“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.
Chapter Nine
The drizzle gave way to a sheet of rain which thundered on the hull of the Princess Cecile and lashed the surface of Bay Ten, the ready slip to which the corvette had been transferred at the completion of her refit. Lightning pulsed continuously, backlighting the thunderheads without ever striking in the cone of Daniel’s vision through the open main hatch.
“Like a cow pissing on a flat rock,” Hogg muttered, though he didn’t sound especially unhappy about it. The rain was blasting itself to mist on the canopy over the walkway from the edge of the pool to the corvette. Watching it, Daniel could imagine he was in one of the metal-roofed hunting cabins deep in the interior of Bantry—
Instead of waiting for the arrival of the courier whom the Navy Office had an hour ago alerted them to expect.
Apparently thinking in the same track, Ellie Woetjans said, “If the RCN don’t teach you nothing else, it’ll teach you to wait.” There was a chorus of, “Amen!” and “Too right!” from the half dozen spacers in the the Princess Cecile’s entranceway.
Woetjans was a rangy, powerful woman who was taller than Daniel by six inches. As bosun she rapped helmets with a length of electrical cord to get the attention of landsmen she was turning into riggers. No need of that with the present crew, of course.
Woetjans was soaking wet, having just come in with the team which had changed out the main hinge of Dorsal 3. The antenna had stuck a few degrees short of closure twice during testing. Daniel had been willing to lift with it—joints loosened in service, after all—but since there were a few minutes unexpectedly available, the bosun had taken five riggers out despite the rain. She hadn’t bothered to change when she returned in case the courier with the Princess Cecile’s orders arrived during those few moments. The crew was even more excited about the corvette’s next deployment than her captain was.
Well, make that as excited. Admiral Anston had called Daniel in personally, after all. He wouldn’t have done that if he’d planned to send the Princess Cecile to the Home Squadron protecting Cinnabar against Alliance raiders—who had last attacked some seventeen years ago. There was every chance that Lt. Leary’s first operational command would be an independent one.
“Daniel?” said Adele’s voice through the earphones of the commo helmet Daniel was wearing along with his utility uniform. “A car and truck have just cleared the main gate with Bay Ten as their announced destination. Over.”