He met Daniel’s eyes squarely. “He was not a fighting officer, though, was he?” Semmes went on. Daniel might have been imagining the sneer beneath the bland assessment. “Your uncle?”
Daniel nodded crisply. “No sir, my uncle was not much of a fighter,” he said. “Fortunately, the RCN has never lacked for officers to supply that particular deficiency.”
He gestured the Alliance officer on into the chapel; not quite a dismissal, but an unmistakable hint. “Perhaps we’ll meet again, Captain Semmes,” he added.
“He’s the sort who’d try to swim off with fifty feet of log chain back in Bantry,” Hogg muttered into Daniel’s ear from behind. “Thinking about it, something along those lines might happen right here in Xenos, young master. Eh?”
The voice from Williams and Son was identifying the next man in line as the recording secretary to the Senate committee on finance—quite an important fellow as Daniel well knew. Daniel had other business that was more important yet.
“Hogg,” he said, turning to fix his servant with a baleful eye, “there’ll be none of that, even in jest! An officer of the RCN cannot—and I will not—have a servant who acts like a street thug!”
“Begging your pardon, master,” said Hogg. He sounded at least vaguely contrite, for all that he met Daniel’s glare with level eyes. “It shan’t happen again, I’m sure. I was a mite put out by the fellow’s disrespect for Master Stacey, is all.”
Daniel nodded, forced up the corner of his lips in a smile, and returned to the receiving line. “A pleasure to see you, Major Hattersly,” he said. The recording secretary had a commission in the Trained Bands. “May I offer you a ring in remembrance of Commander Bergen?”
The trouble in dealing with Hogg was that he wasn’t so much of a servant as the tough older brother who’d raised Daniel in the country while Corder Leary busied himself with money and politics in Xenos. Daniel had a countryman’s instinctive love for Bantry, the family estate. Money was useful only to spend, generally on friends, and as for politics—well, young Daniel had spent days watching the colony of rock cavies on the banks of Tule Creek. So far as he was concerned, they were not only far more interesting than his father’s associates, they were on average a good deal smarter.
Corder Leary didn’t think often about his son. Deirdre, the elder of his two children, was stamped from the mold of her father and absorbed his tutelage with a flair of her own. Daniel’s mother was a saint—everybody agreed that, even her husband, which was perhaps the reason he only saw her on the few times a year when he was in Bantry for other business. But a saint doesn’t have the temperament or the skills to handle a very active, very male, child . . . and Hogg had both in abundance.
Mistress Leary would’ve been horrified to learn not only what Hogg had taught the boy but even more by the way Hogg disciplined him. She never did learn, however, because one of the things Daniel learned from Hogg was how to be a man and not go blubbering to his mommy when he got clouted for doing something stupid.
Daniel didn’t want to face the task of covering for a retainer who’d misguidedly scragged a high representative of a power with whom Cinnabar was for the moment at peace. He’d deal with the situation if it arose, though, because he was a Leary and understood his duties to his retainers . . . another thing he’d learned from Hogg.
Besides, Daniel hadn’t been any happier than Hogg was to hear the implied sneer at Uncle Daniel’s lack of credentials as a warrior. Particularly since the gibe was justified.
“Admiral and Lady Anston,” said Daniel’s earpiece. “He’s head of the Navy Board, but he has no connection with Commander Bergen that I can find.”
Great God almighty! Daniel thought. He had a momentary fear that he’d blurted that aloud in the face of the head of the RCN—though Anston had heard worse and said worse in his time, there was no doubt about that.
He’d been a fighting admiral and a lucky admiral; the two in combination had made him extremely wealthy. Instead of retiring to spend the rest of his life indulging whatever whim struck his fancy—porcelain, politics, or pubescent girls—Anston had for the past eighteen years turned his very considerable talents to the organization and preservation of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy.