“My best to your wife,” Roland replied. “Come on, Miriam. Time to go.”
“Okay.” She followed him back to the car. He started the engine and eased them back out into the local traffic around the light industrial area. “Where next?”
“Oh, we pick up the cases for the return leg, then we’re at liberty,” he said. “I thought you wanted to do some shopping? And some other things to see to? How about a couple of hours at Copley Place and messing around Back Bay, then lunch?”
“Sounds good,” she agreed.
“Okay.” He pulled over, into another parking lot. “Give me a hand again?”
“Sure.”
They got out and Miriam followed him into yet another office. The procedure was the same in reverse: Roland signed a couple of forms and this time collected two identical, ribbed aluminium suitcases, each so heavy that Miriam could barely carry hers. “Right, now into town,” he said after he lifted them both into the car’s trunk. “It’s almost ten o’clock. Think you’ve got time to hit the shops and be back by five?”
“I’m sure I have.” She smiled at him. “There’s some stuff I could do with your help for, actually. Want to hang around?”
“Delighted to oblige.”
The Copley Place shops weren’t exactly ideal, but it was totally covered and had enough stuff in it to keep Miriam occupied for a couple of hours. The platinum card didn’t catch fire-it didn’t even show signs of overheating when she hit Niemann Marcus and some less obvious shops for a couple of evening outfits and an expensive piece of rolling luggage.
After the first half hour, Roland did what many polite heterosexual men did: zoned out and smiled or nodded whenever she asked him for an opinion. Which was exactly what Miriam was hoping for, because her real goal wasn’t to fill her wardrobe with evening dresses and expensive lingerie (although that was an acceptable side effect) but to pull out a bundle of cash and use some of it to buy certain accessories. Such as a prepaid mobile phone and a very small Sony laptop with a bundle of software (“If I can’t go back home, I’ll need something to write my articles on,” she pointed out to Roland, hoping he wouldn’t figure out how big a loss-leader that would make it). She finished her spree in a sports shop, buying some outdoors tools, a pocket GPS compass, and a really neat folding solar panel, guaranteed to charge her laptop up-which she picked up while he was poking around a display of expensive hunting tackle.
She wasn’t totally sure what she was going to do with this stuff, but she had some ideas. In particular, the CD-ROMs full of detailed maps of the continental United States and the other bits of software she’d slipped in under his nose ought to come in handy. Even if they didn’t, she figured that if Angbard expected her to shop like a dizzy teenager, then she ought to get him used to her shopping like a dizzy teenager. That way he ‘II have one less handle on me when I stop, she thought, a trifle smugly.
Twelve thousand dollars went really fast when she was buying Sony notebooks, and even faster when she switched to Hermes and Escada and less well-known couture. But it felt unreal, like play money. Some of the clothes would have %› be altered to fit, and delivered: She took them anyway. ‘1 figure it can be altered on the other side,” she murmured to Roland by way of explanation. He nodded enthusiastically and she managed to park him for a few minutes in a bookshop next door to her real target, a second hand theatrical clothing shop for an old- fashioned long skirt and shirtwaist that could pass for one of the servants. Theatrical supplier, my ass, she thought. The escape committee is in!
Around two o’clock she took mercy on Roland, who by this time was flagging, checking his watch every ten minutes and following her around like a slightly dejected dog. “It’s okay,” she said, “I’m about done. How about we catch that lunch you were talking about, then head back to the house? I’ve got to get some of these clothes altered, which means looking up Ma’am Rosein, and then I need to spend a couple of hours on the computer.”
“That’s great,” Roland said with unconcealed sincerity. “How about some clam chowder for lunch?”
Miriam really didn’t go for seafood, but if it kept him happy that was fine by her. “Okay,” she said, towing along her designer escape kit. “Let’s go eat!”
They ate. Over lunch she watched Roland carefully. He’s about twenty-eight, she thought. Dartmouth. Harvard. Real Ivy League territory and then some. Classic profile. She sized him up carefully. Shaves well. Looks great. No visible bad habits, painfully good manners. If there wasn’t clearly something going on, I’d be drooling. Wouldn’t I? She thought. In fact, maybe there’s something in that? Maybe that’s why Angbard is shoving us together. Or not. I need to find out more about the skeletons in the Clan closet and the strange fruit rotting on the family tree. And there were worse ways of doing that than chatting with Roland over lunch.
“Why is your uncle putting you on my case?” she finally asked over dessert, an exquisite creme Brule. “I mean, what’s your background? You said he was thinking one step ahead. Why you?”
“Hrrm.” Roland stirred sugar into his coffee, then looked at her with frank blue eyes. “I think your guess is as good as mine.”
“You’re unmarried.” She kicked herself immediately afterward. Very perceptive, Ms. Holmes.
“As if that matters.” He smiled humourlessly. “I have an attitude problem.”
“Oh?” She leaned forward.
“Let’s just say, Angbard wants me where he can keep an eye on me. They sent me to college when I was eighteen,” he said morosely. “It was-well, it was an eye-opener. I stayed for four years, then applied to Harvard immediately. Economics and history. I thought I might be able to change things back home. Then I decided I didn’t want to go back. After my first year or so, I’d figured out that I couldn’t stay over here just on the basis of my name-I’d have to work. So I did. I wasn’t much of one for the girls during that first degree-” he caught her speculative look-“or the boys.”
“So?” Personal Memo: Find out what they think of sex, as opposed to marriage. The two are not always interchangeable. “What next?”
“Well.” He shrugged uncomfortably. “I wanted to stay over here. I got into a postgrad research, program, studying the history of economic development in the Netherlands. Met a girl named Janice along the way. One thing led to another.”
“You wanted to marry her?” asked Miriam.
“Sky father, no!” He looked shocked. “The Clan council would never have stood for it! Even if it was just over here. But I could buy us both a house over here, make believe that-” He stopped, took a sip of coffee, then put his cup down again. All through the process, he avoided Miriam’s gaze.
“You didn’t want to go back,” she stated.
“You can cross over twice in a day, in an hour, if you take beta-blockers,” he said quietly. “Speaking of which.” He extracted a blisterpack of pills from his inner pocket and passed it across to her. “They do something about the headaches. You can discharge your duty to Clan and family that way, keep the post moving, and live nine-tenths of your life free of… of… of…”
Miriam waited for him to sort his tongue out.
“Jan and I had two years together,” he finally said quietly. “Then they broke us up.”
“The Clan.” Her mouth was dry. She turned the pack of pills over and over, reading the label. “Did they-”
“Indirectly.” He interrupted her deliberately, then finished his coffee cup. “Look, she kept asking questions. Questions that I couldn’t answer. Wasn’t allowed to answer. I’d have been required to go home and marry someone of high rank within the Clan sooner or later, just to continue the bloodline, but I’m a man. I’m allowed to spend some time settling down. But eventually… if we marry out we go extinct in two, maybe three generations. And the money goes down faster, because our power base is built on positive market externalities-have you-”
“Yes,” she said, mouth dry despite the coffee she’d just swallowed without tasting. “The more of you there are, the more nodes you’ve got to trade between and the more effectively you can run your import/export system, right?”
“Right. We’re in a population trap, and it takes special dispensation to marry out. Our position is especially tenuous because of the traditional nobility; a lot of them see us as vile upstarts, illegitimate and crude, because we can’t trace our ancestry back to one of the hetmen of the Norge fleet that conquered the Gruinmarkt away from the Auslaand tribes about four, five hundred years ago. We find favour with the crown, because we’re rich-but even there we are in a cleft stick: It does not do well to become so powerful that the crown itself is threatened. If you get the chance to marry into the royal family-of Gruinmarkt or of one of our neighbours-but that’s the only way you could marry out without the council coming down on you.”
