Lt. Leary, Commanding

by David Drake

  “It’s quite possible we’ll all be betting our lives on that, Mr. Betts,” Daniel said, with a smile to draw the sting from the reminder. “I’ll expect to test your readiness with some target practice if luck doesn’t send us real targets on this voyage.”

  The Princess Cecile was carrying two more missiles than her Table of Equipment. They would be expended before she returned to Harbor Three, of that Daniel was determined.

  He’d noticed in the past that missileers tended not to think of their charges as being weapons for real use. Missiles were expensive and so big that relatively few could be carried on even a large warship. Missile practice was rarely carried out live, and even during wartime the chance of a missile engagement with a hostile vessel was slight.

  Chief Baylor, who’d been the Aglaia’s missileer, had retired after the ship—including the missiles that had been the children of his heart and mind—had died in the harbor serving Kostroma City. Daniel regretted losing Baylor: the missiles launched in the Aglaia’s final moments had functioned perfectly, putting paid to most of an Alliance invasion fleet. Still, Betts was an experienced man and far more senior than a corvette would normally rate.

  The Princess Cecile had been on Kostroma during a major war and revolution. Many items of value had been saved from destruction by members of the corvette’s crew, with Daniel’s personal servant Hogg chief among the list of rescuers.

  Daniel couldn’t have stopped the practice—it would be wrong to call it looting; mostly wrong, at any rate—if he’d tried, and he was too well aware of the risks his crew had run to feel they didn’t deserve anything they could make off with. He wasn’t comfortable with accepting the half share Hogg insisted was his, however—as a moral question, not from fear of being caught. Theoretically Hogg could fall foul of the Republic’s customs authorities, but the chance was too vanishingly small to affect Daniel’s decision on the matter.

  Then it occurred to Daniel that any doubtful money could be spent on raising the Princess Cecile’s fighting readiness. No one wearing an RCN uniform would find anything morally reprehensible in that, even if the money came from brothel receipts. Daniel accepted his half, then spent it on missiles and extra rations for the crew.

  Surely the money didn’t come from brothel receipts, did it? Though knowing Hogg, it was probably better not to enquire too closely.

  Adele stood up at the communications console. “My systems are in order, Captain,” she said, remembering this time to be formal while in uniform. She was as likely as not to say “Daniel,” which from her couldn’t be considered a breach of discipline.

  “Then I think we’re ready to lift as soon as we have orders and port clearance,” Daniel said, beaming with pleasure. “It might be as little as four hours.”

  His grin became rueful. “Or not, of course,” he added. “We act at the pleasure of the Navy Office, which is rarely to be hastened.”

  “I, ah, wonder, Daniel,” Adele said. “If we have some hours, might I … absent myself on some personal business?”

  Daniel blinked. “Why of course,” he said; just as he would have said to any of his officers, knowing that even the ones who had a tendency to drink were too excited about the planned voyage for them to risk missing liftoff. Daniel didn’t imagine that the truth of the corvette’s orders would be half as wonderful as the rumors circulating about them, but the stories had been enough to keep an already crack crew in a state of wire tautness.

  Mind, the rumor that the Princess Cecile was being sent to capture a disabled Alliance treasure ship was one that had Daniel himself counting shares of dream wealth.

  Adele looked down at her clothing as if in puzzlement, pinching a fold of the blouse between her thumb and forefinger. Like everybody else aboard she was wearing a utility uniform of mottled gray fabric. “I’ll change and be off, then,” she said. “I don’t suppose I’ll be very …”

  She stepped toward the cabin off the bridge which she shared with Tovera. It was officially the captain’s lounge, half of his tiny suite. Daniel preferred to have Adele bunking there in a crisis rather than in the Warrant Officers’ Quarters. Those were at the other end of C Level, adjacent to the Battle Direction Center where Lt. Mon commanded the midshipmen and mates of the missile and gunnery officers on a set of duplicate controls.

  “Ah …” Daniel said, but he couldn’t think of a way to continue.

  Adele’s few personal belongings were already aboard. She had no friends or family in Xenos—no friends or family anywhere beyond the hull of the Princess Cecile, if it came to that—and she wasn’t the sort to go out for one last hell-raising party before lifting ship.

  Even in the midst of his concern, Daniel felt a smile start to crinkle the corners of his mouth. He’d tried to imagine Adele raising hell—and had collided with a brick wall.

  But what in heaven’s name was she planning to do?

  “Wait a moment, Adele,” Daniel said, rising from the command console. “I’ll tag along if I may.”

  There wasn’t a right answer to the situation. The Princess Cecile’s captain had no business leaving her on the eve of departure; on the other hand, Daniel Leary wasn’t going to let a friend go off alone wearing the expression he’d seen on Adele’s face. Needs must, Mon could handle the corvette; probably handle her better than Daniel could.

  Adele turned. “No,” she said. “There’s no need—”

  “No, Mr. Leary,” said Tovera from the hatch of the cabin. The pale woman’s expression was, as always, unreadable, but this time it had an unfamiliar depth to it. “I’ll accompany the mistress. It’s my duty, after all.”

  “There’s no need for anyone to come with me!” Adele said. “I’m just—looking over some real estate before I leave Xenos again.”

  Daniel looked from one woman to the other. “Yes, all right, Tovera,” he said. “But you’ll inform me if there’s some way I or others can be of service, will you not?”

  “Yes, Mr. Leary,” Tovera said. “I’ll be sure to do that.”

  Adele grimaced, but rather than argue she disappeared into the cabin. Tovera swung the hatch to, but remained on the bridge.

  “With all respect, Mr. Leary,” Tovera said softly. “I’m a member of the Mundy household. Accompanying her is my duty.”

  “I see,” said Daniel, who suddenly did see. “Ah, I could send Woetjans with a detachment to, you know … provide visual evidence of Adele’s high merit?”

  “That won’t be necessary, sir,” Tovera said with a crooked smile. “And I think even the suggestion would embarrass the mistress.”

  Adele opened the hatch and stepped through, wearing civilian clothes of brown fabric with fine black stripes. Her expression would have been angry on another person; Adele being who she was, Daniel suspected it was merely a general comment on the unsatisfactory nature of human existence.

  “Good luck in your endeavors,” Daniel said. “I—the whole ship, Adele—look forward to your return.”

  Adele quirked an odd smile. “Yes,” she said. “I’m rather looking forward to that also. But I think I have to go.”

  She stepped down the companionway awkwardly, still not fully comfortable with a warship’s structure. Her servant followed without expression.

  Tovera was carrying her attaché case.

  *

  The new front door was the same style as the one Adele had known, but the center of the solid lower section was the head of a barking dog in relief; worked into the grille protecting the glazed upper portion was the legend rolfe house. The doorman playing solitaire on the doorstep gathered his cards into his hand and stood when he saw Adele and Tovera eyeing the dwelling as they approached.

  “My mother’s people were Rolfes,” Adele murmured, feeling a touch of disdain that she supposed was undeserved. “Their crest’s a pun on that: Rowf!”

  She added, “I suppose they had to replace the door after the Proscriptions, but one could wish that they’d shown a little better taste.”

 
Adele walked up to the doorman, smiling faintly as she considered what she’d just said. It wasn’t true, though if she were a better person it might have been. The Adele Mundy who existed in this world was glad that the present owners of what had been Chatsworth Minor were people that she could look down on.

  The Mundy townhouse was in the style of three centuries past: narrow and four stories high, with brick facings accented by stone transoms and tie courses. The ground floor openings were simple, save for the rose window decorating the pediment above the door. The central windows of the second and third stories were bays half the width of the building, and the facade of the level immediately beneath the peaked roof was fully glazed. At night it had frequently provided a lighted backdrop when Adele’s father had stepped onto the balcony to address a crowd of his supporters in the street below.

  The doorman looked at Adele with something between a sneer and a frown. His orange-and-black livery hadn’t been cleaned in too long, and he didn’t bother to slip the deck away into a pocket.

  “I’d like to view the interior of Rolfe House,” Adele said, offering the doorman her visiting card. “Please inform your master, or whoever’s in charge in his absence.”

  The doorman took the card, read its face, and sniffed. “The master’s not entertaining spacers, that I can tell you,” he said. “I’ll put it in the tray for him to see when he comes down if you like. You can come back another day for your answer.”

  He held the card back toward Adele. “Or you can just save your time.”

  Adele took her card and turned it over as she removed a stylus from her breast pocket. The face of the card read:

  Adele Mundy

  RCS Princess Cecile

  On its reverse she wrote Mundy of Chatsworth. She smiled at the servant. “Take this to your master,” she said pleasantly, tucking the card between his lapel and shirt front. “Now. I will await him in the anteroom for a reasonable time, which I have set at two minutes. If he hasn’t come to greet me by the end of that period, I will go looking for him.”

  “But—” the doorman began.

  Tovera pinched the man’s lips closed. “And I’ll come looking for you, laddy,” she said. “Let’s not learn what’ll happen when I find you, all right?”

  The servant stumbled as he reached for the door because he was patting Adele’s card to keep it safe as he moved. He started to close the panel behind him, then remembered the visitors were following. He was leaving the entrance hall on the way to the servants’ stairs as Adele entered.

  Adele glanced at the floor, then stared in horror and disbelief. What she’d expected was the beewood of her childhood, twenty-inch boards cut from trees on Chatsworth Major, the country estate, and set edgewise. Every generation or so the surface was planed flat, but even so the patterns of wear had an organic reality that bound the house inextricably into the fabric of Cinnabar.

  “Good God,” Adele said under her breath. She was standing on the cravat of the male half of a pair of mosaic portraits. Gold letters curving like a halo above the man’s hair read ligier rolfe. The woman facing him was Marina Casaubon Rolfe, if her caption was to be believed.

  A housemaid carrying a laundry basket stepped into the hall from the door under the formal staircase. She called over her shoulder toward the basement, “Well you can tell her for me that—”

  She saw the visitors, fell silent, and gave them a half-nod as she scurried out the back door. Adele caught a glimpse of doors at close intervals on both sides of the hall beyond: the servants’ quarters here on the ground floor. That at least hadn’t changed in the past fifteen years.

  “Ligier is your cousin, mistress?” Tovera asked mildly. Her eyes danced across doorways and up the four levels of the staircase, covering angles from which someone might spy on them—or shoot.

  “A second cousin of my mother’s, I believe,” Adele said. Her lips formed the words while her mind still tried to cope with the desecration beneath her feet. The mosaic was quite recent; the glazing of the chips in the center of the pattern showed no sign of wear from grit tracked in on the feet of visitors. “I never met him.”

  She smiled without humor. “If he’d been close to the family, of course,” she added, “his head would have been on Speaker’s Rock instead of here on the floor.”

  Two servants started down from the top of the formal staircase. One of them ducked into a room on the third floor and shouted a half-intelligible demand. Moments later he returned with two more footmen in tow, one of them adjusting his cummerbund.

  At least the stairs were still honey-colored beewood; though the newel posts, once Mundy arrows, were now capped by barking dogs. It was an ugly—and worse, a silly—crest, but Adele grudgingly admitted that the woodcarver knew his business.

  A man smoothing a hastily donned jacket came to the head of the stairs. The footmen arrayed on the third floor started down; he followed in their wake.

  “Just inside the two minutes,” said Tovera. She sounded regretful.

  There was no doubt that this was Ligier Rolfe, but his hairline was a good deal higher than that of his mosaic portrait. He held Adele’s card in his hand and his expression was troubled. He was in his mid-fifties; about the age Adele’s mother would have been if she were still alive.

  The servants parted at the bottom of the stairs. Their master, standing on the lowest step, said, “Mistress Mundy? I’m Ligier Rolfe … of course, as you know. We weren’t expecting … that is, I had no idea you, ah …”

  “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 Adel
e 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 righthand 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 …”