After a few minutes the conversation turned to Alvin's business-whatever it was. "Did Margaret send you here for a report?"

"I have no idea," said Alvin. "I usually don't know all that much more about her plans than a knight does in a game of chess."

"At least you're not a pawn," said Papa Moose.

"No, I'm the one she can send jumping around wherever she wants." He said it with a chuckle, but realized as he spoke that he actually resented it, and more than a little.

"I suppose she doesn't tell you everything so you don't go improving on her plan," said Squirrel. "Moose always thinks he knows better."

"I'm not always wrong," said Papa Moose.

"Margaret sees my death down a lot of roads," said Alvin, "and she knows that I don't always take her warnings seriously."

"So instead of giving you warnings, she asks you to help her," said Squirrel.

Alvin shrugged. "If she ever said so, it would stop working."

"The woman is the subtlest beast in the garden," said Papa Moose, "now that snakes can't talk."

Alvin grinned. "But just in case she actually sent me here for a purpose, do you have anything to report to her?"

"Meaning," said Arthur Stuart, looking up from his book, "do you have anything you'd be willing to tell old Alvin here, so he can figure out what's going on?"

"Isn't that what I said?"

"There's all kinds of plots in this city," said Papa Moose. "The older children eavesdrop for us during the day, as they can, and we have friends who come calling. So we know about a good number of them. There's a Spanish group trying to revolt and get Barcy annexed by Mexico. And of course the French are always plotting a revolution, though it don't come to much, since they can't come to any agreement among the parties."

"Parties?"

"Them as favor being part of an independent Canada, and them as want to conquer Haiti, and them as want to be an independent city-state on the Mizzippy, and them as wish to restore the royal family to the throne of France, and two different Bonapartist factions that hate each other worst of all."