Enrique Pansuela turned to Adele with a sad smile. “Lady Mundy,” he said, “have you had your fill of dinner? Because I can show you Uncle Manuel’s study whenever you like.”
“I’ve eaten all I need to, Master Pansuela,” she said. “I’d like to see the records as soon as is convenient.”
Daniel felt friendly warmth against his left arm. “And you, Dannie?” a voice murmured. “Would you like to go somewhere too?”
“I would indeed,” Daniel agreed. As he settled his arm around Margolla’s waist, it struck him that he and Adele both in their different ways were finding Tegeli an unexpectedly pleasant landfall.
* * *
The guest book lay open on the folding table servants had brought into the room at Adele’s direction. Uncle Manuel’s desk of boldly-carved wood was here also, but his study—and for how many generations would it be known by that name?—had become a place to dump whatever the Pansuelas decided they didn’t need but weren’t ready to discard.
Boxes and odd lots—a set of curtains, rotted halfway to the rod on which they were rolled; a holographic entertainment deck, certainly ancient and probably non-functional—stood along one side of the hallway, the overburden removed to get down to the layers of Uncle Manuel’s occupancy. Stolid servants waited just outside the door to execute Adele’s next direction.
She smiled faintly as she twisted off the top of a canister which rattled hopefully. This is really more a task for an archeologist than a librarian, she thought, but she wasn’t about to complain. Not only was this a job well within her capacity, it gave her a familiar warm feeling to unearth information that almost no one else could have dragged from the tangles where it hid.
The canister contained commercially-loaded holochips. According to the legends printed on their sides they were cookbooks. The chips were of a non-standard variety. Adele could probably manage to read them with her data unit, but she didn’t bother. Even if they were something other than they claimed to be—a collection of pornography, for example—they weren’t going to bring her closer to John Tsetzes.
She closed the can and set it in the box of discards beside her. It was full enough, so she called, “Boy!” and went on to the next item.
This was a diary, handwritten by a woman with a penchant for purple ink, though she’d used a number of other colors. Adele skimmed the contents: an empty chronicle of an empty life, very like most other lives. It was from twenty or so years ago, far too recent for the period she was researching, so she set it into the empty box with which a servant had replaced the one he’d carried into the hall.
Adele caught movement from the corner of her eye. These servants didn’t need to be geniuses to understand “Stay out of the room until I call you,” which she’d already had to repeat twice since her initial briefing. “I told you—” she said, looking up in irritation.
Enrique Pansuela had come back. He’d watched her for half an hour initially, then given the servants directions to do whatever Lady Mundy said and to her relief gone off to his own occupations. “Oh,” Adele said. “I’m sorry, Pansuela, I thought . . .”
She let her voice trail off. “I thought you were a servant,” was the honest truth, but it probably wouldn’t be politic to say. She sneezed instead, a natural consequence of the work she’d been doing, and well timed for a change.
“Don’t bother getting up,” her host said with a little gesture. Adele blinked, amazed that he’d thought she was going to. She’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor for hours, so it wouldn’t be a quick process. “I just came over to see how you’ve been getting on.”
He cleared his throat. “I haven’t been able to get to sleep, you see.”
Adele nodded, understanding more than she’d been told. Pansuela had been under the influence of something when he greeted them this afternoon—yesterday afternoon, by now—but he apparently hadn’t taken any more of his drug of choice since the Princess Cecile’s arrival. She supposed she should praise her host for fighting his addiction instead of sneering within herself at somebody weak enough to become addicted in the first place . . . but so long as she kept it within her, not even Pansuela himself had a right to complain about her attitude.