"Had survived?" Adele suggested in a dry voice. She raised an eyebrow.
"Not that!" said Rolfe, increasingly flustered. "Of course I knew. . . . That is, but we didn't realize you'd returned to Cinnabar. Can I offer you refreshment? Ah, perhaps if you told me the purpose of your visit, I could . . . ?"
"I don't require refreshment," Adele said. She wasn't sure what she'd expected to find at Chatsworth Minor, but dithering panic on the part of the present owner hadn't been on her list of possibilities. She found it amusing in an unpleasant sort of way. "And my purpose is simple curiosity. I'd like to look over the house where I was born, before I leave Cinnabar again on my naval duties."
The footmen stood to either side of the staircase, eyeing her and less frequently Tovera. The doorman hadn't reappeared, Adele noticed.
"Naval duties?" Rolfe repeated. His eyes focused on Adele's visiting card; his face cleared. "Ah! Yes, of course, mistress. Anything you care to see. I only regret that my wife is still out, for I'm sure that she'd want to join me in guiding you. Though she should be back momentarily."
"The rooms on the third floor, then, if you please," Adele said, gesturing minutely with her right index finger. "Those were where my sister and I stayed while here at Minor."
You couldn't tell much from a mosaic portrait, but Adele didn't regret missing Marina Casaubon Rolfe. The Casaubons were a family whose money hadn't been able to buy them office by the time Adele left Cinnabar for Blythe. She suspected that Ligier's successful claim for Chatsworth Minor in the settlement which followed the Three Circles Conspiracy had earned him a wealthy wife.
"Would your servant care to wait in the kitchen, or . . . ?" Rolfe said, glancing at Tovera. Tovera's absence of personality made her virtually invisible.
Tovera raised an eyebrow minusculy in assent. "Yes, that will be fine," Adele said. Presumably Tovera wanted to look over the house on her own; in any case, no one could imagine Adele was in any danger from her host.
"Take care of it, Wormser," Rolfe said to one of the footmen, making a shooing motion with his hands. He noticed the card he still held. He dropped it into the salver beside the bust of a Rolfe who'd risen to the Speakership. "Mistress Mundy, if you'll follow me?"
Adele followed, noticing that Rolfe wore slippers with his name in cutwork on the gilded leather uppers.
Does his wife choose his wardrobe?
The second floor had been mother's territory when Adele was a child. It was Mistress Rolfe's as well, though the decor of the sitting room open off the staircase was froufrou in contrast to the severity Adele remembered.
Father had been the politician, but mother was the ideologue of the Mundy household. She practiced the same "simple life of the common people" that she preached at her salons and to her family.
Unlike her mother, Adele had personal experience of how common people live; she'd found their taste in furnishings to be very like that of the present Mistress Rolfe. Which was only to be expected, from a Casaubon.
The doors off the third floor were closed. Adele's apartments had been to the right, her sister's to the left. Rolfe paused. "Ah," he said, "if you'd informed us you were coming . . ."
"Actually, I wasn't sure until this afternoon that I
was
coming," Adele said. She opened the right-hand door herself.
The room beyond had been her library as soon as she stopped needing a nurse sleeping nearby. The bookshelves and the data console were gone. Furniture of several different styles filled all the space around the boundary of the room. A captain's chair with dog-headed armrests even blocked the door which once had led to Adele's bedroom.
The center of the room was filled by a large flat-topped desk. One of the drawers was missing and half the veneer had peeled away. The servants were using the room as a lounge. There were plates of fried potatoes, two mugs, and the remains of a pitcher of beer on the desk; stacks of dirty dishes on several of the chair seats showed how slackly the household was directed.
"I, ah . . ." Rolfe repeated. The reality of the room had obviously taken him aback, despite his previous low expectations.
"There were books here," Adele said, her voice expressionless. "I suppose they would have been sold before you took ownership of the real estate?"
"Yes, that's right," Rolfe said, glad to have something to focus on that didn't make him look like a pig. He stepped past Adele to the desk and dragged open one of the drawers. "But I recall we were given a copy of the receipts when we . . ."
Adele watched with cold amusement as her host pawed inexpertly through the drawer. She'd gone through many such agglomerations in her days as an archivist. She'd learned quite quickly that there was no document that was completely without value to
some
researcher, but there was a limit to what could be catalogued and thus become available for research.
She suspected she could trim the present mass by 99% without doing irreparable harm to posterity. And if it were limited to the Rolfe and Casaubon houses, the percentage saved could be even lower.
"Yes!" cried Rolfe. "Here they are, just as I remembered!"
Adele took the document, a four-foot continuous coil folded to fit into a drawer. It was a printout of the auction listing with numbers, presumably the amounts paid, written in holograph beside them.
"Yes, we had our bailiff, well, my wife's bailiff really, present at the auction," Rolfe said as Adele scanned the list. "Our claim was to the real estate alone, but Marina thought we needed to be careful that the auctioneers didn't try to sell fixtures as well as the personal property."
His voice was an empty background like the rustle of mating insects; not overtly unpleasant but not of any concern either.
Furniture, bedclothes, kitchen utensils. Paintings, electronic equipment, shop tools.
The last had probably belonged to Mick Hilmer, the chauffeur and mechanic. Had he survived the Proscriptions? Mick should have been exempt—he was no Mundy by blood or marriage, to be sure—but neither was he the sort to bow meekly when a gang of street toughs burst into his quarters.
"My wife has been responsible for redecorating," Rolfe burbled. He seemed to have forgotten he was standing in a junk room which once had been a private library equal to any in Xenos. "We have heirlooms from her family and mine both."
Assorted books/316 florins.
"I had laid out over five thousand florins for the books I'd purchased," Adele said. No one listening to her could have told from her voice how she felt. "Of course the more valuable items came to me as gifts. Friends of the family found it amusing that the older Mundy girl was a real antiquarian. Many of them had something on a shelf or in a trunk that even my allowance wouldn't have run to."
"Pardon, mistress?" Rolfe said. He hadn't heard the words, and he wouldn't have understood them anyway.
The Mundy children had been as much a part of the family's political entertainments as the images of ancestors in the entrance hall were. Agatha hadn't been any more outgoing than her elder sister, and unlike Adele she hadn't the taste and intellect to escape into scholarship. She'd buffered herself from the public stress with a parliament of stuffed animals, each of which had a distinct personality as well as a name.
Assorted stuffed toys/Five florins fifty.
Adele's hand began to tremble. She quickly dropped the auction list on the desktop. She wondered if she could ask to wash her hands.
"I wonder if you wouldn't be interested in some walnut pudding, Mistress Mundy?" Rolfe said. "My father-in-law has some marvelous trees on his country estate, that's Silver Oaks in the Varangian Hills."
Adele forced her mind up from the frozen horror of the past. Noises from downstairs penetrated her awareness. A woman was shouting—screaming—and feet were pounding up the stairs.
"Ah, that must be Marina," Rolfe said with false brightness. His eyes were glazing and his face looked as rigid as a mummy's. "I'll see if I can introduce—"
A woman whose garments were trimmed with off-planet furs burst into the room; the doorkeeper and several other servants followed in her wake. If the entryway mosaic had flattered Ligier Rolfe's hairline, it had excised at least fifty pounds from his wife. She tended to a naturally ruddy complexion; in her present anger she looked nearly purple.
"Darling," said Rolfe, "this is—"
Marina Rolfe flung Adele's card to the floor. "Ligier!" she said. "Get this woman out of here! She has no right to Rolfe House, none! Get her—"
She turned from her stunned-looking husband to Adele. "Get out!" she cried. "The time to protest our claim is past, past years and years ago. It's Rolfe House now and you have no right to be here!"
"Please, dear!" Rolfe said in obvious embarrassment. "She's just visiting before—"
"Shut up, you!" his wife said. "If you were any kind of man I wouldn't have to take care of this myself."
Her eyes, brown and hysterically wide, returned to Adele. "Now, are you going to get out or—"
"
Mister
Rolfe," Adele said. "If you don't restrain your dog, I will restrain her for you. Do you understand?"
Adele wasn't certain how Rolfe would react to the whiplash in her voice, though she didn't doubt what she would do if he reacted the wrong way. The anger leaping within her threatened to burst through her skin and consume everyone present.
Assorted stuffed toys/Five florins fifty.
It shouldn't have mattered, not against the greater horror of Agatha's ten-year-old head displayed on the Speaker's Rock; but it mattered.
"Marina, you're overwrought!" Rolfe said with a strength Adele hadn't credited to him. Either he'd understood what he saw in Adele's eyes or, more likely, he'd just been horrified by his wife's boorish behavior to a guest. The Rolfes were a noble house, as old as any in the Republic. "Go up and wait in my apartment while I see Mistress Mundy out."
He pointed at the doorman, perhaps blaming him for the outburst. "You! Escort your mistress to my room. Immediately!"
Mistress Rolfe stepped back, putting her hand to her cheek as though she'd been slapped. The shouted command had much the same effect on her hysteria as a slap might have done; her breathing steadied and the flush began to fade.
"See that you do, Ligier," she said in a controlled voice. She turned and marched up the stairs, her high-laced shoes whacking the treads in an attempt to sound dignified.
The doorman followed her, looking over his shoulder, but the footmen who'd escorted Rolfe remained on the landing. A step below them, smiling faintly as she watched events in the servants' lounge, stood Tovera.
Marina Rolfe had been afraid; afraid of the same thing as her husband, now that Adele had leisure to analyze it. The Rolfes thought that the real heir to the Mundy estate had returned to claim her property. How strange. Despite Deirdre Leary's offer to look into the matter, Adele hadn't imagined trying to overturn the settlement based on the Edict of Reconciliation twelve years previous.
Not until now.
Rolfe took a deep breath and looked warily at her. The left corner of Adele's mouth quirked into a smile of sorts. "You needn't worry, Mister Rolfe," she said. "I'll be leaving presently. But I'd appreciate the use of this desk—"
She gestured toward the wreck beside her. One of the legs had broken; that corner was supported by a metal document box.
"—to write a note. It's on a matter I hadn't given thought to previously, but I'd like my servant to deliver it before I leave Xenos. I'll only be a moment."
"Of course, mistress, of course," Rolfe said. "You can use my—"
He strangled the rest of the offer. He must suddenly have remembered he'd sent his wife upstairs to his suite, rather than down to her own where Adele would have to pass her on the way out.
"This is quite adequate," Adele said coolly. She drew out another visiting card and on the back wrote,
Mistress Deirdre Leary:
I would appreciate any support you could provide in the matter of my regaining title to Chatsworth Minor. I will be in touch with you on my next return to Cinnabar.
Mundy
She closed her stylus, then gave the card to Tovera while Rolfe waited with politely averted eyes. "I'll take my leave now, Mister Rolfe," Adele said aloud. "I appreciate your hospitality."
Rolfe looked embarrassed again, but at his quick gesture the footmen started down the stairs. Rolfe bowed his guest ahead of him, then followed. The doorman was still with his mistress, but Wormser pulled the outer door open in fine style, then closed it behind Adele and Tovera.
Adele's skin felt prickly. Her anger was a cold emotion, and it left her feeling like the dirty slush of a winter streetscape.
"I don't know where you'll find her," she said to her servant. "I'd try the office on—"
"I'll find her, mistress," the pale woman said. "And I'll be aboard the ship before it lifts."
"Yes, that too," Adele said. "I'll meet you there."
Tovera looked at Rolfe House. "It bothers you?" she said.
Adele's face tightened. Then she remembered who'd asked the question and said, "Yes. It bothers me very much."
"It leaves me empty," Tovera said softly. "But then, everything does."
She strode toward a monorail platform. She was quite unremarkable, an office worker heading home with a briefcase full of work.
Adele sighed and walked to her own stop on the opposite end of the street. The sky was threatening; there'd be rain before sunset, she supposed.
That would fit her mood quite well.
T
he drizzle gave way to a sheet of rain which thundered on
the hull of the
Princess Cecile
and lashed the surface of Bay Ten, the ready slip to which the corvette had been transferred at the completion of her refit. Lightning pulsed continuously, backlighting the thunderheads without ever striking in the cone of Daniel's vision through the open main hatch.