Charles Stross: The Hidden Family

Miriam paused. A sense of awe stole over her. This isn’t Boston, she realized. This is something else again. A whole new world, one that had vacuum tubes and adding machines and steam cars—a shadow fell across her. She glanced up and the breath caught in her throat. And airships, she thought. “Airship!” she muttered. It was glorious, improbably streamlined, the color of old gold in the winter sunshine, engines rattling the window glass as it rumbled overhead, pointing into the wind. I can really work here, she realized, excitedly. She paused, looking in the window of a shipping agent, Greenbaum et Pty, “Gateways to the world.”

“’Scuse me, ma’am. Can I help you with anything?”

She looked down, hurriedly. A big, red-faced man with a bushy moustache and a uniform, flat-topped blue helmet —oops, she thought. “I hope so,” she said timidly. Gulp. Try to fake a French accent? “I am newly arrived in, ah, town. Can you, kind sir, direct me to a decent and fair pawnbroker?”

“Newly arrived?” The cop looked her up and down dubiously, but made no move toward either his billy club or the brass whistle that hung on a chain around his neck. Something about her made up his mind for him. Maybe it was the lack of patching or dirt on her clothes, or the absence of obvious malnutrition. “Well now, a pawnbroker—you’ll not want to be destitute within city limits by nightfall, hear? The poorhouse is near to overflowing this season and you wouldn’t want a run-in with the bench, now, would ye?”

Miriam bobbed her head. “Thank you kindly, sir, but I’ll be well looked after if I can just raise enough money to contact my sister. She and her husband sent for me to help with the children.”

“Well then.” He nodded. “Go down Jefferson here, turn a left into Highgate. That’ll bring you to Holmes Alley. Don’t go down the Blackshaft by mistake, it’s an odious rookery and you’ll never find your way out. In Holmes Alley you can find the shop of Erasmus Burgeson, and he’ll set you up nicely.”

“Oh thank you,” Miriam gushed, but the cop had already turned away—probably looking for a vagrant to harass.

She hurried along for a block then, remembering the cop’s directions, followed them. More traffic passed on the road and overhead. Tractors pulling four or even six short trailers blocked the street intermittently, and an incongruous yellow pony trap clattered past. Evidently yellow was the interuniverse color of cabs, although Miriam couldn’t guess what Boston’s environmentalists would have made of the coal burners. There were shops here, shops by the dozen, but no department stores, nor supermarkets, or gas-burning cars, or color photographs. The advertisements on the sides of the buildings were painted on, simple slogans like BUY EDISON’S ROSE PETAL SOAP FOR SKIN LIKE FLOWER BLOSSOM. And there were, now she knew what to look for, no beggars.

A bell rang as Miriam pushed through the door of Erasmus Burgeson’s shop, beneath the three gold spheres that denoted his trade. It was dark and dusty, shelves racked high with table settings, silverware, a cabinet full of pistols, other less identifiable stuff—in the other side of the shop, rack after rack of dusty clothing. The cash register, replete with cherubim and gold leaf, told its own story: And as she’d hoped, the counter beside it displayed a glass lid above a velvet cloth layered in jewelry. There didn’t seem to be anybody in the shop. Miriam looked about uneasily, trying to take it all in. This is what people here consider valuable, she thought. Better get a handle on it.

A curtain at the back stirred as a gaunt figure pushed into the room. He shambled behind the counter and turned to stare at her. “Haven’t seen you in here before, have I?” he asked, quizzically.

“Uh, no.” Miriam shuffled. “Are you Mr. Burgeson?” she asked.

“The same.” He didn’t smile. Dressed entirely in black, his sleeves and trousers thin as pipe cleaners, all he’d need would be a black stovepipe hat to look like a revenant from the Civil War. “And who would you be?”

“My name is Miriam, uh, Fletcher.” She pursed her lips. “I was told you are a pawnbroker.”

“And what else would I be in a shop like this?” He cocked his head to one side, like a parrot, his huge dark eyes probing at her in the gloom.

“Well. I’m lately come to these shores.” She coughed. “And I am short of money, if not in posessions that might be worth selling. I was hoping you might be able to set me up.”

“Posessions.” Burgeson sat down—perched—on a high, backless wooden stool that raised his knees almost to the level of the counter-top. “It depends what type of posession you have in mind. I can’t buy just any old tat now, can I?”

“Well. To start with, I have a couple of pieces of jewelry.” He nodded encouragingly, so Miriam continued. “But then, I have in mind something more substantial. You see, where I come from I am of not inconsiderable means, and I have not entirely cut myself off from the old country.”

“And what country would that be?” asked Burgeson. “I only ask because of the requirements of the Aliens and Sedition Act,” he added hastily.

“That would be—” Miriam licked her lips. “Scotland.”

“Scotland.” He stared at her. “With an accent like that,” he said with heavy irony. “Well, well, well. Scotland it is. Show me the jewelry.”

“One moment.” Miriam walked forward, peered down at the countertop. “Hmm. These are a bit disappointing. Is this all you deal in?”

“Ma’am.” He hopped down from the stool. “What do you take me for? This is the common stock on public display, where any mountebank might smash and grab. The better class I keep elsewhere.”

“Oh.” She reached into her pouch and fumbled for a moment, then pulled out what she’d been looking for. It was a small wooden box—purchased from a head shop in Cambridge, there being a pronounced shortage of cheap wooden jewelry boxes on the market—containing two pearl earrings. Real pearls. Big ones. “For starters, I’d like you to put a value on these.”

“Hmm.” Burgeson picked the box up, chewing his lower lip. “Excuse me.” He whipped out a magnifying lens and examined them minutely. “I’ll need to test them,” he murmured, “but if these are real pearls, they’re worth a pretty penny. Where did you get them?”

“That is for me to know and you to guess.” She tensed.

“Hah.” He grinned at her cadaverously. “You’d better have a good story next time you try to sell them. I’m not sticking my neck in a noose for your mistress if she decides to send the thief-takers after you.”

“Hmm. What makes you think I’m a light-fingered servant?” she asked.

“Well.” He looked down his nose at her. “Your clothes are not what a woman of fashion, or even of her own means, would wear—”

“Fresh off the boat,” Miriam observed.

“And earrings are among the most magnetic of baubles to those of a jackdaw disposition,” he added.

“And wanting a suit of clothes that does not mark me out as a stranger,” Miriam commented.

“Besides which,” he added with some severity, “ Scotland has not existed for a hundred and seventy years. It’s all part of Grande Bretaigne.”

“Oh.” Miriam covered her mouth. Shit! “Well then.” She mustered up a sickly smile. “How about this?”

The quarter-kilogram bar of solid gold was about an inch wide, two inches long, and half an inch thick. It sat on the display case like an intrusion from another world, shimmering with the promise of wealth and power and riches.