"Damn." The Twelfth Earl of North Hollow, said the single word quietly, almost calmly, but there was nothing at all calm about the look in his eyes. He managed not to glare obviously across the huge expanse of Mount Royal Palace's Queen Caitrin's Hall, but only because he knew every eye which wasn't watching the liveried chamberlain by the door prepare to announce the latest arrival was riveted to him.
"Her Grace Admiral Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Duchess and Steadholder Harrington, and Nimitz!"
The huge chamber's advanced sound system carried the announcement to every ear without the need for anything so crass as bellowing, despite the fact that Queen Caitrin's Hall was big enough to have hosted at least two basketball games simultaneously. The chamberlain's voice wasn't intrusive enough to interrupt ongoing conversations, but conversations broke off throughout the Hall anyway. A wave of sudden quiet, almost a hush, rolled outward from the entry as every guest became aware of the tall, slender woman who had just stepped through it.
As always at formal affairs here in the Star Kingdom, she wore her own version of traditional Grayson female attire, but tonight her gown was a deep, jewel-toned blue, not the simple, unadorned white she usually wore. The tabard-like over-vest of the dark, jade green which had become known as "Harrington Green" by clothing designers in two star nations complemented the blue, yet the combination was far more intense than her normal garb, and the Star of Grayson and the Harrington Key flashed golden on her breast. Her hair was straight, gathered at the nape of her neck by a silken ribbon, also of Harrington Green, before it fanned out to spill down her back. The dark brown cascade had been arranged with deceptive simplicity to look natural while it fell gracefully to her left and remained safely out of the way of the treecat on her right shoulder.
She was probably the tallest woman in the whole, vast expanse of Queen Caitrin's Hall. If she wasn't, she was certainly one of the tallest, and she moved with the easy, natural grace of a martial artist as she stepped forward into the silence. Andrew LaFollet and Spencer Hawke, both immaculate in Harrington Guard dress uniform, followed at her heels, unannounced by the chamberlain but certainly not unnoticed. Here and there, expressions clouded with disapproval as the two armsmen brought their holstered side arms into the presence of the Queen of Manticore, but no one was going to be foolish enough to comment on it. Not here. Not in front of Elizabeth III.
The Queen had looked up from where she stood engaged in conversation with Lord William Alexander and Theodore Harper, Planetary Grand Duke of Manticore, as Duchess Harrington's arrival was announced. Now, in complete disregard of centuries of protocol, she moved swiftly across the floor with both hands extended and a huge smile of welcome. The duchess smiled back, and swept a deep, graceful Grayson-style curtsey before she took the Queen's proffered hand and shook it firmly.
Something like a silent sigh seemed to roll through the Hall, but if Harrington sensed it, neither she nor the 'cat on her shoulder gave the slightest sign of it. Her expression was calm and attentive as she bent her head to listen to something the Queen had just said, and then she laughed with what certainly appeared to be a completely natural ease. The Queen said something else, touched her lightly on the shoulder, and started to turn back towards the Duke of Manticore, then paused as the chamberlain announced the next arrival.
"Admiral the Earl and Lady White Haven and Samantha!"
If Duchess Harrington's arrival had sent a ripple of quiet throughout the Hall, that announcement produced something much more profound. It was almost as if every one of the scores of guests had simultaneously drawn a deep breath . . . and held it.
The earl was perhaps two centimeters taller than Lady Harrington, and his wife's life support chair floated silently at his side as the two of them moved forward into the stillness. Neither of them showed the least awareness of all those watching eyes, although the very tip of the tail of the slender, dappled treecat on the earl's shoulder twitched in small, slow arcs. They came through the entry, paused ever so briefly in recognition as they saw the duchess, and then came forward more quickly, with smiles as huge as the Queen's own.
"Honor!" The welcome in Lady White Haven's voice cut clearly through the unnatural stillness, although she certainly hadn't raised it. Then again, she'd learned the actor's tricks for voice projection more than half a century ago. "It's wonderful to see you again!"
"Hello, Emily," Harrington returned the greeting as she and the countess shook hands, then nodded to Earl White Haven. "Hamish," she said, and smiled at the 'cat on his shoulder. "And hello to you, too, Sam!"
"Good evening, Honor," the earl replied, then bowed and kissed the Queen's hand as Elizabeth retraced her steps to greet the newcomers.
"Your Majesty." Conversation had resumed throughout the Hall, but his deep voice carried almost as well as his wife's had.
"My Lord," the Queen replied, then smiled with obvious delight at Lady White Haven. "I'm so glad you decided to come after all, Emily," she said, just loudly enough for those standing close to them to overhear. "We don't see enough of you here in Landing."
"That's because I find Landing a bit on the fatiguing side, I'm afraid, Your Majesty," Emily Alexander said. For all the fairness of her own coloring, there was a similarity—more sensed than seen, yet unmistakable—between her face and the Queen's. Not surprisingly, perhaps, since they were distant cousins. Nor was Elizabeth Emily's only family connection at tonight's gathering, and she cocked her head with another smile of welcome as the Duke of Manticore joined them.
"Hello, Teddy," she greeted him.
"Happy birthday, Aunt Emily," he responded, and bent to kiss her on the cheek. "Wasn't it kind of Her Majesty to arrange things so I didn't have to throw a birthday gala for you?" he teased with a twinkle, and she snorted.
"You may have gotten off lightly where parties are concerned," she told him, "but I expect you to make it up when it comes to the gifts!"
"Oh, well. I suppose I can always sell off part of my portfolio to raise the funds," he sighed, and then reached out to shake the earl's hand. "Good to see you, too, Hamish," he said cheerfully. "And I've been looking forward to meeting your new friend," he added, with a small, formal bow all for Samantha.
The 'cat returned the greeting with a regal nod of her own, and he chuckled delightedly.
"I understand you've been learning to sign, Teddy?" Emily inquired, and snorted as he nodded. "Well, in that case, if you behave yourself properly—and bribe her with sufficient celery, of course—you can probably get Sam to help you practice over supper."
"Yes, Auntie," he promised obediently, and she snorted again, then reached up to pat him on the forearm before she returned her attention to the duchess and the Queen.
It was all about timing, Honor thought as the guests filed into the banquet annex to Queen Caitrin's Hall. It was remotely possible that there was someone here tonight who was naive enough to believe Hamish and Emily had just happened to arrive immediately behind her, or that Elizabeth and Emily's nephew had just happened to join the three of them—well, five, with Nimitz and Samantha—where every single guest could see them. It was even possible that that same naive someone might think it was pure coincidence that her own title took precedence over every other guest present except the Duke of Manticore. That "coincidence" just happened to seat Honor to the Queen's left and the duke to the Queen's right . . . and the fact that the entire function was officially in honor of Emily's birthday and that Emily was "family" had given Elizabeth the perfect excuse for seating her and her husband at the same table, despite the fact that Hamish was "only" an earl. Which just happened to put Honor and Emily right next to one another where every single guest could see how naturally and cheerfully they spoke with one another.
And where no one could possibly mistake the message the Queen of Manticore had actually arranged this entire evening to communicate.
Timing, she thought again, as she offered Nimitz a fresh stick of celery and she tasted the emotional aura of the banquet. It was always difficult to make definitive judgments about the overwhelming group mind-glow of such a large gathering, but she sensed a definite overall trend which gave her a sense of profound satisfaction. The message had gone home, she decided, and drew a huge, mental breath of relief.
This might actually be going to work after all.
"So much for Plan A," Stefan Young grumbled as he flung his formal frock coat across a chair with childish spitefulness.
"I warned you it could turn around and bite us all on the ass," his wife replied. They'd been home from the ball for half an hour, and she'd already shed her own court costume. Now she sat before the bedroom mirror, considering herself. She stuck out her tongue at her own image and studied it for a moment, then shrugged and moved on to the rest of her appearance. She wore a robe of subtly iridescent Gryphon water silk, one of Gryphon's most prized export goods. That robe had cost more than a low-end air car, and worth every penny of it, she thought with a lazy, hunting-hexapuma smile as she admired the way it clung to every curve. But then the smile faded, and she shrugged and turned to look at him.
"We got over four months of effective use out of it," she pointed out. "That was enough to carry us through the debate on the naval reductions and the vote on the new domestic spending measures."
"I know." The earl had lingered in the study to fortify his frustration with brandy. She could smell it on his breath from where she sat, and she concealed a grimace of distaste as he unbuttoned the old-fashioned studs from his cuffs and tossed them into a jewelry case with a grimace of his own. He hadn't enjoyed the way the Queen had seated Emily Alexander and Duchess Harrington at her own elbow and then monopolized their conversation all through supper.
"I'd just hoped for a longer run," he said after a moment. "Like maybe a permanent one. And I still say we should go ahead and keep pushing to make it work that way."
"No, we shouldn't. Not now that Emily Alexander has spiked our guns so neatly."
"Who cares?" North Hollow demanded, and turned to glower at her. "Of course she's going to cover for him! What else can she do? And so is Elizabeth. And only an idiot would believe that entire charade wasn't set up expressly to do just that! All we have to do is point out the political calculation involved, how cynical they're both being by conniving at covering up a pair of adulterers for pure political advantage, and we can turn the public against them, too!"
"Against Emily Alexander?" Georgia Young laughed scornfully. "Two-thirds of the voters in the Star Kingdom think the woman's a saint! Attacking her would be the worst strategic blunder anybody's made since the Peeps started the war early at Hancock Station."
"Um." North Hollow grunted, his expression uglier than ever at the reminder of the battle which had brought about his elder brother's disgrace, then exhaled in an irritated snort. "I just hate to let up on them when we've got them on the run this way," he said almost plaintively.
"That's because you're thinking with your emotions again," Georgia told him. She stood, running her hands across the water silk with a slow, sensual motion that formed a bizarre visual counterpoint for her coldly dispassionate voice. "I know how much you hate Harrington—hate both of them—but when you let hate dictate strategy, it's a recipe for failure."
"I know," Young repeated, his expression still surly. "But I wasn't the one who came up with the idea in the first place, you know."
"No, you weren't. I was," she agreed in that same clinical tone. "On the other hand, you grabbed the concept and ran with it the instant I suggested it, didn't you?"
"Because it sounded like it would work," he replied.
"Because it sounded like it would work . . . and because you wanted to hurt them," she corrected, and shook her head. "Let's be honest, Stefan. It was more important to you personally to make them both suffer than it was for the strategy to work, now wasn't it?"
"I wanted it to work, too!"
"But that was secondary, as far as you were concerned," she said inexorably, and shook her head again. "I'm not saying it was unreasonable of you to want to punish them for what they both did to Pavel. But don't make the same mistake he made. People have a perfectly natural tendency to strike back at anyone who hurts them—the fact that you want to punish Harrington and White Haven is proof enough of that. Unfortunately, Honor Harrington isn't exactly noted for moderation. White Haven is a civilized person. He's going to feel bound to play by the rules, but when she strikes back, people have a habit of finding themselves ankle-deep in bodies, and I'd just as soon not be one of the corpses."
"I'm not going to do anything stupid," he growled.
"And I'm not going to let you do anything stupid," her eyes were as cool as her voice. "That's why I asked you to suggest the approach to High Ridge and let him set up the hatchet men. If she decides to come back after anyone, she'll be looking at Hayes first, and then our beloved Prime Minister. Besides," the countess chuckled humorlessly, "not even she can kill off the entire Government. She'd have to stop before she worked her way all the way down to the Office of Trade!"
"I'm not afraid of her," Stefan shot back, and his wife's eyes hardened.
"Then you're an even bigger fool than your brother was," she said in an even, deadly dispassionate tone. His face tightened angrily, but she met his hot glare with an icy calm which shed its heat effortlessly.
"We've had this discussion before, Stefan. And, yes, Pavel was an idiot. I warned him that going after Harrington, especially the way he did it, was like following a wounded hexapuma into the underbrush with a butter knife. But he insisted, and I was only an employee, so I set it up for him. Now he's dead . . . and she isn't. Not only that, but she's enormously more powerful now than she was then, and she's learned how to use that power. Pavel underestimated her then; if you're not afraid of her now, with all the power and allies she's gained since and the evidence of what happened to him in front of you, then you are a fool."
"She wouldn't dare come after me," North Hollow protested. "Not after the way she shot Pavel. Public opinion would crucify her!"
"That didn't stop her in Pavel's case. What in the world makes you think it would stop her now? The only two reasons she hasn't gone after you already are that her political allies, like William Alexander, have been restraining her from going after anyone at all and that she doesn't know—not for certain—that you were the one who suggested this particular line of attack to High Ridge. If she were certain of that, I'm not at all certain even Alexander or the Queen herself could stop her, given all the history between her and your family. So be afraid of her, Stefan. Be very afraid, because you're never going to meet a more dangerous person in your life."
"If she's so dangerous, why's she been so meek and mild? There are ways she could have counterattacked without resorting to violence, Georgia! So why hasn't she come out swinging and used all that power you say she's got somehow?" Stefan demanded, but the questions came out petulantly, not challengingly.
"Because we hit her with the kind of attack she's most vulnerable to," the countess told him patiently. "She doesn't have the experience to respond in kind to this sort of assault. She's been mostly on the defensive from the outset, because it's not her sort of battlefield. That's precisely why they went out and recruited Emily Alexander to serve as her general. But if you push her too hard, or make the mistake of coming into the open and hurting someone she cares about when she knows who did it, she won't waste any more time even trying to fight your kind of battle, Stefan. She'll come after you directly, her way, and hang the consequences. Your family should know that better than anyone else."
"Well, we're just going to have to come up with something else, then, aren't we? If Plan A isn't going to put her down for the count after all, what do we suggest to High Ridge for Plan B? Now that Emily Alexander's busted our columnists' balls for daring to suggest that her husband and her 'dear friend' Harrington could be humping each other, how the hell do we get the two of them off our backs? You know they're going to be harder to handle than ever now that we've pissed them off!"
"There's probably something to that," Georgia agreed. "And I'm not sure what to propose as Plan B—not just yet, anyway. I'm confident something will suggest itself to me as the situation clarifies. But whatever it is, Stefan, it's not going to be anything she can trace directly back to you or to me. You may not care if she decides to rip your lungs out, but I like mine just fine where they are, thank you."
"I got the message, Georgia," North Hollow half-snapped. His expression was surlier than ever, but there was fear behind the surliness, and Georgia was relieved to see it. On the other hand . . .
Fear might keep him from doing something outstandingly stupid, but she'd used enough stick for one night, she decided. It was time for the carrot, and she touched the neck of her robe.
It floated down to puddle about her ankles, and suddenly Honor Harrington was the last thing on Stefan's mind.
Honor stood beside the lectern, hands clasped behind her, and gazed up at the huge lecture hall's tiers of seats as they filled.
The Tactical Department's D'Orville Hall home boasted every modern electronic teaching aid known to man. Its simulators could re-create anything from the flight deck of a pinnace to the combat information center of a superdreadnought task force flagship, and reproduce all of the sights and sounds of the most horrific combat. The online teaching interfaces could put an instructor face to face with a single student, a group of two or three, or a class literally of hundreds. Those same interfaces made reference works, histories, lecture notes, syllabuses, official after action reports, analyses of past campaigns, and class schedules instantly available to students, as well as delivering student course work and exams equally instantly to instructors.
Saganami Island made full and efficient use of all those capabilities. Yet the Royal Manticoran Navy was a great believer in tradition, as well, and at least once per week, lecture courses met physically in their assigned lecture halls. Honor was perfectly willing to admit that the tradition was scarcely the most modern possible way to transmit knowledge, but that was fine with her. As she herself had discovered as a child, too great a reliance on the electronic classroom could deprive a student of the social interaction which was also a part of the educational process. The electronic format could serve as a shield, a barricade behind which a student could hide or even pretend to be someone else entirely . . . sometimes even to herself. That might not constitute a serious drawback in the education of civilians, but Navy and Marine officers couldn't afford walls of self-deception about who and what they were any more than they could afford to leave their social skills underdeveloped. Their professional responsibilities required them not only to interact with others in a corporate, hierarchical service, but to exude confidence and competence when exercising command in situations in which their ability to lead quite literally might make the difference between life and death. Or, even more importantly sometimes, between success or failure. That was the major reason Saganami Island relentlessly stressed traditions and procedures which forced midshipmen and midshipwomen to deal with one another, and with their superiors and instructors, face to face, in the flesh.
Besides, she admitted from behind the serenity of her expression, she enjoyed the opportunity to see the massed faces of her students. The joy of teaching and challenging young minds while simultaneously building the Navy's future was an unalloyed pleasure, the one thing she had unreservedly treasured about her almost five-T-year stay here on the Star Kingdom's capital planet. She even allowed herself to believe that she'd finally made a substantial down payment on the debt she'd owed to her own Saganami Island instructors, and especially to Raoul Courvoisier. And it was at moments like this, when she actually saw one of her classes assembled, all in one place at the same time, that the sense of continuity of past and future and of her own place in that endless chain came to her most strongly.
And at this particular moment, she needed that sense.
Nimitz stirred uneasily on her shoulder, and she tasted his unhappiness, but there wasn't a great deal she could do about that, and they both knew it. Besides, he wasn't unhappy with her; he was—as she herself—unhappy at the situation.
A fresh spasm of pain flickered through her, concealed from her assembling students by the calm mask of her face, and she cursed her own inner weakness.
She ought to have been one of the happiest women in the Star Kingdom, she told herself yet again. Emily Alexander's counterattack had rolled up the High Ridge machine's campaign of slander like a rug, especially when the Queen got behind it and pushed. One or two of the most bitterly partisan 'faxes and commentators continued the attack, but the vast majority had dropped it like a hot rock once Emily's intervention reversed the poll numbers virtually overnight. The abrupt simultaneity with which the campaign had been terminated by almost all participants should have been a flare-lit tipoff to any unbiased observer that it had been carefully coordinated from the beginning, too. Only a command from above could have shut down so many strident voices so instantly. And only people whose deep, principled concern over the "fundamental questions" being beaten to death had been completely artificial from the outset would have abandoned those principles with such alacrity when they became inconvenient.
But if the attack had been beaten back, it hadn't been defeated without leaving scars. The Grayson public, for example, remained furious that it had ever been mounted in the first place. That would have bothered Honor under any circumstances, but the opposition Keys in the Conclave of Steadholders had seized upon it as an additional weapon in their struggle to roll back Benjamin IX's political power. Their persistent attacks on the Manticoran Alliance—or, rather, on the wisdom of Grayson's remaining bound to that Alliance—had been sufficiently unremitting before the allegations of infidelity ever saw the light of day. That opposition to the Alliance had survived even the execution for treason of Steadholder Mueller, who'd first put it forward, and the inexcusable and stupid arrogance with which the High Ridge Government had treated its allies had lent it a dangerous strength since. Now those same steadholders saw the attacks on Honor as yet another weapon with which to bolster their argument, and the fact that so many of them hated her as the symbol of the "Mayhew Restoration" which they loathed with all their hearts only gave them a sense of bitter, ironic satisfaction when they reached for it.
That was bad enough. Benjamin's letters might argue that the furor would die down with time, but Honor knew him too well. He might actually believe it, but he was nowhere near as confident of it as he tried to make himself appear in his messages to her. And whether he believed it or not, she didn't. She'd told herself again and again that her judgment was never at its best when she confronted the possibility of seeing herself used against friends or things she believed in. She'd reminded herself how often Benjamin's analyses of political and social dynamics had proved superior to her own. She'd even spent hours researching past political crises and scandals, some dating back even to Ante Diaspora Earth, and attempting to dissect their long-term consequences and find the parallels to her own situation. And none of it had changed what really mattered. Whatever Benjamin might believe, whatever might actually be true in the long run, in the short run his enemies had done enormous damage to his ability to preserve the Alliance and keep Grayson in it. And it didn't matter how Grayson public opinion might view these events fifteen T-years from now if the planet was split away from the Alliance and its relationship with the Star Kingdom this year, or the next.
But dreadful as that potential disaster was, one almost as dreadful loomed in her personal life, because Emily had been right. Honor's long-standing relationship with Hamish had been a fatal casualty of the attack. The caution—or cowardice—which had kept either of them from ever admitting his or her feelings to the other had been stripped away. Now both of them knew precisely what the other felt, and the pretense that they didn't was becoming more threadbare and fragile by the day.
It was stupid . . . and very human, she supposed, although the observation offered absolutely no comfort. They were both mature, adult human beings. More than that, she knew that however imperfect they often seemed to themselves, both of them possessed a devotion to duty and their own personal honor codes which was stronger than most. They ought to have been able to admit what they felt and to accept that nothing could ever come of it. Perhaps they couldn't simply have walked away from it completely unscathed, but surely they ought to be able to keep it from destroying their lives!
And they couldn't.
She wanted desperately to believe that her own weakness was the direct consequence of her ability to taste Hamish's emotions. There might even be some validity to that. How could anyone expect her to feel the love and desire flooding out from him, however hard he tried to hide it, and not respond to it? For the first time, Honor Harrington truly understood what drew a moth closer and closer to the all-consuming power of a candle flame. Or perhaps what had drawn treecats to bond to humans before prolong, when they knew that to do so would cut their own life spans in half. Perhaps she could have walked away from what she felt for Hamish, but it was literally impossible for her to walk away from what he felt for her.
Then there was Samantha.
The Sphinx Forestry Service had checked its files at Honor's request, and the SFS report confirmed what she'd suspected. There wasn't a single recorded instance of a mated pair of 'cats who had both adopted humans . . . before Nimitz and Samantha. There'd been mated pairs in which one 'cat had adopted and the other hadn't, although even that had been vanishingly rare, but in those cases, at least only one human had been involved. There'd been no need to choose between two-legs who were not or could not be together, and so there'd been no reason for them to face the possibility of permanent separation from either mate or person. The fact that the situation was unique meant there was no precedent to guide any of them, yet in this, as in so much else, Nimitz and Samantha had set their own precedents, with no regard at all for history or tradition.
She wondered sometimes what might have happened if Harold Tschu hadn't been killed in Silesia before Hamish's awareness of her had shifted so radically. Would she and Harry have been drawn inexorably together? It was certainly possible, but even so, she doubted that it would have happened. He'd been a fine man, and she'd respected him, but he'd also been one of her subordinates. Theirs had been a professional relationship, and so far as Honor could tell, the bonds between each of them and their 'cats hadn't carried over to their attitudes toward one another in any way. Certainly the thought that he might ever have been anything more than a friend, the human partner of Nimitz's wife and the human "uncle" of any of the 'cats' children, had never so much as crossed her mind before his death had erased any possibility of it.
Which had absolutely no bearing on her present intolerable position. As Emily had pointed out, she and Hamish had no choice but to continue to work together, cooperating as closely and as . . . intimately as before the attack. And just as political considerations made it impossible for her to avoid Hamish, so did the personal consideration that Nimitz's mate was bonded to him. There was no way she could possibly separate her beloved friend from his wife, yet the very intensity of their bond with one another only made Honor even more exquisitely sensitive to all of the points of resonance between her and Hamish.
No wonder empaths thought it was insane for anyone to attempt to deny what she truly felt!
The lecture hall's seats were almost full, and she glanced at the time display on the wall. Another ninety seconds. Just long enough for one last self-indulgent wallow in her self-pitying misery, she told herself bitingly.
Yet self-pity or not, there was no escape from the grim reality behind it. Emily had bought her a reprieve, nothing more. Friends and allies could defend her from external attack, but they couldn't protect her from her own inner weakness and vulnerability. No one could defend her from that. The only possible answer she could see was to find some way to separate herself from the source of her pain. She might not be able to do that permanently, but perhaps she could do it long enough to at least learn to cope with it better than she could now. And even if she couldn't learn how to do that, she desperately needed some respite, some break in the pressure to let her pause, catch her breath, and regather her strength.
But recognizing that answer did her no good at all when there was no way she could separate herself from Hamish and the Star Kingdom's political fray. Not without convincing everyone, friend and foe alike, that she was running away. Perhaps they wouldn't know all of the reasons for her flight, but that wouldn't really matter. The damage would be done, especially on Grayson.
So how, she wondered despairingly, did she find the sheltered haven she needed so desperately without looking as if she had allowed herself to be hounded out of town?
Her wrist chrono beeped softly, and she drew a deep breath and reached forward to rest her hands on the traditional polished wood of the lectern while she gazed out at her respectfully assembled students.
"Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen." Lady Dame Honor Harrington's soprano voice was calm and clear, carrying effortlessly to every listening ear. "This is the last lecture of the term, and before we begin our review for the course final, I want to take this opportunity to tell you all how much I've enjoyed teaching this class. It's been a privilege and a pleasure, as well as a high honor, and the way in which you've responded, the fashion in which you've risen to every challenge, only reaffirms the strength and integrity of our Service and its future. You are that future, Ladies and Gentlemen, and it gives me enormous satisfaction to see what good hands the Queen's Navy and all of our allied navies are in."
Silence hovered behind her words, deep and profound, and the wounded corners of her soul relaxed ever so slightly as the answering emotions of her students rolled back through her like an ocean tide. She clung to that sensation from the depths of her battered exhaustion, with the greedy longing of a frozen, starveling waif crouching outside the window of a warm and welcoming kitchen, but no sign of that crossed her serene expression as she gazed back out at them.
"And now," she went on more briskly, "we have a great deal to review and only two hours to review it in. So let's be about it, Ladies and Gentlemen."
"She's like some damned vampire!" Baron High Ridge growled as he slapped the hardcopy of the latest poll numbers down on his blotter.
"Who?" Elaine Descroix asked with an irritatingly winsome little-girl smile. "Emily Alexander or Harrington?"
"Both—either!" the Prime Minister snarled. "Damn it! I thought we'd finally put Harrington and White Haven out of our misery, and then along comes White Haven's wife—his wife, of all people!—and resurrects both of them. What do we have to do? Cut off their heads and drive stakes through their hearts?"
"Maybe that's exactly what we have to do," Sir Edward Janacek muttered, and Descroix chuckled. Despite her smile, it was not a pleasant sound.
"It might not be a bad idea to wash them both down with holy water and bury them by moonlight, as well," she said, and High Ridge snorted harshly. Then he looked at the other two people present.
"Your suggestion worked even better than I'd hoped it would . . . in the short term," he told Georgia Young, abandoning any pretense that the idea had ever been her husband's. "It took Harrington and White Haven completely out of the equation while we fought through the new budget. But it's beginning to look as if our short term victory is going to prove a long term defeat. Unless you've managed to come up with some answer to the rebound in their popularity with the proles, that is."
Almost everyone else in the Prime Minister's paneled office turned to look at Lady North Hollow, but she returned their half-accusing glares with calm composure. Then she waved one graceful hand at the Second Lord of Admiralty, the single person who wasn't glowering at her at the moment, and smiled at High Ridge.
"As a matter of fact, Prime Minister, I believe Reginald and I may actually have come up with a solution of sorts. It's not a perfect one, but then so few things in this world are truly perfect."
"Solution? What kind of solution?" Janacek demanded. He got the questions in before anyone else could ask, but it was a close run thing.
"I've been doing some additional . . . research on Harrington and White Haven," the countess replied. "It hasn't been easy. In fact, it's been impossible to get anyone inside Harrington's household or inner circle. Her security is provided entirely by her Steadholder's Guard, with backup from the Palace Guard Service, and it's the next best thing to impenetrable. Not to mention the fact that she herself seems to have a damnable ability to 'read' the people around her. I've never seen anything like it.
"Fortunately, White Haven isn't quite that tough a nut. He maintains excellent security on the sensitive materials he receives as a member of the Naval Affairs Committee, and his people are almost as loyal as Harrington's. But they're not as security conscious about, ah . . . household matters as hers are. I wasn't able to put anyone actually inside his or his wife's quarters, but I did manage to get a few listening devices into the servant's quarters. And some of his people let much more slip than they thought they did when someone asked them the right questions."
High Ridge and Janacek looked uncomfortable at her deliberate reminder of precisely what it was she did for them. The calm, matter-of-fact way she discussed spying on their political opponents made both of them uneasy, if only because of their awareness of the consequences if they were caught at it. Such privacy violations were illegal for anyone, but the fines and even jail time violators could draw would have been minor considerations beside the devastating public opinion damage awaiting any politician who got caught actually bugging his opponents. And what would have been bad enough for any political figure would be even worse for one of the leaders of the current Government, which was supposed to be in charge of stopping anyone from committing such acts.
However uncomfortable the two Conservatives might have been, Houseman seemed unconcerned, almost as if he were oblivious to any reason why the countess' actions could be considered the least bit improper. Perhaps, High Ridge thought sardonically, because of the way the towering nobility of his intentions justified any act he might choose to commit in order to further them. As for Descroix, she actually smiled as if she thought the entire thing was some huge, slightly off-color joke.
Lady North Hollow let the silence linger just long enough to make her point. Then, having reminded them of the importance of ensuring the competence of whoever did their dirty work for them, she continued.
"The really ironic thing about it all," she told her audience, "is how close we came to telling the truth about both of them."
High Ridge and Janacek looked at each other in obvious surprise, and she smiled.
"Oh, there's absolutely no evidence that they were ever actually lovers," she assured them. "But apparently it's not for lack of temptation. According to some of the White Haven retainers, Harrington and White Haven are pining over each other like a pair of love-sick teenagers. They may be hiding it from the public—so far—but they're suffering in truly appallingly noble silence."
"Really?" Descroix cocked her head, her eyes calculating. "Are you sure about that, Georgia? I mean, they do spend an inordinate amount of time together. That was what made our original strategy workable. But are you seriously suggesting that there's truly something there?"
"That's what the evidence seems to indicate," the countess replied. "Some of the White Haven servants are quite bitter about it, actually. Apparently their loyalty to Lady White Haven is outraged by the thought that Harrington might be scheming to supplant her. To be honest, that outrage was probably enhanced by our media campaign, and it seems to have faded back somewhat in the last few weeks. But what gave it its original legs was the fact that most of them had already come to the conclusion that whatever Harrington thought, White Haven had been busy falling in love with her for months, if not years. I realize that anything they may have said to my investigators constitutes hearsay evidence, at best, but when it comes right down to it, the servants usually know more about what's going on in any household than their masters do. Besides, the handful of . . . technical assets I managed to get inside White Haven's household pretty much confirm their testimony."
"Well, well, well," Descroix murmured. "Who would ever have thought a stodgy old stick like White Haven would fall so hard after so long? His puppy dog devotion to Saint Emily always made me faintly queasy, you know. So maudlin and lower class. But this new itch of his rather restores one's faith in human nature, doesn't it?"
"I suppose so," High Ridge said. Descroix seemed oblivious to the distasteful glance he gave her, and he moved his attention back to Lady North Hollow.
"Interesting as all this is, I fail to see precisely how it addresses our current problems, Georgia."
"It doesn't, directly," the countess replied serenely. "But it suggests that we ought to bear it in mind as we examine several other considerations. For example, it's obvious that Harrington is quite concerned at the moment over the domestic Grayson response to all of this. Then there's the fact that her treecat's mate has seen fit to adopt White Haven. The White Haven servants who were already disposed to resent her had an earful to tell my investigators about that—until they dried up completely, that is. It seems that the bond between the 'cats is forcing White Haven and Harrington even closer together. At least some of the servants were convinced that the female's adoption of the Earl had been deliberately contrived by Harrington to let her worm her way into Lady White Haven's position. I don't personally think there was anything to that theory, given how hard the two of them seem to be working at pretending, even to one another, there's nothing between them. Not to mention the fact that Lady White Haven seems to be reacting to all of this extraordinarily calmly, to judge by what my monitors have managed to pick up. But however it happened, that adoption is one more source of tension and unhappiness for both of them. All three of them, really, I suppose.
"To make a long story short, My Lord, both White Haven and Harrington, but especially Harrington, appear to be under enormous emotional and, to some extent at least, political pressure, regardless of the current turnaround in the poll numbers. And I've analyzed both of their records. You can't produce enough pressure to make Harrington flinch from what she believes her duty requires of her under any conceivable set of circumstances . . . except one. You can shoot at her, blow her up, threaten her with assassination, or tell her her principles are political suicide, and she'll spit in your eye. But if you can convince her that something she wants or needs threatens to undermine what she believes her duty requires of her, that's something else entirely. She'll back away from whatever it is, even shut down completely, rather than 'selfishly' pursue her own interests. And once her emotions are fully engaged, once it's become personal for her, all of the 'Salamander's' decisiveness tends to disappear.
"What do you mean?" Descroix asked intently, and the countess shrugged.
"I mean she's not very good at putting herself first," she said bluntly. "In fact, it actually seems to . . . frighten her when her personal needs appear to threaten the things she believes in."
"Frighten?" High Ridge repeated, one eyebrow raised, and Lady North Hollow shrugged.
" 'Frighten' probably isn't the best word for it, but I don't know one that would be a better fit. Her record is really remarkably clear in that regard, beginning while she was still a midshipwoman. It's common knowledge that she refused to file charges for attempted rape after a certain incident there." She paused very briefly until her audience nodded understanding of the point they knew she probably wouldn't have made had her husband been present.
Probably.
"There might be some argument over why she kept silent in that particular case," the countess went on. "My own belief is that at least part of it was that she was still too young to have developed enough self-confidence to believe her charges would be believed. But it's also highly probable that she believed any scandal would hurt the Navy, and she wasn't prepared to put what had happened to her personally above the good of the Service. That's certainly been the sort of attitude she's displayed repeatedly since, at any rate. If she can find a way to remove herself from a situation in which what she needs conflicts with her duty or with what someone else needs without transgressing her personal code, she'll take it. She did that before the First Battle of Yeltsin, when she pulled her squadron out of Yeltsin's Star because she thought her presence was undermining Courvoisier's efforts to bring Grayson into the Alliance."
Her tone remained conversational, her expression bland, as she ignored Houseman's sudden grimace. The Second Lord's ugly look of remembered hatred (leavened with more than a little fear) was probably so involuntary he didn't even realize he'd let it show, High Ridge reflected.
"If the bigots who'd been giving her grief had done the same thing to anyone else under her command," the countess continued, "she would have come down on them like the wrath of God. She isn't exactly noted for moderation, you know. But their bigotry and resentment were directed at her, and she wasn't prepared to risk blowing Courvoisier's mission by insisting they treat her with the same respect she would have demanded for someone else. So instead, she backed away and took herself out of the equation."
"It sounds almost as if you admire her, Georgia," Descroix observed, and the countess shrugged.
"Admiration doesn't really come into it. But belittling an opponent out of spite when you're trying to formulate a strategy against her is stupid."
This time Houseman actually stirred physically beside her, like a man on the brink of bursting out in protest, but she ignored that, too, and went on speaking directly to Descroix.
"Besides, if you want to look at it from the right angle, what she did in Grayson was to run away from a problem rather than confront it squarely, which is arguably a sign of weakness, not strength. And apparently she did the same thing the first time she realized she and White Haven were straying into forbidden territory. She ran away from the situation—and him—by assuming her squadron command early, which was how the Peeps came to capture her, of course. And she quite clearly did it again on Hades, when she refused to send a courier ship back to the Alliance as soon as she captured one."
"Excuse me?" Janacek blinked at her in surprise. "You're saying she 'ran away' from Hades?"
"Not from Hades, Edward," the countess said patiently. "Away from a profoundly painful personal choice she wasn't prepared to make. As Steadholder Harrington, it was clearly and unambiguously her responsibility to return to Grayson and her duties there as soon as humanly possible. What's more, she had to have realized that whether or not the Admiralty could have scraped up the shipping for a mass prisoner evacuation from the Cerberus System, the Graysons damned well would have sent at least one ship. For that matter, they would have dragged her aboard it at gunpoint, if necessary, if they'd known she was alive and where to find her! But if they'd done that, her public duty as Steadholder Harrington would have pulled her away from a personal duty to all of the prisoners on the planet. She was not only unprepared to turn her back on that responsibility but literally couldn't force herself to 'abandon' them, whatever she knew she ought to have done. So whether she realized it or not, her decision not to inform anyone in the Alliance of what was happening on Hades while she tried to somehow capture or steal enough personnel lift to pull everyone out was a deliberate evasion of something which was too painful for her even to contemplate."
"I never thought of it that way," Janacek said slowly, and Lady North Hollow shrugged.
"I'm not surprised, Edward. For that matter, I doubt very much that Harrington ever thought of it that way. If she had, she probably wouldn't have been able to do it. Which is the reason she didn't think about it. But the reason this particular character flaw is important to us at this particular moment is that it gives us a possible handle to maneuver her in the way we want."
"How?" High Ridge asked, frowning intensely.
"The key here is that she won't evade anything unless there's an 'honorable' way to do it," the countess said. "She may be able to rationalize her way into choosing a way out from among several possible courses of action, but not simply to save herself. There has to be a reason. There has to be something that needs doing, and that she can be convinced—or that she can convince herself—is also her responsibility. Give her an honorable task, a responsibility, especially one that's likely to demand some sacrifice on her part, and the odds are considerably better than even that she'll take it."
"What sort of 'responsibility' did you have in mind?" Descroix arched an eyebrow. "Personally, I can't think of a single thing Harrington would feel compelled to do for any of us—except, perhaps, to pump a little more hydrogen into the furnaces in Hell while we roasted over them!"
"Actually," Reginald Houseman said, speaking up for the first time, "I believe we may have just the job for her. In fact, it's rather like one she was offered once before. She accepted that one, and it almost killed her."
He smiled with an ugly vengefulness he would never have allowed any other audience, and especially not his fellow Liberals, to see.
"Who knows? Maybe this time we'll be luckier."