‘Suspicious, ain’t ya?’ Renie said. ‘That’s good. Now will you take ’em?’
‘What’s this all about?’ Luke asked. ‘Because you’re the world’s most unlikely fairy godmother, and I don’t believe for a minute you’re supposed to have that cabling. I may have only just arrived, but I’m not entirely stupid.’
‘I don’t think you’re stupid. I think you’re someone who’d do a good turn for another and be glad to. Millmoor changes people, Luke Hadley. But what most folk never realize is that you get to choose how.’
Luke hesitated, curling his fingers round the small case. It had assumed a strange and disproportionate weight.
He slid it into the trouser pocket of his boilersuit. Renie bared her gappy teeth in a grin and Luke couldn’t help smiling back.
She reeled off delivery instructions before twirling on one toe and fading back into the shadows.
‘Tell ’im compliments of the Doc,’ her voice rasped. Then she was gone.
5
Bouda
The House of Light – or the New Palace of Westminster, seat of the Parliament of Equals – was four centuries old. Yet it stood as ageless and unblemished as the day it was made.
As their chauffeured Rolls pulled in beneath the Last King’s Gate, Bouda Matravers craned past her papa’s ample form to admire it. Its crenellated spires were as lofty as a French cathedral and its gilded roof glittered like a Russian palace. But only those familiar with it noticed these details. Tourists and field-tripping students gawped at the House’s walls, each a sheer and seamless expanse of glass.
Inside was the debating chamber that housed eight tiered ranks of twinned seats, 400 in total. Here the lord or lady of each estate sat, with their heir beside them. Bouda was one of those heirs. But no one on the outside peering in would ever see them.
That was because the House of Light’s windows looked onto a different place entirely: a shining world, in which nothing could be clearly distinguished. The more curious fact – witnessed only by the Equal parliamentarians and the dozen commoner parliamentary observers permitted to enter the chamber – was that the view through the windows was exactly the same on the inside. On whichever side of the glass you stood, that eerie, incandescent realm lay on the other.
Cadmus Parva-Jardine had known what he was doing when he Skillfully raised up this building from nothing on that day in 1642, Bouda thought, as she swung her legs out of the car. The Great Demonstration, history called it. Commoners often misunderstood the term, thinking it a mere exhibition of the man’s incredible Skill – a show of strength. But Bouda knew it to be far more than that. The House of Light demonstrated the glory, the justice, and the sublime inevitability of Equal rule.
Nothing expressed that rule better than today’s special date in the parliamentary calendar. Excitement fluttered within her as she steered her father, Lord Lytchett Matravers, inside the House and through spacious corridors hung with red silk. Papa was unsteady on his feet. Her sister Dina had put him on some kind of healthy-eating plan again. However, Bouda suspected that the glasses of tomato juice Daddy had drunk at breakfast had actually been Bloody Marys, and strong ones.
But then it was Proposal Day, so perhaps a little celebration was warranted.
The very first Chancellor’s Proposal had been made by Cadmus. It had established Britain as a republic, governed in perpetuity by the Skilled. In the centuries since then, the annual Proposals had ranged from the sensible – such as 1882’s suspension of the legal rights of commoners during their slavedays – to the sensational. Chief among the latter was the 1789 ‘Proposal of Ruin’. This had urged Britain’s Equals to obliterate the city of Paris and crush the revolution of French commoners against their Skilled masters. That had been narrowly defeated – an unforgivable act of cowardice, in Bouda’s opinion.
The first Proposal she had heard and voted upon had been Lord Whittam Jardine’s last. This was seven years ago, at the end of his decade-long incumbency as Chancellor. He had unsurprisingly proposed removing the one-term restriction upon the office.
Bouda had been just eighteen and newly installed as Appledurham’s heir. But her sights were already firmly set on a match with Gavar Jardine, so Bouda had supported the Proposal. Her father did likewise. (Daddy had never been able to refuse her or Dina anything.) The vote went against Whittam. But Bouda had eventually achieved her goal, and was now engaged to Kyneston’s heir.
It wasn’t Gavar himself that she wanted, though. That fact wasn’t lost on Bouda as she caught sight of her fiancé. She and her father passed through the great doors to the debating chamber, and she felt the Skillful wards tingle across her skin. Gavar stood straight ahead, beneath the marble statue of his ancestor Cadmus.
He was as handsome as any girl might wish, but his skin was blotchy with anger and his mouth set in a petulant sneer. Beside him was his father. Both men were tall and auburn-haired, their shoulders squared back. But where Gavar’s emotions were plain in his face, his father’s expression gave away nothing at all. All Bouda could tell from their watchful posture was that they weren’t happy, and that they were waiting for someone.
For her, she realized, as Lord Jardine caught her eye.
Cold trickled through her. What was wrong? She was so close now to her prize of marriage into the Founding Family that she didn’t know what she’d do if thwarted.
She swiftly sorted through the possibilities. Nothing had happened that she knew of that might jeopardize the alliance. She hadn’t woken up one day ugly or Skilless, nor had her father’s vast wealth vanished. Indeed, the only stumbling block on their way to the altar had been provided by Gavar, in the form of a bastard child sired on some slavegirl. Bouda’s affront at the brat’s existence had been surpassed only by the fury of Lord Jardine, but she had contained her emotions. Her future father-in-law had been impressed with Bouda’s cool response to the whole distasteful episode.