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.”