People like that are hard to get at short notice, but Cassie Brewer, the Queen of Air and Darkness herself, fits the bill—at least in her previous capacity as Agent First of Spies and Liars. She can steal your face and your memories, change her appearance to match if she’s got enough thaumic mojo on hand. Convincing everyone she comes into contact with that she’s just a waitress working for a contract agency barely qualifies as a warm-up exercise. Persuading her to rebind her command of the Host so that Alex is the fallback All-Highest if anything happens to her was the hard part; but don’t underestimate the incredible motivational power of the boredom that arises from being bubble-wrapped in a government detention block for a couple of weeks.
So here we are, huddling together around a bunch of computers in a safe house down the road from Nether Stowe House, recording and tracking a bunch of smart bugs around the ground floor and listening in on Cassie’s subvocalized stream of consciousness as she ferries trays of champagne flutes, white wine spritzers, and the occasional apple juice between the scullery and the function spaces of the mansion. And I find myself drifting off, trying to put myself into her head in order to get a better feel for what’s going on …
*
This sucks—but it sucks slightly less than being stuck in that camp, thinks Cassie, as she backs through the entrance to the scullery carrying a mostly empty tray swimming in spilled bubbly.
When Alex’s sometime boss put his proposal to them both, she’d been very excited. The camp on Dartmoor was tedious and lacking in amenities—no Internet access, not even cable TV: just a DVD player, a chessboard, and the rain. They’d given up questioning her after the third interrogator’s breakdown and focused on Alex, who had sworn horribly at the manual typewriter but persisted in writing up an extensive report. But that left her with nothing to do—well, aside from being with Alex, and you can’t stay in bed all the time. Her offer to organize an amateur production of The Great Escape using the knights and officers of the Host billeted in the other wings of the camp had been received with an inexplicable lack of enthusiasm by Captain Marks, and for their part, her sworn vassals seemed to be trying to avoid her. It was almost as if they blamed her for this mess, rather than her father! So Mr. Howard’s offer to get them both out of the camp and find something useful for them to do sounded like a really good idea, even before the nasty soul-parasites and their castrated urük slaves turned up, though Alex had been a total wet blanket about it until she very firmly told him it was going to happen.
But now …
“What a mess! Dump that in the sink and take this one—try not to spill anything this time!” Lisa, the woman running the scullery, points her chin at a waiting tray of glasses on the side table and gives Cassie a pointed glare as she continues to fill glasses, a spare bottle clamped in her left hand. “Why did you—no, don’t tell me.” She shakes her head. “Where do they get these people from?” Lisa demands of the ceiling, “the local Jobcentre?”
Cassie ducks her head submissively and reaches for the next tray just as the door behind her slams open and another waiter called Ben prances in, holding a tray of empties. She nearly jerks the tray but manages to stop herself just short, waits for Ben to pass on his way to the dishwasher, then picks up the fresh load and turns towards the exit. “Take those upstairs,” Lisa snaps at her, “back staircase, round past the kitchen, snap to it!”
Live-action Downton Abbey cosplay spying had sounded like fun when Mr. Howard suggested it, but now that Cassie’s having second thoughts, it’s too late to back out. It seems to be all about being shouted at by horrible people while wearing a ridiculous uniform, avoiding sleazy old men’s wandering hands, and trying not to stumble and spill the drinks in heels. And if 007 is here he’s keeping a low profile.
The servants’ corridors snake around the back of the grand house, a late eighteenth-century addition to keep the below-stairs staff out of the way of their betters. The floors are uncarpeted boards and flagstones, the passages narrow, and the back stairs are steep and poorly illuminated. Cassie takes up her dozen champagne flutes and climbs to the first floor where there’s a landing with a deeply recessed window ledge. She breathes deeply and puts her tray down, then reaches into the pocket of her apron for a sheet of what look like shiny self-adhesive stickers the size of ten-pence pieces. She peels off four of them at a time and transfers each one from her fingertips to the base of a glass until she empties the sheet. It’s only the work of a minute, but she’s sweating nervously by the time she finishes, because there’s no way to deflect suspicion if anyone spots her doing it, and while it’d be easy enough to make them forget, the signs of mental tampering may be evident to the security staff. There are adepts here, maybe even magi. However nobody interrupts her, and a minute later she straightens her dress, picks up the tray, breathes deeply, and carries on up the staircase.
The upper floor of the house is laid out around a long corridor with a landing opening onto the grand staircase, with shorter passages trailing up each wing of the house from either end. Cassie slips through a concealed panel in the wall of the main corridor and walks along it, glancing through open doorways. (On her last trip she made the mistake of opening one of the closed bedroom doors in the east wing. It was educational, but it’s not a mistake she’ll make again.) Most of the open-doored rooms are empty, so she nips inside and replaces any empties among the refreshments on each side table. The doorway at the back above the ballroom opens onto a balcony with sofas and occasional tables. It’s open and there are guests, so she enters and makes a circuit, face frozen in an ingratiating smile.
Half a dozen of the guests have made it up here: all middle-aged to elderly white men in dinner jackets. A couple have lit cigars, and all are in need of refreshments—both for themselves and their much younger escorts. “Hey darling”—one of them flashes her a gold tooth—“why don’t you lose the tray and come join me? You’re wasted as a waitress!” He’s happy but somewhat unhinged in a way that Cassie associates with coke or meth, so she widens her smile, shakes her head, and sways her hips around the edge of his wobbly arm’s reach. “Come here!”
“Got a job to do,” she says mildly, and steps away.
One of the girls takes mercy on her. She grabs two full champagne flutes, and turns to face the grabby guy. “Here you are, sweetie, let me be your waitress,” Cassie hears the companion tell him before he has time to flip from bubbly to sullen. Then Cassie turns the corner of the balcony, only to find herself face-to-face with an elegantly groomed copper-haired woman. She manages to stop dead without spilling the drinks, which is a good thing because this woman clearly thinks she’s someone in authority, and the dry-cleaning bill for her gown would wipe out Cassie’s paycheck for the night. “I don’t remember hiring you,” the woman says accusingly. “Why are you here?” She speaks with a faint Irish accent; her eyes are as cold as camera lenses, and Cassie feels her hackles tense, for there is something subtly wrong about her.