“I think you should stay here for now. When you’re better, I want to—” Miriam caught Brill’s eye—“introduce you to a friend of mine called Paulette. And then we’ll see.” She licked her lips. “I’ve got a business proposition in mind. One that will flush out the bastards who want us both dead, and make everybody involved wealthy beyond belief.” She grinned at Olga. “Interested?”

Agreements

Almost exactly two weeks later, Miriam sat in front of a mirror in the Brighton Hotel, brushing her hair and pulling a face. It’s definitely getting longer, she thought. Damn that hairdresser! She’d drawn the line at a wig, but even shoulder-length hair was considered eccentrically short by Boston polite society, and a reputation for eccentricity was something Miriam didn’t want to cultivate—it would happen anyway, and could only get in her way. But she hadn’t had hair even this long since she was a teenager. Bloody nuisance, she thought affectedly, then snorted with amusement. This place is getting to me. Even the way they talk!

The house purchase was going ahead, the conveyancing papers and legal to-ing and fro-ing well in hand. Erasmus had taken delivery of no less than ten pounds of twenty-three carat gold, an immense amount by any standard—back in Cambridge it would have paid Miriam’s salary at The Weatherman for almost a year—and had warned his shadowy compatriots to expect much larger amounts to start flowing soon, “from a sympathetic source.” His stock had risen. Meanwhile, Miriam had taken pains to quietly slip into at least two meetings of the Friendly Party to keep an eye on where the money was going. When she’d left money on the collecting tray, it had been with a sense that she was doing the right thing.

The Levelers, despite official persecution (and the imprisonment of many of their leading lights for sedition), had a political agenda she thought she understood, one not too alien from her own. High upon it was a bill of rights; the universal franchise (granting women the vote here for the first time); equal rights regardless of age, race, and sex; and separation of Church from state. That the imperial government didn’t take such things for granted gave Miriam one source of comfort; if she was going to get her start here by smuggling contraband gold to fund radicals, at least they were radical democrats. The ironies in the similarity between her activities and the Clan’s own business model didn’t leave her untouched. She consoled herself with two thoughts: Smuggling gold to undermine a despotic monarchy wasn’t in the same moral league as being the main heroin connection for the East Coast, and she intended to switch to a different business model just as soon as she could.