isn’t it? People might misunderstand.”

  “Here, have another—drink while she’s not looking. Who is that longshanks oddboy, anyway?”

  “Him? He’s one of the hangers-on on at court. Some fancy-boy or other to the king’s bedchamber. Dresser-on-of-codpieces or some such.”

  “You don’t know, do you? She doesn’t know!”

  “Rubbish, he’s Sieur Villem du Praha and he’s married to Lady Jain of Cours, and he rides with the king’s hunt. And look, there’s our missy Kara going all gushy over him.”

  “Kara? She’s—”

  “You just look, whenever she gets within six feet of him she has to tie her knees together with her stay laces to stop them falling apart. Silly little bitch, she hasn’t seen the way he looks at his wife.”

  “Milady Kara’s not one to turn her nose up at a lost cause. But what’s with milady the honorable Old Goose? What’s she doing with him?”

  “Who the—knows, pardon my loewsprache, she’s being a witch again. Shamelessly talking to strange men.”

  “What’s shameless about it? She’s got her chaperone—”

  (Laughter.) “Red-Minge Kara is a chaperone? What color is the sky in your county, and do the fish have feathers to match the birds’ scales?”

  “I’d like to know what she’s talking about, though.”

  “I’ve got an idea. Wait here.”

  (Click.)

  “So? What’s the story?”

  “Give me that.”

  “Must be a long story to wet your throat like that.”

  “Long? You haven’t heard the first of it—”

  “Is she trying to fix Kara up with a paramour?”

  “Is she—bah! Even Old Witchy-Goose isn’t that stupid, what would people say if her lady-in-waiting got pregnant? I’m sorry I asked. I thought it would be something like that. And the promises I had to make!”

  “Promises?”

  “Yes, I said I’d ask you to meet Oswelt—him with the belly—behind the marquee in half an hour for a midnight promenade.”

  “Bitch!”

  “Now now, mind your language! Remember I said you weren’t a whore? I didn’t promise you’d be there, just said I’d ask.”

  “You did . . .”

  “So if you want . . .”

  “What about her ladyship? What did you find out?”

  “Well, it’s as well I asked because something tells me we’ll be dragged hither and back in the next months, or I’m not a household hand.”

  “Really? Why? What’s she want from him?”

  “He’s not with the king’s wardrobe, he’s with the prince’s. And you know what that means.”

  “Oh!”

  “Yes.”

  “The slut!”

  “Absolutely wanton.”

  “We’ll be back here three times a night before the month is out.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Hmm. So what else did you tell master Oswelt about me . . . ?”

  (Click.)

  TRANSCRIPT ENDS

  INCORRECT ASSUMPTIONS

  Twelve weeks ago (continued):

  Mike Fleming leaned back in his chair and tried desperately to stifle a yawn. This is crazy, he told himself. How can you be tired at a time like this?

  The air conditioner in the conference room wheezed, losing the battle to keep the heat of the summer evening at bay. He desperately needed another coffee. Despite the couple of hours’ nap he’d caught back home before the spooks from NSA sucked him in, his eyes kept half-closing, threatening him with a sleep-deprivation shutdown.

  “Agent Fleming?”

  “Oh. Yeah? Sorry, what was the question?”

  “How long have you bee
n awake?” It was Smith, his expression unreadable.

  Mike shook himself. “About fifty hours. Got about an hour’s sleep before your guys picked me up.”

  “Ah—right.” Out of the corner of one eye Mike barely registered Herz from the FBI office looking sympathetic. “Okay, I’ll try not to keep you,” said Smith. “We need you awake and alert for tomorrow. Meanwhile, can you give us a brief run-through on the background to Greensleeves? I’ve read Tony’s write-up of your report, but everyone else here needs to be put in the frame, and it’s probably better if they get it from the horse’s mouth first before they get the folder. How do you take your coffee?”

  Mike yawned. “Milk, no sugar.” He stood up. “Shall I?”

  “Be my guest.” Smith waved him toward the podium.

  “Okay.” Mike forced himself to breathe deeply, suppressing another yawn, as Colonel Smith quietly picked up a white phone and ordered a round of coffees for the meeting. “Sorry, folks, but it’s been a long couple of days.” Appreciative muttering. “Source Greensleeves. Don’t ask me who dreams up these stupid names. A couple of weeks ago Greensleeves, whoever he was, casually dropped the hammer on a ring operating out of Cambridge. At this time it was purely a standard narcotics investigation. A low-level wholesaler, name of Ivan Pavlovsk, was handling the supply line for a neighborhood street gang who were shifting maybe a kilo of heroin every month. Greensleeves left a code word and said he’d be back in touch later. I thought at first it was the usual caped-crusader bullshit but it turned out to be solid and the DA up there is nailing down a plea bargain that should put our Ukrainian friend behind bars for the next decade.” He leaned against the podium and glanced at Smith. “Are you sure you want the whole list?”