Pia was just twenty, old for an Imperial woman of noble birth to be unmarried, and four years younger than him. Also unlike most Imperials of her sex and station, she didn’t think giggles and inanities were the only way to talk to a man. She was very pretty indeed, besides, something he was acutely conscious of with their hands linked and one arm around her narrow waist.
No, not pretty—beautiful, he thought.
Big russet-colored eyes, heart-shaped face, creamy skin showing to advantage in the glittering low-cut, long-skirted white ballgown, and glossy brown hair piled up under a diamond tiara. Best of all, she seemed to like him.
The music came to a stop, and they stood for a moment smiling at each other while the crowd applauded the orchestra.
“If jealous eyes were daggers, I would be stabbed to death,” Pia said with a trace of satisfaction. “It is entertaining, after being an old maid for years. My father has been muttering that if I wished to do nothing but read books and live single, I should have found a vocation before I left the convent school.”
John snorted. “Not likely.”
“I would have made a very poor nun, it is true,” Pia said demurely. “And then I could not have gone on to so many picnics and balls and to the opera with a handsome young officer of the Santander embassy. . . .”
“A glass of punch?” he said.
Pia put her hand on his arm as he led her to the punch table. The white-coated steward handed them glasses; it was a fruit punch with white wine, cool and tart.
“You are worried, John,” she said in English. Hers was nearly as good as his Imperial, and her voice had turned serious.
“Yes,” he sighed.
“Your conversations with my father, they have not gone well?”
Even for an Imperial commander, Count Benito del’Cuomo was a blinkered, hidebound. . . . With an effort, John pushed the image of the white muttonchop whiskers out of his mind.
“No,” he said. “He doesn’t take the Chosen seriously.”
Pia sipped at her punch and nodded to her chaperone where she sat with the other matrons against one wall. The older woman—some sort of poor-relation hanger-on of the del’Cuomos—frowned when she saw that Pia was still talking with the Republic’s young chargé d’affaires. They began walking slowly towards the balcony.
“Father does not think the Land will dare to attack us,” she said thoughtfully. “We have so many more soldiers, so many more ships of war. Their island is tiny next to the Empire.”
“Pia—” He didn’t really want to talk politics, but she had reason to be concerned. “Pia, their note demanded extraterritorial rights in Corona and half a dozen other ports, control of grain exports, and exclusive investment rights in Imperial railroads.”
Pia checked half a step. She was the daughter of the Minister of War. “That . . . that is an ultimatum!” she said. “And an impossible one.”
John nodded grimly. “An excuse for war. Even if your emperor and senatorial council were to agree to it, and you’re right, they couldn’t, then the Chosen would find some new demand.”
“Why do they warn us, then? Surely they are not so scrupulous that they hesitate at a surprise attack.”
“Scarcely. I have a horrible suspicion that they want the Empire to be prepared, so you’ll have more forces in big concentrations where they can get at them,” John said.
They walked out into the cooler air and half-darkness of the great veranda. Little Adele and huge Mira were both up and full, flooding the black-and-white checkerwork marble with pale blue light, turning the giant vases filled with oleander and jessamine and bougainvillea into a pastel wonderland. The terrace ended in a fretted granite balustrade and broad steps leading down to gardens whose graveled paths glowed white amid the flowerbanks and trees. Beyond the estate wall, widely spaced lights showed where the townhouses of the nobility stood amid their walled acres, with an occasional pair of yellow kerosene-lamp headlights marking a carriage or steamcar. Westward reached a denser web of lights, mostly irregular—Ciano had a street plan originally laid out by cows, except for a few avenues driven through in recent generations. Those centered on the Imperial palace complex, a tumble of floodlit white and gilded domes.