The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1)

by Charles Stross

  ‘Well then.’ He nodded. ‘Go down Jefferson here, turn a left into Highgate. That’ll bring you to Holmes Alley. Don’t go down the Blackshaft by mistake, it’s a rookery and you’ll never find your way out. In Holmes Alley you can find the shop of Erasmus Burgeson, and he’ll set you up nicely.’

  ‘Oh thank you,’ Miriam gushed, but the cop had already turned away – probably looking for a vagrant to harass.

  She hurried along for a block then, remembering the cop’s directions, followed them. More traffic passed on the road and overhead. Tractors pulling four or even six short trailers blocked the street intermittently, and an incongruous yellow pony trap clattered past. Evidently yellow was the interuniverse color of cabs, although Miriam couldn’t guess what Boston’s environmentalists would have made of the coal burners. There were shops here, shops by the dozen, but no department stores, nor supermarkets, or gas-burning cars, or color photographs. The advertisements on the sides of the buildings were painted on, simple slogans like BUY EDISON’S ROSE PETAL SOAP FOR SKIN LIKE FLOWER BLOSSOM. And there was, now she knew what to look for, no sign of beggars.

  A bell rang as Miriam pushed through the door of Erasmus Burgeson’s shop, beneath the three gold spheres that denoted his trade. It was dark and dusty, shelves racked high with table settings, silverware, a cabinet full of pistols, other less identifiable stuff – in the other side of the shop, rack after rack of dusty clothing. The cash register, replete with cherubim and gold leaf, told its own story: And as she’d hoped, the counter beside it displayed a glass lid above a velvet cloth layered in jewelry. There didn’t seem to be anybody in the shop. Miriam looked about uneasily, trying to take it all in. This is what people here consider valuable, she thought. Better get a handle on it.

  A curtain at the back stirred as a gaunt figure pushed into the room. He shambled behind the counter and turned to stare at her. ‘Haven’t seen you in here before, have I?’ he asked, quizzically.

  ‘Uh, no.’ Miriam shuffled. ‘Are you Mr. Burgeson?’ she asked.

  ‘The same.’ He didn’t smile. Dressed entirely in black, his sleeves and trousers thin as pipe cleaners, all he’d need would be a black stovepipe hat to look like a revenant from the Civil War. ‘And who would you be?’

  ‘My name is Miriam, uh, Fletcher.’ She pursed her lips. ‘I was told you are a pawnbroker.’

  ‘And what else would I be in a shop like this?’ He cocked his head to one side, like a parrot, his huge dark eyes probing at her in the gloom.

  ‘Well. I’m lately come to these shores.’ She coughed. ‘And I am short of money, if not in possessions that might be worth selling. I was hoping you might be able to set me up.’

  ‘Possessions.’ Burgeson sat down – perched – on a high, backless wooden stool that raised his knees almost to the level of the counter-top. ‘It depends what type of possession you have in mind. I can’t buy just any old tat now, can I?’

  ‘Well. To start with, I have a couple of pieces of jewelry.’ He nodded encouragingly, so Miriam continued. ‘But then, I have in mind something more substantial. You see, where I come from I am of not inconsiderable means, and I have not entirely cut myself off from the old country.’

  ‘And what country would that be?’ asked Burgeson. ‘I only ask because of the requirements of the Aliens and Sedition Act,’ he added hastily.

  ‘That would be – ’ Miriam licked her lips. ‘Scotland.’

  ‘Scotland.’ He stared at her. ‘With an accent like that,’ he said with heavy irony. ‘Well, well, well. Scotland it is. Show me the jewelry.’

  ‘One moment.’ Miriam walked forward, peered down at the countertop. ‘Hmm. These are a bit disappointing. Is this all you deal in?’

  ‘Ma’am.’ He hopped down from the stool. ‘What do you take me for? This is the common stock on public display, where any mountebank might smash and grab. The better class I keep elsewhere.’

  ‘Oh.’ She reached into her pouch and fumbled for a moment, then pulled out what she’d been looking for. It was a small wooden box – purchased from a head shop in Cambridge, there being a pronounced shortage of cheap wooden jewelry boxes on the market – containing two pearl earrings. Real pearls. Big ones. ‘For starters, I’d like you to put a value on these.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Burgeson picked the box up, chewing his lower lip. ‘Excuse me.’ He whipped out a magnifying lens and examined them minutely. ‘I’ll need to test them,’ he murmured, ‘but if these are real pearls, they’re worth a pretty penny. Where did you get them?’

  ‘That is for me to know and you to guess.’ She tensed.

  ‘Hah.’ He grinned at her cadaverously. ‘You’d better have a good story next time you try to sell them. I’m not sticking my neck in a noose for your mistress if she decides to send the thief-takers after you.’

  ‘Hmm. What makes you think I’m a light-fingered servant?’ she asked.

  ‘Well.’ He looked down his nose at her. ‘Your clothes are not what a woman of fashion, or even of her own means, would wear – ’

  ‘Fresh off the boat,’ Miriam observed.

  ‘And earrings are among the most magnetic of baubles to those of a jackdaw disposition,’ he added.

  ‘And wanting a suit of clothes that does not mark me out as a stranger,’ Miriam commented.

  ‘Besides which,’ he added with some severity, ‘Scotland has not existed for a hundred and seventy years. It’s all part of Grande Bretaigne.’

  ‘Oh.’ Miriam covered her mouth. Shit! ‘Well then.’ She mustered up a sickly smile. ‘How about this?’

  The quarter-kilogram bar of solid gold was about an inch wide, two inches long, and half an inch thick. She set it down on the display case like an intrusion from another world, shimmering with the promise of wealth and power and riches.

  ‘Well now,’ breathed Burgeson, ‘if that is what ladies of means pay their bills with in Scotland, maybe it’s not such an unbelievable fiction after all.’

  Miriam nodded. It had better cover the bills, she thought, the damn thing set me back nearly three thousand dollars. ‘It all depends how honest you aren’t,’ she said briskly. ‘There are more where this one comes from. I’m looking to buy several things, including but not limited to money. I need to fit in. I don’t care if you’re fiddling your taxes or lying to the government, all I care about is whether you’re honest with your customers. You don’t know me, and if you don’t want to, you’ll never see me again. On the other hand, if you say “yes” – ’ she met his eyes – ‘this need not be our last transaction. Not by a very long way.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Burgeson stared right back at her. ‘Are you in French employ?’ he asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  Miriam’s fleeting look of puzzlement seemed to reassure him. ‘Well that’s good,’ he said genially. ‘Excuse me while I fetch the aqua regia: If this is pure I can advance you, oh, ten pounds immediately and another, ahum – ’ he picked up the gold bar and placed it on the balance behind him – ‘sixty-two and eight shillings by noon tomorrow.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Miriam shook her head. ‘I’ll take ten today, and sixty tomorrow – plus five full pounds’ credit in your shop, here and now, for goods you hold.’ She’d been eyeing the price tags. The shilling, a twentieth of a pound, seemed to occupy the same role as the dollar back home, except that they went further. Pounds were big currency.

  ‘Ridiculous.’ He stared at her. ‘Three pounds.’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Done,’ he said, unnervingly rapidly. Miriam had a feeling that she’d been had, somehow, but nodded. He strode over to the door and flipped the sign in the window pane to CLOSED. ‘Let me test out this bar. I’ll just take a sample with this scalpel, mind . . .’ He hurried into the back room. A minute later he re-emerged, bearing a glass measuring cylinder full of water into which he dropped the gold bar. Scribbled measurements followed. Finally he nodded. ‘Oh, most satisfying,’ he muttered to himself before looking at her. ‘Your sample is indeed of
acceptable purity,’ he said, looking almost surprised. Reaching into an inner pocket he produced a battered wallet, from which he plucked improbably large banknotes. ‘Nine one-pound notes, milady, the balance in silver and a few coppers. I hope these are to your satisfaction; the bank across the street will happily exchange them, I assure you.’ Next he produced a fountain pen and a ledger, and a wax brick and a candle and a metal die. ‘I shall just make out this promissory note for sixty pounds to you. If you would like to select from my wares, I can work while you equip yourself.’

  ‘Do you have a measuring tape?’ she asked.

  ‘Indeed.’ He pulled one down from a hook behind the counter. ‘If you need any alterations making, Missus Borisovitch across the way is a most excellent seamstress, works while you wait. And her daughter is a fine milliner, too.’

  Over the next hour, Miriam ransacked the pawnbroker’s shop. The range of clothing hanging in mothballs from rails all the way up to the ceiling, a dizzying twenty feet up, was huge and strange, but she knew what she wanted – anything that wouldn’t look too alien while she realized her liquid assets and found a real dressmaker to equip her for the sort of business she intended to conduct. Which would almost certainly require formal business wear, as high finance and legal work usually did back home. For a miracle, Miriam discovered a matching jacket, blouse, and skirt that was in good condition and close enough to her size to fit. She changed in Burgeson’s cramped, damp-smelling cellar while he reopened the shop. The outfit took some getting used to, but in his dusty mirror she saw someone not unlike the women she’d passed on her way into town.

  ‘Ah.’ Burgeson nodded to her. ‘That is a good choice. It will, however, cost you one pound fourteen and sixpence.’

  ‘Sure.’ Miriam nodded. ‘Next, I want a history book.’

  ‘A history book.’ He looked at her oddly. ‘Any particular title?’

  She smiled thinly. ‘One covering the past three hundred years, in detail.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Burgeson ducked back into the back of the shop. While he was gone, Miriam located a pair of kidskin gloves and a good topcoat. The hats all looked grotesque to her eye, but in the end she settled on something broad-brimmed and floppy, with not too much fur. He returned and dumped a hardbound volume on the glass display case. ‘You could do worse than start with this. Alfred’s Annals of the New British.’

  ‘I could.’ She stared at it. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Or.’ He pulled another book up – bound in brown paper, utterly anonymous, thinner and lighter. ‘This.’ He turned it to face her, open at the fly-leaf.

  ‘The Hanoverian Exodus Reconsidered – ’ she bit her lip when she saw the author. ‘Karl Marx. Hmm. Keep this on the bottom shelf, do you?’

  ‘It’s only prudent,’ he said, apologetically closing it and sliding it under the first book. ‘I’d strongly recommend it, though,’ he added. ‘Marx pulls no punches.’

  ‘Right. How much for both of them?’

  ‘Six shillings for the Alfred, a pound for the Marx – you do realize that simply being caught with a copy of it can land you a flogging, if not five years’ exile in Canadia?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ She suppressed a shudder. ‘I’ll take them both. And the hat, gloves, and coat.’

  ‘It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, madam,’ he said fervently. ‘When shall I see you again?’

  ‘Hmm.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘No need for the money tomorrow. I will not be back for at least five days. But if you want another of those pieces – ’

  ‘How many can you supply?’ he asked, slipping the question in almost casually.

  ‘As many as you can shift,’ she replied. ‘But on the next visit, no more than two.’

  ‘Well then.’ He chewed his lower lip. ‘For two, assuming this one tests out correctly and the next do likewise, I will pay the sum of two hundred pounds.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘But not all at once. It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Can you pay in services other than money?’ she asked.

  ‘It depends.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t deal in spying, sedition, or popery.’

  ‘I’m not in any of those businesses,’ she said, thinking Popery? ‘But I’m really, truly, from a long way away. I need to establish a toehold here that allows me to set up an import/export business. That will mean . . . hmm. Do you need identity papers to move about? Passports? Or to open a bank account, create a company, hire a lawyer to represent me?’

  He shook his head. ‘From too far away,’ he muttered. ‘God help me, yes to all of those.’

  ‘Well, then.’ She looked at him. ‘I’ll need papers. Good papers, preferably real ones from real people who don’t need them anymore – not killed, just the usual, a birth certificate from a babe who died before their first birthday,’ she added hastily.

  ‘You warm the cockles of my heart.’ He stared at her thoughtfully. ‘I’m glad to see you appear to have scruples. Are you sure you don’t want to tell me where you come from?’

  She raised a finger to her lips. ‘Not yet. Maybe when I trust you.’

  ‘Ah, well.’ He bowed. ‘Before you leave, may I offer you a glass of port? Just a little drink to our future business relationship.’

  ‘Indeed you may.’ She surreptitiously pushed back her glove to check her watch. ‘I believe I have half an hour to spare before I must depart. My carriage turns back into a pumpkin at midnight.’

  PART SEVEN

  POINT OF DIVERGENCE

  HISTORY LESSON

  ‘You are telling me that you don’t know where she is?’ The man standing by the glass display case radiated disbelief.

  Normally the contents of the case – precious relics of the Clan, valuable beyond belief – would have fascinated him, but right now his attention was focused on the bearer of bad news.

  ‘I told you she’d be difficult.’ The duke’s secretary was unapologetic. He didn’t sneer, but his expression was one of thinly veiled impatience. ‘You are dealing with a woman who was born and raised on the other side; she was clearly going to be a handful right from the start. I told you that the best way to deal with her would be to co-opt her and move her in a direction she was already going in, but you wouldn’t listen. And after that business with the hired killer – ’

  ‘That hired killer was my own blood, I’ll thank you to remember.’ Esau’s tone of voice was ominously low.

  ‘I don’t care whether he was the prince-magistrate of Xian-Ju province, it was dumb! Now you’ve told Angbard’s men that someone outside the Clan is trying to kill her, and you’ve driven her underground, and you’ve ruined her usefulness to me. I had it all taken care of until you attacked her. And then, to go after her but kill the wrong woman by mistake when I had everything in hand . . . !’

  ‘You didn’t tell us she was traveling in company. Or hiding in the Lady Olga’s rooms. Nor did we expect Olga’s lady-in-waiting to get nosy and take someone else’s bait. We’re not the only ones to have problems. You said you had her as good as under control?’ Esau turned to stare at Matthias. Today the secretary wore the riding-out garb of a minor nobleman of the barbarian east: brocade jacket over long woolen leggings, a hat with a plume of peacock feathers, and riding boots. ‘You think forging the old man’s will takes care of anything at all? Are you losing your grip?’

  ‘No.’ Matthias rested his hand lightly on his sword’s hilt. ‘Has it occurred to you that as Angbard’s heir she would have been more open to suggestions, rather than less? Wealth doesn’t necessarily translate into safety, you know, and she was clearly aware of her own isolation. I was trying to get her under control, or at least frightened into cooperating, by lining up the lesser families against her and positioning myself as her protector. You spooked her instead, before I could complete the groundwork. You exposed her to too much too soon, and the result is our shared loss. All the more so, since someone – whoever – tried to rub her out with Lady Olga.’

  ‘And whose fault is it that sh
e got away?’ Esau demanded. ‘Whose little tripwire failed?’

  ‘Mine, I’ll admit.’ Matthias shrugged again. ‘But I’m not the one who’s blundering around in the dark around here. I really wanted to enlist her in our cause. Willingly or unwillingly, it doesn’t matter. With a recognized heir in our pocket, we could have enough votes that when we get rid of Angbard . . . well. If that failed, we’d be no worse off with her dead, but it was hardly a desirable goal. It’s a good thing for you that I’ve got some contingency plans in hand.’

  ‘If the balance of power in the Clan tips too far toward the Lofstrom–Thorold–Hjorth axis, we risk losing what leverage we’ve got,’ said Esau. ‘Never mind the old bat’s power play. What did she think she was up to, anyway? If the council suspected . . .’ He shook his head. ‘You have to get this back under control. Find her and neutralize her, or we likely lose all the ground we have made in the past two years.’

  ‘I risk losing a lot more than that,’ Matthias reminded him pointedly. ‘Why did your people try to kill her? She was a natural dissident. More use to us alive than dead.’

  ‘It’s not for the likes of you to question our goals.’

  Matthias tightened his grip on his sword and turned slowly aside, keeping his eyes on Esau the whole time. ‘Retract that,’ he said flatly.

  ‘I – ’ Esau caught his eye. A momentary nod. ‘I apologize.’

  ‘We are partners in this,’ Matthias said quietly, ‘to the extent that both our necks are forfeit if our venture comes to light. That being the case, it is essential that I know not only what your organization’s intended actions are, but what goals you hope to achieve – so that I can avoid conflicts of interest. Do you understand?’

  Esau nodded again. ‘I told you there might be preexisting orders. There was indeed such an order,’ he said reluctantly. ‘It took time to come to light, that’s all.’