Morning ablutions as complete as they were ever going to be, Chang climbed to the ninth floor of stacks, emerging on the third floor of high vaulted public rooms. He crossed to the Document Annex, where the government publications were housed. Like every public room in the Library, the Annex was graced with a pink-streaked marble floor and a large cartouche above the door bearing the arms of the aristocratic family funding that particular room's construction (in this case the extinct and unregretted Grimps). In direct opposition to its opulent trappings, the Annex, owing to its ever-expanding contents, had been crammed with shelving, covering the walls and in free-standing rows, some fifteen feet tall, requiring ladders and the help of Library staff to find anything whatsoever.
For Chang, the collection was a ready source of information about land holdings, changes in law, marriages, estates, legacies, census surveys—anything (which meant everything) the dogged grind of the government decided ought to be set down for posterity. He started at the beginning. The Duke was alive, which meant his puppet mistress, Mrs. Marchmoor, must be as well. Charlotte Trapping was not in her house, and the Palace bureaucracy sought her. By all accounts she was no idiot (unless one took into account her marriage), only a woman who had been routinely shunted aside from her family's power…
Chang rolled a wooden ladder into position and climbed to its highest rung. On the top shelf was a wooden tray holding the newest reports not yet of a quantity to be bound. Chang scooped up the contents and stepped easily down the ladder with his arms full, sure as a cat, crossing to a wide table. He dropped the pile onto it without ceremony.
When the 4th Dragoons had been re-posted to serve at the Palace, Chang had used Ministry announcements to trace where the order had come from. Thus he had uncovered a bargain made between Henry Xonck and Deputy Minister Crabbé. While Chang was not a man to imagine purity in the intentions of others, even he had been surprised by the nakedness with which a man of business like Xonck had insinuated his agenda into that of the government. By placing Colonel Trapping—his own brother-in-law—at the center of the Palace, Xonck ensured that he would receive advance notice of all military actions, diplomatic agreements, tariff decisions—an almost infinite number of events that he could then skillfully exploit to his financial advantage. In turn, Crabbé had been given—quite without lawful precedent—the equivalent of a private army at his own command, which also—being now executed by the Queen's soldiers—put an official government stamp on all of the Cabal's actions. The arrangement had been audacious and arrogant. But now Chang was curious about the finer details that—due to the grind of bureaucracy— might not have been published initially. What had Henry Xonck been promised for his part in the bargain? And by extension what might Charlotte Trapping have discovered since that final night at Harschmort House?
The reports were an uncollected jumble, from every Ministry and each department, but Chang sorted rapidly, discarding documents on agriculture, legal reform, medical patents, cheese, livestock, and stamps. He paused at a mention of royal game preserves, his squinting eyes caught by a reference to Parchfeldt Park. Chang held the paper up to his face and read more closely: a portion of land running directly through the park's southern quarter had been given over to the public interest to allow an arm of the Orange Canal to be extended across the width of the preserve. Chang frowned. What was on the far side of Parchfeldt Park that required access to the canals, and through them the sea? He set this aside and sorted through the rest of the unbound papers, but nothing else caught his interest. He shrugged. That a Parchfeldt canal had anything to do with the Xoncks was mere speculation. On a whim he crossed to the Interior Ministry documents, looking for any previous attempts to open this portion of Parchfeldt to private usage. With some satisfaction he found a cluster of petitions brought forward by a certain Mr. De Groot, the apparently ill-favored owner of a local mill. All had been denied. The requests had persisted for ten years and then abruptly ceased, leaving a gap of some three years with no requests whatsoever… until this last winter, when one was put forward by a Mr. Alfred Leveret.
This request had been granted.
HE LEFT the Annex and crossed the marble landing to the reference room, vaulting behind the archivist's counter without a qualm. Moving like a deliberate half-blind bee amongst dusty blossoms, Chang dipped in and out of heavy, flaking volumes—registries of business, of death, catalogs of land transfer. Thirty minutes later he slipped off his glasses and spat into his handkerchief, rubbing the moistened cloth over each tender eye. He had learned what he needed to know: August De Groot had died bankrupt in a debtor's cell. After three years unclaimed and empty, his mill works had been purchased— just this last October—by Alfred Leveret, a senior employee of Xonck Armaments. And now, in the wake of all the recent transactions between Henry Xonck and the Privy Council, the precious canal access had been granted.
He snorted at the way wealth so effortlessly got its own, De Groot's misery bringing to mind the story of Margaret Hooke, the daughter of a northern mill owner gone bankrupt, no doubt hounded to ruin just as De Groot had been, by others waiting to snap up the leavings for cheap. And what had happened to De Groot's children, or his displaced workers—were any of them driven to a life in the brothels? Were such costs ever considered in the transactions of high finance? Certainly they lay outside the care of any official counting, and thus beyond what the nation could ever admit had occurred. Chang swatted the book dust from his hands.
IT WAS near eight o'clock. The staff would be arriving. De Groot's factory and its proximity to Parchfeldt struck Chang as the exact sort of circumstance he had been looking for, though his rational mind told him it was far more likely that the widowed Charlotte Trapping had decamped to the cottage of some cousin by the sea, or even to a welcoming foreign capital. But was Charlotte Trapping really the person he wanted to follow? He'd gone into her home only to have his search dislocated by the mysteries of Elöise Dujong… ought he to be investigating her? He climbed quietly up to the map room, hoping to investigate all three quarries at the same stroke.
Perhaps his distrust finally had the better of him—perhaps he over-estimated the reach of his enemies, and their capacity… or perhaps he was finally learning that their plans for profit and control spread beyond any boundary he had formerly understood. Chang opened the surveyor's codex and found the map number for Parchfeldt Park, then turned to the large cases of the maps themselves, located the proper drawer, and finally hauled the item in question onto the table.
Like many royal preserves, Parchfeldt was enormous. The park was shaped like a tall Norman shield, and with the Ministry report in mind Chang turned his attention to the southernmost spike, now crossed by the band of a newly laid canal. The park was nearer to the sea than Chang had realized, close to the northern spur of the Orange Canal. Just to the edge of his map he picked out the abandoned—or soon to be so, depending on when the map had actually been made— mill works of the late Mr. De Groot. Chang shook his head. From the mill to the nearest canal had been an awkward circular path, adding days to any delivery, not withstanding the tolls and duties levied along the way—a minor concern to someone like Henry Xonck, but the exact margin of cost to drive a man like De Groot into collapse. With the canal extended, the factory would be but a day from the open sea itself—a shocking advantage, with few or no duties at all. It would be a perfect manufacturing point for goods going abroad… to such a place as Macklenburg.
He dug Caroline Stearne's letter from his pocket. Two things struck him, the first of which was that Elöise had been contacted at all. Xonck had persuaded Elöise to visit Tarr Manor to find Colonel Trapping only after Trapping had been killed. But this letter meant some other member of the Cabal had targeted Elöise and Mrs. Trapping well before… which was also to say that they had their eyes on outflanking Xonck with regard to his family's fortune. Chang snorted at the brazen strategy… and the letter did mention the St. Royale Hotel. It had to have come from the Contessa.