“That wasn’t my doing,” she said evenly.
“I know it wasn’t.” He turned to face her, and she saw that he was holding a somewhat tarnished silver teapot. “And you’d taken the Marx, so it wasn’t as if it was lying around for him to trip over, was it? For which I believe I owe you thanks enough to cancel out any ill will resulting from his unwelcome visit.” He held up the pot. “Can I offer you some refreshment, while you explain why you’re here?”
“Sure.” She glanced in the opposite direction. “In there?”
“The morning room, by all means. I will be but a few moments.”
Miriam walked into Burgeson’s morning room and got a surprise. The room was perfectly round. Even the window frames and the door were curved in line with the wall, and the plaster moldings around the ceiling described a perfect circle twelve feet in diameter. It was also extremely untidy. A huge and dubious Chesterfield sofa with stuffing hanging out of its arms hulked at one side, half submerged beneath a flood of manuscripts and books. An odd-looking upright piano, its scratched lid supporting a small library, leaned drunkenly against the wall. There was a fireplace, but the coals in it barely warmed the air immediately in front of it, and the room was icy cold. A plate with the remnants of a cold lunch sat next to the fireplace. Miriam sat gingerly on the edge of the sofa. The sofa was cold too, so that it seemed to suck the heat right through her layers of heavy clothing.
“How do you take your tea?” Burgeson called. “Milk, sugar?”
He was moving in the hall. She slipped a hand into her bag and pulled out her weapon, and pointed its spine at him. “Milk, no sugar,” she replied.
“Very good.” He advanced, bearing a tray, and laid it down in front of the fireplace. There were, she noticed, bags under his eyes. He looked tired, or possibly ill. “What’s that?” He asked, staring at her hand.
“One good history book deserves another,” she said evenly.
“Oh dear.” He chuckled hoarsely. “You know I can’t offer you anything for it. Not on a Sunday. If the police—”
“Take it, it’s a gift,” she said impatiently.
“A gift?” From his expression Miriam deduced that the receipt of presents was not an experience wim which Erasmus Burgeson was well acquainted—he made no move to take it. “I’m touched, m’dear. Mind if I ask what prompted this unexpected generosity?” He was staring at her warily, as if he expected her to sprout bat wings and bite him.
“Sure,” she said easily. “If you would pour the tea before it gets cold? Is it always this cold here in, uh, whatever this city is called?”
He froze for a moment, then knelt down and began pouring tea from the pot into two slightly chipped Delft cups. “Boston.”
“Ah, Boston it is.” She nodded to herself. “The cold?”
“Only when a smog notice is in effect.” Burgeson pointed at the fire. “Damned smokeless fuel ration’s been cut again. You can only burn so much during a smog, or you run out and then it’s just too bad. Especially if the pipes burst. But when old father smog rolls down the Back Bay, you’d rather not have been born, lest pipes of a different kind should go pop.” He coughed for effect and patted his chest. “You speak the King’s English remarkably well for someone who doesn’t know a blessed thing. Where are you from, really?”
She put the book down on the heap on the sofa. “As far as I can tell, about ten miles and two hundred years away,” she said, feeling slightly light-headed at the idea of telling him even this much.
“Not France? Are you sure you don’t work for the dauphin’s department?” He cocked his head on one side, parrotlike.
“Not France. Where I come from they chopped his head off a long time ago.” She watched him carefully.
“Chopped his head off? Fascinating—” He rose on one knee, and held out a cup to her.
“Thank you.” She accepted it.
“If this is madness, it’s a most extraordinary delusion,” he said, nodding. “Would you be so good as to tell me more?”
“In due course. I have a couple of questions for you, however.” She took a decorous sip of the tea. “Specifically, taking on trust the question of your belief in my story, you might want to contemplate some of the obstacles a traveler from, um, another world, might face in creating an identity for themselves in this one. And especially in the process of buying a house and starting a business, when one is an unaccompanied female in a strange country. I don’t know much about me legal status of women here other than that it differs quite significantly from where I come from. I think I’m probably going to need a lawyer, and possibly a proxy. Which is why I thought of you.”
“I see.” Burgeson was almost going cross-eyed in his attempts to avoid interrupting her. “Pray tell, why me?”
“Because an officer of the law recommended you.” She grinned. “I figure a fence who is also an informer is probably a safer bet than someone who’s so incompetent that he hasn’t reached a working accommodation with the cops.” There were other reasons too, reasons connected with Miriam’s parents and upbringing, but she wasn’t about to give him that kind of insight into her background. Trust went only so far, after all.
“A fence—” He snorted. “I’m not dishonest or unethical, ma’am.”
“You just sell books that the Lord Provost’s Court wants burned,” she said, with an amused tone. “And the police recommend you. Do I need to draw a diagram?”
He signed. “Guilty as charged. If you aren’t French, are you sure you aren’t a Black Chamber agent playing a double gamer’
“What’s the Black Chamber?”
“Oh.” Abruptly he looked gloomy. “I suppose I should also have sold you an almanac.”
“That might have been a good idea,” she agreed.
“Well, now.” He brushed papers from the piano stool and sat on it, opposite her, his teacup balanced precariously on a bony knee. “Supposing I avoid saying anything that might incriminate myself. And supposing we take as a matter of faith your outrageous claim to be a denizen of another, ah, world? Like this one, only different. No le Roi Francaise, indeed. What, then, could you be wanting with a humble dealer and broker in secondhand goods and wares like myself?”
“Connections.” Miriam relaxed a little. “I need to establish a firm identity here, as a woman of good character. I have some funds to invest—you’ve seen the form they take—but mostly ... hmm. In the place I come from, we do things differently. And while we undoubtedly do some things worse, everything I have seen so far convinces me that we are far, far better at certain technical fields. I intend to establish a type of company that as far as I can tell doesn’t exist here, Mister Burgeson. I am limited in the goods I can carry back and forth, physically, to roughly what I can carry on my back—but ideas are frequently more valuable than gold bricks.” She grinned. “I said I’d need a lawyer, and perhaps a proxy to sign documents for my business. I forgot to mention that I will also want a patent clerk and a front man for purposes of licensing my inventions.”
“Inventions. Such as?” He sounded skeptical.
“Oh, many things.” She shrugged. “Mostly little things. A machine for binding documents together in an office that is cheap to run, compact, and efficient—so much so that where I come from they’re almost as common as pens. A better design of brake mechanism for automobiles. A better type of wood screw, a better kind of electric cell. But one or two big things, too. A drug that can cure most fulminating infections rapidly and effectively, without side effects. A more efficient engine for aviation.”
Burgeson stared at her. “Incredible,” he said sharply. “You have some proof that you can come up with all these miracles?”
Miriam reached into her bag and pulled out her second weapon, one that had cost her nearly its own weight in gold, back home, a miniature battery-powered gadget with a four-inch color screen. “When I leave, you can start by looking at that book. In the meantime, here’s a toy we use for keeping children quiet on long journeys w
here I come from. How about some light Sunday entertainment?” And she hit the “start” button on the DVD player.
Three hours and at least a pint of tea later, Miriam stepped down from a hackney carriage outside the imposing revolving doors of the Brighton Hotel. Behind her, the driver grunted as he heaved her small trunk down from the luggage rack—”if you’re going to try to pass in polite society you’ll need one, no lady of quality would travel without at least a change of day wear and her dinner dress,” Burgeson had told her as he gave her the trunk—”and you need to be at least respectable enough to book a room.” Even if the trunk had been pawned by a penniless refugee and cluttered up a pawnbroker’s cellar for a couple of years, it looked like luggage.
“Thank you,” Miriam said as graciously as she could, and tipped the driver a sixpence. She turned back to the door to see a bellhop already lifting her trunk on his handcart. “I say! You there.”
The concierge at the front desk didn’t turn his nose up at a single woman traveling alone. The funereal outfit Burgeson had scared up for her seemed to forbid all questions, especially after she had added a severe black cap and a net veil in place of her previous hat. “What does milady require?” he asked politely.
“I’d like to take one of your first-class suites. For myself. I travel with no servants, so room service will be required. I will be staying for at least a week, and possibly longer while I seek to buy a house and put the affairs of my late husband in order.” I hope Erasmus wasn’t stringing me along about getting hold of a new identity, she thought.
“Ah, by all means. I believe room fourteen is available, m’lady. Perhaps you would like to view it? If it is to your satisfaction...”
“I’m sure it will be,” she said easily. “And if it isn’t you’ll see to it, I’m sure, won’t you? How much will it be?”
He stiffened slightly. “A charge of two pounds and eleven shillings a night applies for room and board, ma’am,” he said severely.
“Hmm.” She sucked on her lower lip. “And for a week? Or longer?”
“I believe we could come down from that a little,” he said, less aggressively. “Especially if provision was made in advance.”
“Two a night.” Miriam palmed a huge, gorgeously colored ten-pound note onto the front desk and paused. “Six shillings on top for the service.”
The concierge smiled and nodded at her. “Then it will be an initial four nights?” he asked.
“I will pay in advance, if I choose to renew it,” she replied tonelessly. Bastard, she thought angrily. Erasmus had primed her with the hotel’s rates. Two pounds flat was the norm for a luxury suite: This man was trying to soak her. “If it’s satisfactory,” she emphasized.
“I’ll see to it myself.” He bowed, then stepped out from behind his desk. “If I may show you up to your suite myself, m’lady?”
Once she was alone in the hotel suite, Miriam locked the door on the inside, then removed her coat and hung it up to dry in the niche by the door. “I’m impressed,” she said aloud. “It’s huge.” She peeled off her gloves and slung them over a brass radiator that gurgled beneath the shuttered windows, then unbuttoned her jacket and collar and knelt to unlace her ankle boots—her feet were beginning to feel as if they were molded to the inside of the damp, cold leather. Chilblains as an occupational hazard for explorers of other worlds? she thought whimsically. She stepped out of her shoes then carried them to the radiator, stockinged feet feeling almost naked against the thick pile of the woolen carpet.
Dry at last, she walked over to the sideboard and the huge silver samovar, steaming gently atop a gas flame plumbed into the wall. She poured a glass full of hot water and dunked a sachet of Earl Grey tea into it. Finally, gratefully, she plopped herself down in the overstuffed armchair opposite the bedroom door, pulled out her dictaphone, and began to compose a report to herself. “Here I am, in Suite fourteen of the Brighton Hotel. The concierge tried to soak me. Getting a handle on the prices is hard—a pound seems to be equivalent to about, uh, two hundred dollars? Something like that. This is an expensive suite, and it shows; it’s got central heating, electric lights—incandescent filaments, lots of them, dim enough you can look right at them—and silk curtains.” She glanced through the open bathroom door. “The bathroom looks to be all brass and porcelain fittings and a flushing toilet. Hmm. Must check to see what their power distribution system’s like. Might be an opportunity to sell them electric showers.”
She sighed. “Tomorrow Erasmus will fix me up with a meeting with his attorney and start making inquiries about that house. He also said he’d look into a patent clerk and get me into the central reading library. Looks like their intellectual property framework is a bit primitive. I’ll need to bring over some more fungibles soon. Gold is all very well, but I’m not sure it isn’t cheaper here than it is back home. I wonder what their kitchens are short of,” she added, brooding.
“Damn. I wish there was someone to talk to.” She clicked off the little machine and put it down on the sideboard, frowning. Whether or not Erasmus Burgeson was trustworthy was an interesting question. Probably he was, up to a point—as long as he could sniff a way to put one over on the cops who were enforcing his unwilling cooperation. But he was most clearly a bachelor, and there was something uncomfortable, slightly strained about him when she was in his presence. He’s not used to dealing with women, other than customers in his shop, she decided. That’s probably it.
In any event, her head ached and she was feeling tired. Think I’ll leave the dining room for another day, she decided. The bed seemed to beckon. Tomorrow would be a fresh start...
Gold Bugs
The following morning, Miriam awakened early. It was still semi-dark outside. She yawned at her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she brushed her hair. “Hmm. They wear it long here, don’t they?” It would just have to do, she thought, as she dressed in yesterday’s clothes once more. She carefully sorted through her shoulder bag to make sure there was nothing too obtrusively alien in it, then pulled her boots on.
She paused at the foot of the main staircase, poised above the polished marble floor next to the front desk. “Can I help you, ma’am?” a bellhop offered eagerly.
She smiled wanly. “Breakfast. Where is it?” The realization that she’d missed both lunch and dinner crashed down on her. Abruptly she felt almost weak from hunger.
“This way, please!” He guided her toward two huge mahogany-and-glass doors set at one side of the foyer, then ushered her to a seat at a small table, topped in spotless linen. “I shall just fetch the waiter.”
Miriam angled her chair around to take in the other diners as discreetly as possible. It’s like a historical movie! she thought. One set in a really exclusive Victorian hotel, except the Victorians hadn’t had a thing for vivid turquoise and purple wallpaper and the costumes were messed up beyond recognition. Men in Nehru suits with cutaway waists, women in long skirts or trousers and wing-collared shirts. Waiters with white aprons bearing plates of—fish? And bread rolls? The one familiar aspect was the newspaper. “Can you fetch me a paper?” she asked after the bellhop.
“Surely, ma’am!” he answered, and was off like a shot. He was back in a second and Miriam fumbled for a tip, before starting methodically on the front page.
The headlines in The London Intelligencer were bizarrely familiar, simultaneously tainted with the exotic. “Speaker: House May Impeach Crown for Adultery”—but no, there was no King Clinton in here, just unfamiliar names and a proposal to amend the Basic Law to add a collection of additional charges for which the Crown could be impeached—Adultery, Capitative Fraud, and Irreconsilience, whatever that was. They can impeach the king? Miriam shook her head, moved on to the next story. “Morris and Stokes to hang,” about a pair of jewel thieves who had killed a shopkeeper. Farther down the page was more weirdness, a list of captains of merchantmen to whom had been granted letters of marque and reprise against “the forces and agents of the continental enemy,” an
d a list of etheric resonances assigned for experimentation by the Teloptic Wireless Company of New Britain.
A waiter appeared at her shoulder as she was about to turn the page. “May I be of service, ma’am?”
“Sure. What’s good, today?”
He smiled broadly. “The kippers are most piquant, and if I may recommend Mrs. Wilson’s strawberry jam for after? Does ma’am prefer tea or coffee?”
“Coffee. Strong, with milk.” She nodded. “I’ll take your recommendations, please. That’ll be all.”
He rustled away from her, leaving her puzzling over the meaning of a story about taxation powers being granted by The-King-In-Parliament to the Grand Estates, and enforcement of the powers of printing rights by the Royal Excise. Even the addition of a powerful dose of coffee and a plate of smoked fish—not her customary start to the day, but nevertheless remarkably edible on an empty stomach—didn’t make it any clearer. This place is so complex! Am I ever going to understand it? She wondered.
She was almost to the bottom of her coffee when a different bellhop arrived, bearing a silver platter. “Message for the Widow Fletcher?” he asked, using the pseudonym Miriam had checked in under.
“That’s me.” Miriam took the note atop the platter—a piece of card with strips of printed tape gummed to it. MEET ME AT 54 GRT MAURICE ST AT 10 SEE BATES STOP EB ENDS. “Ah, good.” She glanced at the clock above the ornate entrance. “Can you arrange a cab for me, please? To Great Maurice Street, leaving in twenty minutes.”
Folding her paper she rose and returned to her room to retrieve her hat and topcoat. The game’s afoot, she thought excitedly.
By the time the cab found its way to Great Maurice Street she’d cooled off a little, taking time to collect her thoughts and begin to work out what she needed to do and say. She also made sure her right glove was pulled down around her wrist, and the sleeve of her blouse was bunched up toward the elbow. Not that it was the ideal way to make an exit—indeed, it would wreck her plans completely if she had to escape by means of the temporary tattoo of a certain intricate knot—but if Erasmus had decided to sell her out to the constabulary, he’d be sorry.
The Hidden Family Page 9