The Clan Corporate

Five days of hard work, stressful and unpleasant, passed her by like a bad dream. At the end of the first day, Miriam went home to her house on the outskirts of Cambridgetown, to find it shuttered, dark, and cold, the servants nowhere to be found. On the second day, she met with her company lawyer, Bates; on the third day, Morgan reported finding the misplaced Roger; and on the fourth day, she actually began to feel as if she was getting somewhere. The agency Bates recommended had sent her a cook, a gardener, and a maid, and the house was actually inhabitable again. (In the meantime, she'd spent two nights in the Brighton Hotel, rather than repeat the first night's fitful shivering on a dust-sheeted sofa.) A visit to Roger, cap in hand, had begun to convince him that it was all an unfortunate mistake, but she was getting very tired of telling everybody that she'd been hospitalized with a fever during a business trip to Derry City and had taken a month to convalesce afterward. Whether they believed the story… well, why hadn't she written? Never mind. Her earlier reputation for mystery and eccentricity, formerly a social handicap of the worst kind, suddenly came in handy.

On the fifth day, while Morgan was away performing his corvée duty for the Clan, a parcel arrived.

Miriam was in the office that morning, going over the accounts carefully-Morgan had left that side of things almost completely to Bates's clerk, and Miriam wanted to double-check him-when the bell outside the window rang. She stood up and slid the window back. "Yes?" she asked.

"Delivery." An eyebrow rose. "Hah! Fancy seeing you here. Sign, please." It was Sharp Suit Number Two from the verminous hole of a post office near Chicago, wearing a fetching magenta tailcoat over the oddly flared breeches that seemed to be the coming fashion for gentlemen this year.

"Thanks." Miriam signed off on his pad. "Want to come in? Or…?"

"No, no, must be going," he said hastily. "Just didn't realize this was a Clan operation."

"It is." Miriam nodded. Isn't it? she asked herself. "Good day to you."

"Adieu." He tipped his bicorn hat at her, then turned away.

She slid the window closed and carried the parcel over to the desk. Inside it were two large plastic bottles of RIFINAH-300 tablets and a handwritten note from Paulette: Here's your first item, the other will be ready by tomorrow. "Good old Paulie," Miriam muttered to herself, smiling. She tucked the bottles into her shoulder-bag, went back to the accounts. They'd wait until after lunch. Then she had to go and visit a friend.

Lunch. Standing up stiffly, Miriam put the heavy ledger back in its place on the shelf, then walked through into the laboratory. John Probity was bent over a test apparatus, tightening something with a spa

"Aye, mam," Probity grunted. A fellow of grim determination and few words, the only time she'd ever seen him look happy was when she'd a

The electric streetcar rattled its way across the trestle bridge over the river, swaying slightly as it went. The air was slightly hazy, a warm, damp summer afternoon that smelled slightly of smoke. Traffic was heavy, horse-drawn carts and steam trucks rumbling and rattling past the streetcar, drivers shouting at one another-Miriam peered out of the window, watching for her stop. She'd traded her dove-gray shalwar suit and cape for the pinafore of a domestic, worn with a slightly threadbare straw hat. With the "Gillian" identity papers tucked in her shabby shoulder-bag, there was nothing to mark her out as anything other than a scullery maid on a scarce day off, except the two jars of pills in her bag-and she'd decanted them into glass bottles rather than leaving them in their original plastic wrappers. Nothing to it, she thought dreamily, staring out at the paddlewheel steamers on the Charles River, letting a beam of sunlight warm her face. I could be anyone I want. Once you took the first step and got used to the idea of living under a false identity, it was easy…

It was a seductive fantasy, but it was hardly practical. Not with so many strange relatives wanting to get their claws into her skin, to graft a piece of her onto the old family tree. A year ago she'd been an only child, adopted at that, with no relatives but an elderly mother and a daughter she hadn't seen in years. Now, she found she craved nothing quite as much as placid anonymity. I want my freedom back, she realized. No amount of money or power can make up for losing it. It was something that the Clan, with their sprawling extended families and their low-tech background, didn't seem to understand about her. A flash of anger: I'm just going to have to take it back, aren't I?

She'd grown up in a world where she'd been led to expect that she could create her own identity, her own success story, rather than vicariously acquiring her identity from her role in a hierarchy, the way the Clan seemed to expect her to. And it was at times like this-when independence seemed a streetcar ride away-that their expectations were at their most tiresome and her natural instinct to rebel came to the fore, an instinct bolstered by the self-confidence she'd acquired from starting up her own business in this strange, subtly alien city.

Highgate High Street, tall brick-fronted houses huddling against one another as if for comfort against the winter gales. Holmes Alley, piles of uncleared refuse lining the gutters. She stepped around the worst of the filth carefully. The shop front was shuttered and dark, and her heart gave a small downward lurch. I thought they had let him go. Or have they arrested him again? Miriam glanced over her shoulder, then walked past the shop to the battered door with the bellpull: E Burgeson, Esq. When she tugged, it took almost a second for the rattle of the doorbell upstairs to reach her. She waited for the chimes to die away, waited and waited, pulled the doorbell again, waited some more. Damn, he's not home, she thought. She began to turn away, just as there was a click from the latch.

"Please, no deliveries-" A hideous fit of coughing doubled the man in the doorway over, racking him painfully.

Miriam stared. Burgeson the pawnbroker, her first contact in New Britain, possibly the nearest thing to a friend she had here, was coughing his lungs bloody.

"Erasmus?" she asked. "You're ill, aren't you?" Shit, he looks awful, she realized, abruptly worried. In the dusty sunlight filtering down between the houses he looked half dead already.

"Euh, euw-" He tried to straighten up, succeeded after another bout of rattling coughing. "Miriam? How-hah-good to see you." Cough. "But not in. This state."

"Let's go inside," she suggested firmly. "I want to take a look at you."

Miriam followed Burgeson's halting progress up the steeply pitched spiral staircase, up to the front door of his apartment. She'd been here before, seen the cavernous twelve-foot ceiling walled on both sides by dusty, tottering shelves of books, the perfectly circular living room with its overstuffed sofa and scratched grand piano. The genteel bachelor-pad disarray of a cultured life going slowly downhill in the grip of chronic illness. Much of his life was a mystery to her, but she'd picked up some tantalizing hints. He'd once had a family, before he'd spent seven years in one of his majesty's logging camps out in the northwestern wilderness. And he wasn't as old as he looked. But his usual gauntness had now given way to the stooped, cadaverous, sunken-cheeked look of the terminally ill. "Make yourself at home. Can I"-he paused for the coughing fit-"make you a pot of tea?" He finished on a croak.