Her Ladyship's Curse

Page 13

With a trembling hand I removed from the box all the glassines pertaining to my grandfather and mother and stuffed them inside my shirt before I trudged back to rejoin the old tunneler.
“Good enough, then.” Hedger tapped the pipe with the side of his fist. “Did you see any seepage under the shelves, lad?”
I heard the guards unlocking the gates to the vault room behind me and managed a strangled “No, marster.”
“Good on ye.” Hedger tramped through the aisle of shelving, had a word with the guards about opening the outside air slats to ventilate the last of the gas from the room, and then brought one back to see the unnecessary work he’d done.
“You’re sure this’ll hold?” the guard asked.
“Aye, it’s as strong a patch as any I’ve done, and none of them ever have cracked.”
The guard yawned. “Get on with you, then.”
As I stepped toward the hatch, the glassine in my shirt crackled, and something grabbed my collar and turned me around.
“What you got on you, boy?” the guard demanded.
“Naught but lunch, Cap’n,” Hedger said, taking out a glassine bundle from his pocket and holding it up. “Wet down here. The old glassies we scram make fine wraps, keep our sandwiches dry.”
If the guard demanded I show him my nonexistent sandwich, Hedger and I were going to the gaol. The whimper that broke from my lips was quite genuine.
“’Sall right, boy,” the guard said, releasing my collar and giving my shoulder a rough shove. “I’d eat dirt before I’d touch scram.” He turned to Hedger. “You be sure to secure that hatch, old rat.”
Hedger nodded eagerly and hustled me out of the vault. Once he’d closed the hatch and spun the hub to lock it, he leaned against it and pressed a blacking-streaked fist against his heart as he murmured a prayer.
If I’d been Church, I’d have done the same. “Sorry.”
“So am I.” He dragged me down the tunnel until we were well away from the vault. “What were ye thinking, Kit? Ye’re no thief. Were ye trying to get us shot?”
I was too shaken to lie. “The papers are about my family. There’s a man who’s looking into my past, and I can’t let him find them.”
He held out his hand. “Give ’em over.”
“Hedger—”
“There’s naught about ye that could rattle me bars,” he snapped. “But I’ll see what ye just near stretched me neck over.”
I pulled out the glassines and handed them to him and watched as he sorted through them. In the midst of the pile he went still.
“Ye’re Harry’s Charm.” He looked at me, his face gone leech white under the layer of dirt. “Why did ye never say so, gel?”
“Because I don’t quite know who I am, Hedger.” I tried to smile. “Did you know my grandfather?”
“Served with him, I did.” His voice grew distant as he stared at nothing in particular. “Until he went up to the North Country. Then he disappeared for years, until . . .”
He didn’t say anything else, and my skin prickled with unease. “Mr. Hedgeworth?”
His face darkened abruptly. “This settles things between us.” He seized my arm. “Ye’re to go now, and ye’re not to come back down here, do ye understand? Never again.”
“Why not?”
“The debt is settled,” was all he would say.
He allowed me just enough time to change back into my bucks before he marched me back to the bathhouse, where he gave me a hard push toward the stairs.
I couldn’t leave without knowing. “Who was my grandfather, Mr. Hedgeworth?” I asked. “What did he do?”
His face twisted. “Get on with ye now.” He turned away.
“Please,” I called after him. “I have to know.”
Hedger glanced back at me. “Harry saved me life. And I’ve cursed him every day since. Now get out.”
I rode home, shoved the papers I’d stolen in my cashsafe, washed the rest of the bronzen from my body, and spent another hour soaking in the tub. I kept seeing the hatred in Hedger’s eyes. Whatever Harry had done, it had made the old scrammer loathe him.
I climbed out of the tepid water to dry off and dress. It had never been my habit to avoid the truth. Weiss sounded too much like White; the name had to belong to Harry or his family. It was time to find out.
A few minutes later, I finished reading the last of the glassines I’d stolen. Harry’s name, as I assumed, had been Weiss, not White. He’d been born a Hungarian.
He’d also been an agent for the Crown.
Dread iced the blood in my veins, but anger soon thawed it out and set it to boil. Harry, the nice old gent, had been a traitor. An informer. One of Her Majesty’s rats. For a moment the elegant words on the royal documents proving I was the granddaughter of a filthy sodding turncoat blurred. I blinked, and they instantly rewrote themselves.
Working as a royal spy had obviously been quite lucrative for my grandfather, who had probably used his earnings to change his identity, marry, and acquire Torian citizenship. That my mother had been the daughter and I the granddaughter of a Hungarian—an enemy of the Crown—hardly registered anymore. I was bound by blood to a member of H.M.’s secret service.
After the failure of the Great Uprising, Toriana may have remained part of the Empire, and grown accustomed to the occupation and institution of Crown law, but we’d never fostered any love for it. Now and then some young hothead commoners would stage a small revolt, embarrass their parents, and spend a few years in the gaol, but they always got out quieter and wiser—or they were kept behind bars where they could make no mischief.
I knew precisely what this connection meant for me. If it became common knowledge that my grandfather had been a spy, I’d be completely and irrevocably ruined. No one would give me the time of day, much less trade with me. Unless redcoats were stationed to protect it, my home would be ransacked and burnt to the ground.
We Torians were still Empire, oh, yes, but we had never forgotten the fate of the first colonists. When the revolution had been crushed, all the survivors who refused to take an oath of loyalty to the Crown had been marched out of Valley Forge into the snows and made to dig their own graves before they’d been shot and shoved into them. Upon hearing of their comrades’ fate, every man left in camp who had taken the oath of service had then killed himself, either by pistol or blade. Forty-seven men had famously marched in formation into the icy waters of the Potomac—refusing to stop even when the redcoats had begun firing on them—and had promptly drowned.
Since then every agent of the Crown who had made himself known as such on Torian soil had vanished shortly thereafter. The remains of a few would occasionally be found floating in whatever river or lake they’d been drowned in. The Crown had never been able to prove their agents had been murdered, but after several more years of the same they’d instructed the traitors to hide their work and operate under the guise of ordinary citizens.
As my grandfather had apparently done.
I’d always known my mother to be a bastard and guessed her to have been the get of some undesirable, or her people would have come forward after my parents’ death to protect me. Not a single relation had. Finally I knew why.
As a schoolgel I’d made my oath to the Crown and renewed it every five years as was required by law, just as every Torian child did. I’d never especially liked or disliked being H.M.’s subject; I’d never really thought about it. It was what it was, an unchanging part of life in my country. Wondering what Toriana would have been like if we’d won the Great Uprising was nothing but a waste of time. We’d lost. After Washington’s surrender at Broken Forge, the Empire would have been within its rights to jail or kill us all. No doubt our ancestors had been grateful to be allowed to continue on as occupied colonies and permitted the means to explore, settle, and develop our country into the provinces of today.
But I was born Torian, not English, and that also meant something. The Union Jack never graced my eaves; in the back of my dresser I still had a small, handmade patch with the stars and stripes the Rebels had carried. I’d sewn it myself as a gel, with a child’s resentment of atrocities she’d never experienced firsthand, when everything had seemed so black and white. While I never indulged in redcoat baiting, putting out forty-seven flowers on Remembrance Day, or any of the other subtle ways Torians thumbed their noses at the Crown, I’d never been a bootlicker. I didn’t think we’d ever see Independence, at least not in my lifetime, but I still dreamed of it. Most Torians did. All that had changed now that I knew the truth about my grandfather.
Harry the Hungarian. Harry the traitor.
If Nolan Walsh had enough influence to gain access to these records, and he knew my mother’s history and where to look, he could ruin my life forever.
But then, anyone else who read them could as well.
I spent an endless night tossing and turning before I finally gave up on sleep and rose to dress. My dire mood dragged at me, reminding me of those first terrible days when I’d come to Rumsen, when I’d slept for an hour here and there on park benches and walked the streets in a hopeless fog. If I hadn’t stopped an old gent from walking into the path of an oncoming cart, I might have been found one cold morning, starved and frozen in the gutter.
That one good deed had changed everything: the old man had insisted his thoughts had been paralyzed by evil magic, magic he believed I’d dispelled with my touch. I’d not argued with him or the fifty pounds he’d gratefully pressed in my hands. I’d asked for directions to a respectable boardinghouse.
That first fifty pounds had gone to feeding and sheltering me while I looked for work. After several more encounters similar to the one with the old man in the street, word spread about my alleged ability to dispel magic.
At first it had felt like thievery, taking money for doing nothing, but the people who had come to me were more desperate than I. I dealt with my guilt by looking for the real source of their woes, and I discovered I had a natural talent for detecting. Combining the two allowed me to provide service without feeling as if I’d become just another magic swindler, like Dredmore.