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.