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CHAPTER EIGHT

_Lt. Daniel Leary sat at the command console in the middle of
the Princess Cecile's bridge. In Kostroman service the console had been fixed facing the bow; now it would rotate 360 degrees in accordance with the most modern RCN practice, so that the captain could watch what was happening down the axis of C Level by dimming his holographic display to a fifty-percent mask.

Pasternak, the chief engineer—new to the corvette but a man with an excellent record both on paper and in the opinion of Sissies who'd served under him on other hulls—came up from A Level. The smile he wore on the companionway faded as he turned toward the bridge, facing Daniel at last with an expression of gray concern.

"Captain," he called across the bustle of the bridge, "I've a full crew and the stores are catalogued, but I don't vouch for the quality of either till we've had time to work up properly."

"Very good, Mr. Pasternak," Daniel said. "As it chances, all but three of your crew have served with me before so I think I with honesty can vouch for them to you. As for the sealed stores, we'll trust the warehouse inspection system till we have reason to doubt it—and we'll raise holy Hell if there is reason, right?"

Pasternak grinned. "They're a prime lot, sir," he said. "I'm honored you wanted me aboard to run things hull-side. But I didn't want to sound, you know, too confident before you'd seen me in action."

"Understood, Pasternak," Daniel said. "I expect we'll both be pleased with the relationship when the Sissie pays off the next time."

Daniel's display was running a crew list, an equipment status report, and a schematic of the Princess Cecile which highlighted mechanical changes in a red that faded through shades of orange with time. This last showed that a dorsal airlock had just cycled. Through the hologram Daniel could see Ellie Woetjans, timing the return from topside of a section of the port watch wearing rigger's suits.

"Lamsoe!" the bosun bellowed. "Lock that Goddamned helmet down or you can see how you like being derated for the tour!"

"I'm going to check the alignment of Number Three thruster, sir," Pasternak said, already backing toward the companionway. "We may have to readjust it after the shakedown run, though."

Betts, the chief missileer, was new to the Princess Cecile also. He turned from the attack console and said, "As ordered, sir, we're carrying the tubes loaded and a full twenty reloads. There's no guarantees short of launching them, of course, but I'd bet my life that all twenty-two'll function clean as a simulation."

"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:

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 Adele was a child. It was Mistress Rolfe's as well, though the decor of the sitting room open off the staircase was froufrou in contrast to the severity Adele remembered.

Father had been the politician, but mother was the ideologue of the Mundy household. She practiced the same "simple life of the common people" that she preached at her salons and to her family.

Unlike her mother, Adele had personal experience of how common people live; she'd found their taste in furnishings to be very like that of the present Mistress Rolfe. Which was only to be expected, from a Casaubon.

The doors off the third floor were closed. Adele's apartments had been to the right, her sister's to the left. Rolfe paused. "Ah," he said, "if you'd informed us you were coming . . ."

"Actually, I wasn't sure until this afternoon that I was coming," Adele said. She opened the right-hand door herself.

The room beyond had been her library as soon as she stopped needing a nurse sleeping nearby. The bookshelves and the data console were gone. Furniture of several different styles filled all the space around the boundary of the room. A captain's chair with dog-headed armrests even blocked the door which once had led to Adele's bedroom.

The center of the room was filled by a large flat-topped desk. One of the drawers was missing and half the veneer had peeled away. The servants were using the room as a lounge. There were plates of fried potatoes, two mugs, and the remains of a pitcher of beer on the desk; stacks of dirty dishes on several of the chair seats showed how slackly the household was directed.

"I, ah . . ." Rolfe repeated. The reality of the room had obviously taken him aback, despite his previous low expectations.

"There were books here," Adele said, her voice expressionless. "I suppose they would have been sold before you took ownership of the real estate?"

"Yes, that's right," Rolfe said, glad to have something to focus on that didn't make him look like a pig. He stepped past Adele to the desk and dragged open one of the drawers. "But I recall we were given a copy of the receipts when we . . ."

Adele watched with cold amusement as her host pawed inexpertly through the drawer. She'd gone through many such agglomerations in her days as an archivist. She'd learned quite quickly that there was no document that was completely without value to some researcher, but there was a limit to what could be catalogued and thus become available for research.

She suspected she could trim the present mass by 99% without doing irreparable harm to posterity. And if it were limited to the Rolfe and Casaubon houses, the percentage saved could be even lower.

"Yes!" cried Rolfe. "Here they are, just as I remembered!"

Adele took the document, a four-foot continuous coil folded to fit into a drawer. It was a printout of the auction listing with numbers, presumably the amounts paid, written in holograph beside them.

"Yes, we had our bailiff, well, my wife's bailiff really, present at the auction," Rolfe said as Adele scanned the list. "Our claim was to the real estate alone, but Marina thought we needed to be careful that the auctioneers didn't try to sell fixtures as well as the personal property."

His voice was an empty background like the rustle of mating insects; not overtly unpleasant but not of any concern either. Furniture, bedclothes, kitchen utensils. Paintings, electronic equipment, shop tools. The last had probably belonged to Mick Hilmer, the chauffeur and mechanic. Had he survived the Proscriptions? Mick should have been exempt—he was no Mundy by blood or marriage, to be sure—but neither was he the sort to bow meekly when a gang of street toughs burst into his quarters.

"My wife has been responsible for redecorating," Rolfe burbled. He seemed to have forgotten he was standing in a junk room which once had been a private library equal to any in Xenos. "We have heirlooms from her family and mine both."

Assorted books/316 florins. 

"I had laid out over five thousand florins for the books I'd purchased," Adele said. No one listening to her could have told from her voice how she felt. "Of course the more valuable items came to me as gifts. Friends of the family found it amusing that the older Mundy girl was a real antiquarian. Many of them had something on a shelf or in a trunk that even my allowance wouldn't have run to."

"Pardon, mistress?" Rolfe said. He hadn't heard the words, and he wouldn't have understood them anyway.

The Mundy children had been as much a part of the family's political entertainments as the images of ancestors in the entrance hall were. Agatha hadn't been any more outgoing than her elder sister, and unlike Adele she hadn't the taste and intellect to escape into scholarship. She'd buffered herself from the public stress with a parliament of stuffed animals, each of which had a distinct personality as well as a name.

Assorted stuffed toys/Five florins fifty. 

Adele's hand began to tremble. She quickly dropped the auction list on the desktop. She wondered if she could ask to wash her hands.

"I wonder if you wouldn't be interested in some walnut pudding, Mistress Mundy?" Rolfe said. "My father-in-law has some marvelous trees on his country estate, that's Silver Oaks in the Varangian Hills."

Adele forced her mind up from the frozen horror of the past. Noises from downstairs penetrated her awareness. A woman was shouting—screaming—and feet were pounding up the stairs.

"Ah, that must be Marina," Rolfe said with false brightness. His eyes were glazing and his face looked as rigid as a mummy's. "I'll see if I can introduce—"

A woman whose garments were trimmed with off-planet furs burst into the room; the doorkeeper and several other servants followed in her wake. If the entryway mosaic had flattered Ligier Rolfe's hairline, it had excised at least fifty pounds from his wife. She tended to a naturally ruddy complexion; in her present anger she looked nearly purple.

"Darling," said Rolfe, "this is—"

Marina Rolfe flung Adele's card to the floor. "Ligier!" she said. "Get this woman out of here! She has no right to Rolfe House, none! Get her—"

She turned from her stunned-looking husband to Adele. "Get out!" she cried. "The time to protest our claim is past, past years and years ago. It's Rolfe House now and you have no right to be here!"

"Please, dear!" Rolfe said in obvious embarrassment. "She's just visiting before—"

"Shut up, you!" his wife said. "If you were any kind of man I wouldn't have to take care of this myself."

Her eyes, brown and hysterically wide, returned to Adele. "Now, are you going to get out or—"

"Mister Rolfe," Adele said. "If you don't restrain your dog, I will restrain her for you. Do you understand?"

Adele wasn't certain how Rolfe would react to the whiplash in her voice, though she didn't doubt what she would do if he reacted the wrong way. The anger leaping within her threatened to burst through her skin and consume everyone present.

Assorted stuffed toys/Five florins fifty. 

It shouldn't have mattered, not against the greater horror of Agatha's ten-year-old head displayed on the Speaker's Rock; but it mattered.

"Marina, you're overwrought!" Rolfe said with a strength Adele hadn't credited to him. Either he'd understood what he saw in Adele's eyes or, more likely, he'd just been horrified by his wife's boorish behavior to a guest. The Rolfes were a noble house, as old as any in the Republic. "Go up and wait in my apartment while I see Mistress Mundy out."

He pointed at the doorman, perhaps blaming him for the outburst. "You! Escort your mistress to my room. Immediately!"

Mistress Rolfe stepped back, putting her hand to her cheek as though she'd been slapped. The shouted command had much the same effect on her hysteria as a slap might have done; her breathing steadied and the flush began to fade.

"See that you do, Ligier," she said in a controlled voice. She turned and marched up the stairs, her high-laced shoes whacking the treads in an attempt to sound dignified.

The doorman followed her, looking over his shoulder, but the footmen who'd escorted Rolfe remained on the landing. A step below them, smiling faintly as she watched events in the servants' lounge, stood Tovera.

Marina Rolfe had been afraid; afraid of the same thing as her husband, now that Adele had leisure to analyze it. The Rolfes thought that the real heir to the Mundy estate had returned to claim her property. How strange. Despite Deirdre Leary's offer to look into the matter, Adele hadn't imagined trying to overturn the settlement based on the Edict of Reconciliation twelve years previous.

Not until now.

Rolfe took a deep breath and looked warily at her. The left corner of Adele's mouth quirked into a smile of sorts. "You needn't worry, Mister Rolfe," she said. "I'll be leaving presently. But I'd appreciate the use of this desk—"

She gestured toward the wreck beside her. One of the legs had broken; that corner was supported by a metal document box.

"—to write a note. It's on a matter I hadn't given thought to previously, but I'd like my servant to deliver it before I leave Xenos. I'll only be a moment."

"Of course, mistress, of course," Rolfe said. "You can use my—"

He strangled the rest of the offer. He must suddenly have remembered he'd sent his wife upstairs to his suite, rather than down to her own where Adele would have to pass her on the way out.

"This is quite adequate," Adele said coolly. She drew out another visiting card and on the back wrote,

Mistress Deirdre Leary:
I would appreciate any support you could provide in the matter of my regaining title to Chatsworth Minor. I will be in touch with you on my next return to Cinnabar.
Mundy 

She closed her stylus, then gave the card to Tovera while Rolfe waited with politely averted eyes. "I'll take my leave now, Mister Rolfe," Adele said aloud. "I appreciate your hospitality."

Rolfe looked embarrassed again, but at his quick gesture the footmen started down the stairs. Rolfe bowed his guest ahead of him, then followed. The doorman was still with his mistress, but Wormser pulled the outer door open in fine style, then closed it behind Adele and Tovera.

Adele's skin felt prickly. Her anger was a cold emotion, and it left her feeling like the dirty slush of a winter streetscape.

"I don't know where you'll find her," she said to her servant. "I'd try the office on—"

"I'll find her, mistress," the pale woman said. "And I'll be aboard the ship before it lifts."

"Yes, that too," Adele said. "I'll meet you there."

Tovera looked at Rolfe House. "It bothers you?" she said.

Adele's face tightened. Then she remembered who'd asked the question and said, "Yes. It bothers me very much."

"It leaves me empty," Tovera said softly. "But then, everything does."

She strode toward a monorail platform. She was quite unremarkable, an office worker heading home with a briefcase full of work.

Adele sighed and walked to her own stop on the opposite end of the street. The sky was threatening; there'd be rain before sunset, she supposed.

That would fit her mood quite well.

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Framed

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Contents

CHAPTER EIGHT

_Lt. Daniel Leary sat at the command console in the middle of
the Princess Cecile's bridge. In Kostroman service the console had been fixed facing the bow; now it would rotate 360 degrees in accordance with the most modern RCN practice, so that the captain could watch what was happening down the axis of C Level by dimming his holographic display to a fifty-percent mask.

Pasternak, the chief engineer—new to the corvette but a man with an excellent record both on paper and in the opinion of Sissies who'd served under him on other hulls—came up from A Level. The smile he wore on the companionway faded as he turned toward the bridge, facing Daniel at last with an expression of gray concern.

"Captain," he called across the bustle of the bridge, "I've a full crew and the stores are catalogued, but I don't vouch for the quality of either till we've had time to work up properly."

"Very good, Mr. Pasternak," Daniel said. "As it chances, all but three of your crew have served with me before so I think I with honesty can vouch for them to you. As for the sealed stores, we'll trust the warehouse inspection system till we have reason to doubt it—and we'll raise holy Hell if there is reason, right?"

Pasternak grinned. "They're a prime lot, sir," he said. "I'm honored you wanted me aboard to run things hull-side. But I didn't want to sound, you know, too confident before you'd seen me in action."

"Understood, Pasternak," Daniel said. "I expect we'll both be pleased with the relationship when the Sissie pays off the next time."

Daniel's display was running a crew list, an equipment status report, and a schematic of the Princess Cecile which highlighted mechanical changes in a red that faded through shades of orange with time. This last showed that a dorsal airlock had just cycled. Through the hologram Daniel could see Ellie Woetjans, timing the return from topside of a section of the port watch wearing rigger's suits.

"Lamsoe!" the bosun bellowed. "Lock that Goddamned helmet down or you can see how you like being derated for the tour!"

"I'm going to check the alignment of Number Three thruster, sir," Pasternak said, already backing toward the companionway. "We may have to readjust it after the shakedown run, though."

Betts, the chief missileer, was new to the Princess Cecile also. He turned from the attack console and said, "As ordered, sir, we're carrying the tubes loaded and a full twenty reloads. There's no guarantees short of launching them, of course, but I'd bet my life that all twenty-two'll function clean as a simulation."

"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:

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 Adele was a child. It was Mistress Rolfe's as well, though the decor of the sitting room open off the staircase was froufrou in contrast to the severity Adele remembered.

Father had been the politician, but mother was the ideologue of the Mundy household. She practiced the same "simple life of the common people" that she preached at her salons and to her family.

Unlike her mother, Adele had personal experience of how common people live; she'd found their taste in furnishings to be very like that of the present Mistress Rolfe. Which was only to be expected, from a Casaubon.

The doors off the third floor were closed. Adele's apartments had been to the right, her sister's to the left. Rolfe paused. "Ah," he said, "if you'd informed us you were coming . . ."

"Actually, I wasn't sure until this afternoon that I was coming," Adele said. She opened the right-hand door herself.

The room beyond had been her library as soon as she stopped needing a nurse sleeping nearby. The bookshelves and the data console were gone. Furniture of several different styles filled all the space around the boundary of the room. A captain's chair with dog-headed armrests even blocked the door which once had led to Adele's bedroom.

The center of the room was filled by a large flat-topped desk. One of the drawers was missing and half the veneer had peeled away. The servants were using the room as a lounge. There were plates of fried potatoes, two mugs, and the remains of a pitcher of beer on the desk; stacks of dirty dishes on several of the chair seats showed how slackly the household was directed.

"I, ah . . ." Rolfe repeated. The reality of the room had obviously taken him aback, despite his previous low expectations.

"There were books here," Adele said, her voice expressionless. "I suppose they would have been sold before you took ownership of the real estate?"

"Yes, that's right," Rolfe said, glad to have something to focus on that didn't make him look like a pig. He stepped past Adele to the desk and dragged open one of the drawers. "But I recall we were given a copy of the receipts when we . . ."

Adele watched with cold amusement as her host pawed inexpertly through the drawer. She'd gone through many such agglomerations in her days as an archivist. She'd learned quite quickly that there was no document that was completely without value to some researcher, but there was a limit to what could be catalogued and thus become available for research.

She suspected she could trim the present mass by 99% without doing irreparable harm to posterity. And if it were limited to the Rolfe and Casaubon houses, the percentage saved could be even lower.

"Yes!" cried Rolfe. "Here they are, just as I remembered!"

Adele took the document, a four-foot continuous coil folded to fit into a drawer. It was a printout of the auction listing with numbers, presumably the amounts paid, written in holograph beside them.

"Yes, we had our bailiff, well, my wife's bailiff really, present at the auction," Rolfe said as Adele scanned the list. "Our claim was to the real estate alone, but Marina thought we needed to be careful that the auctioneers didn't try to sell fixtures as well as the personal property."

His voice was an empty background like the rustle of mating insects; not overtly unpleasant but not of any concern either. Furniture, bedclothes, kitchen utensils. Paintings, electronic equipment, shop tools. The last had probably belonged to Mick Hilmer, the chauffeur and mechanic. Had he survived the Proscriptions? Mick should have been exempt—he was no Mundy by blood or marriage, to be sure—but neither was he the sort to bow meekly when a gang of street toughs burst into his quarters.

"My wife has been responsible for redecorating," Rolfe burbled. He seemed to have forgotten he was standing in a junk room which once had been a private library equal to any in Xenos. "We have heirlooms from her family and mine both."

Assorted books/316 florins. 

"I had laid out over five thousand florins for the books I'd purchased," Adele said. No one listening to her could have told from her voice how she felt. "Of course the more valuable items came to me as gifts. Friends of the family found it amusing that the older Mundy girl was a real antiquarian. Many of them had something on a shelf or in a trunk that even my allowance wouldn't have run to."

"Pardon, mistress?" Rolfe said. He hadn't heard the words, and he wouldn't have understood them anyway.

The Mundy children had been as much a part of the family's political entertainments as the images of ancestors in the entrance hall were. Agatha hadn't been any more outgoing than her elder sister, and unlike Adele she hadn't the taste and intellect to escape into scholarship. She'd buffered herself from the public stress with a parliament of stuffed animals, each of which had a distinct personality as well as a name.

Assorted stuffed toys/Five florins fifty. 

Adele's hand began to tremble. She quickly dropped the auction list on the desktop. She wondered if she could ask to wash her hands.

"I wonder if you wouldn't be interested in some walnut pudding, Mistress Mundy?" Rolfe said. "My father-in-law has some marvelous trees on his country estate, that's Silver Oaks in the Varangian Hills."

Adele forced her mind up from the frozen horror of the past. Noises from downstairs penetrated her awareness. A woman was shouting—screaming—and feet were pounding up the stairs.

"Ah, that must be Marina," Rolfe said with false brightness. His eyes were glazing and his face looked as rigid as a mummy's. "I'll see if I can introduce—"

A woman whose garments were trimmed with off-planet furs burst into the room; the doorkeeper and several other servants followed in her wake. If the entryway mosaic had flattered Ligier Rolfe's hairline, it had excised at least fifty pounds from his wife. She tended to a naturally ruddy complexion; in her present anger she looked nearly purple.

"Darling," said Rolfe, "this is—"

Marina Rolfe flung Adele's card to the floor. "Ligier!" she said. "Get this woman out of here! She has no right to Rolfe House, none! Get her—"

She turned from her stunned-looking husband to Adele. "Get out!" she cried. "The time to protest our claim is past, past years and years ago. It's Rolfe House now and you have no right to be here!"

"Please, dear!" Rolfe said in obvious embarrassment. "She's just visiting before—"

"Shut up, you!" his wife said. "If you were any kind of man I wouldn't have to take care of this myself."

Her eyes, brown and hysterically wide, returned to Adele. "Now, are you going to get out or—"

"Mister Rolfe," Adele said. "If you don't restrain your dog, I will restrain her for you. Do you understand?"

Adele wasn't certain how Rolfe would react to the whiplash in her voice, though she didn't doubt what she would do if he reacted the wrong way. The anger leaping within her threatened to burst through her skin and consume everyone present.

Assorted stuffed toys/Five florins fifty. 

It shouldn't have mattered, not against the greater horror of Agatha's ten-year-old head displayed on the Speaker's Rock; but it mattered.

"Marina, you're overwrought!" Rolfe said with a strength Adele hadn't credited to him. Either he'd understood what he saw in Adele's eyes or, more likely, he'd just been horrified by his wife's boorish behavior to a guest. The Rolfes were a noble house, as old as any in the Republic. "Go up and wait in my apartment while I see Mistress Mundy out."

He pointed at the doorman, perhaps blaming him for the outburst. "You! Escort your mistress to my room. Immediately!"

Mistress Rolfe stepped back, putting her hand to her cheek as though she'd been slapped. The shouted command had much the same effect on her hysteria as a slap might have done; her breathing steadied and the flush began to fade.

"See that you do, Ligier," she said in a controlled voice. She turned and marched up the stairs, her high-laced shoes whacking the treads in an attempt to sound dignified.

The doorman followed her, looking over his shoulder, but the footmen who'd escorted Rolfe remained on the landing. A step below them, smiling faintly as she watched events in the servants' lounge, stood Tovera.

Marina Rolfe had been afraid; afraid of the same thing as her husband, now that Adele had leisure to analyze it. The Rolfes thought that the real heir to the Mundy estate had returned to claim her property. How strange. Despite Deirdre Leary's offer to look into the matter, Adele hadn't imagined trying to overturn the settlement based on the Edict of Reconciliation twelve years previous.

Not until now.

Rolfe took a deep breath and looked warily at her. The left corner of Adele's mouth quirked into a smile of sorts. "You needn't worry, Mister Rolfe," she said. "I'll be leaving presently. But I'd appreciate the use of this desk—"

She gestured toward the wreck beside her. One of the legs had broken; that corner was supported by a metal document box.

"—to write a note. It's on a matter I hadn't given thought to previously, but I'd like my servant to deliver it before I leave Xenos. I'll only be a moment."

"Of course, mistress, of course," Rolfe said. "You can use my—"

He strangled the rest of the offer. He must suddenly have remembered he'd sent his wife upstairs to his suite, rather than down to her own where Adele would have to pass her on the way out.

"This is quite adequate," Adele said coolly. She drew out another visiting card and on the back wrote,

Mistress Deirdre Leary:
I would appreciate any support you could provide in the matter of my regaining title to Chatsworth Minor. I will be in touch with you on my next return to Cinnabar.
Mundy 

She closed her stylus, then gave the card to Tovera while Rolfe waited with politely averted eyes. "I'll take my leave now, Mister Rolfe," Adele said aloud. "I appreciate your hospitality."

Rolfe looked embarrassed again, but at his quick gesture the footmen started down the stairs. Rolfe bowed his guest ahead of him, then followed. The doorman was still with his mistress, but Wormser pulled the outer door open in fine style, then closed it behind Adele and Tovera.

Adele's skin felt prickly. Her anger was a cold emotion, and it left her feeling like the dirty slush of a winter streetscape.

"I don't know where you'll find her," she said to her servant. "I'd try the office on—"

"I'll find her, mistress," the pale woman said. "And I'll be aboard the ship before it lifts."

"Yes, that too," Adele said. "I'll meet you there."

Tovera looked at Rolfe House. "It bothers you?" she said.

Adele's face tightened. Then she remembered who'd asked the question and said, "Yes. It bothers me very much."

"It leaves me empty," Tovera said softly. "But then, everything does."

She strode toward a monorail platform. She was quite unremarkable, an office worker heading home with a briefcase full of work.

Adele sighed and walked to her own stop on the opposite end of the street. The sky was threatening; there'd be rain before sunset, she supposed.

That would fit her mood quite well.

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