The Merchant’s War

"We need to take the Northside 'car, three miles or so downtown." He was staring at a wooden post with a streetcar timetable pasted to a board hanging from it. "Then a New Line car to St. Peter's Cross. I think there's a salon there." He glanced sidelong at her hair. "By the time we've got that out of the way-well, unless we find a mail express, I don't think we'll get back to Boston tonight, so I suggest we take a room in one of the station hotels and entrain at first light tomorrow."

"Right." She shrugged, slightly uncomfortably. "Erasmus, when I crossed over, I, um, I didn't bring any money..."

He glanced up and down the street, then reached into an inner pocket and withdrew a battered wallet. "One, two-all right. Five pounds." He curled the large banknotes between bony fingertips and slipped them into her hand. "Try not to spend it all at once."

Miriam swallowed. One pound-the larger unit of currency here-had what felt like the purchasing power of a couple of hundred dollars back home. "You're very generous."

He smiled at her. "I owe you."

"No, you- " She paused, trying to get a grip on the sense of embarrassed gratitude. "Are you still taking the tablets?"

"Yes. It's amazing." He shook his head. "But that's not what I meant. I still owe you for the last consignment you sold me." A shadow crossed his face. "You needn't worry about money for the time being. There are lockouts and beggars defying the poor laws on every other street corner. Nobody has money to spend. If I was truly dependent on my business for a living I would be as thin as a sheet of paper by now."

"There's no money?" She took his arm again. "What's the economy doing?"

"Nothing good. We're effectively at war, which means there's a blockade of our Atlantic trade and shipping raiders in the Pacific, so it's hit overseas trade badly. His majesty dismissed parliament and congress last month, you know. He's trying to run things directly, and the treasury's near empty: we'll likely as not be stopped at the Excise bench as we arrive in Boston, you know, just to see if there's a silver teapot hiding in this valise that could be better used to buy armor plate for the fleet."

"That's not good." Miriam blinked, feeling stupid. How not good? she wondered uneasily. "Is the currency deflating?"

"I'd have said yes, but prices are going up too. And unemployment." Burgeson smiled humorlessly. "This war crisis is simply too damned soon after the last one, and the harvest last year was a disaster, and the army is overstretched dealing with civil disorder-they mean local rebellions against the lax inspectorate-on the great plains and down south." It took Miriam a moment to remember that down south didn't mean the southern United States- it meant the former Portuguese and Spanish colonies that the New British crown had taken by force in the early nineteenth century, annexing to the empire around the time they'd been rebelling against their colonial masters across the ocean in the world she'd grown up in. "And the price of oil is going up. It's doubled since this time last year."

Miriam blinked again. The dust and the smelly urban air were getting to her eyes. That, and something about Burgeson's complaint sounded familiar... "How's the government coping?" she asked.

He chuckled. "It isn't: the king dismissed it. We're back into the days of fiat reale, like the way King Frederick the Second ran things during the civil war." He noticed her expression and did a double take. "Seventeen ninety-seven to eighteen hundred and four," he murmured. "I can find you a book on it if it interests you. Long and the short is, there was a war across the Atlantic and the states of Carolina, Virginia, and Columbia tried to rebel against the Crown, in collusion with the French. They nearly mustered a parliamentary majority for secession, too: invited in a French pretender to take their crown. So Frederick dissolved the traitor parliament and went through the plantation states with fire and the sword. He wasn't merciful, like your, ah, Mister Lincoln. Frederick was not stupid, though: he recognized the snares of unencumbered absolute power, and he reconvened the estates and allowed them to elect a new parliament-once he'd gibbeted the traitors every twenty feet along the road from Georgetown to New London." "That's martial law, isn't it?"

"No, it's worse: it's the feudal skull showing through the mummified skin of our constitutional settlement." Erasmus stared into the near distance, then stuck his arm out in the direction of the street. A moment later a streetcar lumbered into view round the curve of the road, wheels grinding against the rails as it trundled to a halt next to the stop. "After you, ma'am."