Cordelia's Honor - Lois McMaster Bujold [183]
"Sincere, but a trifle smug. I think we may have coddled his self-doubts long enough. It may be time to kick his tail."
Aral's shoulders slumped wearily. "He owes her, no doubt. Yet what should I order him to do? It's worthless, if he doesn't pay freely."
Cordelia growled agreement.
* * *
It wasn't until lunch that Cordelia noticed something missing from their little world.
"Where's the Count?" she asked Aral, as they found the table set only for two by Piotr's housekeeper, in a front dining room overlooking the lake. The day had failed to warm. The earlier mist had risen only to clot into low scudding grey clouds, windy and chilly. Cordelia had added an old black fatigue jacket of Aral's over her flowered blouse.
"I thought he went to the stables. For a training session with that new dressage prospect of his," said Aral, also regarding the table uneasily. "That's what he told me he was going to do."
The housekeeper, bringing in soup, volunteered, "No, m'lord. He went off in the groundcar early, with two of his men."
"Oh. Excuse me." Aral nodded to Cordelia and rose, and exited the dining room to the back hall. One of the storerooms on the back side of the house, wedged into the slope, had been converted into a secured comm center, with a double-scrambled comconsole and a full-time ImpSec guard outside its door. Aral's footsteps echoed down the hall in that direction.
Cordelia took one bite of soup, which went down like liquid lead, set her spoon aside, and waited. She could hear Aral's voice, in the quiet house, and electronically tinged responses in some stranger's tones, but too muffled for her to make out the words. After what seemed a small eternity, though in fact the soup was still hot, Aral returned, bleak-faced.
"Did he go up there?" Cordelia asked. "To ImpMil?"
"Yes. He's been and left. It's all right." His heavy jaw was set.
"Meaning, the baby's all right?"
"Yes. He was denied admittance, he argued awhile, he left. Nothing worse." He began glumly spooning soup.
The Count returned a few hours later. Cordelia heard the fine whine of his groundcar pass up the drive and around the north end of the house, pause, a canopy open and close, and the car continue on to the garages, sited over the crest of the hill near the stables. She was sitting with Aral in the front room with the new big windows. He had been engrossed in some government report on his handviewer, but at the sound of the closing canopy put it on "pause" and waited with her, listening, as hard footsteps passed rapidly around the house and up the front steps. Aral's mouth was taut with unpleased anticipation, his eyes grim. Cordelia shrank back in her chair, and steeled her nerves.
Count Piotr swung into their room, and stood, feet planted. He was formally dressed in his old uniform with his general's rank insignia. "There you are." The liveried man trailing him took one uneasy glance at Aral and Cordelia, and removed himself without waiting to be dismissed. Count Piotr didn't even notice him go.
Piotr focused on Aral first. "You. You dared to shame me in public. Entrap me."
"You shamed yourself, I fear, sir. If you had not gone down that path, you would not have found that trap."
Piotr's tight jaw worked this one over, the lines in his face grooved deep. Anger; embarrassment struggling with self-righteousness. Embarrassed as only one in the wrong can be. He doubts himself, Cordelia realized. A thread of hope. Let us not lose that thread, it may be our only way out of this labyrinth.
The self-rightousness took ascendance. "I shouldn't have to be doing this," snarled Piotr. "It's women's work. Guarding our genome."
"Was women's work, in the Time of Isolation," said Aral in level tones. "When the only answer to mutation was infanticide. Now there are other answers."
"How strange women must have felt about their pregnancies, never knowing if there was life or death at the end of them," Cordelia mused. One sip from that cup was all she desired for