The Con-Artist Couple

Between concluding the rail-supply contract, buying the townhouse in the capital, taking delivery of the sleeping draught from the detective, and securing the people we would plant inside House Drake, weeks had slipped by before I knew it.

Hard as these past weeks had been for me — I could have used ten bodies and still come up short — Herman had been busier than I by many times over.

Inside the swaying carriage, Herman sat with his head against the window frame, his eyes closed. He didn’t seem to be sleeping, exactly, yet his long lashes never so much as stirred.

He’d been sleeping badly of late. The railway enterprise had thrown up more unforeseen obstacles than he’d ever anticipated. Marking out the route the rails would follow had been simple enough, but buying up land held in private hands was no easy thing at all.

Count Konrad Meier.

He owned something close to a tenth of all the land the line would cross. And above all, he was the man who had eyed the railway enterprise more covetously than anyone alive.

“Five times the market rate, he wants.”

Herman muttered it out of nowhere. The sum Count Meier had named came to five times the going rate of the land around it. I knew perfectly well he hadn’t said it looking for any answer from me. Even so, after a moment’s hesitation, I carefully parted my lips.

“Herman.”

At my call, he slowly opened his eyes.

“Don’t let it weigh on you too much. Before we came out here, I went through every last one of the lands House Meier holds. There’s bound to be some way to bring the Count to terms, whatever it takes.”

They were documents I’d clutched even in my sleep these past two weeks. How many hectares the Meier holdings ran to, how many tons of grain those lands yielded each year, reports weighing their present market value against what they’d be worth in time, even a profit-and-loss table of all we stood to lose if we failed to buy. It would be no exaggeration to call my preparations for this negotiation flawless.

At my firm assurance, Herman gave a sudden, faint smile.

“I trust you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said I trust you. I know how good you are at what you do.”

To blush like some bashful girl over a compliment stripped of all its lead-up and follow-through would be a ridiculous thing indeed. And yet, once kindled, the heat in my cheeks was in no hurry to fade.

Before I could manage any reply, Herman closed his eyes again, heavily. I gazed at the smooth, sunlit line of his nose, then, following his lead, let myself sag against the window frame.

At first, it had been only to lighten the debt that weighed on my heart…

Lately, though, a greed had been rising in me, a wish to make myself even a little more useful to Herman.

Why do you keep giving me your acknowledgment, again and again?

The trouble was that the recognition and praise he gave me were far too sweet.

I gazed at Herman a long moment, then, as he had, slowly lowered my own eyelids. I truly didn’t understand it. Any of it.

Herman closed the contract Count Meier had handed him without so much as reading it through.

“To my eyes, this stubbornness of yours looks like nothing but bravado.”

Unlike the first round of talks, where he’d asked five times the market rate, this time Konrad Meier brazenly demanded seven.

“That land has been passed down in our house for generations. For time out of mind, House Meier’s chief source of income has been the tenant rents it brings in, I’ll have you know.”

Konrad pressed his outrageous demand without so much as a blink.

“State-led enterprise or no, I can hardly hand over land like that for a pittance, matched to the going rate of the neighborhood.”

At Konrad’s petulance, a snort of a laugh escaped me despite myself.

In all the land-buying up to now, not one seller had parted with their land at its fair price; Herman had, as a matter of course, seen to it that every party came away with a reasonable margin. But with Count Konrad Meier, the trouble was that the margin he demanded was frankly outrageous.

Konrad plainly knew that if the new rails didn’t cross House Meier’s land, they would have to loop all the way around the great mountain nearby. The price he was asking came to exactly the cost of diverting the rails around the mountain’s outer edge.

“The rails to be newly laid through this enterprise come to one thousand and twenty-four kilometers in all. And you would have me believe it reasonable to sink that kind of money into the mere hundred and seven kilometers of track that cross your land, Count?”
“Regrettable as it is, I’d have thought that a concern for the party doing the building…”

Count Meier muttered it, avoiding Herman’s gaze.

“Ah. My concern.”

Herman let out a deep sigh and ground his back teeth. He’d been out of temper the whole way here, and perhaps for that reason he was failing entirely, quite unlike himself, to keep his expression in check.

This man is deliberately trying to get a rise out of Herman.

Count Konrad, staying in the capital for the social season, had put their meeting off a full three times since they’d first discussed the contract in writing. First it was that he’d fallen ill after the hunting tournament; then that some urgent matter had come up with a relative he’d not seen in an age; and last that he was run off his feet preparing for the ball to be held in the season’s final week.

And so today, at last, his patience worn through by the three postponements, Herman had come storming to the Meier manor unannounced.

“Be that as it may, let us discuss the matter together, at our leisure. It’s not as though a train must run this very instant, nor as though failing to lay track across our land would force you to bore a tunnel under the sea. There’s no call to be in such a rush, is there?”

Konrad shrugged and put the question to us brazenly. As he lolled about in his seat, the reek of liquor drifted through the whole room.

“Besides, it’s the social season just now, is it not. The social season.”

Laying his stress on the words, he looked, as any fool could see, to be enjoying the season to the full.

“Then again, I suppose it’s little wonder the Duke and Duchess have no leisure to spare. Buried as you are in nothing but this weighty railway enterprise, while every other noble makes merry through the season.”

At that, Konrad’s gaze came to rest on me.

“Aha.”

Then he smirked and nodded, as though something had just dawned on him.

“I’m well aware you’ve been unable to show yourself in society on account of a certain great to-do of late. For which I am terribly sorry, of course…”

A great to-do. It was plainly a reference to the incident at the triumphal banquet some weeks back.

“As you can see, I’m still in the very midst of enjoying the season myself. So let us save this vexing business for a good, unhurried talk once the season’s through.”

“Hah.”

It was then that Herman, with a look of purer disbelief than I had ever seen on him, let slip a sharp, barbed scoff and spoke.

“No need for that. The deal’s off. Sooner than run the line through your land, I’d rather bore the rails clean through the mountain.”

Herman snatched the contract off the table and flung it in the Count’s face. He hadn’t quite meant to hit him; it only came to that because Konrad, taking fright before the thing even reached him, cringed and hunched down right into it.

“I rather think House Meier will never again sit at our house’s negotiating table.”
“Y-Your Excellency.”
“A man ought to know the limit of his own nerve.”

Herman’s reactions were growing sharper by the moment. Setting aside how on edge he’d grown over the enterprise of late, it was a remarkably emotional response for him.

Herman had seemed worn out, so I’d asked to come along myself — and it seems I did well to.

For the most part I’d only ever sat in when a guest called on us directly at the townhouse. This was the first time I’d accompanied him to an outside engagement like this.

Because this was a contract that mustn’t be allowed to fall through.

Whatever else happened, for now, running the line through the Meier estate was the best course open to us.

“Get up, Gloria.”

But before I could stop him, Herman shot to his feet and held out his hand. Against the sheer force of his manner, Count Meier spilled out words he seemed to have prepared in advance.

“E-even if you take this line with me, there’s nothing in it to my loss. I’d only point out that laying the rails to skirt our estate will cost you a pretty sum.”

Once again Konrad scratched at Herman’s temper. Whether he’d taken heart from his own talking or not, he went on to tip his chin up stiffly and put on insolent airs.

“With the budget as it currently stands for the railway enterprise, wouldn’t any cost beyond that be more than you can bear? So, out of regard for the ties between our houses, I’ll take a mere six times the market rate.”

The sum he’d written into the contract had, it seemed, been pitched deliberately high. The price he was naming now was most likely what Konrad had meant to get all along.

“Count.”

In negotiations I had always looked on from a step behind, but now I could hold my tongue no longer.

“Who ever runs an enterprise on his own money? This budget you speak of is a thing one may enlarge as much as one pleases.”
“…I beg your pardon?”
“You’ve a keen head for economics, so surely you know it well. Should the capital fall short, one has only to open more avenues for investment.”

Perhaps not expecting me to cut in, Konrad regarded me with a puzzled look. I fixed my eyes squarely on Count Meier and went on without a waver.

“The land the line will tread upon as it skirts the Meier estate and winds around the mountain — we need only take contributions from the owners of that land and put the capital to work.”
“Come now. And you’re telling me they’ll hand over such funds meekly?”
“If we bind each contributor by covenant and pledge them a share of the profits, the line of those clamoring to join this enterprise would wrap once around Baltaheim Square and half again.”
“…”
“Anyone not dull to reason would see it plainly. That once a station rises on their land, and the commerce and quarters spring up around it, they’ll have their contribution back tenfold. No, twentyfold.”

As I spoke, I rose from my seat alongside Herman.

“Should it come to that, the lords whose lands border the Meier estate will grow wealthier still than they are now. And then — who’s to say. Perhaps they’ll swallow up the Meier estate’s people and capital, every last bit.”

Konrad opened and closed his mouth dumbly.

“Ah — so that must be the future you’ve been picturing, Count. Starving away alongside your tenant farmers, on land that yields no bounty of crops.”

That the grain yield on the plot we meant to buy was none too high I’d confirmed several times over before coming. To show him his bluster wouldn’t sway me, I drove the point home like a wedge.

“If I may be so bold as to say it out of concern, you would do well to take care that no tenant revolt breaks out on your estate.”

Then I gently took hold of Herman’s arm, where he stood watching me with an air of intrigue.

“For otherwise, the society balls you so delight in might well find this one their last.”

At my parting words Herman finally broke into a small laugh. I tightened my grip on his arm and gave him a subtle, coaxing look.

Herman — the moment that matters starts now.

The bait was cast. Now it was our turn to wait for the other side to bite.