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.