Miriam braked hard, jumped off the bike. “Brill?” she asked.
“Miriam?” Brill’s face was a bright green pool in the twilight displayed by her night goggles. “Is that you?”
“Yes.” Miriam walked closer, then flicked her goggles up and pulled out a pocket flashlight. “Are you okay?”
“Frozen half to death.” Brill smiled shakily. “But otherwise unharmed.”
A vast wave of relief broke over Miriam. “Well, if that’s all…”
“This cloak lining is amazing,” Brill added. “The post house is just past the next bend. I’ve only been waiting for an hour. Shall we go?”
“Sure.” Miriam glanced down. “I’d better change, first.” It was the work of a few minutes to disassemble the bike, pull on her outfit over her trousers, and turn the bike and panniers into a backpack disguised by a canvas cover. “Let’s get some dinner,” Miriam suggested.
“Your magic goggles, and lantern.” Brill coughed discreetly.
“Oh. Of course.” Together they fumbled their way through the darkness toward the promise of food and a bed, be it ever so humble.
Almost exactly twenty-four hours later, Paulette’s doorbell chimed. “Who is it?” she called from behind the closed door.
“It’s us! Let us in!” She opened the door. Brill stumbled in first, followed by Miriam. “Trick or treat?”
“Trick.” Paulette stood back. “Hey, witchy!”
“It is, isn’t it.” Miriam closed the door. “It itches, too. I don’t know how to put this discreetly—have you got any flea spray?”
“Fleas! Away with you!” Paulette held her nose. “How did it go?”
“I’ll tell you in a few minutes. Over a coffee, once I’ve made it to the bathroom—oh shit.” Miriam stared up the staircase at Brilliana’s vanishing feet. “Well at least that’s sorted.” She dropped her pack onto the carpet; it landed with a dull thump. “’Scuse me, but I am going to strip. It’s an emergency.”
“Wait right there,” said Paulie, hurrying upstairs.
By the time she returned, bearing a T-shirt and a pair of sweats from the luggage, Miriam had her boots off and was down to outer garments.
“Damn, central heating,” she said wonderingly. “There’s nothing to make you appreciate it like three days in a Massachusetts winter without it. Well, two and a half.”
“Did you got where you wanted to go?” Paulie asked, pausing.
“Yeah.” Miriam cracked a wide, tired grin.
“Give me five, baby!”
High fives were all very well, but when Miriam winced Paulette got the message. “Use the living room,” she said. “Get the hell out of those rags and then go up to my bedroom, okay? You can use the bedroom shower.”
“You’re a babe, babe.” Miriam nodded. She pulled a face. “Oh shit. I think I’m coming on.”
“That’s no fun. Look, go. I’ll sort the mess out later, ’kay?”
An hour later Miriam—infinitely warmer and cleaner—sat curled at one end of Paulette’s living room sofa with a mug of strong tea. Brill, wrapped in a borrowed bathrobe, sat at the other end. “So tell me, how was your walk in the woods?” Paulette asked Brill. “Meet any bears?”
“Bears?” Brill looked puzzled. “No, and a good thing—” she caught Miriam’s eye. “Oh. No, it was uneventful.”
“Well then.” Paulie focused on Miriam. “You had more luck, huh? Not just a walk in the woods?”
“Well, apart from Brill half freezing to death while I was trying not to get arrested, it was fine.”
“Getting. Arrested.” Paulette picked up the teapot and poured herself a mug. “You’re not getting away with that, Beckstein. Didn’t they accept your press pass or something?”
“It’s Boston, but not as we know it,” Miriam explained. “Uh, about two miles southeast of here I found myself on the edge of town. They speak English and they drive automobiles, but that’s about as far as the similarities go.” She pulled out her dictaphone and turned the volume up: “zeppelin overhead, with a British flag on it! Uh, four propellers, sounds like diesel engines. There goes another steam car. They seem to make them big deliberately, I don’t think I’ve seen anything smaller than a fifty-eight Caddy yet.”
Paulette closed her mouth with a visible effort. “Did you take photographs?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.” Miriam grinned and held up her wrist “You’ll have them just as soon as I get my Casio secret agent watch plugged into the computer. I knew those Inspector Gadget toys would come in handy sooner or later.”
“Toys.” Paulette rolled her eyes.
“Well, now we’ve got a whole new world to not understand,” said Miriam. “Any constructive suggestions?”
“Yep.” Paulette put her mug down. “Before you go over again, girl, we work out what you’re going to do. You need a lawyer or business manager over there, right? And you need money, and somewhere to live, and we need to find a place on the far side that’s away from human habitation in Brill’s world and we can rent on our own side. Right? And we need to understand what you’re messing with before you get yourself arrested. So spill it!”
Miriam reached into her bag and pulled out two books then dumped them on the table with a bump. “History lesson time. Watch out for the one with the brown paper cover,” she warned. “It bites.”
Paulette opened that one first, looked at the flyleaf, and sucked in her breath. “Communist?” she asked.
“Nope, it’s much weirder than that.” Miriam picked up the other book.
“I’ll start with this one, you start with that one, then we’ll swap.”
Paulette glanced at the window. “It’s nearly eleven, for Pete’s sake! You want I should pull an overnighter?”
“No, that won’t be necessary.” Miriam put her book down and looked at her. “I’ve been meaning to raise this for a while. I’ve been staying here, and I didn’t mean to. I really appreciate you putting Brill up, but two guests is two too many and—”
“Shut up,” Paulette said fiercely. “You’re going to stay here till you’ve told me what you’ve seen and gotten your act together to move out properly! And bit the deadline,” she muttered under her breath.
“Deadline?” Miriam raised an eyebrow.
“The Clan summit,” Brill explained tonelessly. She yawned. “I told Paulie about it.”
“You can’t let them do it!” Paulette insisted.
“Do what?” Miriam blinked.
“Move to declare you incompetent and make you a permanent ward of whoever the Clan deems appropriate,” Brill explained. She looked puzzled.
“Didn’t you know? That’s what Olga said Baron Oliver was muttering about.”
Iris raised the cup of coffee to her lips with both hands. She looked a little shaky today, but Miriam knew better than to make a fuss. “So what did you do next?” she asked.
“I went to bed.” Miriam leaned back, then glanced around. The level of background noise in the museum food court was high and all their neighbors seemed to be otherwise preoccupied. “What else could I do? Beltaigne is nearly five months away, and I’m not going to let the bastards stampede me.”
“But the other place, this new one—” Iris sounded distracted—
“doesn’t it take you a whole day to go each way, even if you have somewhere to stay at the other end?”
“There’s no point going off half-cocked, Ma.” Miriam idly opened a tube of sugar crystals and stirred them into her latte. “Look, if Baron Hjorth wants to declare me incompetent, he’s going to have to come up with some evidence. He might shove it through if I’m not there to defend myself, but I figure the strongest defense I can get is proof that there’s a conspiracy out there—a conspiracy that murdered my birth-mother and is trying to murder me, too, not just the petty shit he and my—grandmother—are shoveling at me. A second-strongest defense is evidence that I may be erratic, but I’ve come up with something valuable. Now, the assassin’s locket takes me to this oth
er world—call it world three—and I’ve got to wonder. Does this mean they’re not part of the Clan or families? They’re working on the other side and in world three, while the Clan works on the other side and here, call here world two and Niejwein is part of world one. I’m, I guess, the first member of the Clan to actually become aware of world three and be able to get over there. That means that I can see about finding whoever’s sending the killers—see defense one, above—or see about opening up a whole new trade opportunity—see defense two, above. I’m going to tie the whole story up with a bow and hand it to them. And mess up Baron Hjorth’s game into the bargain.” She rolled up the empty sugar tube into a tight little wad and threw it at the back of the booth.
“That sounds like my daughter,” Iris said thoughtfully. She grinned.
“Don’t let the bastards realize you’ve got the drop on them until it’s too late for them to dodge.” She put the smile aside. “Morris would be proud of you.”
“Um.” Miriam nodded, unable to trust her tongue. “How have you been? How did you get away from them tonight?”
“Well, you know, I haven’t had much trouble with being under surveillance lately.” Iris sipped her coffee. “Funny how they don’t seem to be able to tell one old woman in a motorized blue wheelchair from another, isn’t it?”
“Ma, you shouldn’t have!”
“What, give some of my friends an opportunity for a little adventure?” Iris snorted and pushed her bifocals up her nose. Slyly: “Just because my daughter thinks she can go baring off to other worlds, running away from her problems—”
“It’s the source of my goddamn problems, not the solution,” Miriam interrupted.
“Well good, just as long as you understand that.” Iris met her eyes with a coolly unreadable expression that slowly moderated into one of affection.
“You’re grown up now and there’s not a lot I can teach you. Just as well really, one day I won’t be around to do the teaching and it’d be kind of embarrassing if—”
“—Mother!”
“Don’t you ‘mother’ me! Listen, I raised you to face facts and deal with the world as it really is, not to pretend that if you stick your head in the sand problems will go away. I’m in late middle age and I’m damned if I’m not going to inflict my hard-earned wisdom on my only daughter.” She looked mildly disgusted. “Come to think of it, I wish someone had beaten it into me when I was a child. Pah. But anyway. You’re playing with fire, and I would really hate it if you got burned. You’re going to try and track down these assassins from another universe, aren’t you? What do you think they are?”
“I think—” Miriam paused. “They’re like the Clan and the families,” she said finally. “Only they travel between world one and world three, while the Clan travel between world one and world two, our world. I figure they decided the Clan were a threat a long time ago and that’s probably something to do with, with why they tried to nail my mother. All those years ago. And they’re smaller and weaker than the Clan, that much seems obvious, so I can maybe set up in world three, their stronghold, before they notice me. I think.”
“Ambitious.” Iris didn’t crack a smile. “What did I tell you when you were young, about not jumping to conclusions?”
“Um. You know better? Is there something you haven’t been telling me?”
Iris nodded sharply. “Can you permit your mother to keep one or two things to herself?”
“Guess so.” Miriam shrugged uncomfortably. “Can you give your daughter any hints?”
“Only this.” Iris met her gaze unflinchingly. “Firstly, do you really think you’d have been hidden from the families for all these years without someone over there covering your trail?”
“Ma—”
“I can’t tell you for sure,” she added, “but I think someone may have been watching over you. Someone who didn’t want you dragged into all this—at least not until you were good and ready to look out for yourself.”
Miriam shook her head. “Is that all? You think I’ve got a fairy godmother?”
“Not exactly.” Ms finished her coffee. “But here’s a ‘secondly’ for you to think about. Shortly after you surfaced, the strangers, these assassins, started hunting for you. To say nothing of the second bunch who tried to wipe out this Olga person. Doesn’t that suggest something? What about that civil war among the families that you told me about?”
“Are you trying to suggest it’s part of some sixty-year-old feud?” Miriam demanded. “Or that it isn’t over?”
“Not exactly. I’m wondering if the sixty-year-old feud wasn’t part of this business, if you follow my drift. Like, started by outsiders meddling for their own purposes.”
“That’s—” Miriam paused for thought—“Paranoid! I mean, why—”
“What better way to weaken a powerful enemy than to get it fighting itself?” Ms asked.
“Oh.” Miriam was silent for a while. “You’re saying that because of who I am—nothing more, just because of who my parents were—I’m the focus of a civil war?”
“Possibly, And you may just have reignited it by crawling out of the woodwork.” Ms looked thoughtful. “Do you have any better suggestions? Are you involved in anything else that might explain what’s going on?”
“Roland—” Miriam stopped. Ms stared at her. “You said not to trust any of them,” Miriam continued slowly, “but I think I can trust him. Up to a point.”
Iris met her eyes. “People do the strangest things for money and love,” she said, a curious expression on her face. “I should know” She chuckled humorlessly. “Watch your back, dear. And…call me if you need me. I don’t promise I’ll be there to help—with my health that would be rash—but I’ll do my best.”
The next morning Paulette arrived back at the house around noon, whistling jauntily. “I did it!” she declared, startling Miriam out of the history book she was working up a headache over. “We move in tomorrow!”
“We do?” Miriam shook her head as Brill came in behind Paulie and closed the door, carefully wiping the snow off her boots on the mat just inside.
“We do!” Paulette threw something at her; reaching out instinctively, Miriam grabbed a bunch of keys.
“Where to?”
“The office of your dreams, madam chief high corporate executive!”
“You found somewhere?” Miriam stood up.
“Not only have I found somewhere, I’ve rented it for six months up front.” Paulette threw down a bundle of papers on the living room table.
“Look. A thousand square feet of not-entirely-brilliant office space not far from Cambridgeport. The main thing in its favor is a downstairs entrance and a backyard with a high wall around it, and access. On-street parking, which is a minus. But it was cheap—about as cheap as you can get anything near the waterfront for these days, anyway.” Paulie pulled a face. “Used to belong to a small and not very successful architect’s practice, then they moved out or retired or something and I grabbed a three-year lease.”
“Okay.” Miriam sighed. “What’s the damage?”
“Ten thousand bucks deposit up front, another ten thousand in rent. About eight hundred to get gas and power hooked up, and we’re going to get a lovely bill from We the Peepul in a couple of months, bleeding us hard enough to give Dracula anemia. Anyway, we can move in tomorrow. It could really use a new carpet and a coat of paint inside, but it’s open plan and there’s a small kitchen area.”
“The backyard looked useful,” Brill said hesitantly.
“Paulie took you to see it?”
“Yeah.” Brill nodded. Where’d she pick that up from? Miriam wondered: Maybe she was beginning to adjust, after all.
“What did you think of it?” Miriam asked as Paulette hung her coat up and headed upstairs on some errand.
“That it’s where ordinary people work? There’s nowhere for livestock, not enough light for needlework or spinning or tapestry, not enough ventilation for dyeing or tanning, not enough water f
or brewing—” She shrugged. “But it looks very nice. I’ve slept in worse palaces.”
“Livestock, tanning, and fabric all take special types of building here,” Miriam said. “This will be an office. Open-plan. For people to work with papers. Hmm. The yard downstairs. What did you think of that?”
“Well. First we went in through a door and up a staircase like that one there, narrow—the royal estate agent, is that right? took us up there. There’s a room at the top with a window overlooking the stairs, and that is an office for a secretary. I thought it rather sparse, and there was nowhere for the secretary’s guards to stand duty, but Paulie said it was good. Then there is a short passage past a tiny kitchen, to a big office at the back. The windows overlooking the yard have no shutters, but peculiar plastic slats hung inside. And it was dim. Although there were lights in the ceiling, like in the kitchen here.”
“Long lighting tubes.” Miriam nodded. “And the back?”
“A back door opens off the corridor onto a metal fire escape. It goes down into the yard. We went there and the walls are nearly ten feet high. There is a big gate onto the back road, but it was locked. A door under the fire escape opens into a storage shed. I could not see into any other windows from inside the yard. Is that what you wanted to know?”
Miriam nodded. “I think Paulie’s done good. Probably.” Hope there’s something appropriate on the far side, in “world three,” she thought. “Okay, I’m going to start on a shopping list of things we need to move in there. If it works out, I’ll start ferrying stuff over to the other side—then make a trip through to the far side, to see if we’re in the right place.” She grinned. “If this works, I will be very happy.” And I won’t have to fork out a second deposit for somewhere more useful, she noted mentally.
“How was your reading?” Paulie asked, coming downstairs again.
“Confusing.” Miriam rubbed her forehead. “This history book—” she tapped the cover of the “legal” one—“is driving me nuts.”
The Hidden Family: Book Two of Merchant Princes Page 6