The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) (47 page)

‘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. 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 paused. ‘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. ‘Can you permit your mother to keep one or two things to herself?’

‘Guess so. 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.’ Iris 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? 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?’ Iris 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. I’m wishing I hadn’t given you the shoebox now.’ Iris looked thoughtful. ‘Do you have
any better suggestions? Are you involved in anything else that might explain what’s going on?’

‘Roland – ’ Miriam stopped. Iris stared at her. ‘You said not to trust any of them,’ Miriam continued, ‘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. ‘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 yard with a high wall around it, and access. The parking is
on the street, 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 for 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. If this works, I will be very happy.’
And I won’t have to fork out a second deposit for somewhere more useful,
she
thought to herself.

‘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.’

‘Nuts? What’s wrong with it?’

‘Everything!’ Miriam raised her hands. ‘Okay, look. I don’t know much about English history, but it’s got this civil war in the sixteen-forties, goes on and on
about some dude called the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. I looked him up in
Encarta
and yes, he’s there, too. I didn’t know the English had a civil war, and it gets better:
They had a revolution in 1688, too! Did you know that? I sure didn’t, and it’s not in
Encarta
– but I didn’t trust it, so I checked
Britannica
and
it’s there. Okay, so England has a lot of history, and it’s all in the wrong order.’

She sat down on the sofa. ‘Then I got to the seventeen-forties and everything went haywire.’

‘Haywire. Like, someone discovered a time machine, went back, and killed their grandfather?’

‘Might as well have. The Young Pretender – look, I’m not making these names up – sails over from France in 1745 and invades Scotland. And in
this
book, he got to
crown himself king in Edinburgh.’

‘Young pretender – what did he pretend to be?’

‘King. Listen, in
our
world, he did the same – then he marched on London and got himself spanked, hard, by King George. That’s the first King George, not the King
George who lost the War of Independence. That was his grandson.’

‘I think I need an aspirin,’ said Paulette.

‘What this means is that in the far side, England actually lost Scotland in 1745. They fought a war with the Scots in 1746, but the French joined in and whacked their fleet in the channel.
So they whacked the French back in the Caribbean, and the Dutch joined in and whacked the Spanish – settling old scores – and then the Brits, while their back was turned. It’s all
a crazy mess. And somewhere in the middle of this mess things went wrong, wrong,
wrong
. According to
Britannica
, in
our
world, Great Britain got sucked into something
called the Seven Years’ War with France, and signed a peace treaty in 1763. The Brits got to keep Canada but gave back Guadeloupe and pissed off the Germans, uh, Prussians. Whatever the
difference is. But according to this looking-glass history, every time the
English
– not the Brits, there’s no such country – started getting somewhere, the king of
Scotland tried to invade – there were three battles in as many years at some place called New Castle. And then somewhere in the middle of this, King George, the
second
King George,
gets himself killed on a battlefield in Germany, and is succeeded by King Frederick, and I am totally lost now because there is
no
King Frederick in the
Encyclopedia
Britannica
.’

Miriam stopped. Paulette was looking bright, fascinated – and a million miles away. ‘That was when the French invaded,’ she said.

‘Huh?’ Paulie shook her head. ‘The French? Invaded where?’

‘England. See, Frederick was the crown prince, right? He got sent over here, to the colonies as a royal governor or something – ‘Prince of the Americas’ – because
his stepmother the queen really hated him. So when his father died he was over here in North America – and the French and Scottish simultaneously invaded England. Whose army, and previous
king, had just been whacked. And they
succeeded
.’

‘Um, does this mean anything?’ Paulette looked puzzled.

‘Don’t you see?’ demanded Miriam. ‘Over on the far side, in world three,
there is no United States of America
: Instead there’s this thing called New
Britain, with a king-emperor! And they’re at war with the French Empire – or cold war, or whatever. The French invaded and conquered the British Isles something like two hundred and
fifty years ago, and have held it ever since, while the British royal family moved to North America! I’m still putting it all together. Like, where we had a constitutional congress and
declared independence and fought a revolutionary war,
they
had something called the New Settlement and set up a continental parliament, with a king and a house of lords in charge.’
She frowned. ‘And that’s as much as I understand.’

‘Huh.’ Paulette reached out and took the book away from her. ‘I saw you look like that before, once,’ she said. ‘It was when Bill Gates first began spouting about
digital nervous systems and the internet. Do you need to go lie down for a bit? Maybe it’ll make less sense in the morning.’

‘No, no. Look, I’m trying to figure out what
isn’t
there. Like, they’ve had a couple of world wars – but fought with wooden sailing ships and airships.
There’s a passage at the end of the book about the “miracle of corpuscular transubstantiation” – I think they mean atomic power but I’m not sure. They’ve got the
germ theory of disease and steam cars, but I didn’t see any evidence of heavier-than-air flight or antibiotics or gasoline engines. The whole industrial revolution has been delayed –
they’re up to about the 1930s in electronics. And the social thing is weird. I saw an opium pipe in that pawnbroker’s, and I passed a bar selling alcohol, but they’re all wearing
hats and keeping their legs covered. It’s not like our 1920s, at least not more than skin-deep. And I can’t get a handle on it,’ she added. ‘I’ll just have to go over
there again and try not to get myself arrested.’

‘Hmm.’ Paulette pulled up a carrier bag and dumped it on the table. ‘I’ve been doing some thinking about that.’

‘You have? What about?’

‘Well,’ Paulie began carefully, ‘first thing is, nobody can arrest you and hold you if you’ve got one of these lockets, huh? Or the design inside it. Brill –
’

‘It’s the design,’ Brilliana said suddenly. ‘It’s the family pattern.’ She glanced at Paulette. ‘I didn’t understand the history either,’
she said plaintively. ‘Some of the men . . .’ she tailed off.

‘What about them?’ Asked Miriam.

‘They had it tattooed on their arms,’ she said shyly. ‘They said so, anyway. So they could get away if someone caught them. I remember my uncle talking about it once. They even
shaved their scalp and tattooed it there in reverse, then grew their hair back – so that if they were imprisoned they could shave in a mirror and use it to escape.’