Agent of the Crown

by Melissa McShane

  “Of course, milord,” she said, bowing. She had to work hard to conceal her excitement beneath an expression of pleased disinterest. Morgan joined the Baron on the doorstep, his head lifted as if sniffing something on the cool breeze. Early autumn in the mountains was still warm, but the crisp smell of the air told Telaine winter was coming. Morgan turned to look at Telaine with his pointed smile. His eyes were disturbingly intent on her. He’d come to fetch her a few times, always without a spare mount, always maneuvering her to clutch him tightly, and despite her initial suspicions about him and the Baron, Telaine was now certain he had a sexual interest in her.

  She met his eyes with innocent unconcern. His obsession might be countered for a while by her pretense at not understanding what he wanted, drawing out whatever game he was playing, but at some point Telaine was going to have to do something drastic. She wished she knew what.

  A groom led two horses around to the front door. One was Morgan’s and the other was an indifferent gray mare, not a bad horse, but suffering by comparison to Morgan’s elegant bay. The Baron mounted and gave her a wave of dismissal, his attention already on the fort. Morgan fixed her with a long, intimate stare before following.

  Telaine went inside, allowing the servants to close the front door behind her. She looked around. No other servants near. She decided to lay the foundation for her snooping rather than go straight for the study, and went up the stairs into the curio room. Her job today was to repair the self-focusing binoculars, although she had no idea what the Baron used them for. Watching non-existent birds in trees far too close to require long-distance vision, perhaps?

  She cradled the exquisite Device, brass wrapped in leather with finely-ground glass lenses, then left the room and, ostentatiously sniffing, went back down the hall. She encountered no one; she kept on playing her part anyway. Always assume you have an audience.

  She made a show of going into each room in the southeast hall, admiring the billiards table, wrinkling her nose at the trophy heads. Still no one. Where were all the servants, anyway? She almost never saw the same servants twice. It must be hard, working for the Baron.

  The study door was locked. Telaine glanced both ways, tucked the binoculars under her arm, took her lock picks out of her boot, and worked at the lock until it clicked. It took far too long. She was falling out of practice.

  The study was as she’d seen it before: desk, chair, bookshelves, drinks table. None of the drawers in the desk were locked, a bad sign. She went through all of them quickly but thoroughly. No correspondence from Harroden, no records of mysterious shipments. She closed the last drawer, looked around the room, and thought.

  The room had been locked. The Baron had things in here he didn’t want disturbed. Things he didn’t want out in the open, even if the open was a desk drawer. Telaine checked the bookshelves, ponderous things of oak with gilded finials that looked like they could kill a man if they fell on him, though that would mean getting them to move at all. They were thoroughly dusted, so she wouldn’t find any suspiciously clean books marking a hiding spot.

  She surveyed the shelves, hoping she wouldn’t have to check every single book in the room. Grandmama Alison the Royal Librarian would have been able to cast her expert eye on the collection and tell exactly how many there were. Telaine had to settle for “a lot.”

  There. Something had caught her attention, something so subtle her conscious brain hadn’t noticed it. She scanned back over the shelves. A hair, a short, fine brown hair, lay lengthwise across two books as if it had been overlooked by the maid in her vigorous dusting.

  Telaine grinned. My dear Baron, if you’re going to employ this old trick, you shouldn’t let your maids be so thorough. She gently laid the hair well to one side and lifted out one of the books, checking first to make sure it had been thoroughly dusted. Leaving her finger marks behind would be bad.

  Inside the front cover lay a handful of folded letters. Telaine removed them one by one and scanned their contents. Ah, the letters from Harroden. Naturally there would only be one half of the conversation here. They were sorted in chronological order, oldest first.

  The first was noncommittal, free of details, just some general hand-wringing about having to do favors for the Baron. The second was more interesting. Harroden had developed a spine and—so that’s what hold the Baron has on him. Harroden was a seqata addict. That explained why he’d been so quick to suspect her at the ball and probably why he was working with the Veriboldan rebels, since the plant grew abundantly in Veribold. It altered the body at the cost of the mind—built muscle, improved heart and lung function, but made the user paranoid and manic by turns, eventually to the point of total psychosis.

  Harroden claimed in this letter that he didn’t care if Steepridge revealed his “little problem.” He must have been in the irrational stage of the drug to say anything like that; seqata addiction could ruin his social standing and get him stuck in a forced rehabilitation hospital. That was part of her assignment fulfilled. Telaine moved on.

  The third letter. Harroden repented of his earlier outburst and fawned over the Baron, promising anything he wanted if he’d only keep his secret. Telaine thought briefly of young Roger Chadwick, whose father was going to ruin both their lives. Harroden, the idiot, laid out all the details of his industrial connections and royal appointments and how he could abuse them for Steepridge’s sake.

  Telaine was disgusted at the man’s belly-up toadying. She wished she dared steal these letters, but her word swearing to their existence and contents would have to do. The word of an agent of the Crown was supposed to be equal to evidence in court, but she’d never seen it tried. With luck, her uncle’s soldiers would be able to retrieve these when they finally arrested the Baron.

  The fourth letter referred in a more general way to “shipments” the way the letters she’d found in Harroden’s study had, but the fifth letter referred to a shipment that was “the fourth part” of something bigger. The letter was written in response to a probably infuriated letter of the Baron’s, because Harroden came across as even more spineless and toadying than in the other letters. It seemed the shipment had been damaged in transit and Harroden promised not only to replace it, but to increase the rate of the other shipments.

  Still no mention of what those other shipments were. The one Harroden and the Baron had discussed had involved weapons, but Harroden had fingers and a couple of toes in so many pies it would be foolish to assume that was all Harroden was shipping him, especially since Harroden had access to so many other, more valuable trade goods.

  Telaine put the letters back exactly as she’d found them, replaced the book and the hair, then stared a moment at the heavy desk. Something didn’t seem right about this. She needed to find out what the Baron was receiving from Harroden, which would tell her whether he was smuggling goods for his own use or reselling them elsewhere. Barony Highton adjoined Steepridge to the west and was as cut off from the plains as Steepridge during the winter; there’d be a good market for trade goods there. Silverfield, where her Aunt Catherine was Baroness, was also a possibility, though less likely, given that winter would cut that trade route off for almost six months. The chances of the Baron bringing in supplies to help provision Thorsten Keep out of the goodness of his heart were vanishingly small. At any rate, she’d learned enough to know she should look elsewhere for further information.

  She checked to make sure she hadn’t left any traces of her presence, such as her own hairs, then left and crouched to relock the door, far too slowly. She needed more practice.

  She’d just made the lock click back into place when someone said, “What are you doing there?” She concealed the lock picks in her sleeve and turned slowly, not a trace of guilt anywhere on her.

  She waved the binoculars at the maid who had addressed her. “Looking for a source to imbue this,” she said. “I think I smell one in there, but it’s locked. I don’t suppose you have a key?”

  “Milord’s got the keys,” t
he woman, a plump lady in her thirties, said. “You best not poke around there. That’s himself’s study and he don’t like it over much when we do.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s all right, I’ll find another one. Happen he’ll let me use it when he’s back.” Telaine smiled and saluted the woman, who shrugged and proceeded down the hall toward the front doors. Wait. The woman had been between Telaine and the near end of the hall, but Telaine knew she hadn’t passed her, and the only other door at this end of the hall was directly behind her.

  Telaine approached the end of the hall and looked at the paneling, which looked like all the rest of the manor walls, but on inspection proved to be cheap pine stained and distressed to look expensive. Behind it lay steep, narrow stairs going up and down. Servants’ stairs. Now that she was paying attention, she could smell something cooking. She decided to investigate the ground floor.

  The narrow, uncarpeted stairs led down to a hallway that turned sharply to the right. The smell of food was stronger now, boiled vegetables and roasted pork and chicken broth mixed with spices. The air hummed with movement and the murmur of pots boiling.

  Telaine poked her head around the corner and saw two giant ranges, each twice the size of Aunt Weaver’s stove, fire glowing behind their grates. Slabs of six-inch-thick oak, scarred with cuts and burns, lined the walls between them, and another took up the center of the vast room, bristling with blocks of knives and a rack of carving forks. Women in dark dresses and brown aprons hurried between counter and pot, fireplace and stove. One small girl stood on a stepstool in front of a sink big enough for her to sit in, scrubbing a china platter.

  “What are you doing here?” said an elderly woman with a loud voice who was standing at the central counter. She came toward Telaine, wiping her hands on her apron. “This place is off limits.”

  “I’m sorry to intrude, but I was following a source for this,” Telaine lied, holding up the binoculars.

  The woman eyed them with suspicion. “Don’t know what that means.”

  “I’m a Deviser. I’m fixing the Baron’s Devices. This one needs…it’s a kind of energy Devices run on. I can smell the source down here.”

  “Surprised you can smell anything but roast chicken,” the woman said, her face still filled with suspicion.

  “I’m sorry to have bothered you.” Telaine turned to go.

  “You from Ellismere?” the woman asked.

  “I’m living in Longbourne with my Aunt Weaver.”

  The woman’s face cleared. “Our Alys is apprenticed to Mistress Weaver. You’re her niece?” She gestured to Telaine to enter the kitchen. “Come in and have a seat. Haven’t seen our Alys in weeks. Don’t get much time off.”

  Her smile made her wrinkled cheeks more deeply lined, the creases at the corners of her eyes giving her a merry look. “I’m Mistress Wilson. Alys is my daughter’s youngest. Pretty as they come.” Telaine agreed, keeping her opinions on Alys’s character to herself.

  “Here, have a taste of this,” Mistress Wilson said, holding a spoon to Telaine’s lips.

  Telaine tasted and said, “That’s delicious.”

  “That’s supper, that is,” Mistress Wilson said with satisfaction. “Say what you like about himself, but he sets a good table.”

  “Mistress Wilson, what is it they say about Baron Steepridge? I’ve been working for him, on and off, for several weeks now, and no one will say why he’s disliked.” Telaine helped herself to an apple.

  Mistress Wilson’s eyes went guarded. “Not my place to speak against the Baron,” she said. “He’s got his ways and they ain’t Longbourne ways. Happen people don’t warm to them as aren’t the same.”

  Telaine was certain that although the woman wasn’t lying, she wasn’t giving Telaine the whole truth. Well, time enough to press Mistress Wilson on future visits. She was an interesting, pleasant lady, and she was a fabulous cook. And she’d be a good asset to cultivate, she thought, an agent’s thought, and was surprised to find it had been her second thought.

  “Don’t let that boil over!” shouted Mistress Wilson, turning her attention to a hapless assistant at the fireplace. Telaine, munching her apple, casually exited the kitchen and proceeded in the direction opposite the stairs. The next doorway revealed a table laid with a white cloth and four benches drawn up around it. Servants’ dining hall.

  Opposite the dining hall were a number of closed doors; she peeked into a few and found storerooms for spices and baking needs, the housekeeper’s offices, and a short stairway leading down to the wine cellar. Nothing interesting.

  She turned another corner and found a short hallway with three doors, one straight ahead and two to her left. The two to the left, broader and squarer than normal, were locked with reasonably good locks Telaine was sure she wouldn’t be able to pick without being noticed by a servant. The door at the end of the hall swung open easily, revealing bright midday light and a view down the valley. Telaine noted how wide the doors and the hall were. Easily able to accommodate large, mysterious shipments.

  She scrutinized the locks again, then regretfully turned away. Whatever was in those rooms would have to wait until some time when all the servants were busy elsewhere.

  She went back around to the stairs and up to the third floor. Time to get back to work before the Baron returned. Telaine hadn’t caught a whiff of mint and lilac anywhere; how inconvenient. At some point her need for a source would be real. The binoculars were a simple repair, just a new spring, but they were beautiful and she couldn’t help taking them apart further to see how they worked.

  She was tightening down a minute screw when the door opened and someone entered without speaking. Morgan. She was as certain of it as if he’d announced his presence. He made no movement to approach her, so she chose to ignore him. Then he took a step, and another, and her heart began beating faster with anxious anticipation—should she continue to pretend unawareness, or greet him with that innocent, ignorant expression she’d cultivated just for him?

  She moved on to another screw, waiting for him to speak, her nerves making her hands shake enough that holding the tiny screwdriver was difficult. Then he stopped, very near to her, and his hand caressed her spine, from the base of her neck to above her hips. She jumped; several tiny pieces fell to the floor. “Mister Morgan!” she exclaimed, squatting to retrieve the pieces. “Please don’t take such liberties.”

  “But you’re so attractive when you’re intent on your work,” he said quietly. He took a step back, but was still far too close for Telaine’s peace of mind. She laid the pieces back on the pedestal where she was working, and turned to look at him. Now her hands were shaking too much to hold a tool at all. She clasped her hands and kept her voice steady.

  “Mister Morgan, I’m here to work for the Baron. That’s all. I would rather you not stand so close to me while I’m working.”

  “Does that mean you’d welcome my…closeness…at other times?” The pointed smile was back. It still didn’t reach his eyes. She tried a demure smile.

  “I don’t have time for any sort of closeness now,” she said. “Though I’m honored by your interest. Please don’t be offended by my refusal.”

  The smile widened. “On the contrary. I find it…refreshing.”

  The Baron entered the room. “Morgan, are you disturbing my Deviser?” Telaine, her hands no longer shaking, had to clench one of them on that “my.” “My dear, are you finished?” Funny how the Baron’s “my dear” never had any tenderness in it. Funny, and a relief.

  “One more moment, milord. I’m afraid Mister Morgan startled me and I dropped the last few pieces.” Telaine twisted another screw, then held the binoculars out to the Baron. “Would you test them, milord?”

  The Baron turned toward the window. “Perfect,” he said. He laid them back on their pedestal. “Can I tempt you to join us for dinner?”

  She put on a sad but firm expression. “I’m afraid I have another job back in town to return to. Maybe another time?”

&n
bsp; The Baron lifted her hand to his red lips. “Certainly.” The air of distraction he’d worn earlier was gone. What kind of problem would the fort have had for him to deal with? Getting inside the fort would have to be her next priority. Those shipments had to be somewhere.

  Chapter Twelve

  She hadn’t been lying about having a job in Longbourne. She stopped at the tavern for dinner, then knocked on Mistress Richardson’s—Eleanor’s—door. The little girl, Hope, answered, flinging herself around Telaine’s knees.

  “You’re late,” she accused. “I been waiting all day.”

  “Hope, I told you not to annoy Miss Bricker,” said Eleanor. Her hands and face were red from washing, and she pushed a strand of her hair out of her eyes. “She’s been watching all day for you. I couldn’t stop her,” she said in a quiet voice.

  “I much prefer her embraces to the one I had earlier,” Telaine said, then bit her tongue. Eleanor straightened and gave Telaine a worried look. “The Baron?” she asked.

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle,” Telaine said. “Hope, why don’t you show me the problem?”

  Hope took her by the hand and dragged her through the large front room in which Eleanor did laundry and up a short flight of stairs that practically qualified as a ladder. She led Telaine to the room she shared with her mother, went to her trundle bed, and held up her rag doll. “She doesn’t talk,” she announced, then gave the doll a two-armed hug that would have crushed a real baby.

  “Is she supposed to?”

  Hope nodded. “She used to talk when Marie had her. Then she stopped.”

  “Can I hold her?” Hope nodded and handed the doll over. Telaine felt it all over and found, in the head, a hard yet still pliant knot. “I’m afraid this is going to take some work,” she said. “And your ma will have to help because I can’t sew.”

  Hope screwed up her face. “How come you can’t sew if you’re big?”

  “Because I make Devices instead,” Telaine lied. The truth was she’d always been awkward with a needle, despite everything master seamstress Imogen North could do. The discovery that she had a talent for Devisery had been a relief from the fear that she was fumble-fingered, period.