The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (49 page)

Hjalmar found his voice first; diffidently – incongruously, too, for he was a big bear of a man – he asked: ‘Is something the matter?’

‘It’s the crown prince.’ Angbard grinned. Someone unfamiliar with him might have mistaken his expression for a smile: neither of his guests did so.

‘What? Has Egon had an accident – ’

‘In a manner of speaking.’ Angbard sat down again, leaning back in his chair. ‘Egon has just murdered his own father and brother, not to mention Henryk and my niece Helge and a
number of our cousins, at the occasion of his brother’s betrothal. He’s sent troops to lay siege to the Thorold Palace and he’s issuing letters of attainder against us, promising
our land to anyone who comes to his aid.’ Angbard’s grin turned shark-like. ‘He’s made his bid at last, gentlemen. The old high families have decided to cast their lot in
with him, and we can’t be having that. An example will have to be made. King Egon the Third is going to have one of the shortest reigns on record – and I’m calling this meeting
because we need to establish who we’re going to put on the throne once Egon is out of the way.’

Hjalmar blanched. ‘You’re talking about high treason!’ The old scar on Angbard’s cheek twitched. ‘It’s never treason if you win.’ His smile faded into a
frown and he made a steeple of his fingers. ‘And I don’t know about you gentlemen, but I see no alternative. Unless we are to hang – and I mean that entirely literally – we
must grasp the reins of power directly. The very first thing we must do is remove the usurper from the throne he’s claimed.’

*

Morning in Boston: a thick fog, stinking of coal dust and burned memories, swirled down the streets between the brown brick houses, blanketing the pavement and forming eddies in
the wake of the streetcars. Behind a grimy window in a tenement flat on Holmes Alley a man coughed in his sleep, snorted, then twitched convulsively. Distant factory bells tolled dolorously as he
rolled over, clutching the battered pillow around his head. It was an hour past dawn when a bell of a different kind broke through his torpor, tinkling in the hallway outside the kitchen.

The gaunt, half-bald man sat up and rubbed his eyes, then fastened his gaze on a cheap tin alarm clock that had stopped, its hands mockingly pointed at the three and the five on the dial. He
focused on it blearily and swore, just as the doorbell tinkled again.

For someone so tall and thin, Erasmus Burgeson could move rapidly. In two spidery strides he was at the bedroom door, nightgown flapping around his ankles; three more strides and his feet were
on the chilly stone slabs of the staircase down to the front door. Upon reaching which he rattled the chain and drew back the bolts, finally letting the door slide an inch ajar. ‘Who is
it?’ he demanded hoarsely as an incipient wheeze caught his ribs in its iron fist.

‘Post Office electrograph for a Mister Burgeson?’ piped a youthful voice. Erasmus looked down. It was, indeed, a Post Office messenger urchin, barefoot in the cold but wearing the
official cap and gloves of that institution, and carrying a wax-sealed envelope. ‘Thruppenceha’penny to pay?’

‘Wait one.’ He turned and fumbled behind the door for his overcoat, in one pocket of which he always kept some change. Three and a half pence was highway robbery for an electrograph:
the fee had gone up two whole pennies in the past year, a sure sign that the Crown was desperate for revenue. ‘Here you are.’

The urchin shoved the envelope through the door and dashed off with his money, obviously eager to make his next delivery. Burgeson shut and bolted the door, then made his way back upstairs, this
time plodding laboriously, a little wince crossing his face with each cold stone step. His feet were still warm and oversensitive from bed: with the fire embargo in effect on account of the smog,
the chill of the stairs bit deep into his middle-aged bones.

At the top step he paused, finally giving in to the retching cough that had been building up. He inspected his handkerchief anxiously: there was no blood.
Good
. It was nearly two
months, now, and the cough was just the normal wheezing of a mild asthmatic caught out by one of Boston’s notorious yellow-gray smogs. Erasmus placed the electrograph envelope on the stand at
the top of the staircase and shuffled into the kitchen. The cooking range was cold, but the new, gas-fired samovar was legal: he lit it off, then poured water into the chamber and, while it was
heating, took the bottle of miracle medicine from the back of the cupboard and took two more of the strange cylindrical pills.

He’d barely dared believe Miriam’s promises when she gave him the pills, but they seemed to be working. It was almost enough to shake his belief in the innate hostility of the
universe. People caught the white death and they died coughing up their lungs in a bloody foam, and that was it. It happened less often these days, but it was still a terror that stalked the camps
north of the Great Lakes – and there was no easy cure. Certainly nothing as simple as taking two tablets every morning for six months! And yet . . .
I wonder where she is?
Erasmus
pondered, not for the first time:
Probably busying herself trying to make another world a better place.

The water was close to boiling. He spooned loose tea into the brewing chamber then wandered over to the window, squinting against the smog-diffused daylight in hope of glimpsing one of the
neighborhood clock towers. He’d have to wind and reset the alarm once he’d worked out by how long it had betrayed him. Still, nobody had jangled the bell-pull tied to the shop door
handle while he was sleeping like a log. Business had boomed over the springtime and early summer, but things had fallen ominously quiet lately – nobody seemed to have the money to buy their
possessions back out of hock, and indeed, nobody seemed to be buying much of anything. Even the local ’takers were slacking off on enforcing the vagrancy laws. Things seemed all right in the
capital whenever his other business took him there to visit –
the rich man’s cup spilleth over; the poor man gets to suck greedily on the hem of the tablecloth
– and the
munitions factories were humming murderously along, but wages were being cut left, right and center as the fiscal crisis deepened and the banks called in their loans and the military buildup
continued.

Finally the water began hissing and burbling up into the brewing chamber. Erasmus gave up on staring out the window and went in search of his favorite mug. A vague memory of having left it in
the lounge drew him into the passage, between the bookcases stacked above head-height with tracts and treatises and rants, and as he passed the staircase he picked up the letter and carried it
along. The mug he found sitting empty on top of a pyramid of antinomianist-utilitarian propaganda tracts and a tottering pile of sheet music.

Back in the kitchen, he spooned rough sugar into the mug. The samovar was still hissing like a bad-natured old cat, so he slit open the electrograph’s seal while he was waiting for it to
finish brewing. The letter within had been cast off a Post Office embosser, but the words had been composed elsewhere. YOUR SISTER IN GOOD HANDS DURING CONFINEMENT STOP MIDWIFE OPTIMISTIC STOP WHY
NOT VISIT STOP BISHOP ENDS.

His eyebrows furrowed as he stared at the slip of paper, his morning tea quite forgotten. Nobody in the movement would entrust overtly coded messages to the government’s postal service;
the trick was to use electrographs for signaling and the movement’s own machinery for substantive communications. But this wasn’t a pre-arranged signal, which made it odd. He’d
had a sister once, but she’d died when he was six years old: what this was telling him was that Lady Bishop wanted him to visit her in New London. He stared at it some more. It didn’t
contain her double-cross marker – if she’d signed her first name to a signal it would mean
I’ve been captured
– and it did contain her negative marker – if a
message contained an odd number of words that meant
I am at liberty
. But it wasn’t a scheduled meeting: however he racked his brains he couldn’t think of anything that might
warrant such an urgent summons, or the disruption to his other duties.

Does this mean we have a breach?
He put the treacherous message down on the kitchen table and turned off the gas, then poured boiling hot tea into his mug.
If Margaret’s been
taken, it’s a catastrophe. And if she hasn’t
– Gears spun inside his mind, grinding through the long list of possibilities. Whatever the message meant, he needed to be on a
train to the capital as soon as possible.

An hour later, Erasmus was dressed and ready to travel, disguised as himself (electrograph in wallet, along with ID papers). He carefully shut off the gas supply and, going downstairs, hung up
the CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS sign in the shop window. It needed no explanation to such folk as knew him, and in any case the Polis had been giving him a wide berth of late, ever since his relapse in
their cells.
They probably think I’m out of the class struggle for good,
he told himself, offering it as a faint prayer. If he could ever shed the attention he’d attracted,
what use he could make of anonymity with his age and guile!

It took him some time to get to the new station beside the Charles River, but once there he discovered that the mid-morning express had not yet departed, and seats in second class were still
available. And that wasn’t his only good fortune. As he walked along the pier past the streamlined engine he noticed that it had none of the normal driving wheels and pistons, but multiple
millipede-like undercarriages and a royal coat of arms. Then he spotted the string of outrageously streamlined carriages strung out along the track behind it, and the way the gleaming tractor
emitted a constant gassy whistling sound, like a promise from the far future. It was one of the new turbine-powered trains that had been all the talk of the traveling classes this summer. Erasmus
shook his head. This was unexpected: he’d hoped to reach New London for dinner, but if what he’d heard about these machines were true he might arrive in time for late lunch.

His prognostications were correct. The train began to move as he settled down behind a newspaper, accelerating more like an electric streetcar than any locomotive he’d been on, and minutes
later it was racing through the Massachusetts countryside as fast as an air packet.

Burgeson found the news depressing but compelling.
Continental Assembly Dismissed!
screamed the front page headline:
Budget Deadlock Unresolved
. The king had,
it seemed, taken a right royal dislike to his Conservative enemies in the house, and their dastardly attempts to save their scrawny necks by raising tariffs to pay for the Poor Law rations at the
expense of the Navy. Meanwhile, the rocketing price of Persian crude had triggered a run on oil futures and threatened to deepen the impending liquidity crisis further. Given a choice between a
rock and a hard place – between the need to mobilize the cumbersome and expensive apparatus of continental defense in the face of French aggression, and the demands of an exhausted Treasury
and the worries of bondholders – the king had gone for neither, but had instead dismissed the quarrelsome political mosquitoes who kept insisting that he make a choice between guns and
butter. It would have struck Erasmus as funny if he wasn’t fully aware that it meant thousands were going to starve to death in the streets come winter, in Boston alone – and that was
ignoring the thousands who would die at sea and on foreign soil, because of the thrice-damned stupid assassination of the young prince.

There were some benefits to rule by royal edict, Erasmus decided. The movement was lying low, and the number of skulls being crushed by truncheons was consequently small right now, but with the
dismissal of the congress, everyone now knew exactly who to blame whenever anything bad happened. There was no more room for false optimism, no more room for wishful thinking that the kindly Crown
might take the side of the put-upon People against his wicked servants. The movement’s cautious testing of the waters of public opinion (cautious because you never knew which affable drinking
companion might be an agent provocateur sent to consign you to the timber camps, and in these days of gathering wartime hysteria any number of ordinarily reasonable folks had been caught up in the
most bizarre excesses of anti-French and anti-Turkish hysteria) suggested that, while the king’s popularity rose whenever he took decisive action, he could easily hemorrhage support by taking
responsibility for the actions usually carried out by the home secretary in his name. No more lying democracy: no more hope that if you could just raise your thousand-pound landholder’s bond
you could take your place on the electoral register, adding your voice to the elite.

The journey went fast, and he’d only just started reading the small-print section near the back (proceedings of divorce and blasphemy trials; obituaries of public officials and nobility;
church appointments; stock prices) when the train began to slow for the final haul into Queen Josephina Station. Erasmus shook his head, relieved that he hadn’t finished the paper, and
disembarked. He pushed through the turbulent bazaar of the station concourse as fast as he could, hailed a cab, and directed it straight to a perfectly decent hotel just around the corner from
Hogarth Villas.

Half an hour later, after a tense walk-past to check for signs that all was in order, he was relaxing in a parlor at the back of the licensed brothel with a cup of tea and a plate of deep-fried
whitebait, and reflecting that whatever else could be said about Lady Bishop’s establishment, the kitchen was up to scratch. As he put the teacup down, the side door opened. He rose:
‘Margaret?’

‘Sit down.’ There were bags under her eyes and her back was stooped, as if from too many hours spent cramped over a writing desk. She lowered herself into an overpadded armchair
gratefully and pulled a wry smile from some hidden reservoir of affect: ‘How was your journey?’

‘Mixed. I made good time.’ His eyes traveled around the pelmet rail taking in the decorative knick-knacks: cheap framed prints of music hall divas and dolly-mops, bone china
pipe-stands, a pair of antique pistols. ‘The news is – well, you’d know better than I.’ He turned his head to look at her. ‘Is it urgent?’