Her Ladyship's Curse

Page 11

Natives lived outside Rumsen on the lands permanently deeded to them by the Crown after the last treaty had been struck, and they did not permit their women to leave its boundaries. However, after failing to become the farmers the Crown had desired them to be, the tribesmen had gradually drifted back to Rumsen to seek work in the city. They were generally employed to look after horses or livestock, as they preferred animals to people, or worked in tanneries or potteries. I’d seen a few light-skinned braves serving as drivers and footmen to young bachelor masters, as they were ferocious fighters and made the best bodyguards. Given the distressing history between the races, few families trusted them around their females, and so natives were never brought on as household staff, even among the working class.
The one prime convenience the treaty had brought for the natives was equal rights as voting citizens. New Parliament had argued for years against it, but a change in attitude toward the preservation of indigenous peoples throughout the Empire had resulted in the males of the tribes being made full citizens. Posing as a native male I had the right to access any of the government’s archives whenever I pleased—something not even the wealthiest of white women could do without paying a prodigious number of bribes.
As it was a weekday, I expected the City Archives Building to be jammed—and it was. But most of the citizens came to purchase permits and licenses or pay their taxes, which created long lines outside Provincial Planning and H.M.’s Revenue & Customs. By comparison the small, cramped office of the Hall of Records was nearly empty, with only a sour-faced legal clerk and two vicars waiting in line. The collars ignored me, a poor heathen who in their view was already doomed to burn in hell everlasting. After one desultory glance I also ceased to exist for the legal clerk, who could not expect to solicit business from a citizen whose interests could only be represented in court by a tribal conciliator.
After fifteen minutes of standing and waiting—something a woman would never have been expected to do—I faced the records secretary. He was one of the thousand ubiquitous young clerks in the city, overly groomed and hopelessly attired, but he greeted me courteously enough and asked via universal hand gestures if I required an interpreter.
“I speak and read the English,” I said in my deepest guttural native accent.
“Thank the Son,” the secretary said baldly. “Takes forever to hand-speak things with you lot, especially with the documents. What do you want?”
“I seek record of grandfather, soldierman, work class,” I told him. “Father wish give name papers for young sister to husband’s tribe.”
Some of the natives believed having blood ties to important white families, particularly if they were friendly, elevated the status of a female and could result in her husband’s family offering a higher bride price. Since the government collected a hefty percentage of bride prices from the tribe, they encouraged the practice.
“Do you know how to operate the sorter, then?” When I nodded, the secretary gestured toward one of the empty booths to the left of the counter.
I placed a pound note through the window slot. “How long I can use?” Generally there was a limit of one hour, but the clerks tended to give natives more time for translation purposes.
“Unless we’ve a rush come in, you can use it as long as you like,” he said as he placed the note in his cash drawer. “If you need assistance, tap the bell.”
I entered the glass-sided booth, which smelled of dust, paper, and men’s sweat, and sat down on the hard-backed chair in front of the wide records sorter panel.
Three large levers were marked with the B, M, and D representing the three major record rondellas (Birth, Marriage, and Death). To the right of each were twenty-six smaller levers marked with every letter of the alphabet, along with two extra with I and D that sorted out incomplete or damaged records. Another row of seven levers further separated the records by province of origin, and at the bottom of the panel was a long row of even smaller annum levers with faded labels indicating years in five-decade increments.
I pulled the B lever and watched through the glass window of the booth as the sorter’s arm descended from the ceiling, then I flipped down the W, another for Tull province, and the annum lever for the fifty-year span before my mother’s birth date.
With its internal cogs adjusted by the levers, the arm stretched out, plucking the first sheaf of glassined documents from the archive shelves. It dropped them into a flat-sided chute, which carried them one by one to my window, where I used the stop knob to hold and glance at each one before allowing it to be whisked by the chute back to its shelf.
Surnames beginning with W in Tull province were common, so there were a great many records to skim through before I reached the Wh’s, and all the birth records of Tullan citizens of the time period named White. There were seventy-two, and not one of them named Harold, Harrison, or Harcourt.
Which was impossible, because my grandfather could not have immigrated to Toriana without registering some sort of document of origin.
I searched the records for the annum of my mother’s birth and found none registered for her either. I then went to the annum of my own birth, which I had never seen, and found the record of my delivery at Middy Women’s Hospital, which noted my parents’ names. Mum had been listed not as White but as Doyle. Using the new surname, I found among the birth records a writ of adoption, which named Rachel White as a foundling taken in by the Doyle family at age sixteen.
Tommy’s grandfather must have gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to formally adopt my mother, but why? Had my grandfather been some sort of criminal, living underground or under a false identity?
I went back to the annum of my mother’s birth and this time pulled all the incomplete records. I found one single handwritten note filed by the midwife who had attended the birth of a female child, delivered to a Harry White, Esq., and wife. My grandmother was not named but was listed as having passed in childbirth. I found no corresponding death certificate for her.
The paper trail ended there. My grandfather had come into existence on the night of my mother’s birth, had evidently lived for sixteen years after without ever registering his identity, and had vanished after Arthur Doyle had adopted her.
I made note of the number stamped on the glassine seal before sending the last of the documents back to the archives, then stepped out of the booth. The other patrons had left, and I saw the secretary was finishing up his lunch at his desk. He came over to the window as soon as he saw me.
“Find what you needed?” he asked.
“No,” I admitted, only just remembering to alter my voice. “If man has no papers here, where else they could be?”
“All citizens of Toriana are required by law to register birth, marriage, and death certificates.” He sighed. “Unless the man was a criminal, or protected by the Crown. Then his papers would be held by the Ministry of Prisons for the length of his sentence, or kept under seal.”
I doubted even someone as high in society as Arthur Doyle could have adopted Rachel if her father had been a convict. “Where these seal papers?”
“All protected documents are kept in the secured archives belowground,” he told me. “But you can’t access them without a writ from the governor’s office, and they won’t issue those to a native. Sorry, old man.”
I knew what I needed then, so I gruffly thanked him and left.
One of the strangest jobs I’d ever undertaken had been for one of the city’s moles, who had contracted me by tube to investigate a sudden infestation of rats in a posh hotel, for which he was being blamed. He in turn claimed to me that the hotel had been placed under a dark enchantment by a rival establishment hoping to drive them out of business.
I’d never realized how vast and intricate the labyrinth of tubes, drainageways, and mech rooms beneath the city was until I searched them for the source of the rodents. I’d discovered the hotel’s new rubbish tubes had actually been the culprit, for the builders had used substandard materials that had allowed the rats infesting the city’s landfill to gnaw through a joint and come up into the hotel’s kitchens. The old tunneler had been too poor to pay me, but thinking I might someday need to use his warren, I’d accepted a favor to be claimed as settlement.
Gaining access to the underground from the surface was not easy; the storm drains were protected by mesh to keep out debris, and the busy downtown traffic ruled out using one of the hatch drops spaced along the middle of the streets. Fortunately my investigation had also taught me where the less traditional access points in the city were, and I went to the nearest bathhouse where I was known.
My native disguise didn’t fool the proprietor, a genial woman named Delia, for longer than an eyeblink.
“Eh, Miss Kit, is that you under all that bronze? So it is.” She chuckled as she handed me a cowled cloak. “Mind you keep your head down in there. Don’t want the ladies thinking I’ve sold them out to the savages.”
She led me back through the communal baths to the private rooms used by ladies who enjoyed a rub before or after their wash. The young men who attended them worked stripped to the waist and had been trained to use their hands to deliver various degrees of pleasure. Rina always claimed the bathboys were doing a great deal more than that behind the locked doors, but I thought not. If a woman wished to be penetrated and run the risk of catching a babe, she went to her husband, or a lover who resembled her husband. If she wished to be stroked and petted and made to feel beautiful in her skin, she came here for a rub.
Delia let me into her tube room and the stairs leading down to the small sorting station beneath it. “Tell Clancy while you’re down there that I don’t want no holdup on the linens in those tubes today. Missus Trevors and her ducklings are coming in at three.”
“All nine of them?” I pulled on my gloves and gogs. “Better let the boys have an early supper, Del.”
I climbed down through the darkness on the rusty, rickety staircase and stepped off into a damp, murky room filled with tubes from the bathhouse and several other businesses. Four of Delia’s brothers worked in the station, and they rarely had a moment’s rest from dawn until dusk, when all the tubes finally closed. Clancy, her eldest sibling, paused long enough to laugh soon as he saw me.