Chapter 17
O’Connor and Fitzroyce watched the English girl coming and going around the Presidential Palace as easily as if she was at home. O’Connor was delighted, as it meant they had news that the Earl of Cork would appreciate knowing. The tall woman with the commanding manner who escorted the Midlanders from the train station was familiar to the Irishmen. They’d seen her in the prisons of the Tower of London. She had been the one overseeing cleaning and sanitizing rooms, and giving medicine to the sick people, especially children. Ruth Simpson, or something of that order.
So, there was a clear connection between the girl from the Midlands and the Americans. Since it had been the Americans’ first visit to London, O’Connor put two and two together. He thought it was an almost certainty that the English girl had met them while they were guests of His Majesty. Could she have had something to do with the escape, or had she been present during the planning of it all? It didn’t matter. Ah, O’Connor could already smell the rewards he and Fitzroyce would reap. His lordship was wild to solve the mystery that was still exercising his spleen, even as he scrambled to rebuild the riverside wall of the Tower of London, on top of having to cope with the queen’s death, and the renovations to the Palace of Whitehall that had already been promised His Majesty, including a mural to be painted on the ceiling of the great dining hall by the Dutch artist and diplomat, Pieter Paul Rubens. London was a beehive, and every stinger was turned toward their master. They’d be able to assuage one of his wounds, if they could get any solid information.
They needed to find a way to hear what the girl and Lady Simpson were brewing between them, but just word that they were connected would have meaning for his lordship. If they could get Mistress de Beauchamp alone for just a short time, they’d certainly glean all the information she possessed. If not with charm, then with threats. Then, they would disappear like shadows, and return to England.
Ah, but the girl was almost never alone.
They’d followed the girl’s carriage from the depot to the Presidential Palace, and heard Lady Simpson describing the sights as they went. Her voice carried easily from the open-topped cart to theirs in the echoing street. It had required no jump of intuition to see that the girl and Lady Simpson were good friends, of an acquaintance that extended at least as far back as the Americans’ residence in London. O’Connor and Fitzroyce had exchanged pleased glances. There was meat on this bone yet to be savored. After the dry spell in Amsterdam, they’d struck a freshet.
For all that it was the office and residence of the Prime Minister of the new country, the watch wasn’t as anywhere near as vigilant as it surely would have been in other royal domiciles. Not a single guard stood at the wide-open door near the kitchen. The two men strode in as though they belonged there, and donned aprons from pegs near the doorway of the busy scullery. Joining the throng of servants was no trouble at all. In fact, the busy woman in the headscarf who was assigning tasks seemed to pay them little mind, just two more sets of willing hands. She put them to work hauling in baskets of vegetables from wagons lined up in the rear of the building.
“Think there’s a chance at a meal?” Fitzroyce asked. O’Connor looked longingly at the rows of cheeses on shelves in the dairy and the sides of meat hanging from hooks in the butchery. The warm smell of fresh-baking bread wafted temptingly through the air.
“Do what the others do,” O’Connor said. “Ye had a good breaking of the fast afore dawn in the pub on the quay.”
“That was hours ago,” Fitzroyce whined.
“Keep your voice to yourself and your eyes out on sticks,” O’Connor warned him. “It’s not like we can just walk in and ask them where the English girl is bestowed.”
Though they had very little German or the new language Amideutsch, the Dutch they had picked up while traveling through the Lowlands was good enough to allow them to understand instructions. Apparently, servants and workers came and went from there often enough that no one remarked upon two strangers in their midst. That was all in order to what the two Irishmen could have wished. They didn’t want to speak too much, for there was no disguising the fact that the two of them were Irish the moment they opened their mouths.
The head housekeeper, or so they thought of her, barked orders out in both English and the pidgin German. Everyone seemed to understand one or the other, and if the Irishmen didn’t understand, someone else was quick to push them in the right direction. They picked up the meat of it, though. A reception for some notable was to be held that evening. The floors and walls of the grand ballroom, on the top floor of the palace, must be scrubbed clean, brass and glass polished to a gleam, and sconces shined so that the freakishly blue gas lamps would cast the maximum possible light. The big room was hung with tapestries, deeply hued velvet curtains covering the floor-to-ceiling windows, and framed pictures of outlandish buildings and people clad in very strange clothes.
Neither Irishman was a stranger to hard work. They managed to avoid having to wield mops and buckets, but they followed on soon afterwards with the heavy lifting. Carrying trestle tables from a storeroom two floors below, and setting them up was as easy as building a tower out of children’s blocks. In fact, they got a few words of praise from the housekeeper. When cold food was laid out on a long table against the wall of the room, she waved them toward it, and gestured that they should eat their fill. The two men helped themselves to slices of a cold spiced pork roast and a couple of bread rolls before being ordered to carry chairs up and set them in groups amenable to conversation. Fitzroyce got enough to fill his greedy belly, and more beside. All they needed to do now was locate the girl and strike up a conversation.
From the talk among the other servants, they gleaned the name of the guest of honor for the evening, then promptly forgot it, as it was a lord with a string of harsh-sounding German names and titles. No one seemed to know a thing about the English girl who was a guest of Lady Simpson, nor did they much care. Once the room was clean and set up to the satisfaction of a man in all black, they were dismissed to their other duties until nine in the evening.
“And do not be late,” he admonished them in English as well as German.
O’Connor was unmoved. He’d been chastised by experts. But they weren’t going to miss the chance to take Mistress de Beauchamp aside and talk with her, when she should appear.
As soon as the housekeeper took her eyes off them, they slipped around a corner and threw the aprons behind the nearest curtain. People came and went in this warren of a building without questioning from anyone, so they set out to see if they could locate the girl on their own.
Every corridor looked the same, with the same brass plaques and solid wooden doors. They tried a few doorknobs, but most of those were locked, and they’d no excuses or the language to make them for the unlocked ones. Best not to attract undue attention. The girl must emerge at some point.
The Irishmen appeared back in the kitchen on time as ordered, and were given fresh aprons and instructions to dole out food and drink to guests. As he was also clad all in black, the man in charge picked Fitzroyce out of the line, among others, to carry trays of drink among the guests. The Irishman hoisted the broad wooden trencher as he might haul a hog into a pen. In between, they were to fetch and carry more food from the kitchen as it was needed. That was perfect as far as O’Connor and Fitzroyce were concerned. It gave them the excuse to disappear when they needed to.
The appointed hour arrived. Musicians had already taken their place at one end of the grand hall. Men and women in outlandish and unfamiliar dress, hats, and wigs began to fill the room. The two men scanned the hall for the brown-haired girl, but didn’t spot her. Instead, they saw the tall woman, Lady Simpson, walking from one group to another, chatting and smiling.
O’Connor went back to the serving table and seized a platter of small portions of food from a woman who was just about to take it, and began to ply guests nearby with his offerings. While Fitzroyce doled out punch with what he thought of as a hospitable smile, his partner followed Lady Simpson around the room, and tried to hear her conversation.
“Well?” Fitz asked in an undertone, when his compatriot returned.
“Nothing. Enough gossip that she ought to ride a ducking stool. Not a thing about the girl, and nothing at all about London.”
“You could start a conversation about it,” Fitz suggested, as his partner went by for the second time.
“And start Amsterdam all over again? When hell freezes over.”
Fitzroyce kept following Lady Simpson until his tray was empty, and he brought it back to the main serving table.
“You two, get more. Down below.” The man in black signed to them to fetch more meats and cheeses. O’Connor gave him a cheery nod and headed for the door with Fitzroyce in tow.
The moment they were on the outside of the ballroom door, they scurried around the corner to find a place to stow the new aprons, straighten themselves up, then return to stand in line to be announced by the page.
“Mr. O’Flaherty and Mr. Domhaill!”
And with that, the Irishmen joined the party. They accepted cups of punch from one of the young women at the serving table, and went to mingle. The girl gave them an odd look, but they returned an icy glare. It seemed the aprons had been as good a disguise as masks. Without them, they were no longer servants, but guests.
The Americans talked very freely among themselves, but they kept a close eye out to see who was listening. It could have been the English court, except that the Americans didn’t dress as fancy.
They found Lady Simpson chatting with a somewhat older, more petite, and far better dressed American woman. Lady Simpson noticed the two men hovering nearby, and gave them a polite nod, as if to request that they wait a moment for her attention. O’Connor and Fitzroyce smiled back and faced one another in seeming conversation, but listened as well as they could over the other voices and music that filled the room. Finally, someone was talking about the English girl.
They had her name now: Margaret de Beauchamp. The lieutenant of the Meadowlark was indeed her brother, James. The woman to whom Lady Simpson was talking was also a Lady Simpson, the mother of her husband, whom, it seems, was not in Magdeburg at the moment. Ruth, or Rita, as they now knew she was called, would also be a source of information for his lordship. Mistress Margaret wasn’t coming that evening.
“Ach, Entschuldigung,” said a grand gentleman in green velvet. He had bumped into Fitzroyce. “Guten abend, Frau Simpson! Und Frau Simpson!” This pleasantry was followed by a spate of incomprehensible German. The two ladies turned to the newcomer and extended their hands to grasp his outstretched fingers warmly. Several more guests, as richly dressed, bumped their way past the two Irishmen to get to the Simpson women. Fitzroyce looked more and more irritated with each jostle.
“I canna stand the shite that these people talk,” he hissed. “Thinking they’re as grand as God on his throne! I’d murder the whole lot of them!”
Some of the people standing nearby heard his tone and shot puzzled glimpses toward them. A couple of uniformed soldiers started to move in their direction. Sighing for the lost opportunity, O’Connor grabbed his friend’s arm and urged him toward the door.
“Ah, well, ye’ve had too much to drink, have you not?” he said, shooting merry looks toward the others in the room. “Now ye’ll not meet his graflandspeer. It’d be a pure disgrace. Come on with you.”
Once they were out of the ballroom, Fitzroyce gave himself a mighty shake.
“Sorry I am,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me. It felt like the crowd was closing in, just like Amsterdam. My back was to the wall. If you hadn’t pulled me out of there, I might have started stabbin’ people just to get away.”
O’Connor clapped him on the back. “Never you mind. We have the seed of what we require to inform his lordship. The girl won’t stay out of our grasp forever. We’ll have other chances to get what we want.”
* * *
The next opportunity came soon enough. In the course of the next few days, they picked up a couple of suits of decent clothing from disused cupboards, caught fitful nights’ sleep in stairwells and in empty offices, and acquired a stack of documents and a beaten-up valise from a trash barrel that they began to carry about the building, pretending to go to one appointment or another. They’d learned the art of seeming to be busy in Whitehall, when his lordship wanted them within a shout, but didn’t want them hanging about near his private quarters, nor throwing back pints in the taverns.
O’Connor and Fitzroyce also kept their hand in at the kitchen. Donning their aprons, they reported near mealtimes to be assigned tasks. The housekeeper sent them to eat with the rest of the “employees,” and put them to work as she saw fit when they had been fed. She never asked for their names. Nor did she address any of the other kitchen drudges by theirs, so O’Connor didn’t concern himself with it. He’d just have made up another alias, and hope he could remember which name he was using where.
“O’Flaherty,” on the other hand, was an honored guest at the large receptions, of course. The footman, or whatever he was called in the USE, came to know him by sight, and admit him without a second glance.
“Always walk in as if you belong,” he said smugly to Fitzroyce, “and no one will question you.”
They found their pot of gold at that second reception.
“Fräulein Margaret de Beauchamp!”
The girl entered, the plain maidservant at her elbow, and sailed into the room like a princess. In fact, if it was not for her dress, which was virtually unadorned, she might have been a noblewoman, not just gentry.
“She wouldn’t be out of place at court,” Fitz remarked, eyeing her up and down.
“Is that it, then?” O’Connor asked, disappointed. “Was she only a lady-in-waiting who met the Americans?” Hell’s bells, there went their reward from the Earl of Cork. Plenty of the nobles and their servants went to the Tower to try their luck with the Tower guards. Cost them a coin or two to gawk at the prisoners, but it was no different than seeing a traveling mummers show in Covent Garden Market or a hanging on Tyburn Hill. Still and all, she was there in Thuringia, not back in London where she belonged. That was worth exploring. A queen’s woman, for all that the queen had gone to heaven, had no business in the realm of an enemy of the crown. That spoke of subterfuge of some kind.
They tried to keep out of her line of sight, easy enough with the crowd. Both men took their turns getting within earshot to hear what she said to other guests. Truth to tell, it wasn’t much. She did far more listening than talking. She had some German language, but it seemed to be limited. O’Connor found it to be a relief when the circles into which she introduced herself switched to the more familiar language. Most of the time, when she did make conversation, she talked about books. Books! Who gave a mouthful of devil’s spit about those?
Aha, there was the tall woman again, dressed in green and wearing a lord’s treasure of gems on her. O’Connor saw Fitz’s eyes light up, and he elbowed him hard.
The Simpson woman moved into the circle of conversation and brought the girl out with her. To O’Connor’s delight, he saw them move over to where the Prime Minister was sitting.
The man himself looked formidable, kingly, even, though there wasn’t a way in creation that he had a divine right to rule anything. He greeted the girl as though he knew her, and leaned forward to ask her questions. With that, O’Connor didn’t need to hear another thing. She was of importance to the Americans. But in what capacity? Was she a spy for them?
“That’s something his lordship will want to know,” Fitz said. He had written the girl’s name down on a slip of paper to make certain it wasn’t forgotten.
They edged closer to the conversation to try and hear what they were talking about. A man in plain dress saw them and waved them back. Fitz tried edging around the other side of the chairs, still out of the girl’s line of sight, but the courtier was having none of it. He marched toward them, and made a scooting motion. They didn’t dare attract overt attention, and backed away.
Frustrated, they retreated to near the refreshment tables. The girl there recognized them and gave them a puzzled look. O’Connor gave her his most charming glance and eyed her up and down with a speculative air. There, that was good. He’d embarrassed her. She retreated to the far end of the table.
At last, another person came to claim the Prime Minister’s attention, and he made his apologies to the girl. Her servant came to fuss over her and bring her a glass of punch.
“D’ye think we can cut her out of the crowd?” Fitz asked. “We need to get her alone.”
“Not here,” O’Connor said, keeping his voice to a murmur. “She must go back to her rooms at some point. We’ll follow and get what we need to know. I fancy with all the people leaving the palace after the party, no one will notice us spiriting her away.”
Over the noise of the crowd, he heard a sudden gasp. Fitzroyce looked horrified, and pushed O’Connor toward the door.
“What ails you, man?” he asked.
“It’s the maidservant,” Fitz said. “She recognized us. Get out of here before she raises a fuss.”
O’Connor turned to look, but was only in time to see both women disappear behind a pillar. He strode after his companion, and all but elbowed the footman out of the way to go out into the corridor.
“May Judas curse them,” he said. “When could she have seen us?”
“On the Hamburg docks? Or on the train? It doesn’t matter. The servant knows our faces. We’ll have to keep our distance.”
* * *
They kept their eyes open for another opportunity, as well as a keen awareness of who might be around or behind them. But no one came looking for them after the reception. If the wench had told her powerful friends about them, they’d have no choice but to abandon the palace and Margaret de Beauchamp, and go on to Grantville as they had been instructed. Since no hue and cry had been raised, they decided it was worth the chance of remaining.
The head housekeeper scolded them for not helping to clear the ballroom the night of the reception. She sent them to the laundry instead. Now they had to fetch and carry heavy baskets of linens to the rear of the building to dry on lines. Fitz took the opportunity to make up to one of the young women, filling her ears with sweet nonsense. He persuaded her that he could aid her in pushing carts up and back between apartments and bathing rooms, dropping off clean laundry for the residents and guests.
O’Connor waited for him in the laundry, growing more impatient with every passing hour.
Fitzroyce eventually returned, the blushing young lady tucked in his arm. O’Connor grew even more resentful when he realized what the two of them must have been doing.
“I’ve been pulling heavy, wet cloth out of one tub and into another, and you’ve been romping through Cupid’s garden?” he snarled.
“Be calm,” Fitz said, looking smug. “I’ve found the girl’s rooms. Helga wouldn’t let me in to look around, but I know which stair and corridor leads there. Come on.”
No one was nearby when they reached the doorway. O’Connor plastered his ear against the portal.
“What is she doing?”
“Bustling around,” O’Connor whispered. “They are talking about a chocolate room in the city. They are going out.” Fitzroyce grinned.
“We’ll catch her there.”
They followed her down the stairs. They knew the streets outside well enough to know of a passageway to urge her into for a private talk. Fitzroyce fingered the knife in his belt.
But, no, she did not go alone. A young man met Mistress Margaret and the servant in the entry hall and escorted them outside.
Cursing the ill luck, the two men followed at a distance, keeping at least half a street between them so Mistress de Beauchamp, but particularly the young man, who walked like an experienced fighter, didn’t spot them. He had a pistol at his side and looked as though he knew how to use it. His sharp eyes darted this way and that, taking in the entire street. They’d no means of taking him by surprise. But they followed anyhow, in case an opportunity arose. But not a single chance presented itself.
They kept back a good distance and listened, both there and back again to the palace. The two women talked without paying attention to their surroundings. Mistress de Beauchamp was planning to return soon to Hamburg, and thence to England.
“On the train, then,” Fitzroyce said. “We’ve still enough money to follow her. She can’t escape from it while it’s in motion, and she will be easy prey when she alights in the station near the port.”
“Aye,” O’Connor said. “Our bad luck has got to break there.”