The most important thing, which Stella learned from Jack, the newspaper boy on Commercial Road, was that she had won the paper prediction game she’d played with herself the day before. “Economic Hostility, says Austria” dominated the front page, and there was an article about Vienna blaming Prague for a trade stranglehold. The situation in Austria was getting desperate, with 50% of people out of work and 17000 kroner worth the same as £1. Imagine trying to bribe someone with £20 in Kroner. She’d have needed… Stella did a quick calculation in her head… don’t forget to carry the one… is that right? She’d have needed a wheelbarrow! The blockade was understandable, really, since Austria had been the Holy Spanish Empire’s launchpad for the Bohemian invasion. Both times.
Stella scanned the front page as she made her way towards the church. Sweden had increased its naval patrols. Försvarsdepartementet, the newly formed Swedish Ministry of Defence, was a gorgeous word, but she didn’t think she would manage to fit it in a sentence today. If she did, she’d give herself the last tin of birthday peaches tonight, because that would deserve a reward.
The Siberian exposé was continuing with another day on the Warlords of the Wastes, and the government had decided they would not be sending famine relief efforts to Russia. Prime Minister Lloyd George was quoted saying “private charity may proceed, but without government involvement.”
Stella was frowning as she entered the church. The only good word was the Swedish one. She definitely wasn’t getting peaches tonight. When she reached the crypt, she walked over to her bibi-daj, who was standing with Árpád. When she had dropped off the supplies the previous night, she had given her bibi-daj the apology bouquet. Her bibi-daj had started with “you can’t just give someone flowers to make going into burning buildings acceptable,” and become more unreasonable from there. The lecture had taken an hour and ended with her bibi-daj demanding a promise that Stella wouldn’t run into burning buildings, and Stella quickly agreeing and escaping. Running in burning buildings was dangerous. The floors could be unsafe. Sensible people walked.
“I thought you would be gone by now,” Stella said as she reached them.
“Tomorrow,” her bibi-daj replied. “I am waiting to greet my brother first. How was your sleep?”
“Delightful. My bed is so much more comfortable than my floor.”
“Why were you on the floor?” Before Stella could respond to that, her mother saw her and shouted her over. Stella gave her bibi-daj a rueful smile and headed over to where her mother was standing. The Prussian Baron was before her, in her face, his face red, flushed with anger.
“Listen to me, woman,” she heard him say in a low, threatening tone.
Stella didn’t realise her clothes were shifting as she walked. Subconsciously she readied herself for a fight, dropping her centre of gravity, silk stretching up over the lower half of her face, her skirt morphing into trousers. She shoved between her mother and the red-faced idiot who was trying to berate her. “Nah, you listen ya ritzy kotlo-kisser,” Stella said, pushing into his face. He was a good four inches shorter than her and stumbled back as she approached him. “Nob’dy gives lip to m’mama, capische?”
“What are you saying, peasant? I do not understand you.” His vocabulary was bold. The tremor in his voice when he spoke was not. He backed up another step. Of course he didn’t understand her. He’d probably never heard a commoner speak in his life. He’d certainly never heard one of the Sabini gangsters defending their mother when a buddy made a joke that went too far. That was why she’d slipped into the voice: aristocrats like him always feared the peasantry. They had the numbers, they were the ones who could rise up. The world gave all the power to nobility, but the peasantry could strip it away. She closed the gap.
“Be respectful,” she said, returning to a tone he could understand. He was already afraid, she’d be able to end this without violence, now. His fear was doing half the work already.
“I am an East Prussian baron, heir to a barony. You must respect me,” he blustered. She felt dizziness swamp her but pushed through it. Whatever his power was – he could make people dizzy? – it was weak and she was angry.
“You only get one warning,” she told him.
“And if I don’t heed it?” He was trying to regain some of the power she had stripped from. Best nip that in the bud, no power for the baron.
“Then I’ll make sure that when you are returned to your daddy, it’s in pieces.”
The baron blanched. “You… you wouldn’t.” He backed into the wall.
Stella pressed her face right up to his. His neck was tilted so far back he was cricking it just to look at her. “No one knows you are here,” she reminded him gently. “He would suspect whoever had taken you. Do not threaten my mother again.”
“It… I wasn’t making a threat…”
“Do not speak to her in that tone.”
“What tone?”
Her patience snapped. Her silk grabbed him and drew him up to her height. Sweat beaded on her forehead. “Do not act the mooncalf with me,” she growled. “Do not speak to my mother in anyway I dislike, or you think I might dislike. Am I clear?”
“Ye-yes.”
“Good.” She dropped him.
As Stella turned back to her mother, she heard Diego’s whisper cut through the silent hallway. “Puede que yo sea fuego, pero eso sí que es caliente.”
Stella turned towards him, but her mother set a gently restraining hand against her arm. Every eye in the hallway was locked on her. Every teenager was staring at her; some with respect or awe, some with fear or distrust, Madeleine Girard with Parisian disdain.
It wasn’t her power that made her stand out in a room filled with those who had powers. It was her attitude, her ability to make a member of the aristocracy back up, to calmly threaten to dismember him, to ignore rank, class, propriety, and what they undoubtedly saw as plain good sense. No wonder Madeleine Girard looked so unimpressed, the French had beheaded their nobles and monarchs.
“What the sek you bako fulgi looking at?” Stella asked, and they all found somewhere else to stare, except Diego and Henri, because they were boys. Most of the rest looked at the floor. Madeleine Girard met Stella’s eyes with a look that had seen everything before, and Stella looked away.
The French girl didn’t even bother to smirk.
“Thank you for stepping in, Stella,” her mother said. “I did not want to have to damage the boy.”
“You should have just hurt him, mama.”
“We do not need a dead Prussian aristocrat in the crypt, my varra, it’s in enough of a mess with the children camping. No call for corpses. Now, I had intended for you to spend some time with the others. They are your peers, after all; mingling would do you good, and it would help them to see you in a leadership role. However, after this unpleasantness, it might be best for you to step out for some time.”
“Yes, mama. I do have errands to run.”
“Then be about it. Farry’s brother will be here tomorrow, make sure you’re back for that.”
Stella gave her mother a kiss on the cheek and left the church with a smile on her face. Thirty minutes later she was in the waiting room of a private clinic in Harley Street. The motor cab she had hired for the journey had taken only twenty-five minutes, when the train would have taken forty. She had come in, spoken to the receptionist, and been directed to take a seat. The waiting room had that sterile, clinical smell that all hospitals seem to develop, though they had attempted to hide it behind the floral scent of a potpourri bowl on the table. There were a few scattered magazines around the bowl: The Illustrated London News, The Sketch, Punch, and The Strand Magazine.
Stella left them alone, preferring to study the room itself. The walls were painted a faint cream colour. The woollen carpet was dark brown. The reception desk was English oak, and the receptionist was well-dressed. Her posture was perfect, her speech clearly refined; it had the tells of someone who had learned to speak Proper, but not quite mastered the lessons. Her bibi-daj had taught her how to spot that.
She was offered tea or coffee but declined. No one else came in whilst she waited, and she could only see silhouettes pass by. The busy London street outside was obscured by the frosted glass windows. The room was even warm, though she couldn’t spot a fireplace.
After around ten minutes, a door behind the desk opened, and a man came through. He spoke briefly with the receptionist and then went back through the door.
The receptionist stood up. “Miss Tildum, the doctor is prepared to see you now.” It was subtle, the way the receptionist’s lower class accent hung to her speech, on some words more than others. It was detectable on the word is, subtle like the scent of smoke in hair. Stella had washed her hair twice since the warehouse fire and still caught the occasional whiff from it.
It wasn’t just the accent, though, it was also vocabularian choices, the doctor should be prepared to see Stella at her convenience, not now.
Stella entered the room behind the reception, where the doctor was waiting for her, with a nurse. The nurse was a huge man, as tall as she was, and thickly muscled, but he was no larger than a man could be. She’d fought the monstrous form of Robbie Staunton, so a large man didn’t intimidate her.
Still, there was something off about this situation. Her threat assessment suggested the nurse was in the optimum place, off to one side, to charge forward and grab her. She couldn’t think of a reason for him to be there, unless they were already suspicious.
“You told the receptionist you would like to tour our clinic and receive a consultation,” the doctor said. His eyes very clearly travelled up and down her body in a clinical manner. “Tell me, what prosthesis do you require?”
Ah, that was why they were suspicious. She smiled genuinely, happy to have solved the little mystery. She’d solve the big one too, soon. “An arm,” she said. “My father, Colonel William Tildum, lost his fighting the Spanish.”
The doctor warmed to her immediately. “Arms are a speciality of ours,” he told her. “Now, we would need to meet with your father for a proper consultation. Sometimes, when one loses an arm part of it remains, and that can have an impact on the prosthetic limbs we can offer. However, I can certainly tell you about our processes.”
“Please, my father would like as much information as possible. He is a busy man now he is getting involved in politics, but he will make time for a consult if he thinks it worthwhile.”
“Then let me start by showing you a selection of our arms. They are produced right here in London, you know. Is your father a praeditus or expers occultum?”
“Praeditus.”
“Perfect. Our best limbs are praediti only, you know. We manufacture the best artisan prosthetics in the empire, custom built to each client’s specifications, using only the finest yew, silver-iron, ceramics, and crystals. Each one is itself a work of art, with full precision movement and sensory feedback. It will be better than the arm he lost, I assure you of that. Now over here we have…”
The consultation lasted an hour and ten minutes and was very thorough. By the end of it, she was actually considering booking an appointment for the father she’d invented. The doctor was incredibly passionate about his work, and the prosthetic limbs were amazing. It was just disappointing that there seemed to be no connection between the clinic and the warehouse.
She took a second motor cab home, and gave the driver a large tip for anonymity, which her mother had taught her to do even when it didn’t seem necessary. It didn’t completely preclude him talking about her; the tip would be meaningless if he was tortured, but it should stop him gossiping. She still had him stop a fifteen minute walk away from her house in case the clinic staff asked questions.
Even if they traced her to here, most people would only look at a distance of ten minutes before giving up. It was one of the peculiarities of human nature, or so her bibi-daj had said when she explained it.
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