“Seven years in one of His Majesty’s penal colonies for sedition back in seventy-eight and you still don’t have a fucking clue.” The inspector shook his head slowly. “Levellers, Mr. Burgeson.” He leaned forward until his face was inches away from Burgeson’s. “That dressing table happened to have a hollow compartment above the top drawer and there were some most interesting papers folded up inside it. You wouldn’t have been dealing in proscribed books again, would ye?”
“Huh?” The last question caught Burgeson off-guard, but he was saved by another coughing spasm that wrinkled his face up into a painful knot before it could betray him.
The inspector waited for it to subside. “I’ll put it to you like this,” he said. “You’ve got bad friends, Erasmus. They’re no good for yer old age. A bit o’ paper I can’t put me finger on is one thing. But if I was to catch ’em, this Mrs. Blue or Mr. Brown, they’d sing for their supper sooner than put their necks in a noose, wouldn’t they? And you’d be right back off to Camp Frederick before your feet touch the ground, on a one-way stretch. Which in your case would be approximately two weeks before the consumption carried you away for good an’ all and Old Nick gets to toast you by the fires of hell.
“All that Godwinite shit and old-time Egalitarianism will get you is a stretched neck or a cold grave. And you are too old for the revolution. They could hold it tomorrow and it wouldn’t do you any good. What’s that slogan-’Don’t trust anyone who’s over thirty or owns a slave’? Do you really think your young friends are going to help you?”
Burgeson met the inspector’s gaze head-on. “I have no Leveller friends,” he said evenly. “I am not a republican revolutionary. I admit that in the past I made certain mistakes, but as you yourself agree, I was punished for them. My tariff is spent. I cooperate fully with your office. I don’t see what else I can do to prevent people who I don’t know and have never heard of from using my shop as a laundry. Do we need to continue this conversation?”
“Probably not.” The inspector nodded thoughtfully. “But if I was you, I’d stay in touch.” A business card appeared between his fingers. “Take it.”
Burgeson reached out and reluctantly took the card.
“I’ve got my eye on you,” said the inspector. “You don’t need to know how. If you see anything that might interest me passing through your shop, I’ll trust you to let me know. Maybe it’ll be news to me-and then again, I’ll know about it before you do. If you turn a blind eye, well-” he looked sad-“you obviously won’t be able to see all the titles of the books in your shop. And it’d be a crying shame to send a blind man back to the camps for owning seditious tracts, wouldn’t it?”
Two women stood ten feet apart, one shaking with rage, the other frightened into immobility. Around them, orange trees cloistered in an unseasonable climate perfumed the warm air.
“I don’t understand.” Miriam’s face was blank as she stared down the barrel of Olga’s gun. Her heart pounded. Buy time! “What are you talking about?” she asked, faint with the certainty that her assignation with Roland had been overseen and someone had told Olga.
“You know very well what I’m talking about!” Olga snarled. “I’m talking about my honour!” The gun muzzle didn’t deviate from Miriam’s face. “It’s not enough for you to poison Baron Hjorth against me or to mock me behind my back. I can ignore those slights-but the infamy! To do what you did! It’s unforgivable.”
Miriam shook her head very slowly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I didn’t know at the time it started between us, I mean. About your planned marriage.”
A faint look of uncertainty flickered across Olga’s face. “My betrothal has no bearing on the matter!” She snapped.
“Huh? You mean this isn’t about Roland?” Miriam asked, feeling stupid and frightened.
“Roland-” Olga stared at her. Suddenly the look of uncertainty was back. “Roland can have nothing to do with this,” she claimed haughtily.
“Then I haven’t got a clue what the it you’re talking about is,” Miriam said heavily. Fear would only stretch so far, and as she stared at Olga’s eyes all she felt was a deep wellspring of resignation, at the sheer total stupidity of all the events that had brought her to this point.
“But you-” Olga began to look puzzled, but still angry. “What about Roland? What have you been up to?”
“Fucking,” Miriam said bluntly. “We only had the one night together but, well, I really care about him. I’m fairly sure he feels the same way about me, too. And before you pull that trigger, I’d like you ask yourself what will happen and who will be harmed if you shoot me.” She closed her eyes, terrified and amazed at what she’d just heard herself say. After a few seconds, she thought, Funny, I’m still alive.
“I don’t believe it,” said Olga. Miriam opened her eyes.
The other woman looked stunned. However, her gun was no longer pointing directly at Miriam’s face.
“I just told you, dammit!” Miriam insisted. “Look, are you going to point that thing somewhere safe or-”
“You and Roland?” Olga asked incredulously.
A moment’s pause. Miriam nodded. “Yes,” she said, her mouth dry.
“You went to bed with that dried-up prematurely middle-aged sack of mannered stupidity? You care about him? I don’t believe it!”
“Why are you pointing that gun at me, then?”
For a moment, they stood staring at each other; then Olga lowered the machine pistol and slid her finger out of the trigger guard.
“You don’t know?” she asked plaintively.
“Know what?” Miriam staggered slightly, dizzy from the adrenaline rush of facing Olga’s rage. “What on earth are you talking about, woman? Jesus fucking Christ, I’ve just admitted I’m having an affair with the man you’re supposed to be marrying and that isn’t why you’re threatening to kill me over some matter of honour?”
“Oh, this is insupportable!” Olga stared at her. She looked very uncertain all of a sudden. “But you sent your man last night.”
“What man?”
Their eyes met in mutual incomprehension.
“You mean you don’t know? Really?”
“Know what?”
“A man broke into my bedroom last night,” Olga said calmly. “He had a knife and he threatened me and ordered me to disrobe. So I shot him dead. He wasn’t expecting that.”
“You. Shot. A, a rapist. Is that it?”
“Well, that and he had a letter of instruction bearing the seal of your braid.”
“I don’t understand.” Miriam shook her head. “What seal? What kind of instructions?”
“My maidenhead,” Olga said calmly. ‘The instructions were very explicit. What is the law where you come from? About noble marriage?”
“About-what? Huh. You meet someone, one of you proposes, usually the man, and you arrange a wedding. End of story. Are things that different here?”
“But the ownership of title! The forfeiture. What of it?”
“What ‘forfeiture’?” Miriam must have looked puzzled because Olga frowned.
“If a man, unwed, lies with a maid, also unwed, then it is for him to marry her if he can afford to pay the maiden-price to her guardian. And all her property and titles escheat to him as her head. She has no say in the matter should he reach agreement with her guardian, who while I am in his care here would for me be Baron Hjorth. In my event, as a full-blood of the Clan, my Clan shares would be his. This commoner-” she pronounced the word with venomous diction-“invaded my chamber with rape in mind and a purse full of coin sufficient to pay his way out of the baron’s noose.”
“And a letter,” Miriam said in tones of deep foreboding. “A letter sealed with… what? Ink? Wax? Something like that, some kind of seal ring?”
“No, sealed with the stamps of Thorold and Hjorth. It is a disgusting trick.”
“I’ll say.” Miriam whistled tunelessly. “Would you believe me if I said that I don’t have-and have never seen-any such stamp? I don’t even know who my braid are, and I really ought to, because they’re not going to be happy if I-” she stopped. “Oh, of course.”
“ ‘Of course,’ what?”
“Listen, was there an open door to the roof in your apartment last night? After you killed him? I mean, a door he came in through?”
Olga’s eyes narrowed. “What if there was?”
“Yesterday I world-walked from my room to the other side,” said Miriam. “This house is supposed to be
