The pistol in the sidepocket of Adele’s tunic was so flat it didn’t bulge even a dress uniform. Its trigger was indeed light.
Smiling again Adele said, “I didn’t have to check myself, did I, Tovera? You’d have told me if something was wrong.”
Tovera shrugged. “If you wanted me to, mistress,” she said. “I don’t imagine we’ll attract much attention at this affair.”
Adele adjusted the set of her own black ribbon. “No,” she said, “I don’t suppose we will. But Daniel loved his Uncle Stacey, and I wouldn’t care to fail Daniel.”
I’d rather die than fail Daniel . . . But she didn’t say that aloud, and Tovera wouldn’t have cared anyway.
Adele glanced at the footmen, waiting patiently as she’d known they would be, and then to the doorman. The house servants wore Mundy livery, but unlike Tovera they were employed by the bank which on paper leased the townhouse. That was one of the perquisites which had fallen to Adele by virtue of her friendship with Lieutenant Daniel Leary, RCN; the son of Corder Leary, Speaker Leary to his associates even though he’d given up the speakership of the Assembly years before.
“I believe we’re ready, then,” she said. The doorman bowed and swung open the front door of softly gleaming beewood cut on what had been the Mundy country estate of Chatsworth Major. With the four footmen ahead of her and Tovera trailing a polite pace behind, Adele stepped into the court.
Times indeed change. Speaker Leary had been primarily responsible for crushing the Three Circles Conspiracy—and Adele’s family—into a smear of blood . . . but it was his influence acting through the agency of Daniel’s elder sister Deirdre which had returned the townhouse to Adele’s ownership when she decided she wanted it after all. Ligier Rolfe, the distant cousin who’d taken possession of the truncated estate after the Proscriptions, probably didn’t to this day know what had happened to end his ownership.
The tram stop was at the mouth of the court, now quiet, which had acted as an assembly room when Lucius Mundy addressed his supporters from the fourth floor balcony of Chatsworth Minor. Political power had never meant anything to Adele; indeed, so long as she had enough to feed her and the freedom of a large archive in which to indulge her passion for knowledge in the abstract, she didn’t care about money. Even so it pleased her to think of how furious her cousin’s wife, Marina Casaubon Rolfe, must have been when she was evicted from a house to which the mere wealth of her merchant family would never have entitled her.
Tovera must have noticed her expression. “Mistress?” she asked mildly.
“Do you remember Mistress Rolfe?” Adele said.
“Yes,” Tovera said. “A fat worm.”
“I was recalling,” Adele explained, “that she saw fit to insult a Mundy of Chatsworth.”
Tovera didn’t comment. Perhaps she smiled.
Servants lounging at the entrances of other houses fronting on the court rose and doffed their caps, standing with their heads bowed as Adele passed by. In Lucius Mundy’s day, all these houses had been owned by supporters of the People’s Party. They’d suffered accordingly, but those who bought the properties in the aftermath of the Proscriptions were generally social climbers like Marina Rolfe. To them Adele’s return gave the neighborhood the cachet of a real aristocrat’s presence; they’d made very sure that their servants were properly obsequious.
Adele couldn’t imagine what her neighbors made of the fact that Mundy of Chatsworth was a naval officer; and a warrant officer besides, a mere technician instead of a dashing commissioned officer like her tenant, Daniel Leary. Aristocrats were allowed to be eccentric, of course.
“Mistress?” Tovera said again.
“Am I eccentric, Tovera?” Adele asked, glancing over her shoulder.
“I wouldn’t know, mistress,” Tovera said. “You’d have to ask someone who understands what ‘normal’ means.”
Adele grimaced. “I’m sorry, Tovera,” she said. “It’s not something I should joke about.”
As Adele and her entourage approached the stop, an east-bound tram pulled onto the siding. Another monorail car clattered past on the main line, heading west toward the great roundabout in the center of Xenos. By law only the Militia, the national police, could fly aircars within the municipal limits of the capital; the likelihood that a touchy rival aristocrat would shoot down a private aircar passing overhead made the law more effective than merely legal sanctions could have done.