"You're not as tall as I expected from the talk show circuit and news reports," Lady Emily observed, with a faint smile. "I expected you to be at least three meters tall, and here you are, scarcely two and a half."
"I think we all look taller on HD, Your Grace."
"So we do." Lady Emily's smile grew broader. "I always did, at any rate," she went on, and her tone and emotions alike were barren of any self-pity for those vanished days. She cocked her head—the only thing, besides her right arm, that she could move—and gazed up at Honor thoughtfully.
"You look as if this has been even uglier for you than I was afraid it had," she said calmly. "I regret that, just as I regret that you and I must meet under these circumstances. But the more I've thought about it, the more it's become clear to me that it's essential for the three of us to decide how we will all respond to these . . . people."
Honor looked down into those brilliantly green, understanding eyes, and felt something deep within her begin to yield as she tasted the genuine compassion at Emily Alexander's core. There was resentment, as well. There had to be, for however special Lady Emily might be, she remained a human being, and no mere mortal confined forever to a life support chair could look at Honor, standing beside her husband, and not resent the younger woman's physical health and vitality. Yet that resentment was only a part of what she felt when she looked at Honor, and her understanding, her refusal to prejudge or to condemn, reached out to her guest like a comforting embrace.
Lady Emily's eyes narrowed slightly, and she pursed her lips. Then she glanced at Hamish, and one graceful eyebrow rose as she saw the treecat in his arms. She started to speak, then paused and visibly changed what she'd been about to say.
"I see we have even more to talk about than I'd expected," she said instead, gazing speculatively at Samantha. "But that should probably wait. Hamish, I think Her Grace and I need to get to know one another. Go find something to do."
A whimsical smile took the possible sting from the final sentence, and Honor surprised herself by smiling back. It was a fragile, weary smile, but genuine, and White Haven actually chuckled.
"I will," he agreed. "But I've already told Nico to ask Cook to put together something for dinner, so don't take too long."
"If we take too long, it won't be the first time dinner's gotten cold," his wife replied serenely. "Now go away."
He chuckled again, swept a deep bow to both women, and then, suddenly, they were alone.
"Please, Your Grace," Lady Emily said. "Have a seat."
She waved her mobile arm once more, indicating a bench of natural stone with a thick, woven seat cushion built into a natural rock wall beside the splashing fountain. A miniature Old Earth willow's drooping branches framed it welcomingly, and built-in stone planters spilled Manticoran cloud flowers to either side of it. It was as if the plants surrounded the bench in a protective, earthy-smelling shield of brilliant blue and red and yellow petals, and Lady Emily's life support chair turned silently in a half-circle until she faced it, as well. She'd maneuvered the chair without manipulating a single control with her good hand, Honor realized. Obviously, the doctors had managed to provide at least limited neural interfacing, despite the catastrophic damage to her motor centers, and Honor was glad.
"Thank you, Lady White Haven," she replied, and crossed to the bench and seated herself. She settled Nimitz into her lap, where he lay alert and watchful but without the quivering tension he might have exhibited under other circumstances.
Lady Emily's lips quirked in another wry smile, and she shook her head.
"Your Grace, I think that whatever else happens, the two of us are going to come to know one another much too well to continue with all these formalities. Unless you object, I shall call you Honor, and you shall call me Emily."
"Of course . . . Emily," Honor agreed. It was odd, she thought. Emily was older than her own mother, and a tiny part of Honor recognized that seniority and responded to it. But only a tiny part. And that, she realized, was because although she could taste Emily's awareness of her own relative youth, the countess radiated no sense of superiority. She was aware of her own age and experience, but she was also aware of Honor's, and her sense of sureness, of being the one who knew how to proceed in this painful instance, arose from the fact that her experience was different from Honor's, not greater.
"Thank you," Emily said, and her chair tilted slightly backwards in mid-air while she gazed thoughtfully at her guest.
"You realize that Hamish asked you here at my suggestion," she said after a moment, more as someone observing an unexpected truth than as if she were asking a question or making a statement, and Honor nodded.
"I'd hoped you would, just as I'd hoped you'd come," Emily continued. "I meant it when I said I regret meeting under these circumstances, but I've been curious about you for years now. So in a way, I'm happy to finally meet you, although I could certainly wish it hadn't come about this way."
She paused for a moment, then gave her head a small toss and continued more briskly.
"You and Hamish—and I—have been made the victims of a concerted, vicious attack. One that depends for success on innuendo and hypocrisy in the service of the belief that the end justifies any means whatsoever. And ugly as it may be, and for all the potential for public opinion to recoil on the accusers in disgust, it's unfortunately effective. Because it relies on the knife in the back rather than open confrontation, it can never be answered by reasoned argument or proof of innocence, however genuine and however convincingly presented. Even if you and Hamish were having an affair, which I don't for a moment believe you are, it ought to be your business. And mine, perhaps, but no one else's. Yet even though almost anyone in the Star Kingdom would agree with that statement in the abstract, by now it's completely useless as a defense. You realize that, don't you?"
"Yes." Honor nodded again, stroking Nimitz's silky pelt.
"I don't know that there is a defense, really," Emily said frankly. "It's always harder to prove a negative, and the more you two or your surrogates deny the lies being told about you, the more a certain portion of the electorate will believe them. Worse, all of the Government newsfaxes and commentators are beginning to take it as a given that you're guilty as charged. Very soon now, they won't even bother to argue the case any longer. The assumption of guilt will simply be there, in everything they write or say, and the taint will cling despite anything you can do."
Honor felt her shoulders hunching once more as Emily calmly spelled out what she'd already realized for herself.
"The most damning point of their 'indictment'—and the one I find the most personally infuriating—is the allegation that you and Hamish have betrayed me," Emily continued, and although her voice remained as level and thoughtful as before, she couldn't hide her own seething anger. It was an anger Honor understood only too well, the fury of someone who knew she had been cynically used as a weapon against all she believed in and stood for.
"If they choose to involve me in their games and machinations," Emily told her, "then I think it's only fitting that I respond. I realize neither you nor Hamish have asked me to become involved. I even understand why."
She looked very steadily into Honor's eyes for a moment, her own eyes very dark and still, and Honor felt the fusion of fury and compassion at her core.
"To an extent, Honor, I was willing to stay out of the fray if that was what the two of you wished. In part, I'm ashamed to admit, because I was . . . afraid to do otherwise. Or perhaps not afraid. Perhaps I was simply too tired. My health has been particularly poor for the past year or so, which is undoubtedly one reason Hamish has tried so hard to keep me out of this. And that ill-health may also explain why something inside me quailed every time I thought about becoming involved, anyway. And there may have been . . . other reasons."
Again, their eyes met, and again Honor felt the complex freight of emotions hanging between them.
"But that was cowardice on my part," Lady Emily continued quiet
ly. "An abandonment of my own responsibility to stand and fight against anyone who wants to destroy my life. And certainly of my responsibility to prevent moral pygmies with the ideology and ethics of back-alley rats from raping the political processes of the Star Kingdom."
She paused for a moment, jaw clamped, and this time Honor tasted something else in her emotions. A scathing self-condemnation. Anger at herself for having evaded her obligations. And not, Honor realized, solely because of weariness or ill health—or even Hamish's desire to shield her. This was a woman who had looked into her mirror and faced her own resentment, her sense of hurt and shame, and her perfectly natural anger at the younger woman whose name had been so publicly linked with her husband's. She'd faced those things and overcome them, yet a part of her could not forgive herself for taking so long to do it.
"One reason I asked Hamish to invite you here," Lady Emily told her unflinchingly, "was to tell you that whatever he—or you—may wish, this is not simply your fight. It's also mine, and I intend to take the battle to the enemy. These . . . people have seen fit to drag me and people I care about into their tawdry, vicious games, and I won't have it."
There was, Honor reflected, something frightening about the complete calm with which Lady Emily delivered that final sentence.
"The only possible reply I can see," White Haven's wife continued "is to turn the hook for their entire attack against them. Not to mount a defense so much as to take the war to them, for a change."
Honor sat up straighter on the bench, leaning forward with the first faint flickers of hope as she tasted Emily's resolution.
"I don't wish to sound vain," the countess said, "but it would be foolish for me to pretend not to know that, like you and Hamish, although for different reasons, I enjoy a unique status with the Manticoran public. I've seen enough of you on HD, and heard enough about you from others, to know you sometimes find your public stature more than a little embarrassing and exaggerated. Mine often strikes me the same way, but it exists, and it's the reason High Ridge and his flunkies have been able to attack you and Hamish so effectively.
"But the key to their entire position is to portray me as a 'wronged woman' as the result of your alleged actions. The public's anger has been generated not because you and Hamish might have had an affair, but because Hamish and I married in the Church, in a sacrament we've never renounced or altered which pledged us to honor a monogamous marriage. And because you're a naval officer, not a registered courtesan. If you were an RC, the public might resent any relationship between you and Hamish on my behalf, but no one would consider that either of you had 'betrayed' me or our marriage. But you aren't an RC, and that lets them portray any affair between the two of you as a direct attack upon me. You and he have already issued statements of denial, and you were wise to let those initial statements stand without the sort of repeated denials which so many people would consider little more than sure proof of guilt. You were also wise to avoid the rather disgusting tactic of claiming that even if you'd been guilty, 'everyone' does it. I know some of your advisors must have suggested that approach as a way to brush off the seriousness of your alleged offense, but any move in that direction would have been tantamount to admitting that the charges were justified. Yet even though you've issued your denials with dignity and as calmly and effectively as you possibly could have, they haven't been enough. So I believe it's time to move to the next level of counterattack."
"Counterattack?" Honor asked.
"Precisely." Emily nodded firmly. "As you may know, I virtually never leave White Haven these days. I doubt that I've been off the grounds more than three times in the last T-year, because I love it here. And, frankly, because I find the rest of the world entirely too fatiguing.
"But that's about to change. The Government hacks who have been so busily raping you and Hamish in their columns have used me to do it. So I've already informed Willie that I'll be in Landing next week. I'll be staying at our house in the capital for a month or two, and I shall be entertaining for the first time in decades, albeit on a small scale. And I will make it my personal business to be certain everyone knows that I know there isn't a shred of truth to the allegations that you and Hamish have ever slept together. I'll also make it my business to inform anyone who asks—and, for that matter, anyone who doesn't ask—that I consider you a personal friend in my own right and a close political colleague of my husband. I imagine it will become at least a little more difficult for those assassins to spread their poison if the 'wronged woman' announces to the entire galaxy that she isn't wronged and never has been."
Honor stared at her, heart rising in the first true hope she'd felt in weeks. She was neither so naive nor so foolish as to believe Emily could wave some sort of magic wand and make all of it go away. But Emily was certainly correct about one aspect of it. The portion of the Government press which had been shedding such huge crocodile tears over how dreadfully Lady White Haven had been betrayed, and how terribly her husband's infidelity must have hurt her, could hardly continue to weep for her if she were busy publicly laughing at the absurdity of their allegations.
"I think . . . I think that would help enormously, Emily," she said after a moment, and the slight quaver around the edges of her voice surprised her.
"No doubt it will," Emily replied, but Honor felt a fresh tremor of anxiety at the taste of the other woman's emotions. The countess wasn't done yet. There was something more—and worse—to come, and she watched the older woman draw a deep breath.
"No doubt it will," she repeated, "but there's one other point I think we must discuss, Honor."
"Another point?" Honor asked tautly.
"Yes. I said that I know you and Hamish aren't lovers, and I do. I know because, frankly, I've known that he has had lovers. Not many of them, of course, but a few."
She looked away from her guest, at something only she could see, and the deep, bittersweet longing at her center pricked Honor's eyes with tears. It wasn't anger, or a sense of betrayal. It was regret. It was loss. It was sorrow for the one thing she and the man who loved her—and whom she loved, with all her heart—could never share again. She didn't blame him for seeking that one thing with others; but she bled inside with the knowledge that she could never give it to him herself.
"All of them, with one single exception he deeply regrets, have been registered courtesans," she went on softly, "but he's also respected and liked them. If he hadn't, he would never have taken them to bed. He isn't the sort of man to have casual affairs, or to 'sleep around.' He has too much integrity for that." She smiled sadly. "I suppose it must sound odd for a wife to speak about her husband's integrity when he chooses his lovers, but it's really the only word that fits. If he'd asked me, I would've told him that, yes, it hurts, but not because he's being 'unfaithful' to me. It hurts because I can no longer give him the one thing they can . . . and that he can no longer give it to me. Which is why he's never asked me, because he already knows what I'd say. And that's also why he's been so utterly discreet. He knows that no one in our circles would have faulted him for patronizing an RC under the circumstances, and that most other Manticorans would understand, as well. But he's always been determined to avoid putting that to the test. Not to shield his own reputation, but to protect me, to avoid underscoring the fact that I'll never again leave this chair. He doesn't want to humiliate me by even suggesting that I might be somehow . . . inadequate. A cripple.
"And he refuses to do that," she went on, turning to look at Honor once more, "because he loves me. I truly believe that he loves me as much today as he did the day he proposed to me. The day we married. The day they pulled me from that air car and told him I would never walk or breathe again unassisted."
She drew another deep breath, the muscles of her diaphragm controlled by the life support chair interfaces because she could no longer directly control them herself.
"And that's been the difference between me and all of his lovers, Honor. He cared about them, and he respected them,
but he didn't love them. Not the way he loves me.
"Or the way he loves you."
Honor jerked back on the bench, as if Emily had just thrust a dagger into her heart. Her eyes flew to meet Emily's, and saw the brimming tears, the knowledge . . . and the compassion.
"He hasn't told me he does," the countess said quietly. "But he hasn't had to. I know him too well, you see. If he didn't, he would have had you out here to meet me years ago, given how closely the two of you have worked together in the Lords. And he would have turned to me the instant this whole affair hit, instead of trying so desperately to keep me out of it. To protect me. I'm his chief analyst and adviser, though very few people realize it, and there's no way he would have failed to introduce us to one another, especially after High Ridge's cronies launched these attacks on the two of you . . . unless there were some reason he couldn't. And that reason—the reason he was willing to see his own name and reputation ruined by false charges and the Opposition's ability to fight High Ridge effectively undermined rather than enlist my aid to defeat them—is that he was afraid I'd see the truth and be wounded by his 'betrayal.' And just as it's the reason he's kept me from meeting you, it's the fact that he loves you which has prevented him from even trying to become anything more than your friend and colleague. You're not a professional, and even if you were, he knows it wouldn't be a brief affair. Not this time. And deep inside, he's afraid that for the first time he might truly betray me."
"I—How did—?"
Honor tried desperately to get a grip on herself, but she couldn't. Emily Alexander had just given her the final clue she'd needed, the final puzzle piece. Everything she'd ever felt from Hamish snapped suddenly into place, and she wondered how Emily, without her own link to Nimitz, had been able to grasp the core truth so completely.