Chapter Six
The gurgling sound of my BrewsMaid roused me from the last minutes of my uncomfortable night sleeping on the office settee. I might have rolled over and tried for another restless hour or two, if not for the tasks that awaited me.
Tom Doyle could have done a lot more than simply ask questions on behalf of Nolan Walsh. Last night he could have hauled me in for questioning, or even tossed me in a cell to be held under suspicion. I appreciated his restraint; I also heeded his warning about Lady Diana’s husband.
Too many odd things had been happening too fast. I’d met the ghost of a grandfather I’d never known existed. Doyle had been sent to question me and then had hinted he knew more about my mother than I did. Even Dredmore had made a point to warn me off Walsh while nattering on about his dark and dire forces, whatever that meant.
I’d never investigated myself or my family, but it seemed a prudent time to remedy that. I’d start by going down to the City Archives, where I could search the Hall of Records.
Before I left the office, I retreated into my private lavatory, where I kept several changes of clothes. In going into the realm of men I had two options: donning my gray switch, some face paint, and my blacks to project the appearance of a widow lady, which would be costly, or stripping myself down to the skin and donning my bucks. Since Walsh might be having me watched, and I never cared to hand out bribes unless they were absolutely necessary, I decided to go native.
Erasing every aspect of my gender didn’t take much time. I sprayed my face, arms, hands, ankles, and feet with bronzen, which darkened my tanned skin to a copper brown. Making my brow fringe stand on end and stay that way required the careful application of axle grease mixed with a bit of flour. I could do nothing about the color of my eyes, but enough native women had been captured and released along with their too-dark children during the settlement that tribal people with light eyes were not uncommon now.
Finally I stuffed my crotch with a stocking-covered sausage, a trick Rina had picked up from her clients and had passed along to me. “If you’re ever wondering if the bulge your beau sports is real,” she had advised, “introduce him to a hungry dog.”
My garments were fashioned out of scraped hides sewn together with leather lacings and decorated modestly with native beadwork. Out of respect for the real natives, I didn’t wear any feathers in my hair or on my person; those were reserved for braves who had bloodied themselves in war. They were also sported by the only natives I truly despised, the shamans, who claimed to have the sight.
Native magic was every bit as phony as the kind performed by Rumsen’s resident magefolk, but far more dangerous. The city practitioners faked their spells out of greed, in order to swindle their victims; the shamans used their false conjuring to control their entire tribe, to whom magic was like a religion.
The only drawback to going native was the lack of transport; I couldn’t take the trolley or hail a cab, and natives were not permitted to own carris or coaches. Instead I hired a pleasant mare from a public stable and rode on horseback to City Hall. There I had to ride past a native stablehand, but he must not have looked too closely at me, for he made only the terse, sidewise jerk of the head that served as a wordless greeting among the tribes.
Natives lived outside Rumsen on the lands permanently deeded to them by the Crown after the last treaty had been struck, and they did not permit their women to leave its boundaries. However, after failing to become the farmers the Crown had desired them to be, the tribesmen had gradually drifted back to Rumsen to seek work in the city. They were generally employed to look after horses or livestock, as they preferred animals to people, or worked in tanneries or potteries. I’d seen a few light-skinned braves serving as drivers and footmen to young bachelor masters, as they were ferocious fighters and made the best bodyguards. Given the distressing history between the races, few families trusted them around their females, and so natives were never brought on as household staff, even among the working class.
The one prime convenience the treaty had brought for the natives was equal rights as voting citizens. New Parliament had argued for years against it, but a change in attitude toward the preservation of indigenous peoples throughout the Empire had resulted in the males of the tribes being made full citizens. Posing as a native male I had the right to access any of the government’s archives whenever I pleased—something not even the wealthiest of white women could do without paying a prodigious number of bribes.
As it was a weekday, I expected the City Archives Building to be jammed—and it was. But most of the citizens came to purchase permits and licenses or pay their taxes, which created long lines outside Provincial Planning and H.M.’s Revenue & Customs. By comparison the small, cramped office of the Hall of Records was nearly empty, with only a sour-faced legal clerk and two vicars waiting in line. The collars ignored me, a poor heathen who in their view was already doomed to burn in hell everlasting. After one desultory glance I also ceased to exist for the legal clerk, who could not expect to solicit business from a citizen whose interests could only be represented in court by a tribal conciliator.
After fifteen minutes of standing and waiting—something a woman would never have been expected to do —I faced the records secretary. He was one of the thousand ubiquitous young clerks in the city, overly groomed and hopelessly attired, but he greeted me courteously enough and asked via universal hand gestures if I required an interpreter.
“I speak and read the English,” I said in my deepest guttural native accent.
“Thank the Son,” the secretary said baldly. “Takes forever to hand-speak things with you lot, especially with the documents. What do you want?”
“I seek record of grandfather, soldierman, work class,” I told him. “Father wish give name papers for young sister to husband’s tribe.”
Some of the natives believed having blood ties to important white families, particularly if they were friendly, elevated the status of a female and could result in her husband’s family offering a higher bride price. Since the government collected a hefty percentage of bride prices from the tribe, they encouraged the practice.
“Do you know how to operate the sorter, then?” When I nodded, the secretary gestured toward one of the empty booths to the left of the counter.
I placed a pound note through the window slot. “How long I can use?” Generally there was a limit of one hour, but the clerks tended to give natives more time for translation purposes.
“Unless we’ve a rush come in, you can use it as long as you like,” he said as he placed the note in his cash drawer. “If you need assistance, tap the bell.”
I entered the glass-sided booth, which smelled of dust, paper, and men’s sweat, and sat down on the hard-backed chair in front of the wide records sorter panel.
Three large levers were marked with the
I pulled the
With its internal cogs adjusted by the levers, the arm stretched out, plucking the first sheaf of glassined documents from the archive shelves. It dropped them into a flat-sided chute, which carried them one by one to my window, where I used the stop knob to hold and glance at each one before allowing it to be whisked by the chute back to its shelf.
Surnames beginning with
Which was impossible, because my grandfather could not have immigrated to Toriana without registering some sort of document of origin.
I searched the records for the annum of my mother’s birth and found none registered for her either. I then
