went to the annum of my own birth, which I had never seen, and found the record of my delivery at Middy Women’s Hospital, which noted my parents’ names. Mum had been listed not as White but as Doyle. Using the new surname, I found among the birth records a writ of adoption, which named Rachel White as a foundling taken in by the Doyle family at age sixteen.
Tommy’s grandfather must have gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to formally adopt my mother, but why? Had my grandfather been some sort of criminal, living underground or under a false identity?
I went back to the annum of my mother’s birth and this time pulled all the incomplete records. I found one single handwritten note filed by the midwife who had attended the birth of a female child, delivered to a Harry White, Esq., and wife. My grandmother was not named but was listed as having passed in childbirth. I found no corresponding death certificate for her.
The paper trail ended there. My grandfather had come into existence on the night of my mother’s birth, had evidently lived for sixteen years after without ever registering his identity, and had vanished after Arthur Doyle had adopted her.
I made note of the number stamped on the glassine seal before sending the last of the documents back to the archives, then stepped out of the booth. The other patrons had left, and I saw the secretary was finishing up his lunch at his desk. He came over to the window as soon as he saw me.
“Find what you needed?” he asked.
“No,” I admitted, only just remembering to alter my voice. “If man has no papers here, where else they could be?”
“All citizens of Toriana are required by law to register birth, marriage, and death certificates.” He sighed. “Unless the man was a criminal, or protected by the Crown. Then his papers would be held by the Ministry of Prisons for the length of his sentence, or kept under seal.”
I doubted even someone as high in society as Arthur Doyle could have adopted Rachel if her father had been a convict. “Where these seal papers?”
“All protected documents are kept in the secured archives belowground,” he told me. “But you can’t access them without a writ from the governor’s office, and they won’t issue those to a native. Sorry, old man.”
I knew what I needed then, so I gruffly thanked him and left.
One of the strangest jobs I’d ever undertaken had been for one of the city’s moles, who had contracted me by tube to investigate a sudden infestation of rats in a posh hotel, for which he was being blamed. He in turn claimed to me that the hotel had been placed under a dark enchantment by a rival establishment hoping to drive them out of business.
I’d never realized how vast and intricate the labyrinth of tubes, drainageways, and mech rooms beneath the city was until I searched them for the source of the rodents. I’d discovered the hotel’s new rubbish tubes had actually been the culprit, for the builders had used substandard materials that had allowed the rats infesting the city’s landfill to gnaw through a joint and come up into the hotel’s kitchens. The old tunneler had been too poor to pay me, but thinking I might someday need to use his warren, I’d accepted a favor to be claimed as settlement.
Gaining access to the underground from the surface was not easy; the storm drains were protected by mesh to keep out debris, and the busy downtown traffic ruled out using one of the hatch drops spaced along the middle of the streets. Fortunately my investigation had also taught me where the less traditional access points in the city were, and I went to the nearest bathhouse where I was known.
My native disguise didn’t fool the proprietor, a genial woman named Delia, for longer than an eyeblink.
“Eh, Miss Kit, is that you under all that bronze? So it is.” She chuckled as she handed me a cowled cloak. “Mind you keep your head down in there. Don’t want the ladies thinking I’ve sold them out to the savages.”
She led me back through the communal baths to the private rooms used by ladies who enjoyed a rub before or after their wash. The young men who attended them worked stripped to the waist and had been trained to use their hands to deliver various degrees of pleasure. Rina always claimed the bathboys were doing a great deal more than that behind the locked doors, but I thought not. If a woman wished to be penetrated and run the risk of catching a babe, she went to her husband, or a lover who resembled her husband. If she wished to be stroked and petted and made to feel beautiful in her skin, she came here for a rub.
Delia let me into her tube room and the stairs leading down to the small sorting station beneath it. “Tell Clancy while you’re down there that I don’t want no holdup on the linens in those tubes today. Missus Trevors and her ducklings are coming in at three.”
“All nine of them?” I pulled on my gloves and gogs. “Better let the boys have an early supper, Del.”
I climbed down through the darkness on the rusty, rickety staircase and stepped off into a damp, murky room filled with tubes from the bathhouse and several other businesses. Four of Delia’s brothers worked in the station, and they rarely had a moment’s rest from dawn until dusk, when all the tubes finally closed. Clancy, her eldest sibling, paused long enough to laugh soon as he saw me.
“What’s all this, then?” He rerouted a load of damp, soiled towels from the bathhouse to the launderer’s tube. “You giving up the civilized life, Miss Kit?”
I sighed. “Why do I never fool you people?”
He chuckled. “You may dress the part of a savage well enough, but you smell of roses and lavender. That lot, they smell of horses or trees, or naught ’tall.”
“Next time I’ll have to remember to dab some pine resin behind my ears.” I passed along his sister’s message, and then asked, “Have you seen Hedger today?”
“Aye, he came up with his bucket at noon.” Clancy waved his hand toward the tubes that curved out of sight beside a hatch. “Said to me he were off to scram under the exchange today. Here.” He tossed me a watershed. “Keep your heathen skin from washing off.”
“Thanks, Clance.” I pulled on the rubber cloak and followed the tubes.
Descending into Rumsen’s bowels required I bring my own light, so I borrowed a flystick from Clancy and gently shook it until the bugs inside the glass rod gave off a blue-green glow. That lit my path down into the sublevels and tunnels where old Hedger dwelled and worked.
Chapter Seven
As usual, the stink from the sewer tubes hit me first and took my breath away. Every time I came belowground I wondered how the old man could tolerate living in it. He claimed one became accustomed to it and even grew to like it, although I doubted I’d ever accomplish the feat.
Toriana’s first citizens had used pit privies and rubbish dumps for their waste, but when the blues sent over their architects to begin building a more permanent settlement, the builders had been instructed to attend first to the works needed belowground. For every building erected, three sublevels had been dug out and reinforced around what had been sewer lines and root bunkers.
As tubeworks and iceboxes had come along into common use, the sewer lines had been converted over, and the bunkers emptied. Now and then I spotted a cluster of carrot or potato plants that had grown from what had been left to rot in the old storage bins, their stunted, whitish-green leaves looking ghostly and unnatural.
The darkness and the smell didn’t unnerve me, nor had the rats I’d helped the old tunneler clear out. (Crate traps baited with raw bacon and nut butter had done the trick, along with some judicious reinforcement of the dump tubes.) The inherent dampness of the tunnels made trodding through them a wet business, but my bucks and Clancy’s watershed kept me dry enough. I even liked the echoing clatter, plings, and bongs of the mechworks overhead, and the constant rush of air sucked along by the tubes.
Something else crawled along my skin, however. Something I didn’t feel aboveground, a kind of awareness I’d never understood. A sense of presence just out of view, of watching eyes and waiting fists.
“Ere ye, hold on.” Hedger popped out of a hatch some three feet to the side of me, his gnarled hands pulling up his fogged gogs to expose bulging, tunnel-dilated eyes. “Miss Kit? Is that ye in all that getup?”
“It is.” I smiled. “Afternoon, Mr. Hedgeworth.”
“I’ll be blind.” The old man hoisted himself out of the drop and stood, shaking some of the water from the
