After a moment, she breathed a sigh of relief. Her gaze fell on the dictaphone and she picked it up. “Memo to self,” she muttered. “At a formal banquet the pain in the small of your back might be the chair, but on the other hand it might be your kidneys backing up.” Four, no five, glasses of wine. She shook her head, still wobbly, and took another deep breath. “And the breathing trouble. Fuck ’em, next time—if they want formal, they can put up with whatever I can buy off the rack in Boston. I’m not turning myself into an orthopedic basket case in the name of local fashion.”

Miriam took another deep breath. “Right. More notes. Margit of Praha, middle-aged, looks to be a chaperone for Olga Thorold, who seems to be senior to her. Olga is a ditz. Thinks a Swiss finishing school is higher education. Main ambition is to make a good marriage. I think Angbard may have been showing her to me as a role model, fuck knows why—maybe that’s what high-born women do around here. I think Vincenze is just horribly shy. May be some sort of all-male schooling for menfolk here. Their English is better than the women’s. I wonder if that means they get out more.”

She hit the “pause” button, then finished with the toilet. Standing up, she stripped off, then luxuriated in the sensation of having nothing at all in contact with her skin.

A thought struck her. “I’m going to have a bath,” she called through the door. “Don’t wait up for me. I don’t need any help.”

It was Miriam’s third bath of the day, but it didn’t strike her as excessive. Her skin itched. She poured expensive bath salts and perfumed oil into the water without remorse, then slid down into the sea of foam. “Memo: The bath obviously came over from the other side. That means they must have some way of moving heavy items. I need to find out how. If some asshole cousin is going to try killing me because of my name, I’d like to know whether they’re likely to use a pistol or a B-52.” A thought struck her. “It looks like they’re stuck in a development trap, like the Gulf Emirates. The upper class is fabulously rich and can import luxury items to their heart’s content, and send their kids for education overseas, but they can’t import enough, uh—stuff—to develop their population base. Start an industrial revolution. Whatever.” She leaned back, feeling her spine unkink. “I wish I knew more about developing world economics. Because if that’s what this all boils down to, I’ll have to change things.”

She put the recorder down and soaped herself all over, trying to scrub away the sweat and stress.