The Clan Corporate

Miriam's eyes widened. "You're kidding!"

He took her glass and placed it on the floor, alongside his own, by the skirting board. Then he straightened up again. "No."

"What did they find?"

He offered her his hand. "Will you dance? People will gossip less…"

"Sure." She took it. He led her onto the floor. In deference to the oldsters the tempo was slow, and she managed to follow him without too much stumbling. "I'm crap at this. Not enough practice when drunk."

"I shouldn't worry." The room spun around her. "In answer to your question, we don't know. Nobody knows. The elders forbade further experiments when they failed to return."

"Oh." She leaned her weight against him, feeling deflated, the elephantine weight of depression returning to her shoulders. For a moment she'd been able to smell the fresh air drifting through the bars of her cell-and then it turned out to be prison air-conditioning. The music spiraled to an end, leaving her washed up on the floor by the doorway. The ferret was waiting, looking bored. "I think this is my cue to say good-bye," she told Lee.

"I'm sure we'll meet again," he said, smiling a lazy grin of intrigue.

As several days turned into a week and the evenings grew long and humid, Miriam grew resigned to her confinement. As prisons went, it was luxurious-multiple rooms, anxious servants, no shortage of basic amenities, even a walled courtyard she could go and walk in by prior arrangement-but it lacked two essentials that she'd taken for granted her entire life: freedom and the social contact of her equals.

After Kara's marriage, she was left with only the carefully vetted maids and the ferret for company. The servants didn't have a word of English between them, and the ferret had a very low tolerance for chitchat. After a while Miriam gritted her teeth and tried to speak hochsprache exclusively. While a couple of the servants regarded her as crack-brained, an imbecile to be humored, a couple of the younger maids responded, albeit cautiously. A noblewoman's wrath was subject to few constraints: they would clam up rather than risk provoking her. And it didn't take long for Miriam to discover another unwelcome truth: her servants had been chosen, it seemed, on the basis of their ignorance and tractability. They were all terrified of the ferret, frightened of her, and strangers to the city (or overgrown town) of Niejwein. They'd been brought in from villages and towns outside, knew nobody here outside the great house, and weren't even able to go outside on their own.

About a week into the confinement, the boredom reached an excruciating peak. "I need something to read, or something to write," she told the ferret. "I'll go out of my head with boredom if I don't have something to do!"

"Go practice your tapestry stitch, then."

Miriam put her foot down. "I'm crap at sewing. I want a notepad and mechanical pencil. Why can't I have a notepad? Are you afraid I'll keep a diary, or something?"

The ferret looked at her. He'd been cleaning his fingernails with a wickedly sharp knife. "You can't have a notepad," he said calmly. "Stop pestering me or I'll beat you."

"Why not?"

Something in her expression gave him pause for thought: "You might try to draw an escape knot from memory," he said.

"Ri-ight." She scowled furiously. "And how likely do you think that is? Isn't this place doppelgangered in New York?"

"You might get the knot wrong," he pointed out.

"And kill myself by accident." She shook her head. "Listen, do you really want me depressed to the point of suicide? Because this, this-" The phrase sensory deprivation sprung to mind, but that wasn't quite right. "This emptiness is driving me crazy. I don't know whose idea keeping me here was, but I'm not used to inactivity. And I'm rubbish at tapestry or needlepoint. And the staff aren't exactly good for practicing conversational hochsprache."

He stood up. "I will see what I can do," he said. "Now go away." And she did.

Two days later a leather-bound notebook and a pen materialized on her dresser. There was a note in the book: Remember you are thirty feet up, it said. The ferret insisted on holding it whenever she went downstairs to walk in the garden. But at least it was progress. Miriam drew a viciously complicated three-loop Möbius strip on the first page, just to deter the ferret from snooping inside, then found herself blocked, unable to write anything. I should have studied shorthand, she thought bitterly. Privacy, it seemed, was a phenomenon dependent on trust-and if there was one thing she didn't have these days, it was the confidence of her relatives.

One foggy morning, almost two weeks after Kara's arranged wedding, there was a knock at the door to her reception room. Miriam looked up: this usually meant the ferret wanted to see her. Today, though, the ferret tiptoed in and stood to one side as two tough-looking men in business suits and dark glasses-Secret Service chic-entered and rapidly searched the apartment. "What's going on?" she asked, but the ferret ignored her.

One of the guards stepped outside. A moment later, the door opened again. It was Henryk, leaning heavily on a walking stick. The ferret scurried to fetch a padded stool for the baron, positioning it in front of Miriam's seat in the window bay. Miriam stared at Henryk. Her heart pounded and she felt slightly sick, but she stayed seated. I'm not going to beg, she told herself uncertainly. What does the old bastard want?

"Good morning, my dear Helge. I hope you are keeping well?" He spoke in hochsprache, but the phrases were stock.

"I am well. I thank you," she said haltingly, frowning. I'm not going to let him show me up-

"Good." He turned to the ferret: "Clear the room. Now."

Thirty seconds later they were alone. "What require-do you want?" she asked.

"Hmm." He tilted his head thoughtfully. "Your accent is atrocious." She must have looked blank: he repeated himself in English. "We can continue in this tongue if you'd rather."

"Okay." She nodded reluctantly.

"Tonight there will be another private family reception at the summer palace," Henryk said without preamble. "A di

"Huh." Miriam frowned. "What about the crown prince? Is he going to be there?"

"Egon?" Henryk looked bemused. "No, why should he be? He's off on a hunting trip somewhere, I think."

"Oh." One less thing to worry about, Miriam thought. "Is that all?"

"Not quite." Henryk paused, as if uncertain how to continue. "You know what our plans for you are," he said slowly. "There are some facts you need to understand. The younger prince-you have met him." Miriam nodded, suppressing a shudder. The prince belonged in a hospital ward with nursing attendants and a special restricted diet. Brain damage. "He's a little slow, but he is not a vegetable, Helge. You should respect him. If he had not been poisoned-" A shadow crossed his face.

"What do you expect me to do?"

"I expect you to marry him and bear his children." Henryk looked pained at being made to spell it out. "Nothing more and nothing less, and it is not just what I expect of you-the Clan proposes and the Clan disposes. But you can do this the easy way, if you like. Go through the ceremony, then Dr. ven Hjalmar will sort you out. You don't need to worry about bedding the imbecile, if that thought upsets you: the doctor has made a sufficient study of artificial insemination. You'll be pregnant, but you'll have the best antenatal care we can provide, and in an emergency the doctor will get you to a hospital on the other side within half an hour. The well-being of your child will be a matter of state security. Once you are mother to a child in the line of succession, a certain piece of paper can be discreetly buried. Two or more children would be better, but I shall leave that as a matter for you and your doctor to decide upon-your age, after all, is an issue."