The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) (15 page)

*

Roland tried to say something as they left Angbard’s rooms. ‘Hush,’ she said, leaning on his arm as they descended the grand staircase. She was wobbling on her
heels. ‘Just get me back to my room.’

‘I think we need to talk,’ he said urgently.

‘Later.’ She winced as they reached the corridor.
Take lots of little steps,
she thought. The ache in her back was worst in the region of her kidneys. She felt drunk.
‘Tomorrow.’

He held the door open for her. ‘Please – ’

She looked into his eyes. They were wide and appealing: He was a transparently gallant, well-meaning young man –
Young? He’s only a couple of years younger than I am
–
with a great ass, and she instinctively distrusted that. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said firmly, then winced. ‘I’m tired. Maybe after breakfast?’

‘By all means.’ He stepped back and Miriam turned to close the door, only to find the head maidservant, Meg, standing ahead of her.

‘Ah. Meg.’ Miriam smiled experimentally. Glanced at the bathroom. ‘I’ve had a long day and I’m going to bed shortly. Would you mind leaving?’

‘But how is you to undress?’ Meg asked, confused. ‘What if you want something in the night?’

‘What’s the usual arrangement?’ Miriam asked.

‘Why, we sleep inside the door here, against your needs.’ She dipped her head.

‘Oh my.’ Miriam sighed, and would have slumped but for her dress, which seemed to be holding her upright. ‘Oh God.’ She took a stride toward the bathroom, then caught
herself on the door frame with one arm. ‘Well, you can start by undressing me.’ It took the combined efforts of two maids ten minutes to strip Miriam down to her underwear. Eventually
something gave way and her ribs could move again. ‘Oh. Oh!’ Miriam took a breath, then gulped. ‘’Scuse me.’ She fled dizzily into the bathroom, skidding on the tiled
floor, and locked the door.

‘Oy . . .’ she planted herself firmly on the toilet.

After a moment, she breathed a sigh of relief. Her gaze fell on the dictaphone and she picked it up. ‘Memo to self,’ she muttered. ‘At a formal banquet, the pain in the small
of your back might be the chair, but on the other hand, it might be your kidneys backing up.’ Four, no five, glasses of wine. She shook her head, still wobbly, and took another deep breath.
‘And the breathing trouble. Fuck ’em, next time – if they want formal, they can put up with whatever I can buy off the rack in Boston. I’m not turning myself into an
orthopedic basket case in the name of local fashion.’

Miriam took another deep breath. ‘Right. More notes. Margit of Praha, middle-aged, looks to be a chaperone for Olga Thorold, who seems to be senior to her. Olga is a ditz. Thinks a Swiss
finishing school is higher education. Main ambition is to make a good marriage. I think Angbard may have been showing her to me as a role model – maybe that’s what high-born women do
around here. I think Vincenze is just horribly shy. May be some sort of all-male schooling for menfolk here. Their English is better than the women’s. I wonder if that means they get out
more.’

She hit the ‘pause’ button, then finished with the toilet. Standing up, she stripped off, then luxuriated in the sensation of having nothing at all in contact with her skin.

A thought struck her. ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ she called through the door. ‘Don’t wait up for me. I don’t need any help.’

It was Miriam’s third bath of the day, but it didn’t strike her as excessive.

Her skin itched. She poured expensive bath salts and perfumed oil into the water without remorse, then slid down into the sea of foam. ‘Memo: The bath obviously came over from the other
side, and they’ve got hot and cold water on tap. That means they must have some way of moving heavy items, plumbing equipment. I need to find out how. If some asshole cousin is going to try
killing me because of my name, I’d like to know whether they’re likely to use a pistol or a B-52.’ A thought struck her. ‘It looks like they’re stuck in a development
trap, like the Gulf Emirates. The upper class is fabulously rich and can import luxury items to their heart’s content, and send their kids for education overseas, but they can’t import
enough, uh – stuff – to develop their population base. Start an industrial revolution. Whatever.’ She leaned back, feeling her spine unkink. ‘I wish I knew more about
developing world economics. Because if that’s what this all boils down to, I’ll have to change things.’

She put the recorder down for a couple of minutes while she soaped herself all over, trying to scrub away the sweat and stress.

‘Personal File: Roland. He’s too damn smooth.’ She paused, biting her upper lip. ‘Reminds me of the college jocks, same kind of clean-cut hunky outdoors thing, except
he’s painfully polite and doesn’t smell of beer or cigarettes. And he’s trying to hide something. First cousin, which means, um. I have no idea what that means in the context of
this extended Clan-family structure thing, except he treats me like I’m made of eggshells and soap bubbles. Great class, behaves like a real gentleman, then again, he’s probably a
gold-plated bastard under the smooth exterior. That, or Uncle Angbard is trying to throw us together for some reason. And he is a tough cookie. Right out of
The Godfather
. Trust him as far
as you can throw him.’

She leaned back farther. ‘Next Memo: sexual politics. These people are basically medievals in suits. And tonight they were just medievals. Olga is the giveaway, but the rest of it is
pretty hard to miss. Better not talk about Ben or the divorce, or the kid, they might get weird. Maybe I can qualify as an aged spinster aunt who’s too important to mess with, and
they’ll leave me alone. But if they expect me to lie back and act like a – a countess, someone’s going to be in trouble.’
And it could be me
, she admitted.
Stuck in a strange land with weird and stifling customs, under guard the whole time
–

‘Memo: The locket is not unique. Duke Angbard owns its twin. He gave it back to me to keep and talked about a doppelgängered house. And the family trait. Which means they know all
about it – and about how it works and how you use them. Hmm. Find out what they know before you start messing.’

There was a lot to think about. ‘Most kids sometimes play make-believe, that they’re actually the long-lost prince or princess of a magical kingdom. Not Ruritania with
poison-tasters, armed guards, and
Dallas
reruns as the height of sophisticated after-dinner entertainment.’ She hummed tunelessly. ‘I wonder where they get the money to pay for
the toys?’ Something Paulette had said was trying to surface, but she couldn’t quite remember what.

The bathtub drained and Miriam caught herself yawning as she toweled herself dry. ‘Maybe it’ll all go away in the morning,’ she told herself.

ECONOMICS LESSON

Miriam jolted awake with her eyes open and a strong sense of panic. Incoherent but unpleasant dreams dogged her: goggled soldiers looming over her bed, limbs moving through
molasses, too slow, too slow . . .

The bed was too big, much too big. She groped for the side of it, floundering across cold white sheets like an arctic explorer.

‘Aagh.’ She reached open air, found herself looking down at the floor from an unaccustomed height. Her arm hurt, her mouth tasted horrible – something had obviously died in it
the night before, and she ached everywhere but especially in a tight band across her forehead. ‘Mornings!’ The air was distinctly cold.

Shivering, she threw the comforter off and sat up, then jumped.

‘What are you doing in here!’ she squeaked, grabbing the covers.

‘Excuse, ma’am – we required to attend?’ The maid’s accent was thick and hard to make out: English clearly wasn’t her first language, and she looked shocked,
though whether it was at Miriam’s nakedness or her reaction to her presence wasn’t clear.

‘Well.’ Miriam held her breath for a moment, trying to get her heart under control. ‘You can just wait outside the door. I’ll be up in a minute.’

‘But how is you to be dress?’ asked the woman, a rising note of unhappiness in her voice.

‘I’ll take care of that myself.’ Miriam sat up again, this time holding the bedding around her. ‘Out. I mean, right out of my chambers, all of you, completely out! You
can come back in half an hour. And shut the door.’

She stood up as the door clicked shut, her heart still pounding. ‘How the hell do they manage?’ she wondered aloud. ‘Jesus, royalty!’ It came out as a curse.

It had never occurred to her to sympathize with the Queen of England before, but the idea of being surrounded by flunkies monitoring her every breath gave her a sinking feeling in her stomach.
I’ve got to get away from this for a while,
she realized.
Even if I can’t avoid them in the long term, they’ll drive me mad if I don’t get some
privacy.

Domestic servants were something that had passed out of the American middle-class lifestyle generations ago. Just the idea of having to deal with them made Miriam feel as if she was about to
break out in hives.

Right. I’ve got to get away for a bit. How? Where?
Miriam glanced at the bedside table and saw temporary escape sitting there, next to her dictaphone. Ah. A plan! She approached
the huge chest of drawers and rummaged through it, hunting clothes. Ten minutes later she was dressed in urban casual – jeans, sneakers, sweater, leather jacket. Someone had helpfully
installed some of her bags in the bottom of a cavernous wardrobe, and her small reporter’s briefcase was among them, preloaded with a yellow pad, pens, and some spare tapes and batteries.

She poked her nose around the bedroom door cautiously. No, there was nobody lurking in ambush.
It worked!
She told herself. Five minutes in the bathroom and she was ready to activate
her plan. Ready, apart from a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, anyway.

‘Damn. I’ll need money.’ She ransacked the reception room in haste, hunting for her personal effects, and found them in a closed bureau of exquisite workmanship – her
wallet, driving license, credit cards, and house keys. Either the servants didn’t dare tamper with the private possessions of a relative of the duke – or they didn’t know what
they were. She found some other items in the bureau that shook her – her snub-nosed pistol and a box of ammunition that she didn’t remember buying. ‘What is this?’ she asked
herself before putting the gun in her jacket pocket. She kept her hand around it. If what she was planning didn’t work . . . well, she’d jump that hurdle when she reached it.

They’re treating me as family,
she realized. Adult, mature, sensible family, not like Olga the ditz. Servants and assassins crawling out of the woodwork, it was a whole different
world.

Carefully not thinking too hard about the likely consequences of her actions, Miriam walked to the center of the reception room between sofa and fireplace, snapped open her locket with her left
hand, and focused on the design inside.

‘Owww!’ She stumbled slightly and cradled her forehead. Vision blurred, and everything throbbed. ‘Hell!’ She blinked furiously through the pounding of her abruptly
upgraded headache. The room was still there: bureau, chairs, fireplace –

‘I wondered how long you’d take,’ Roland said from behind her.

She whirled, bringing her gun to bear, then stopped. ‘Jesus, don’t do that!’

Roland watched her from the sofa, one hand holding a pocket watch, the other stretched out along the cushioned back. He was wearing a sports jacket and chinos with an open-necked shirt, like a
stockbroker on casual Friday.

The sofa was identical to the unoccupied one in the suite she’d just left – or so close as to be its twin. But Roland wasn’t the only different feature of the room. The quality
of light coming in through the window was subtly altered, and some items had appeared on the side table, and the bedroom door was shut. ‘This isn’t the same apartment,’ she said
slowly, past the fog of headache. ‘It’s a doppelgänger, right? And we’re on the other side. My side.’

Roland nodded. ‘Are you going to shoot me or not?’ he asked. ‘Because if you aren’t, you ought to put that away.’

‘Sorry.’ She lowered the pistol carefully and pointed it at the floor. ‘You startled me.’

Roland relaxed visibly. ‘I think it’s safe to say that you startled me, too. Do you always carry a gun when you explore your house?’

‘I hope you’ll excuse me,’ she said carefully, ‘but after waking up in bed with a stranger leaning over me for the second time in as many days, I tend to overreact a
little. And I wasn’t sure how the duke would respond to me going walkabout.’

‘Really?’ He raised an eyebrow.

‘No shit.’ She glanced around. The bathroom door was closed – she needed some Tylenol or some other painkiller bad. ‘Do you keep hot and cold running servants on this
side, too?’

‘Not many; there’s a cook and some occasional cleaning staff, but mostly this is reserved for Covert Operations, and we pay much more attention to secrecy. Over here it’s a . .
. a safe house, I guess you’d call it, not a palace. I take it you haven’t eaten – can I invite you to join me downstairs for breakfast?’

‘As long as I don’t have to dress for it,’ she said, checking then pocketing her gun. She picked up her briefcase. ‘I dug the lecture about not being able to hide, I
don’t want you to misunderstand me. But there are some things I really need to do around town today. Assuming I’m not under house arrest?’

Roland shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘I can answer for your security, in any case. Will you be able to do your stuff if I come along?’

Miriam looked out of the window and took a deep breath. ‘Well.’ She looked at him again. ‘I guess so.’
Damn, there goes my chance to warn Paulie.
‘Is it
really that risky?’

‘Breakfast first.’ He was already heading for the door. He added, over his shoulder, ‘By now news of your arrival will have leaked out and junior members of at least two of the
other families will be desperate, absolutely desperate. But they don’t know what you look like so you probably don’t need a permanent bodyguard yet. And once your position is secure,
they won’t be able to touch you.’