Ms. Midshipwoman Zilwicki saw the familiar green-on-green uniform before she caught sight of Duchess Harrington. Everyone on Saganami Island knew that uniform, because it was the only non-Navy or Marine uniform allowed on the RMN academy's campus. Helen Zilwicki wasn't supposed to know about the resentment and outrage certain august personages tended to very privately vent behind the scenes over its presence here, but she wasn't her father's daughter for nothing. Anton Zilwicki might have started his naval career as a "techno weenie," but before that career had come to a screeching halt four T-years before, he had more than completed his transition to a full-time intelligence type, and a good one. He wasn't the sort who talked down to anyone, far less to his motherless daughter, and he'd always emphasized how important it was to actually listen to anything she heard.
Of course, his . . . relationship with Lady Catherine Montaigne, Countess of the Tor, also offered Helen a certain insight denied to her fellow midshipmen. Helen never actually tried to eavesdrop on the conversations between her father and Lady Cathy, but the countess was as effervescent and compulsively energetic as Anton Zilwicki was methodical and disciplined. Her exclamation point-punctuated conversations usually seemed as if they were going off in all directions at once, with a sort of high-energy trajectory that left the unwary feeling somewhat as if they'd been run over by a ground lorry . . . or possibly a small fleet of them. In fact, there was always an underlying structure and cohesiveness for anyone who had the wit to stay in shouting distance of Lady Cathy's scalpel-sharp intelligence. And one thing the Countess of the Tor had never possessed was anything like Anton Zilwicki's instinctive respect for authority and tradition. "Irreverent" was far too mild a term to describe her, and her comments on the current Government started at scathing and went rapidly downhill from there.
Which had made it inevitable that Helen would hear Lady Cathy's opinion of the ill-considered attempt Sir Edward Janacek had made to revoke Duchess Harrington's special permission to bring armed personal retainers into the sacred precincts of the Naval Academy.
His efforts had failed ignominiously, exactly (in Helen's opinion) as they deserved to. Fortunately for him, he, or at least his political advisers, had possessed enough sense not to conduct his campaign in a public forum, which had left him room to retreat when he ran into the Queen's unyielding resistance. Since the dispensation which allowed for the presence of the Harrington Steading armsmen on the island in the first place had been granted by the Queen's Bench at the direct request of the Foreign Secretary in light of the fact that Steadholder Harrington and Duchess Harrington were two totally separate legal entities who simply happened to live in the same body as Admiral Harrington, the decision to revoke it had not been the purely internal Navy affair Janacek had attempted to make it. The Foreign Secretary who had requested it had also happened to be the Queen's uncle, and the Queen's Bench answered directly to her, not to Edward Janacek or even Prime Minister High Ridge. Given both of those things, only an idiot would have tried to overturn the arrangement out of what was clearly a sense of petty spite.
That, at least, had been the countess' opinion, and nothing Helen had seen or heard elsewhere suggested Lady Cathy had been in error. Not that Helen intended to discuss that observation with any of her classmates. Her father had often admonished her to remember the example of the 'cat, who saw and heard everything but said nothing. Of course, that example had developed a small flaw since the treecats had learned to sign. On the other hand, it was beginning to look as if the 'cats had been doing a lot more hearing and seeing—and thinking—than even her father had ever suspected, so perhaps the analogy was actually even better than she'd thought. Either way, a first-form midshipwoman had no business at all explaining to her fellow students that the civilian head of their service was a small-minded, small-souled, vindictive cretin. Especially not when that was true.
Helen's lips twitched in an almost-smile at the thought, but she banished the expression and stepped out of the way as Colonel LaFollet came through the pistol range door. The armsman's gray eyes swept his surroundings with an attention to detail which had long since become instinctive. He noticed the tall, sturdy young midshipwoman, and his expression suggested that some orderly file in his mind had brought up her image as one of Duchess Harrington's hundreds of students. But recognition or no, those eyes considered her with a cool, analytical detachment which made her suddenly grateful that he was unlikely to consider her a threat to his charge.
She was dressed out for gym at the moment, in the shorts and unitard which were standard issue for midshipwomen. That uniform included no headgear, which excused her from the normal requirement to salute a superior officer, but she braced quickly to attention until he nodded in acknowledgment of the courtesy. Then he stepped past her, and she came to attention once more as Duchess Harrington walked into the range behind him.
"Ms. Zilwicki," the Duchess observed.
"Your Grace," Helen responded respectfully.
The Duchess' immaculate space-black and gold uniform was unique. She was the only RMN officer who properly wore a Grayson Space Navy shoulder flash bearing the flame-enshrouded salamander emblem of the Protector's Own Squadron even in Manticoran uniform, since she was the Protector's Own's official commander. But in addition to that, she was also the only person in history whose uniform tunic carried both the blood-red ribbon of the Star of Grayson and the crimson, blue, and white one of the Parliamentary Medal of Valor. There were persistent rumors that Duchess Harrington had refused the PMV after leading the escape from Cerberus, but even if they were true, she hadn't been able to avoid it after the Cromarty Assassination. Helen suspected that she'd accepted it with very mixed emotions, however, since Baron High Ridge, as the new Prime Minister, had played the media event for all it was worth when he announced she was to receive it.
But Helen had seen those ribbons often before, and neither they nor the treecat who rode on the Duchess' shoulder were what drew her attention this afternoon. That was left to the wooden case in Duchess Harrington's hand. It was the sort of case which was hand-built at an exorbitant price by some skilled craftsman in some tiny shop filled with dusty sunlight and the sweet scent of wood shavings and varnish to wrap around something indecently expensive, and Helen felt a stir of interest. She'd never seen the box before, but she'd spoken to other midshipmen who had, and she knew what was inside it.
Lady Harrington's ".45" was famous—or infamous, depending on one's perspective—throughout the Navy. Those who continued to cling to the notion that she was some sort of loose warhead, a dangerous lunatic unable to recognize the difference between the derring-do of bad historical holo dramas and the reality of a modern officer's duties, saw the archaic hand weapon as proof of their prejudices. Others, like Helen and Anton Zilwicki, regarded it somewhat differently. Perhaps it was because, unlike those who condemned Lady Harrington's "recklessness" and considered her some sort of glory hound, both Helen and her father had spent their own time in a place those critics had never been. It wasn't something Helen ever discussed with any of her classmates, but she sometimes wondered how they would have reacted if she'd ever told them about her adventures on Old Earth. Or mentioned the fact that before she was fifteen T-years old she had killed three men with her bare hands.
No. Helen Zilwicki knew far better than most exactly what had been going through Lady Harrington's mind when she decided to match a piece of technology that was over two millennia old against modern hand weapons in a personal shoot out with a pirate leader and his bodyguards. But she was also young enough to want very badly to see that piece of technology in action.
Unfortunately, she was already running late for her martial arts class. Although she was rapidly mastering the Academy's preferred coup de vitesse style, she was also spending extra time assisting Chief Maddison in teaching the more esoteric Neue-Stil Handgemenge developed on New Berlin. It wasn't widely practiced in the Star Kingdom, but she'd had the privilege of studying it under sensei Robert Tye, one of Old Earth's two or three most experienced practitioners. Despite her youth, that made her a teaching resource Maddison was determined to put to maximum use. Helen sincerely enjoyed teaching others, but it did put an undeniable squeeze on her time. And even if it hadn't, she'd already finished her own scheduled pistol training for the day. Which meant she couldn't think of an excuse which would justify her in hanging around while Lady Harrington took her .45 to the shooting line.
Damn.
"With your permission, Your Grace?" she said, and Lady Harrington nodded.
"On your way, Ms. Zilwicki," she said with a slight smile, and Helen jogged off towards her waiting instructor.
Honor watched the youthful midshipwoman disappear, and her smile broadened. She approved of Ms. Zilwicki. Not that it was surprising that the young woman should have turned out as well as she had . . . and not just because her mother had been a genuine hero. Few PMVs had been harder earned than that of Captain Helen Zilwicki, but that had been when young Helen was only a child. The father was the place to look for the full flowering of the daughter's strength, and over the last few T-years, Honor had gotten a better chance than most to appreciate just how strong that father was. And the reason Helen never doubted that she could do anything she set her mind to.
In fact, Honor often wished that she'd had a bit more of Helen's confidence, if that was the right word, at the same age. She'd tasted enough of the youngster's emotions through her empathic link with Nimitz to feel quite certain Helen would never have reacted the same way Honor had when Pavel Young had attempted to rape her. Well, after Young's rape attempt, anyway, Honor corrected herself. At the actual moment, she would undoubtedly have done precisely what Honor had done, and possibly even more thoroughly than Honor had, judging from her scores in unarmed combat training. But later, when she'd had time to think about it, Helen would never even have considered not telling the Academy commandant what had happened.
If I'd been a bit more like her at her age, Honor reflected, my life would have been completely different. And Paul would still be alive. She felt a familiar stir of loss and the echo of grief and inhaled sharply.
Yes, he'd still be alive. But I'd never have met him—not the same way, at least, she reminded herself.
She allowed herself a moment longer to recall all she and Paul Tankersley had been to one another, and then she put the memory gently away once more and followed Andrew toward the range officer's counter to sign in.
Technically, the letter of Grayson law required that she be accompanied by an absolute minimum of two armsmen wherever she went, and she knew LaFollet was far from reconciled to her decision to reduce her normal personal detachment to just himself here on the Island. Truth to tell, she'd been a little surprised when she realized how much she resented that reduction herself, even though it had been her own idea. Of course, her reasons for resenting it weren't quite the same as Andrew's. It was part of his job description to be hyperconscious of any potential threat at all times and in all places, and he was profoundly unhappy at the way it reduced his ability to guarantee her safety. Personally, Honor felt reasonably confident no assassins skulked in the shrubbery of Saganami Island, but she'd long since given up any hope that LaFollet's institutional paranoia would allow them to see eye-to-eye on that particular point.
In addition to his purely practical considerations, however, Honor knew her armsman deeply resented what he saw as a calculated insult to his Steadholder. He knew all about Janacek's efforts to have Honor's personal security detachment entirely barred from the Academy's campus. He'd never said so in so many words, but his firm belief that it was only one more aspect of the petty vindictiveness in which the present Manticoran Government indulged whenever it thought no one could see was painfully obvious to Honor. It would have been even without her link to Nimitz; as it was, he might as well have shouted his disgust aloud.
Unfortunately, and even though she'd been the one who'd suggested the compromise, Honor shared his view of what had inspired Janacek's attempt. Which was why she, too, resented it so bitterly. She hoped her resentment stemmed from the circumstances which had put Janacek into the First Lord's chair once again, not from a sense of her own importance, but she was self-honest enough to admit that she wasn't as certain of that as she would have preferred to be.
She grimaced at the thought and set her pistol case and accessory shoulder bag on the counter as the range officer, an absurdly youthful looking Marine master sergeant whose nameplate read "Johannsen, M.," produced ear protectors for her and LaFollet, along with the proper forms. She signed and thumbprinted the paperwork, then opened the shoulder bag for the special ear protectors she'd had made for Nimitz. The 'cat regarded them with scant favor, but he wasn't about to reject them. Back home on Grayson, her outdoor range allowed him to keep an eye on her while she practiced without bringing him into such proximity as to make the sound of the gunshots a problem. Here at the Academy, with its indoor range, that wasn't a possibility, and she watched patiently while he slipped the protectors into place and adjusted them carefully.
"Ready, Stinker?" she asked. The protectors were advanced developments of devices which had been available even before humanity left Old Earth for the stars. They were fully effective at damping the decibel spikes which could injure someone's hearing, yet normal conversational tones were clearly audible through them, and the 'cat raised one true-hand, closed in the sign for the letter "S," and "nodded" it up and down in affirmation.
"Good," she said, and adjusted her own ear protection. LaFollet had already donned his protectors, and she waited patiently while he stepped through the door to give the firing line itself a careful once over. Satisfied that no desperately determined hired killers had infiltrated it, he opened the door once more and held it courteously for her.
"Thank you, Andrew," she said gravely, and stepped through it.
Colonel LaFollet stood well behind the Steadholder in the noisy range and watched her punch holes in anachronistic paper targets with meticulous precision. Her automatic produced a cloud of sharp-smelling smoke, unlike the pulsers most people came here to fire, but at least there were enough other chemical firearm afficionados in the Navy for the range to have been provided with a highly efficient ventilation system.
It was somehow typical of her that she preferred the ancient, traditional paper to the highly sophisticated, holographically created targets which were used in virtually every combat marksmanship training program. The colonel had often thought that her preference resulted from the way she saw shooting, as much as an art form as a serious form of self defense. She approached her beloved coup de vitesse and her lessons in Grayson-style swordsmanship exactly the same way. Not that she took her training in them any less seriously, as her track record of carnage in all three amply demonstrated. And she did spend at least one session per week working the combat range against realistically programmed holographic opponents.
She was just as good at shooting holes in the bad guys as in the ancient silhouette and bull's-eye paper targets which were her preferred victims, too.
Although he was never likely to pass up the opportunity to tease her, respectfully of course, about her choice of weapons, LaFollet took great comfort from her skill with the antique handgun High Admiral Matthews had presented to her. If he had his way, Lady Harrington would never again have the opportunity to demonstrate her proficiency at self defense, but his past lack of success in that regard didn't exactly inspire him with confidence for the future. It was scarcely his fault she kept attracting assassination attempts, close personal encounters with bloodthirsty megalomaniac pirates, and transportation to hellhole prison planets, but that didn't change the fact that she did. Which meant Andrew LaFollet was intensely in favor of anything which made her harder to kill.
Nor was the colonel ever likely to underestimate the lethality of her ear-beating, propellant-spewing hand-cannon. It might be big, noisy, and two thousand years out of date, but that didn't make it ineffective. And unlike his Manticoran counterparts, LaFollet had initially been trained using weapons very like the Steadholder's semiauto. Their designs might have been somewhat more sophisticated, and the materials of which they'd been constructed had certainly been more advanced, but the basic operating principles had been virtually identical. He and his security service colleagues had traded them with gleeful jubilation for the pulsers Grayson's alliance with the Star Kingdom had finally made available, yet the twelve T-years he'd spent training with them first left him with a profound respect for their capabilities. Besides, he'd once seen the Steadholder use the very same "antique" .45 to kill two fully prepared opponents armed to the teeth with "modern" weapons.
Not that the hopefully remote possibility that she might someday be required to once again personally wreak effective mayhem against armed opponents was the only reason he was perfectly happy to stand around in a smoky, noisy pistol range while she sent bullet after bullet downrange. No. However comforting he might find her proficiency, the real reason he had no objection to her range visits was much simpler.
They relaxed her. Even more, perhaps, than her coup de vitesse katas, her shooting sessions required a complete mental break from all of the host of problems which currently beset her. The need to empty her mind while she concentrated on muscle memory, on breathing, on grip and trigger control, on capturing the sights and sight picture . . . Nothing could have been better designed to distract her, however briefly, from the current political and diplomatic lunacy which had come to focus more and more intensively on her. And that, all by itself, was more than sufficient to win Andrew LaFollet's enthusiastic endorsement.
Which didn't mean he approached her trips to the range without a certain trepidation. For one thing, he wasn't at all in favor of allowing anyone—even fellow naval officers—into the Steadholder's presence with weapons in their hands. He knew better than to raise that particular point with Lady Harrington, however, which was why he'd somehow overlooked reporting to her about the private conversation he'd had with Sergeant Johannsen's predecessor over four T-years ago. The colonel had long since discovered that the easiest way to prevent the Steadholder from complaining about irksome security considerations was simply not to mention them to her. Not even Lady Harrington could get exercised over something she didn't know about, although keeping secrets from her wasn't exactly the easiest thing in the universe.
In this case, though, he was reasonably certain she remained blissfully unaware that Johannsen, like the last range officer, discreetly saw to it that no other shooter was ever admitted to the range while she was at the line. It was certainly possible that sooner or later she would begin wondering why she always seemed to have the range to herself, of course. When she did, she was probably going to ask some extremely pointed questions, and LaFollet wasn't looking forward to answering them. But in the meantime, his if-you-don't-ask, I-won't-tell policy seemed to be working just fine, and tomorrow could look after itself when it got here.
Despite his arrangement with Johannsen, LaFollet's well-trained and carefully honed sense of paranoia prevented him from ever completely relaxing his vigilance. Even as he watched the Steadholder systematically removing the "X" ring from yet another silhouette at a range of fifteen meters, his eyes also constantly scanned the other shooting stations and watched the soundproofed door into the range proper.
Which was why he became aware of the arrival of the tall, broad shouldered, blue-eyed man well before Lady Harrington did.
The colonel recognized the newcomer the instant he stepped through the door, but his professionally expressionless face hid his dismay admirably. Not that LaFollet disliked the new arrival. In point of fact, he admired and respected Admiral Hamish Alexander, Thirteenth Earl of White Haven, almost as much as he admired and respected Lady Harrington, and under other circumstances, he would have been delighted to see him. As it was . . .
The armsman came to attention and saluted, despite the fact that White Haven, unlike the Steadholder, was in civilian dress. That made him stand out like a deacon in a house of joy here on Saganami Island, and LaFollet suspected it was deliberate. The Earl was widely acknowledged as the premier field commander of the entire Manticoran Alliance after his brilliant performance in Operation Buttercup, and the Grayson Space Navy had granted him the rank of Fleet Admiral in its service. He was fully entitled to wear the uniform of his rank—in either navy—whenever he chose, despite the fact that Sir Edward Janacek had seen fit to place him on inactive, half-pay status with indecent speed as one of his first actions as First Lord of the Admiralty. If he could have, Janacek would undoubtedly have attempted to order him not to accept the Grayson promotion, as well. Technically, he had that power, since the Graysons had not made the rank honorary, despite the fact that White Haven was not a Grayson citizen, but not even the High Ridge Government had dared to offer an insult quite that gratuitous to the man who'd won the war. So the First Lord had swallowed the ground glass and accepted it . . . then deprived White Haven of the opportunity to wear any uniform on active duty. The fact that White Haven chose not to wear it off-duty, either, even here at the very fountainhead of the Royal Manticoran Navy's officer corps, only emphasized the pettiness and spite of Janacek's action.
The Earl nodded, very much as Lady Harrington would have if she'd been out of uniform, and gestured for the colonel to stand at ease once more. LaFollet relaxed, and White Haven, ears safely covered by his own protectors, crossed to stand beside him and watch Lady Harrington's demolition of her current target. LaFollet was more than a little surprised that Nimitz hadn't alerted the Steadholder to White Haven's arrival via their link. Perhaps she was simply too deeply focused on her shooting to be as fully aware of the 'cat as usual. It certainly wasn't because Nimitz shared LaFollet's sense of dismay. In fact, it was obvious to the armsman that the 'cat not only liked White Haven but actively approved of the Earl's attitude towards his own adopted person.
Which, in LaFollet's opinion, was yet another demonstration of the fact that, despite centuries of association with human society, treecat brains simply didn't work the way human ones did.
The colonel was far too professional—and discreet—to permit his eyes to abandon their systematic scan of his environs. But he watched the Earl, very unobtrusively, from the corner of one eye, and his heart sank as White Haven's unguarded ice-blue gaze clung to the Steadholder and softened warmly.
Lady Harrington fired the final round in her current magazine, and her pistol's slide locked in the open position. She laid it carefully on the shelf at her station, muzzle pointed downrange, and pressed the button to bring her target back to her. She gazed at it thoughtfully for several moments, then pursed her lips in grudging approval of the single large, multi-lobed hole which had replaced the silhouette's "X" ring. She reached up to unhook the target from the carrier, then turned to set it aside and mount a replacement and froze as she saw White Haven.
It was only the briefest of hesitations, so fleeting that anyone who didn't know her as well as LaFollet probably would never have noticed it at all. But LaFollet did know her, and the heart which had sunk at the Earl's expression plummeted.
Against most people, the Steadholder's sharply-carved, high-cheekboned face was an admirable mask for her feelings. Very few of them probably appreciated the years of military discipline and self-discipline which had gone into crafting that mask, but those who truly knew her knew exactly how to read her expression anyway. It was the eyes, of course. Always the eyes. Those huge, chocolate-dark, almond-shaped eyes. The ones she'd inherited from her mother. The ones that mirrored her feelings even more revealingly than Nimitz's body language.
The ones which for no more than two heartbeats, three at the most, glowed with bright, joyful welcome.
Sweet Tester, LaFollet thought almost despairingly, each of them thinks no one in the world—including each other—can tell what's going on. They actually believe that.
Idiots.
He took himself sternly to task the instant the thought crossed his mind. In the first place, it was no business of his who the Steadholder decided to fall in love with. His job was to protect her, not to tell her what she could or couldn't do with her life. And in the second place, she was obviously as well aware as LaFollet of all the manifold reasons she had no business looking at Earl White Haven that way. If she hadn't been, the two of them would undoubtedly have stopped suffering in such noble silence at least two T-years ago.
And Tester only knew where that would have led!
"Hello, Honor," White Haven said, and waved a hand at the perforated target. "I never could shoot that well myself," he went on. "Did you ever consider trying out for the marksmanship team when you were a middy?"
"Hello, Hamish," Lady Harrington responded, and held out her hand. The Earl took it, but rather than shake it in the Manticoran fashion, he raised it and brushed his lips across it as a Grayson might have done. He'd spent long enough on Grayson to make the gesture completely natural looking, but the faintest hint of a blush painted the Steadholder's cheekbones.
"In answer to your question," she went on a moment later, her voice completely normal as she reclaimed her hand, "yes. I did consider trying out for the pistol team. The rifle team never really interested me, I'm afraid, but I've always enjoyed hand weapons. But I was just getting really into the coup at that point, and I decided to concentrate on that, instead." She shrugged. "I grew up in the Sphinx bush, you know, so I was already a pretty fair shot when I got here."
"I suppose that's one way to put it," White Haven agreed dryly, picking up the target and raising it to look at her through the hole blown in its center. "My own athletic endeavors were a bit more pacific than yours."
"I know." She nodded and gave him one of the crooked smiles enforced by the artificial nerves in her left cheek. "I understand you and Admiral Caparelli had quite a soccer rivalry during your time on the Island."
"What you understand is that Tom Caparelli kicked my aristocratic backside up one side of the field and down the other," the Earl corrected, and she chuckled.
"That might be true, but I've become far too diplomatic to put it quite so frankly," she told him.
"I see." He lowered the target, and the humor in his expression faded just a bit. "Speaking about being diplomatic, I'm afraid I didn't hunt you up here in your hidey hole just to enjoy your company. Not," he added, "that your company isn't always a pleasure."
"You're not too shabby as a diplomat yourself," she observed, and anyone but Andrew LaFollet might not even have noticed the very slight edge which had crept into her voice.
"Decades spent as the brother of an ambitious politician do that to you," White Haven assured her easily. "In fact, the reason I came looking for you was that the aforesaid ambitious politician and I spent most of the morning together."
"Ah?" Lady Harrington cocked an eyebrow at him.
"I had to fly into Landing on business anyway," the Earl explained, "so I dropped by to see Willie . . . who happened to have just returned from Mount Royal Palace."
"I see." The Steadholder's tone had suddenly become far more neutral, and she ejected the magazine from her pistol, released the slide, and tucked the weapon into the fitted recess in its case.
"Should I assume he asked you to drop by to see me?" she went on.
"Not specifically. But Elizabeth had invited him to the Palace as the Leader of the Opposition to hear the official briefing on the latest inspirations to strike High Ridge and his flunkies." Lady Harrington looked up from the gun case to dart a sharp glance at the Earl, but he either failed to notice or pretended that he had. "The official message inviting the Opposition Leader to the briefing had somehow gone astray. Again."
"I see," she repeated, and closed the gun case with a snap. She reached for her accessory bag, but White Haven's hand got to it before hers, and smiling, he slung it over his own shoulder.
She smiled back, but her eyes were troubled. LaFollet wasn't surprised. The Steadholder had come an enormous distance from the politically unsophisticated naval officer she'd been when LaFollet first became her armsman. Which meant she was unaware neither of the fresh contempt in White Haven's voice when he spoke of the Prime Minister, nor of the pettiness of High Ridge's obviously intentional failure to advise Lord Alexander of the briefing.
Like the Steadholder, although to a lesser degree, the colonel had become better informed on Manticoran political processes than he'd ever really wanted to be. Because of that, he knew there was no specific constitutional requirement for the Prime Minister to invite the leader of his opposition in Parliament to the Queen's official weekly briefings. By long tradition, however, he was supposed to invite the Opposition Leader to the regular briefings, both as a matter of common courtesy and to ensure that if there were a sudden change of government, the individual who would almost certainly replace him as Prime Minister was as fully up to speed as possible.
No one expected any politician, even the Prime Minister of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, to invite his main political rival to Cabinet meetings, or to special Crown briefings. That would have been both unreasonable and foolish. But the twice-a-week general briefings were another matter entirely, and LaFollet knew Duke Cromarty had been scrupulous even at the height of the war against the Peeps about inviting High Ridge, who'd led the Opposition at the time, to attend them. It was typical of High Ridge to "forget" to extend the same courtesy to the man who'd been Cromarty's political second-in-command.
"Was it your impression there was a specific reason this particular invitation might have 'gone astray'?" the Steadholder went on after a moment.
"Not really," White Haven admitted, "although I doubt very much that he was overjoyed to see Willie, given the nature and content of the briefing. On the other hand, he might have been better off because Willie was there anyway." Lady Harrington tilted her head inquiringly, and the Earl chuckled. "My impression is that Her Majesty actually behaves herself a bit better when Willie's present to act as a buffer between her and her Prime Minister," he said dryly.
"I'm afraid that's probably true," Lady Harrington observed, both her voice and her expression rather more serious than the Earl's. "I wish it weren't," she went on, turning away to reach for Nimitz. The 'cat leapt into her arms and swarmed up into his proper position on her right shoulder. He perched there, with the tips of his true-feet's claws digging into the special fabric of her uniform tunic just below her shoulder blade while one true-hand removed his ear protectors, and she turned back to White Haven. "Lord knows I sympathize with her, but showing her contempt for him so obviously, even in private, doesn't help the situation at all."
"No, it doesn't," the Earl agreed, his own tone less amused then it had been a moment before. "On the other hand, Elizabeth and High Ridge are like oil and water. And say what you will about her tactfulness, or lack thereof, no one could ever accuse her of deceitfulness."
"There's deceitfulness, and there's guile," the Steadholder replied. "And then there's the recognition that grinding someone's face in the fact that you loathe and despise him, even if you only do it in private, can only make things worse."
"It's hardly fair to say she 'grinds' it into his face, Honor," White Haven protested mildly.
"Yes, it is," she contradicted firmly. "Face it, Hamish. Elizabeth doesn't handle people she despises well. I know, because in my own way, I have the same weakness." She did not, LaFollet noticed, say anything about the famous White Haven temper. "But I've had to learn there are some situations I just can't solve by simply reaching for a bigger hammer when someone irritates me. Elizabeth recognizes that intellectually, but once her emotions become involved, it's almost impossible for her to mask her feelings except in the most official settings."
She held the Earl's gaze until, finally, he nodded almost unwillingly; then she shrugged.
"Elizabeth has enormous strengths," she said then, "but there are times I wish she had a little more of Benjamin's . . . interpersonal skills. She can lead in a way very few people could possibly match, but she's the wrong woman in the wrong place when it comes to manipulating people who don't already want to be led into following her. And that's doubly true when the people she ought to be convincing to do what she wants want to do exactly the opposite for reasons of their own."
"I know," White Haven sighed. "I know. But," he added in a stronger, more cheerful voice, "that's what she has people like you and Willie for—to advise her when she's headed into trouble."
"Willie, maybe," Lady Harrington said with another shrug.
"And you," the Earl insisted. "She's come to rely on you for a lot more than your insight into Grayson politics, and you know it."
"Maybe," she repeated, obviously more than a little uncomfortable with the thought, and he changed the subject.
"At any rate, I decided that since I was in the area, and since Willie had bent my ear about what High Ridge—and Janacek—had to say at the briefing, I'd stop by and see about bringing you up to speed, as well."
Of course you did, LaFollet thought dryly. After all, it was obviously your bounden duty to get this critical information to her as rapidly as possible . . . in person.
Nimitz glanced at the armsman over White Haven's shoulder, and his ears flicked in obvious amusement as he tasted the colonel's emotions. LaFollet stuck out a mental tongue at the 'cat, and Nimitz's grass-green eyes danced devilishly, but he declined to do anything more overt.
"Thank you," Lady Harrington told the Earl, and her tone was just as casually serious as his was, as if she were totally oblivious to the shared amusement of her 'cat and her henchman. Which she most certainly wasn't, LaFollet reminded himself, and forced his unruly thoughts back under control. Fortunately, the only thing she could sense through her link to Nimitz was emotions, not the thoughts which had produced them. Under most circumstances, she was capable of deducing approximately what those thoughts must have been with almost frightening accuracy, but in this instance, that ability seemed to have deserted her. Which, the colonel reflected with much less amusement, probably reflected the intensity with which she refused to face what was actually happening between her and White Haven.
"It may take a while," the Earl warned her. "What does your schedule look like for the rest of the afternoon?"
"I have an evening guest lecture over at the Crusher, but that's not until after dinner, and I've already finish-polished my notes for it. Until then, I'm free. I have a small clutch of papers I really ought to be reading and grading, but they're all extra-credit electives, and I can probably afford to let them slide for a single afternoon."
"Good." White Haven glanced at his chrono. "I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned dinner, but it's just about lunchtime. Could I buy you lunch somewhere?"
"No, but I'll buy you lunch," she countered, and LaFollet felt a fresh sinking sensation as he saw the way her eyes suddenly danced even more devilishly than Nimitz's had. White Haven arched a questioning eyebrow, and she chuckled. "You're here on the Island, Hamish, and whether Janacek likes it or not, you are a flag officer. Why not let me com ahead to Casey and reserve one of the flag dining rooms for lunch?"
"Oh, Honor, that's evil," White Haven said with a sudden huge grin, and LaFollet closed his eyes in profound agreement. Casey Hall was the enormous cafeteria right off the Quadrangle. Its main dining hall was capable of seating almost a third of Saganami Island's entire student body simultaneously, but it also boasted smaller, much more palatial dining rooms for more senior officers. Including fifteen or twenty small, private rooms reserved for admirals and very senior captains of the list and their guests on a first-come, first-served basis.
"Janacek will fall down in a frothing fit when he hears you and I had lunch together in the very heart of what he'd like to consider his own private domain," the Earl continued. "Especially when he figures out I came straight from Willie's after discussing what he and High Ridge had to say at the briefing this morning."
"I doubt we'll be quite that lucky," Lady Harrington disagreed, "but we can at least hope his blood pressure will kick up a few points."
"I like it," White Haven announced cheerfully, and waved for her to precede him towards the door.
For the tiniest sliver of a moment, Andrew LaFollet hovered on the brink of the unthinkable. But the instant passed, and as he stepped around the Steadholder to open the door for her, he pressed his lips firmly together against the words he had no business saying.
They really don't have a clue, he thought. That's why they don't realize I'm not the only person—the only two-footed person, anyway—who's begun to notice the way the two of them look at each other. The last thing they need is to go traipsing off to a private lunch in such a public place, but they don't even realize it.
He opened the door, glanced through it in a quick, automatic search, then stood aside to allow the Steadholder and her guest through it. He watched them heading for Johannsen's desk to sign off the range sheet, and shook his head mentally.
Father Church says You look after children and fools, he told the Comforter. I hope You're looking after both of them now.