My injury sets off a chain reaction of shuffling around the records department. I am not experienced enough to simply swap places with Nigel, whose work is apparently highly technical. The only junior clerk capable of covering for Nigel is Laurie. So Laurie takes Nigel’s desk job, Nigel returns to being the runner, and I take Laurie’s night shift for a week.
Night shift requires very little actual work. It is mostly rote organization tasks and the occasional fetching of a file for Prince Ezra’s midnight reading, nothing that requires me to walk any further than the file rooms. By all accounts, it is the perfect job for someone recovering from injury, and I should enjoy it. But the exhaustion and boredom are what make night shift nearly intolerable. Coffee barely helps. I try some of Laurie’s sudoku and crossword puzzles, but those get old fast.
There is an uncanny stillness about the palace after dark. The night guards make their rounds, but they do not speak or look at me, even as they pass within a few feet of my desk. They are like toy soldiers, wound up with a key and set to walk mechanically in one direction, unthinking and unfeeling. I would not be surprised if they are, actually, automatons—while abroad, I heard rumors of such fancies as enchanted suits of armor with no one inside; no flesh to wound or lungs to pierce—I have never seen such abominations, nor do I actually believe they exist. But in this world of magic and regression, anything is possible. As the night guards pass, I invent a game where I try to catch one blinking. Throughout the whole eight hours of my first night, I do not see a single blink.
The second night, I fall asleep at the desk within minutes of lights out. A bell awakens me. It rings directly in my ear, startling me upright. That is the sound of a records request coming in through our remote-call system, a complex magic wire that runs throughout the palace. It can only transmit short messages and is very easy for a third party to tap into, so the requests come in as a seemingly abstract numbered cipher printed on a ticket. If I do this long enough, I will have the most common numbered combinations memorized. I already know one code: “requested by: Ezra Rosencrantz,” because that is the only one that has come in so far.
But this requestor code is different. I do not recognize the name at all. I flip through the massive, thousand-page binder of ciphers until I find it. Edgar Rosencrantz.
“What the hell are you doing up so late, old man?” I mutter. Sighing, I rip off the ticket, reach for my cane, and limp away from the desk to rifle through my father’s filing cabinet.
His request is for bank account withdrawal records—a lot of them. I am already dreading the possibility that I may need to rouse Nigel early from his slumber to help me lift the heavy boxes, a task I am normally able to do with ease, but have been advised against by my doctor. But my irritation soon turns to confusion. The filing cabinets assigned to my father are…suspiciously empty. About half of the space is cleared, with only old records and official church documents remaining. And there are no bank records anywhere.
Am I reading the requests wrong? No, the request is for bank records. Are the records stored someplace else? No, the only place for Edgar’s bank records is the drawer reading “Edgar Rosencrantz - Bank Records,” and that one is empty. Does someone else have them? The checkout list does not indicate that anything is missing. Am I just stupid? It’s possible. Reluctantly, I hobble to the male clerks’ living quarters and knock on Nigel’s door.
He answers after a few very long minutes, during which I actually wonder if he is just ignoring me. He is a thin, sullen young man with large spectacles and unmanaged curls that hang over his brow and ears. I always get the impression that he is expecting a physical attack, though whether his response will be flight or fight I cannot tell.
“Hey, I’m really sorry,” I say, “but I can’t find these files.”
Nigel squints. I lead him to the file room and gesture to the open, empty drawers.
“Oh,” he murmurs. “That’s Pym.”
“What?”
“Pym. Edgar’s clerk. He’s doing…some sort of internal audit, I think?”
I wait for him to continue explaining. He doesn’t, so I prompt him, “And?”
“And he has the files,” says Nigel.
“Why didn’t he write down that he checked them out?” I ask.
“He doesn’t need to.”
“Okay,” I respond, unsatisfied. “So what do we do?”
“We can’t get them.”
“And…what should we do to get them?”
“I don’t think we can.”
Gods, it’s like pulling teeth with this guy. I take a deep breath, think long and hard about my question as if about to present it to a genie, and ask slowly, “How…should I respond…to Prince Edgar’s request…so that I do not lose my job?”
“Just say they’re pulled for auditing. I’m going back to bed,” says Nigel, and leaves before I can stop him.
I want to tear my hair out. I consider waking up Laurie, who will be infinitely more helpful, but I would feel terrible about interrupting one of his precious few nights to sleep in. Martha is my go-to for most difficult questions, but she has similar permissions to the senior clerks in that she can go home at the end of the day, trusting that six junior clerks can handle the very rare records requests that come in overnight. I suppose I can handle it, but I don’t want to. If Edgar is anything like me, I know exactly what will happen when I tell him no.
I spend the next half hour laboriously punching in the cipher codes to transmit a short message: Unable to pull requests until Mr. Pym returns. When I hit send, I look at my watch. When my ankle isn’t broken, it takes me approximately six minutes to walk the distance between the records department and Prince Edgar’s office. Edgar himself makes it in five and a half.
“Excuse me,” he calls out, even before he has finished crossing the hallway towards my desk. “Excuse me! You, clerk.”
My stomach is in a knot. I want to throw up. Or curl up and die. This is not how I wanted to confront my father for the first time. I squeak out in a pathetic voice, “Yes, Your Highness?”
“Why can’t you pull those records?” he asks. It’s the sort of rhetorical question that leaves little room for excuses. I fumble with the papers and the cipher book around the desk, not wanting to look up and meet his eyes.
“I…um…the records have already been pulled, Your Highness. Your senior clerk, Mr. Peter Pym, is reviewing them. All of them. They are locked up in his office.”
“What for?”
“I was told for auditing.”
“What kind of auditing?”
“I’m not sure.
“Can’t you find out?”
Oh, sure I can, once I’m actually trained in this job and not just given cheeky non-answers by Nigel. “I’m afraid not, Your Highness. I can try to follow up with him in the morning…?”
Edgar leans forward over the desk. Now I have no choice but to meet his gaze. I can only be grateful for the low light of my weak desk lamp, allowing my face to hide in the shadows of its beam. What is more, Edgar is in some state of wild mania that, I doubt, would allow him to pay attention to any such details as facial features, even in broad daylight. His whitish-blond hair is unkempt and eye sockets dark from lack of sleep. His shirt is wrinkled, untucked, and stained with coffee. Regrettably, I have seen much the same crazed dishevelment in the mirror after a late night of work—Edgar and I share in our singular obsession upon our task, abandoning all self-care or decency in pursuit of some end. This is a man who will stop at nothing.
“You are new here, correct?” Edgar asks.
I nod.
“Good. Then you are disposable.”
“Huh?”
“I need you to get inside Pym’s office. I assume it’s locked for the night? And you wouldn’t have the key?”
“Um,” I hesitate. “I can…see about waking another clerk. Someone who knows more than me. Laurie might be more helpful—”
“No!” Edgar yelps. “Gods, no. I can’t trust any of them. Any of them could be tainted. You’re new, you’re different—they haven’t sunk their teeth into you yet, I can tell.” He paces for a few more moments. He is losing it, I am sure. Then he whirls around. “Show me. I want to know what’s missing.”
I don’t see any harm in that, so I grab the key ring and lead Prince Edgar to the file rooms. As I predicted, he is displeased. He spends a few moments making rounds to each of the file cabinets, opening and closing them seemingly at random, cursing every time one is empty.
“There’s nothing here,” he raves. “Nothing!”
That is not quite accurate. As reluctant as I am to correct this madman, I feel it is necessary. “As far as I can tell,” I add meekly, “I don’t think any church records have been touched.”
“Church records!” He barks a humorless laugh. “To hell with the church records. I need personal records. Bank and trust statements. Correspondence. Delivery receipts. Anything under the ‘personal’ tag, I need that. There’s nothing here. He pulled all of them?”
“It appears so, Your Highness.”
“That—fucking— snake . Fuck! FUCK!!! Shit. God fucking damn it!”
I am starting to get very worried. Edgar is not angry with me, per se, just seems to be incensed in general, but his volume threatens to wake the whole south wing. I try a different tack, one that is thoroughly unfamiliar to me: comfort. “Now, Your Highness,” I say as gently as I can manage, “it’s going to be alright. If there are bank statements missing, the royal bank always has another copy—we can file a request first thing in the morning, I can make sure of that. And they should have delivery receipts on file, too, as long as you used your bank account for the purchases—”
He cuts me off. “No.” His voice has dropped to a melancholy whisper. “My personal affairs are paid in cash, and I always order the bank’s copies to be destroyed. We have the only records.”
Cash? Like the books you sent me? Perhaps I have been going about this all wrong. I had been addressing Edgar’s problem from a distance, unwilling to get myself too tangled in the matter. But if my earlier assumption—that Edgar did not care enough about his gifts to me and Mama to keep the receipts all these years—is incorrect, then that complicates matters. I may need to handle this with more caution than I originally assumed. Could the missing records…have to do with me?
Edgar says something. I am snapped out of my thoughts, startled, and straighten up. “How long have you all known about this?” he asks.
“I—I don’t know, Your Highness,” I respond. “Mr. Pym has specific instructions to the junior clerks to let him handle your records.”
“Hah! Of course he does.”
“I haven’t heard of any trouble fulfilling your requests lately, so…I don’t know how long the storage has been like this. Have you…made any similar requests lately? Of the same kind of documents?”
“No. Fuck, no. I usually don’t. I thought I could trust Peter. What a fool am I.” Edgar whirls around to me, looks up and down at my attire, gaze lingering at last on my bandaged ankle and cane. “You couldn’t climb through a window with that. We’ll need another way in.”
He paces around the storage room one more time, then finally comes to a stop inches away from me, eyes shining with a fiery light.
“Break down the door.”
I recoil. “I’m sorry?”
“Are you dense? I said, break Pym’s fucking door down. Do not forget that I am your prince . Whatever trouble your superiors threaten, I promise much worse. Get me in that office, now.”
The threat is quite effective. I say a quick and silent prayer begging for Martha’s forgiveness, then lead Edgar to the senior clerks’ offices.
Pym’s office sits at the very end of the hallway. I am hardly strong enough to break the door handle on my own, so I grab a heavy marble paperweight. That’s not enough, either. After a few frustrating minutes, during which he is clearly growing impatient, Edgar swipes the paperweight from me, grips it in both hands, and brings it down. He succeeds only in mangling the doorknob beyond recognition. The door’s main deadbolt, separate from the doorknob, refuses to give way and offers little purchase to smash the paperweight against. An idea springs in my mind. With some direction to Edgar to help me lift, we load the file delivery cart with boxes full of other files, and he pushes it to the other end of the hall.
By now, however, the banging and pounding of our efforts has roused the whole department. Laurie and Nigel arrive first, followed closely by the girls, all of the clerks bleary-eyed and still in their nightgowns.
“What the hell are you doing?” Laurie shouts.
“Are you dense?” I retort. “We are using this cart as a battering ram. Get out of the way!”
Edgar gets a running start. With a yell, he barrels down the hall with the delivery cart. On impact, Pym’s door splinters almost exactly down the middle. The other clerks flinch. I pump my fist in victory. The door is not fully cleared, but with all the strength he can muster, Edgar rips the rest away and stumbles inside. Cautious but curious, we follow.
Inside is a sight that takes my breath away. Like all of the senior clerks, Pym’s office has all the luxuries afforded to his rank, including a large L-shaped desk, a sitting area with a coffee table, and a beautiful decorative fireplace. Almost none of it is visible. Cardboard boxes are stacked floor to ceiling. Files sit in haphazard piles on every surface, and loose papers drift like snow across the floor. Absolutely nothing has been afforded the care and dignity that we usually grant to royal records. Some piles even show the beginning signs of mold and rot, borne of moisture damage from the nearby windows. And although the palace-wide furnace system serves to warm the air on colder days, eliminating the need for fireplaces beyond mere decoration, the hearth is full—overflowing, even—with ash. Ash and scraps of parchment.
“Was he…” Nigel starts.
“Burning files,” I finish.
Edgar drops to his knees. His back is towards us, but as I creep closer, I can see that his shoulders are shaking. Is he…crying? Whatever for? I am about to ask when he whips around. He isn’t crying. He is furious.
“Everyone, out!” he yells. “No one touches these files— no one— until I get Pym’s head on a silver fucking platter!”
