The Parvennys; Rhadymantus of Selbourne; the Marcomann brothers, shipping magnates who’d been hit hard by bad investments—all of them proscribed as members of the Three Circles Conspiracy, all of them intimates of Adele’s parents and elder kin.
Adele slammed the heel of her right hand against the console. The tough casing bonged without injury. Vanness hunched his shoulders; the lovers’ whispering paused, then resumed.
There was a pistol in Adele Mundy’s pocket, a flat weapon of Cinnabar manufacture. She carried it on Kostroma as a sensible precaution for a woman who because of poverty walked home alone at night to lodgings in a bad district.
But the reason she owned the gun and could blow the head off a rat at fifty meters with it was because of her training as a child. Her parents had been determined that every Mundy of Chatsworth would be able to take a place at the barricades on the day the people gained power and the reactionaries came to take it away from them.
Marksmanship hadn’t helped her parents when an armored vehicle crushed through the front wall of the Mundy townhouse. Marksmanship hadn’t helped Adele’s ten-year-old sister Agatha either, though what happened to her was later, and slower, and much worse. Nothing could justify what had happened to Agatha.
Adele closed her eyes. She couldn’t remember ever crying as an adult. People said crying was healthy, that it made them feel better. Perhaps. Personally Adele thought the folk who talked that way were fuzzy-minded weaklings, just as likely to advocate prayer to nature spirits or a diet of bark infusions as a route to health, but perhaps they were right.
It didn’t affect Adele Mundy, though. She didn’t cry, any more than she took her clothes off to dance on tables. What she did do, what she must do, was prepare this collection for . . .
The door opened. Adele opened her eyes and turned.
The two journeyman carpenters and Master Carpenter Bozeman entered the library. Ms. Bozeman wore a green velvet robe and carried a meterstick plated with one of the noble metals to give it a dull, eternal sheen. Her juniors carried two shelves, this time. The material was veneer-quality hardwood which had been polished as smooth as the meterstick.
“Good afternoon, mistress librarian,” Bozeman said in a rasping bellow. She was a big woman with a florid face and hair in ringlets beneath her beret. She’d put on the formal garb of her status before coming to ram her point of view down the foreigner’s throat. “We’ve come to set the first pair of shelves for you.”
Adele got up and walked toward the trio. She should be getting into formal wear for the dinner herself, but first things first.
The journeymen had entered in front of their superior. Now they moved to Ms. Bozeman’s other side.
“I believe we’ve had this discussion before, master carpenter,” Adele said in a pleasant tone. She owed Leary a good deal for reminding her of who she was.
“I hope you’ve come to your—” Mistress Bozeman said.
Adele gripped the meterstick and pulled it from the carpenter’s hand. She turned and flung the symbol of rank through a window. The sash exploded in shards of glass and splintered wood. More work for the carpenters, Adele supposed.
“We aren’t going to go over the subject again,” she said. “We’re going to go to your shop now, and then we’re going to take all this lovely and unsuitable wood to a supplier who can provide what I need to do my job. Do you understand, Ms. Bozeman?”
Adele was approximately half the size of the carpenter. Her smile was genuine because at last she’d seen that the obvious path out of her dilemma was to assert her authority—in the certainty that she had no authority if she didn’t assert it.
Bozeman’s mouth worked; it was surprisingly small and bow-shaped in a face that otherwise resembled a pie. No words came out. She wiped her empty hands on her robe, crushing splotches in the velvet. She turned in sudden fury on her journeymen and snarled, “Come along, you damned fools! Do you expect me to carry lumber?”