Charles Stross - The Hidden Family

“Possibly. And you may just have reignited it by crawling out of the woodwork.” Iris looked thoughtful. “Do you have any better suggestions? Are you involved in anyming else that might explain what’s going on?”

“Roland—” Miriam stopped. Iris stared at her. “You said not to trust any of them,” Miriam continued slowly, “but I think I can trust him. Up to a point.”

Iris met her eyes. “People do the strangest things for money and love,” she said, a curious expression on her face. “I should know.” She chuckled humorlessly. “Watch your back, dear. And… call me if you need me. I don’t promise I’ll be there to help—with my health that would be rash—but I’ll do my best.”

The next morning Paulette arrived back at the house around noon, whistling jauntily. “I did it!” she declared, startling Miriam out of the history book she was working up a headache over. “We move in tomorrow!”

“We do?” Miriam shook her head as Brill came in behind Paulie and closed the door, carefully wiping the snow off her boots on the mat just inside.

“We do!” Paulette threw something at her; reaching out instinctively, Miriam grabbed a bunch of keys.

“Whereto?”

“The office of your dreams, madam chief high corporate executive!”

“You found somewhere?” Miriam stood up.

“Not only have I found somewhere, I’ve rented it for six months up front.” Paulette threw down a bundle of papers on the living room table. “Look. A thousand square feet of not-entirely-brilliant office space not far from Cambridgeport. The main thing in its favor is a downstairs entrance and a backyard with a high wall around it, and access. On-street parking, which is a minus. But it was cheap—about as cheap as you can get anything near the waterfront for these days, anyway.” Paulie pulled a face. “Used to belong to a small and not very successful architect’s practice, then they moved out or retired or something and I grabbed a three-year lease.”

“Okay.” Miriam sighed. “What’s the damage?”

“Ten thousand bucks deposit up front, another ten thousand in rent. About eight hundred to get gas and power hooked up, and we’re going to get a lovely bill from We the Peepul in a couple of months, bleeding us hard enough to give Dracula anemia. Anyway, we can move in tomorrow. It could really use a new carpet and a coat of paint inside, but it’s open plan and there’s a small kitchen area.”

“The backyard looked useful,” Brill said hesitantly.

“Paulie took you to see it?”

“Yeah.” Brill nodded. Where’d she pick that up from? Miriam wondered: Maybe she was beginning to adjust, after all.

“What did you think of it?” Miriam asked as Paulette hung her coat up and headed upstairs on some errand.

“That it’s where ordinary people work ? There’s nowhere for livestock, not enough light for needlework or spinning or tapestry, not enough ventilation for dyeing or tanning, not enough water for brewing—” She shrugged. “But it looks very nice. I’ve slept in worse palaces.”

“Livestock, tanning, and fabric all take special types of building here,” Miriam said. “This will be an office. Open-plan. For people to work with papers. Hmm. The yard downstairs. What did you think of that?”

“Well. First we went in through a door and up a staircase like that one there, narrow—the royal estate agent, is that right? took us up there. There’s a room at the top with a window overlooking the stairs, and that is an office for a secretary. I thought it rather sparse, and there was nowhere for the secretary’s guards to stand duty, but Paulie said it was good. Then there is a short passage past a tiny kitchen, to a big office at the back. The windows overlooking the yard have no shutters, but peculiar plastic slats hung inside. And it was dim. Although there were lights in the ceiling, like in the kitchen here.”

“Long lighting tubes.” Miriam nodded. “And the back?”

“A back door opens off the corridor onto a metal fire escape. It goes down into the yard. We went there and the walls are nearly ten feet high. There is a big gate onto the back road, but it was locked. A door under the fire escape opens into a storage shed. I could not see into any other windows from inside the yard. Is that what you wanted to know?”

Miriam nodded. “I think Paulie’s done good. Probably.” Hope there’s something appropriate on the far side, in “world three,” she thought. “Okay, I’m going to start on a shopping list of things we need to move in there. If it works out, I’ll start ferrying stuff over to the other side—then make a trip through to the far side, to see if we’re in the right place.” She grinned. “If this works, I will be very happy.” And I won’t have to fork out a second deposit for somewhere more useful, she noted mentally.

“How was your reading?” Paulie asked, coming downstairs again.

“Confusing.” Miriam rubbed her forehead. “This history book—” she tapped the cover of the “legal” one—”is driving me nuts.”

“Nuts? What’s wrong with it?”

“Everything!” Miriam raised her hands in disgust. “Okay, look. I don’t know much about English history, but it’s got this civil war in the sixteen-forties, goes on and on about some dude called the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. I looked him up in Encarta and yes, he’s there, too. I didn’t know the English had a civil war, and it gets better: They had a revolution in 1688, too! Did you know that? I sure didn’t, and it’s not in Encarta—but I didn’t trust it, so I checked Britannica and it’s kosher. Okay, so England has a lot of history, and it’s all in the wrong order.”

She sat down on the sofa. “Then I got to the seventeen-forties and everything went haywire.”

“Haywire. Like, someone discovered a time machine, went back, and killed their grandfather?”

“Might as well have.” Miriam rolled her eyes. “The Young Pretender—look, I’m not making these names up—sails over from France in 1745 and invades Scotland. And in this book, he got to crown himself king in Edinburgh.”

“Young pretender—what did he pretend to be?”

“King. Listen, in our world, he did the same—then he marched on London and got himself spanked, hard, by King George. That’s George the first, not the King George the thingummy who lost the war of Independence.”

“I think I need an aspirin,” said Paulette.

“What this means is mat in the far side, England actually lost Scotland in 1745. They fought a war with the Scots in 1746, but the French joined in and whacked their fleet in the channel. So they whacked the French back in the Caribbean, and the Dutch joined in and whacked the Spanish—settling old scores—and then the Brits, while their back was turned. It’s all a crazy mess. And somewhere in the middle of this mess things went wrong, wrong, wrong . According to Bri-tannica, Great Britain got sucked into something called the Seven Years’ War with France, and signed a peace treaty in 1763. The Brits got to keep Canada but gave back Guadaloupe and pissed off the Germans, uh, Prussians. Whatever the difference is. But according to this looking-glass history, every time the English —not the Brits, there’s no such country—started getting somewhere, the king of Scotland tried to invade—there were three battles in as many years at some place called New Castle. And then somewhere in the middle of this, King George, the second King George, gets himself killed on a battlefield in Germany, and is succeeded by King Frederick, and I am totally confused because there is no King Frederick in Britannica.”