Agent of the Crown (13 page)

“You’re right. I do it without thinking,” she
admitted. “The people of Longbourne aren’t friends. They’re pieces
I’m using to do my job. And the truth is, I don’t need to treat
them that way to do what I’m here for. I don’t mean them any harm,
but if I were planning to live here, I’d be abusing their
trust.”

“And since you’re not staying, you ought
leave ’em be.”

Telaine put her elbows on her knees and her
face in her hands, and groaned. “Aunt Weaver,” she said, her voice
muffled, “if I swear I won’t manipulate these people anymore, will
you stop putting obstacles in my way? Starting with showing me how
I’m supposed to bathe?”

Aunt Weaver nodded once. “But you’re not
going to like the bathing,” she said.

She
hated
the bathing. Telaine stood naked in a large metal tub in the
darkened kitchen, calf-deep in lukewarm water, and scrubbed herself
more quickly than she’d imagined possible. Washing her hair in the
sink was worse; the water was cold, her waist-length hair took
forever to dry, and she resolved to be out of Longbourne before
winter, because she imagined hair-washing didn’t even happen
then.

But once she was clean, she felt so much
better. It was late when she finally crawled into bed. She slept,
and had pleasant dreams of places far from this awful town where no
one liked her.

Breakfast was a surprise. When she came
downstairs, Aunt Weaver was in the process of frying flat cakes on
a griddle set on the top of the stove. She lifted one off with the
spatula and deposited it on a plate she handed to Telaine. “They’re
good with honey,” she said. Telaine poured a dollop on and tasted
it. It was delicious.

“I thought you’d made up ‘figgin,’” she
confessed without thinking.

“Does sound like a made-up thing,” Aunt
Weaver agreed. “Did you ask for one?”

“No, I asked him to name all the sizes.”

Aunt Weaver grunted. It might have been a
kind of low-grade laugh. “You’re not stupid,” she said.

“Thanks for the compliment,” Telaine said.
She gobbled her flat cake and had another one, then cleared her
plate and washed it under the tap. She was starting to figure out
how washing dishes worked. “I worked on a Device for Mister
Garrett,” she said. “It heats water as it comes out of the
tap.”

“Boiling water over the fire’s always been
good enough for me.”

“But I think I could get the
materials—wouldn’t it be nice—”

“I got my own ways of doing things, thank
you.”

Telaine gave up. “I’m going back over there
now. I’ll be back for supper.”

“Have a good day,” said Aunt Weaver.

Telaine stopped. “You know,” she said with an
arched brow, “that was almost pleasant. I might get the idea that
you approve of me.”

Aunt Weaver grunted again. Telaine smiled and
left the kitchen through the back door.

She came around to the front of the house and
jumped, startled, because Morgan stood by the front door, leaning
against the wall as lazy as a cat. “Miss Bricker,” he said without
looking at her. “I wonder if you might be interested in a
commission.”

Her heart began to beat faster. “What might
that be, Mister Morgan?”

“Baron Steepridge has a Device he needs
repaired. I told him of your presence in our little community and
he was so pleased you could help him.”

Not so much a request as a command, then. She
didn’t care. Finally, she could start work. “I’d be happy to work
for the Baron. When would he like me to begin?”

“How does ‘now’ sound?”

“I’d…certainly. Let me fetch my tools.” She
ran back upstairs, checked the roll and bundled up the larger
tools, and hid her lock picks in her boot. She probably wouldn’t
get a chance to use them today, but taking them along was a good
habit. She once again felt full of fizzy excitement. Time to
begin.

Today it seemed everyone she passed looked at
her. Or maybe they were looking at Morgan, who was as elegant as
before in a cream-colored silk shirt, full-sleeved, with a tightly
laced black vest and black trousers of heavy twilled cotton. His
boots still shone like mirrors, quite a feat considering how much
rock dust came off the road. He wore a knife in a sheath dangling
from his belt; it bounced off his leg as he strode.

It was like having an extra shadow, him
towering over her as they walked side by side down the street. Were
they going to walk all the way to the Baron’s manor? Morgan’s
footwear certainly wouldn’t survive that trip unscathed. And she
had trouble picturing him doing anything so plebeian as walking any
farther than the length of the town.

They approached the forge, and Telaine
remembered where she’d been going before Morgan accosted her.
“Excuse me one moment, Mister Morgan,” she said, and went to the
forge rail, smiling reflexively at Tanner and his cronies, whose
conversation stopped when she neared. As far as she could tell,
lounging around the forge was their only employment.

Garrett turned away from tending the forge
fire and flashed one of those quick smiles, but then he looked
beyond her to Morgan, and his face went still. “Mister Garrett, I’m
going to the manor, but I’ll be back this afternoon to finish that
repair. If the gear is ready.”

He looked away from Morgan and back at her.
“Be careful,” he said quietly, and went back to his work.

Morgan smiled when she returned to his side.
Unlike Garrett’s elusive smile that flashed and vanished, Morgan’s
smile was like a cat’s—pointed, wide, and rarely reaching his eyes.
“Don’t tell me you have an admirer?” he drawled.

“A job,” she replied. Even without Garrett’s
warning and that of her actual admirers two nights ago, she would
have found Morgan alarming. On the surface, his regard of her was
the kind of appreciation the Princess was familiar with and could
manipulate with ease, but Telaine had a feeling his interest went
beyond simple admiration into a darker emotion that made her
uneasy. She would think carefully before trying to captivate or
manipulate him. He might see through her plan, and weave a far more
cunning trap for her.

“How nice that you’re making a place for
yourself here,” he said, with an emphasis on “nice.” His drawling
upper-class voice made everything he said sound as if it were
invested with a double meaning, as if he were having a joke at
everyone else’s expense. That was a mystery; what was someone who
sounded as if he belonged in a palace drawing room doing in the
back of beyond?

“I don’t plan on staying long,” she said. She
was about to add more, but caution held her tongue. If he was as
dangerous as she suspected, it would be a bad idea to give him any
more information about herself than necessary.
But what exactly
am I afraid he might do? Am I being paranoid? Good.

Morgan led her to the tavern, where a
beautiful bay horse was tethered to the porch rail. “Can you ride?”
he asked, mounting, and reached down a hand to help her mount.
Telaine almost refused right there; getting on a horse controlled
by this man made her nervous. She steeled herself, took his hand,
and let him pull her up behind him. The horse went from standing
still to a trot in a heartbeat, and Telaine had to throw her arms
around Morgan’s waist to keep from falling. She heard him chuckle,
and she flushed, moving around until she didn’t have to grip him so
tightly. It was a good horse, a tall gelding with an excellent
gait, and Morgan rode well.

“
i would have brought a mount for you,
but I didn’t know if you were a rider,” he said without turning his
head.

“I do ride fairly well,” Telaine said. The
lying echo confirmed her instinct that he’d wanted to make her
uncomfortable. That she’d known what he intended left her
unsettled. She was good at reading people, but this went beyond
simple observation; it was as if they had some kind of connection,
and it was a far from lovely feeling. She took a slow breath, then
another, and thought
This isn’t the job. Don’t let him rattle
you.

Morgan rode beyond Longbourne and up a
wandering path to the end of the valley. It was a beautiful, sunny
late summer day, and Telaine enjoyed the ride despite the company.
At least Morgan had stopped speaking. The dark pines began to close
in around them as the valley narrowed, but it was peaceful rather
than oppressive, as if the trees were reaching out to shelter them,
though why the trees didn’t shrink from Morgan’s presence was a
mystery.

After about ten minutes of their silent ride,
Telaine could see the dark blot that was the fort in the distance,
with another, smaller blot off to the right. Another ten minutes
brought them in full view of both the Baron’s manor and the fort,
which straddled a narrow cut in the mountains like a lion crouched
over its prey. Morgan turned off the main road before they reached
the fort and down a smaller road that turned into a graveled drive
running in front of the manor.

The manor, in contrast to its peaceful
surroundings, huddled in on itself, shrinking from the pines that
surrounded it on three sides. It was small for a noble’s house, but
still bigger than any five buildings in Longbourne combined; four
stories tall, it had the now-familiar stone foundation and wooden
upper stories, with large glass windows gleaming in the morning
sun. The foundation stones were light-colored granite, larger and
more regular than the ones Longbourne residents used, but the
wooden upper stories had been painted a dour brown which, with the
black leading of the windows, gave the place a haunted look.
Telaine could not imagine living there, however opulent it was on
the inside.

A long flight of stairs led up to the second
story, to a double door framed in heavily carved square timbers.
The abstract curlicues and triangles of the carvings were no older
than the manor itself—Telaine judged it to have been built some
fifty years earlier—but resembled those of the long-ago era when
Tremontanans still worshipped gods instead of ungoverned
heaven.

Morgan pulled up his horse at the foot of the
stairs, dismounted, and helped Telaine down before she could
protest that she could dismount very well on her own, thanks. She
followed him up the stairs, where two footmen dressed in what could
only be the Baron’s livery stood at…you couldn’t call it “at
attention,” could you, when they slouched and seemed not to notice
the visitors? Morgan opened the door himself and bowed Telaine
in.

Her guess about the opulence of the interior
turned out to be inadequate. The Baron of Steepridge might have
gone into exile, but he had taken his wealth with him and turned it
into mahogany paneling, fine art, tiled flooring, and furniture
that would not have looked out of place in the palace. Sweeping
staircases curved up both sides of the entry hall, meeting in a
gallery on the floor above; doors of mahogany and glass on the
entry level led further into the house. It was exquisite without
being tasteless, and Telaine’s amazed appreciation for the place
apparently showed, because Morgan said, in his lazy drawl,
“Impressive, isn’t it? Even to a city girl?”

“I don’t exactly move in these circles,”
Telaine said.
Not at the moment, anyway
.

“We will have to change that,” said a voice
Telaine recognized. She looked up to the gallery and saw, for the
first time, Hugh Harstow, Baron of Steepridge. She had pictured him
as a lean, hawk-nosed man with narrow eyes. She was completely
wrong.

From this angle, she couldn’t tell how tall
he was, but he had a bit of a paunch and unusually red lips. He
wore a dove gray morning coat and trousers with a white shirtfront
and a beautifully tied cravat pinned with a ruby the size of her
thumbnail, exactly as if he expected to call on the King in half an
hour.

He came down the stairs slowly, allowing her
to absorb his magnificence, and to do him credit, he was
magnificent, despite his physical shortcomings. When he stood
before her, she saw he was several inches taller than her and, when
he inclined his head to her, that his brown hair was thinning on
top.

“Miss Bricker, thank you for coming,” he
said, extending his hand. Telaine reached out to shake his hand,
but he grasped hers and lifted it to his red lips, just as Morgan
had done. She forced herself not to jerk her hand away; his lips
were wet and surprisingly cold. “Has Morgan explained my little
problem to you?”

“Only that you need a repair done.”
Steepridge released her hand and she refrained from wiping it on
her leg.

“I hope you’ll find it an interesting
challenge. Please, follow me.”

The Baron led the way through one of the
glass-paned doors into a room brightly lit by half a dozen windows
looking out over the approach to the manor. Chairs and couches
upholstered in golden brown velvet made a half-circle around a
glossy pianoforte, sheets of music spread out on it as if waiting
for a performer. To the left was the huddled shape of a harp
swathed in sheets, almost blocking a glass-fronted cabinet
containing bound books of music. Their footsteps were swallowed up
by the thick carpet, making the room feel dull, as if any sound,
even the most beautiful, would simply fly into the walls and fall
disregarded to the floor.

In one corner a large birdcage made of ornate
wires of many different metals hung from a hook in the low ceiling.
The Baron opened a wire door in its side and reached in. He pulled
out a dead bird and showed it to Telaine. “Remarkable
craftsmanship, don’t you think?”

Telaine overcame her revulsion to look
closer, and was stunned. The Baron held a large bird-shaped Device
whose black feathers were iridescent in the indirect light. Its
head was made of gold and its lidless eyes were round, cabochon
sapphires.

“Take it,” the Baron said, offering it to
her, and she accepted the thing with wonder. It was heavier than it
looked—the body under the feathers might be as gold as the head—and
warm from more than the Baron’s body heat.