“With what—”
Miriam was already kneeling near the skirting board beside the bed. Stale dust and a faint smell of mouse piss wrinkled her nose. “In here. Here, hold this.” She passed Brill the loose piece of woodwork. Behind it, the brickwork was visible. “Pass me your knife.…” It took a little work, but between them they levered the two half-bricks out of their niche. Then Miriam reached inside and grabbed. “Got it.”
The black cloth bag was about the size of a boot, but much heavier. Miriam grunted and lifted it onto the bed.
“How much is it?” asked Brilliana.
“I’m surprised it’s still here.” Miriam untied the knotted drawstring then thrust her hand inside. “Yep, it’s the real thing.” The gold brick glinted in the afternoon light; she returned it to the bag hastily. “About six kilos of twenty-three-carat. It was worth a hell of a lot a year ago—God only knows what it’s worth right now.” Stuck in a deflationary cycle and a liquidity crash with a revolution on top, gold—with or without seigniorage—was enormously more valuable than it had been when it was merely what the coin of the realm was made of. The national treasury had been stripped bare to pay for the war: That was what had started the crisis.
She straighted up and dusted herself down. “Job number one for Alasdair is to get someone who knows what they’re doing to hide this properly. We lucked out once, but sooner or later one of Erasmus’s rival ministries will probably try and shake us down to see where the leverage is coming from. They won’t believe the truth, and if they find this here we’ll be for the chop. Revolutionary governments hate hoarders; it’s a law of nature.”
“I’ll see to it, my lady—”
“That’s another thing.” Miriam glanced at the windows. “It’s not ‘my lady’ anymore—I mean it. Drop the honorific, and tell everyone else: It’s Miriam, or ma’am, but not ‘my lady.’”
Brill’s dismay was palpable. “But you are my lady! You are my liege, and I owe you an acknowledgment of that fact! This isn’t the United States, this is—”
“This is a continent in the grip of revolution.” Miriam walked towards the wardrobe and lifted one corner of its dusty shroud. “What do you know about revolutionary governments?”
“Not much; we hang rebels, my lady.” Brill lifted back the top of the dust sheet from the bed, wrinkling her nose.
“Well, I’ve been doing some reading this week. Remember the books?” Miriam had given Brill a list of titles to order from Amazon. “There’s a general pattern. First there’s a crisis—usually fiscal, often military. The old government is discredited and a coalition of interests move in and toss the bums out. Then they start trying to govern as a coalition, and it goes to hell quickly because just changing the government doesn’t solve the underlying crisis unless it was a crisis of legitimacy.” Brill looked perturbed, as Miriam continued: “This means that the new government gets to try and fix the crisis at its weakest, and in conditions where it’s very easy to replace them. Most postrevolutionary regimes are overthrown by their own hard-line radicals, the ones with the most blinkered ideological outlook—precisely because they’re also the ones most willing to murder anyone who stands between them and a solution to the crisis.”
She tugged the dust sheet down from the wardrobe and stepped aside.
“The revolution here was against the autocratic monarchy, but there’s also a fiscal crisis and a war. They hit the trifecta—crisis of currency, conflict, and legitimacy in one go. The aristocracy, such as it is, gets its own legitimacy from the Crown—for centuries, John Frederick and his family have sold titles as a way of raising revenue—so anyone with a noble title is going to be automatically suspect to the hard-liners in the new government. And unless Sir Adam can end the war with France and fix the economy in, oh, about six months, the hard-liners are going to get restive.” She turned worried eyes on Brilliana. “That’s why I want everyone to stop using titles immediately. If I’m wrong, they’ll get over it. But if I’m right…”
“I understand,” Brill said tiredly. “There’s no need to repeat yourself. Miriam. Ma’am.” She peeled back the blankets and sheets that had stayed on the bed, exposing them to air for the first time in months. “What else is going to happen here?”
“I don’t know. It depends on whether they tackle the economy, the war, or the constitutional problems—any or all of them.” She opened the wardrobe, sniffed. “I think something died in here. Where’s the flashlight?”
“Here.” Brill waited while Miriam shoved aside the dresses on the rail and shone the beam around the interior of the wardrobe. “What do you think?”
“I think they’ll have to execute the king, and a lot of his supporters, or the French would use him as an excuse to make mischief. And they won’t rest with a revolutionary superpower on the other side of the world—Sir Adam Burroughs’s Leveler ideology is an existential threat to any absolute monarchy, much like the Soviet Union was to the United States’ capitalist system. Which leaves the economy.” Miriam straightened up. “Lots of radical ministries jockeying for preeminence, a permanent emergency in foreign affairs, a big war effort. Central planning, maybe, lots of nationalization. They’re going to have to industrialize properly if they’re going to dig their way out of this mess. War spending is always a good way to boost an economy. And land reform, let’s not forget the land reform—they’ll probably expropriate the big slave plantations in South America, the duchies of the Midwest.”
“My—Miriam, you can’t sleep here: The bedding’s mildewed.”
“Wha—oh? Shit. There should be spare sheets in the laundry—” Miriam wound down. “Oh. No servants.”
“I could hire bodies easily enough, if you think it necessary?”
“No.” Miriam frowned. “Flashing around cash would be really dangerous right now. Huh. Need to know if the electricity’s working … listen, let’s go see if the office is intact and the power still works. If so, we ought to go look at the factory. Then I can electrograph Erasmus and tell him we’re ready to start work whenever he comes up with those passes he was talking about.”
* * *
In an office near the northern end of Manhattan, with a window overlooking the royal navy dockyard, Stephen Reynolds set aside the stack of death warrants at his left hand and stood, smiling warmly, as commissioners Jennings and Fowler walked in.
“Good morning, citizens.” He gestured at the seats beside his desk as he walked around it, placing himself on the same side of the table as his visitors: “Nice to see you. Are you both well? Edward, is your wife—”
“She’s fine,” Jennings said, a trifle brusquely, then cleared his throat. “Nothing to worry about, and the would-be assassin is already in custody.” As the citizen inquisitor supervising the Justice Directorate, Jennings (not to mention his family) had become accustomed to being the principal target of the regime’s enemies (not to mention their surviving relatives). “I gather your people have identified his conspirators already.”
“Ah, excellent.” Fowler cleared his throat. “Time is short, I’m afraid: Got a meeting of the Construction Subcommittee to chair in an hour. You have something that calls for extreme measures?”
“Yes.” Reynolds smiled again, concealing his minor irritation at being so preempted. “Alas, we have a minor problem. That fine fellow Mr. Burgeson is apparently trespassing on our turf. I’ve had a tipoff from certain sources”—not mentioning Elder Cheung and his magical powers, or his strange associate, the Dutch doctor—“that Erasmus is, not to put too fine a point on it, dealing with persons of interest. There’s some question as to what he is doing; I haven’t been able to get an informer into his organization. But the secrecy with which he is conducting his affairs is suggestive. Certainly it’s not any activity that falls within the portfolio of the commissioner for state truth. I believe he is in league with wreckers and subversives, and I would appreciate the cooperation of your departments in, ah, distinguishing the sheep from the goats.”