The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (25 page)

‘Erasmus –’ She paused in the doorway. He had his back turned to her, washing his hands thoroughly under a stream of water piped from the coal-fired stove.

‘Yes?’ He half-turned, his face in shadow.

‘Have you eaten in the past hour or two?’ she asked.

Evidently she’d surprised him, for he shut the tap off and turned round, drying his hands on a towel. ‘What kind of question is that to be asking?’ He cocked his head on one
side, and something of the old Erasmus flickered into light.

‘I’m asking if you’ve eaten,’ she said impatiently, tapping her toe.

‘Not recently, no.’ He put the towel down and reached back into his pocket for his handkerchief.

‘Okay.’ She dug around in her bag. ‘I’ve got something for you. You’re
certain
what you’ve got is consumption?’

‘Ahem –’ He coughed, hacking repeatedly, into the handkerchief. ‘Yes, Miriam, it’s the white death.’ He looked grim. ‘I’ve seen it take enough of
my friends to know my number’s come up.’

‘Okay.’ She tipped two tablets out into the palm of her hand, held them out toward him: ‘I want you to take these right now. Wash them down with tea, and make sure you
don’t eat anything for half an hour afterwards.’

He looked at her in confusion, not taking the tablets. After a moment he smiled. ‘More of your utopian nonsense and magic, Miriam? Think this’ll cure me and make me whole
again?’

Miriam rolled her eyes. ‘Humor me. Please?’

‘Ah, well. I suppose so.’ He took the two tablets and swallowed them one at a time, looking slightly disgusted. ‘What are they meant to do? I’ve got no time for quack
nostrums as a rule . . .’ The kettle began to whistle, and he turned back to the stove to pour water into a tarnished metal teapot.

‘Remember the DVD player I showed you? The movie?’ Miriam asked his turned back.

He froze.

‘It’s not magical,’ she added. ‘You need to take two of these tablets at the same hour, on an empty stomach, every day
without fail
, for six months. That should
– I hope – stop the disease from progressing. It won’t make your lungs heal from the damage already done, and there’s a chance, about one in ten, that it won’t work,
or that it’ll make you feel even more sick, in which case I’ll have to find some different medicine for you. But you should lose the coughing in a couple of weeks and begin to feel
better in a month. Don’t stop taking them, though, until six months are up, or it will come back.’ She paused. ‘It’s not a utopia I come from, and the drugs don’t
always work. But they’re better than anything I’ve seen here.’

‘Not a utopia.’ He turned to face her, holding the teapot. ‘You’ve got some very strange notions, young lady.’

‘I’m thirty-three,
old man
. You want to put that teapot down before you spill it? And no, it’s not a utopia. Thing is, the bac – germs – that cause
consumption, they evolve over time to resist the drugs. If you stop taking the medicine before you’re completely cured, there’s a chance that you’ll develop a resistant strain of
infection and these drugs will stop working. Too many homeless people where I come from stopped taking them when they felt better – the result is, there are still people dying of tuberculosis
in New York City.’ He was halfway back to the living room as she followed him, lecturing his receding back. ‘That stuff is the cheap first-line treatment. And you’ll by god finish
the bloody course, because I need you alive!’

He put the teapot down. When he turned round he was grinning. ‘Hah! Now that’s a surprise, ma’am.’

‘What?’ Miriam, stopped in midstream, was perplexed.

He exhaled through a gap between his teeth. ‘You’ve shown no sign of needing anyone ever before, if I may be blunt. You’re a veritable force of nature.’

Miriam sat down heavily. ‘A force of nature with family problems. And a dilemma.’

‘Ah. I see. And you want to tell me about it?’

‘Well –’ She paused. ‘Later. What brought the tuberculosis back? How long did they hold you for?’
How have you been?
she wanted to ask, but that might
imply an intimacy in their relationship that had never been explicit in the past.

‘Oh, questions, questions.’ He poured tea into two china cups, neither of them chipped. ‘Always the questions.’ He chuckled painfully. ‘The kind of questions that
turn worlds upside down. One lump or two?’

‘None, thank you.’ Miriam accepted a cup. ‘Did they charge you?’

‘No.’ Burgeson looked unaccountably irritated, as if the Political Police’s failure to charge him reflected negatively on his revolutionary credentials. ‘They just banged
me up and squatted in my shop.’ He brightened: ‘Some party or parties unknown – and not related to my friends – did them an extreme mischief on the premises.’ He
cracked his knuckles. ‘And I was in custody! Clearly innocent! The best alibi!’ He managed not to laugh. ‘They still charged me with possession – went through the
bookshelves, seems I’d missed a tract or two – but the beak only gave me a month in the cells. Unfortunately that’s when the cough came back, so they kicked me out to die on the
street.’

‘Bastards,’ Miriam said absently. Burgeson winced slightly at the unladylike language but held his tongue. ‘I’ve been seeing a lot of that.’ She told him about the
train journey, about Marissa and her mother who was afraid Miriam was an informer or police agent. ‘Is something happening?’

‘Oh, you should know better than to ask me that.’ He glanced at her speculatively. When she nodded slightly, he went on: ‘The economy.’ He raised a finger.
‘It’s in the midden. Spinning its wheels fit to blow a boiler. We have plenty out of work, queues for broth around the street corners – bodies sleeping in the streets, dying in
the gutter of starvation. Go walk around Whitechapel or Ontario if you don’t believe it. There’s a shortage of money, debtors are unable to pay their rack, and I am having to be very
careful who I choose to give the ticket to. Nobody likes a pawnbroker, you know. And that’s just the top of it: I’ve heard rumors that in the camps they’re going through
convicts’ teeth in search of gold, can you believe it? Claiming it as Crown property.
Secundus
.’ He raised another finger. ‘The harvest is piss-poor. It’s been
getting worse for a few years, this unseasonable strange weather and peculiar storms, but this year it hit the corn. And with a potato blight rotting the spuds in the field –’ He
shrugged. A third finger: ‘Finally, there is the game of thrones. Which heats up apace, as the dauphin casts a greedy eye at our beloved royal father’s dominions in the Persian Gulf.
He’s an ambitious little swine, the dauphin, looking to shore up his claim to the iron throne of Caesar in St. Petersburg, and a short victorious war that would leave French boots a-cooling
in the Indian ocean would line his broadcloth handsomely. Would you like me to elaborate?’

‘Um, no.’ Miriam shook her head. ‘Different players, but the game’s the same.’ She sipped her tea.
Global climate change? What
is
the world’s
population here, anyway?
Suddenly she had a strange vision, a billion coal-fired cooking stoves staining the sky with as bad a smog as a billion SUVs.
Convergence
. . .

‘So times are bad and the constabulary are getting heavyhanded. The Evil Empire is rattling its sabers and threatening to invade, just to add to the fun. And the economy is stuck in a
liquidity trap that’s been getting worse for months, with deflation setting in . . . ?’ She shook her head again. ‘And I thought things were bad back home.’

‘So where have
you
been?’ Erasmus asked, cocking his head to one side. There was something birdlike about his movements, but now Miriam could see that it was a side effect
of the disease eating him from the inside out, leaving him gaunt and huge-eyed. ‘I thought you’d abandoned me.’ He said it in such a self-consciously histrionic tone that she
almost laughed.

‘Nothing so spectacular! After you were arrested, the shit hit the fan’ – she ignored the wince and continued – ‘and – well. The people who were trying to
kill me have been neutralized. But one of them defected to the police in my own . . . in the world I grew up in. He, his man, killed –’ She stopped for a moment, unable to continue.
‘Roland’s dead. And, and.’
Nothing else matters in comparison
. It was true; she couldn’t care less about everything. Roland’s absence still felt like a gaping
hole in her life, every time she woke up, every time she noticed it.

After a few seconds she forced herself to continue. ‘The Clan’s entire fortune there, in my world, is based on smuggling. They’ve been driven underground. Some of them seem to
have blamed me for it; as a result, they’ve been keeping me on a very short leash. I’m not the family black sheep anymore, but I’m not exactly trusted, and it took me a lot of
work just to be allowed out here on my own. Some of them have got a scheme to marry me off. They’re big on arranged marriages,’ she added bitterly. ‘It’s a good way of
silencing inconveniently loud women.’

‘You’re not so easy to silence,’ Erasmus noted after she’d stopped talking. He smiled. ‘Which is a good thing: it is our willingness to allow ourselves to be
silenced easily that allows scoundrels to get away with so much, as a friend of mine put it – you might like to drop in on her next time you’re in New London, incidentally. She’s
another loud woman who doesn’t believe in being silenced. She’s called Margaret, Lady Bishop, and you can find her at Hogarth Villas: I think you’ve got a lot in common.’ He
cracked his knuckles again. ‘But you haven’t told me why you wanted to see me. Much less, why you wanted to save my life.’

‘I didn’t?’ She shook herself. ‘Damn, I’m stupid. It’s – well. Look, I managed to steal a week over here, and it’s nearly over, and I’ve
wasted most of it repairing the damage Morgan inflicted on my company through neglect – ’

‘I thought you said he was stupid and lazy?’

‘He is. But – ’

‘Well then, imagine how much damage he could have done if he was stupid and
energetic
.’

‘I did: that’s why I made him general manager. I think I’ve got him sufficiently house-trained to minimize the damage in future. Only time will tell.’

‘Ah, nepotism,’ Erasmus said, nodding sagaciously. ‘But your week is up and you have nothing to show for it?’

‘Well.’ She looked at him speculatively. ‘I’ve been doing some thinking. And it seems to me that I’ve been letting them take me for granted. They have their own set
of assumptions about how I should behave, and if I let them apply those assumptions to me they’ll back me into a corner. So I need to do something, acquire leverage. Make them let me
alone.’

‘That could be dangerous,’ Erasmus said neutrally.

‘You bet it’s dangerous!’ Miriam rolled her teacup between her hands, fidgeting. ‘They’ve got my mother.’ Tight-lipped: ‘She’s dependent on
certain medicines. They think that’s enough to get a handle on me. But if I can establish my autonomy,
I
can provide her meds. I just have to get them to leave me alone.’

‘Hmm. As I understood it, when you first told me about your turbulent family, they wouldn’t leave you alone because you signify an inheritance of enormous wealth, is that not the
case?’ He raised an eyebrow at her.

‘Yes,’ she said grudgingly. ‘Not that it makes a lot of difference to me.’

‘Hah. Perhaps not, but they might be reluctant to leave you alone not because they insist on controlling you for control’s own sake but because they fear the disposition of such
wealth in directions inimical to their own interests. In which case you will need a tool with which to express your urgency somewhat persuasively . . .’

‘I was leaning toward blackmail, myself.’ She frowned. ‘Their pressure is relatively subtle, social expectations and so forth. There are lots of secrets in this kind of
culture, embarrassing facts best not aired in public and so on. Given a handful of truths it’s possible to suggest to people that they butt out’ – her expression brightened
– ‘and if there’s one thing I’m told I’m good at, it’s digging up embarrassing truths.’

Erasmus tried again. ‘But, that is to say – you are applying your not-inconsiderable reasoning skills to this as a social paradox. Your real problem is a temporal, political one. If
you try to blackmail them – ’

‘They’re aristocrats. The personal is political,’ she said dismissively. ‘Once you get a pig by the nose, its body will follow, right?’

‘Right,’ he agreed, reluctantly.

‘I’d better hope so,’ she added, ‘because if I’m wrong about them, well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. So I’m not going to worry about it. But
everything I’ve seen
so far
tells me that it’s going to work. Matthias blackmailed Roland . . .’ She stared bleakly at the thin patina of dust on top of the lid of
Erasmus’s piano. ‘Blackmail seems to be a way of life inside the Clan. So I’d better get with the program.’

*

‘Hi, Paulie!’

Miriam waved from across the station concourse, smiling when Paulette spotted her and headed straight to where she was standing.

‘Hey, Miriam, that’s a great coat! You’re looking good. Listen, there’s this new brasserie just outside the center, you up to eating or do you just want to hang out? We
could go back to the office – ’

‘Eating would be good.’ Miriam rubbed her forehead. ‘Made two crossings this morning; I need something in my stomach so I can take the ibuprofen.’ She winced
theatrically. ‘I’d rather not go near the office,’ she added quietly as Paulie led her toward one of the side doors of the station. ‘Too much chance someone’s bugged
it.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Paulette didn’t break stride: not that Miriam had expected her to. Back when Miriam had been a senior reporter for
The Industry Weatherman
Paulette had been
her research assistant – right up until one of Miriam’s investigations had gotten them both escorted off the premises with extreme prejudice. Then when Miriam had gotten mixed up with
the Clan she’d hired Paulie to look after her interests back home in Boston, United States timeline. Paulette knew about the Clan, had grown up in a tough neighborhood where some of the
residents had mob connections. Angbard knew about Paulette, which meant there was a very real risk the office was indeed bugged, and thus Miriam had arranged to meet up with her at Penn
Station.