At his age, Howard Clinkscales was out of the habit of feeling ill at ease in public. He'd begun his career as a Sword armsman recruit, not even an officer cadet, but an enlisted man, sixty-seven T-years ago and climbed to the rank of brigadier in palace security by age thirty-six. By the time of the Mayhew Restoration, he'd been commanding general of Planetary Security, a post he'd held under Benjamin IX's father, as well, and an unofficial member of the royal family. Along the way, he'd dealt with street criminals, serial killers and other psychotics, assassination plots, and treason, and taken them all in stride.
Even more surprisingly, he'd also learned to take the monumental social changes of his home world in stride, which was something no one who'd known him before Grayson joined the Alliance would ever have predicted. He'd been almost eighty when the treaty was signed, and a more hidebound reactionary would have been hard to find. Not even his best friends would have called Clinkscales a brilliant man, he was no fool, certainly, and he liked to think he'd learned a few things in eight decades, but no one had ever considered him a genius, and that was one reason so many people had expected him to reject any sort of accommodation with the reforms rolling through the society he'd known since boyhood. But those people had overlooked the three qualities which had carried him so high from such humble beginnings: inexhaustible energy, an unyielding sense of duty, and an iron-bound integrity.
It was the last quality which had turned the trick in the end, for his was a personal integrity. Many people could be conscientiously honest in dealing with public responsibilities or other people; Clinkscales was one of those much rarer individuals whose integrity extended to himself, and that meant he could no more shut his eyes to the truth just because it was unpalatable than he could have flown without a counter-grav belt.
That was why Benjamin IX had appointed him as Honor Harrington's regent, for his sense of duty had been the Protectors insurance policy. It was unthinkable that Howard Clinkscales would do anything less than his best to serve his Steadholder and her steading, and the fact that the planets other conservatives knew he shared their philosophical leanings made him uniquely valuable as Harrington Steading’s regent. If he could do his duty and live with the changes he personally detested, then they could, as well, or that, at least, had been Benjamin’s theory.
It hadn't quite worked out that way, however. Oh, Clinkscales' role as regent had undoubtedly had an impact on the more reasonable among Grayson's conservatives, but it hadn't prevented the true fanatics from plotting against Honor and the Mayhew reforms. Of course, realistically speaking it was unlikely that anything could have dissuaded people whose minds were that far gone, so expecting his appointment to slow them down had probably been wishful thinking, anyway. But that appointment had had one effect which Benjamin had never anticipated and would, in fact, have denied was possible. It hadn't precisely turned Clinkscales into a radical reformer (to be honest, the mind still boggled at the thought of him in that role), but he'd actually come to see the changes in his world as beneficial. And that was because his position had brought him into regular contact with Honor Harrington at the same time it required him to superintend the mountain range of details involved in creating the first new Grayson steading in over seventy-two T-years. Not only had he been forced to confront the reality of a woman whose capability, courage, and, perhaps most importantly of all, sense of duty at least matched his own, but he'd also been forced to actually work out the details of implementing the reforms as he labored on the blank canvas which was to become Harrington Steading. It was a tribute to him that he could make such major adjustments to his thinking so late in life, although he didn't see it that way himself. As far as he was concerned, he was still a conservative trying to mitigate the more extreme demands of the reformers, but that was all right. He was actually quite a few strides in front of the curve, and Honor had been gently amused on more than one occasion by his irate reaction to 'troublemakers' who tried to get in the way and slow things back down.
If anyone could have screwed up the nerve to ask him why he supported the changes, his answer would have been simple enough. It was his duty to his Steadholder. If pressed, he would have admitted (not without a choleric expression and a fearsome glower) that his support stemmed not simply from duty, but from devotion to a woman he'd come to respect deeply. What he would not have admitted was that he had come to view his Steadholder through a curiously mixed set of lenses, as a warrior, a leader, his personal liege lady... and also as one of his own daughters. He was proud of her, as proud as if she actually were his own child, and he would have killed anyone who dared to say so, for like so many people who care deeply, Howard Clinkscales went to great lengths to conceal his feelings from the world. Emotions had been dangerous chinks in a policeman's armor, and so the man who had become the commander-in-chief of a planet's security forces had learned to hide them, lest they be used against him. It was a habit he had never learned to break... but that didn't mean he was unaware of what he felt.
And that was part of the reason he felt uneasy at this particular public function, for his Steadholder should have been here for it, and his mental antennae insisted that the reasons she'd given him for departing again so quickly weren't her actual motives. Oh, all of them were true enough, he'd never known Honor Harrington to lie; in fact, he wasn't at all certain she knew how to, but they hadn't been the real cause for her decision, and that worried him. She was his Steadholder, and it was his job to know when something worried her and to deal with it. Besides, if the fanatics plotting against her under the late, unlamented Lord Burdette and Brother Marchant hadn't been enough to drive her off-planet, anything that could do the trick obviously needed seeing to.
But even that was only a partial explanation for his uneasiness, and he drew a deep breath and admitted the rest of it to himself as he watched the shuttle descend. He might have become more comfortable with the reforms around him, but at heart he was still an old-fashioned Grayson patriarch. He'd learned to admit that there were women in the galaxy, including quite a few homegrown Graysons, who were at least as capable as he was, but in the final analysis, that was an intellectual admission, not an emotional one. He had to have personal contact with a woman, actually see her demonstrate her abilities, before his emotions made the same connection. It was foolish of him, not to mention patronizing, and he knew it, yet it was nonetheless true. He did his best to overcome it, and much as it might affect his attitudes he managed to keep it from affecting his actions, but he'd come to the conclusion that it was too fundamental a part of his societal programming for him ever to be fully free of it. And that was a problem today, for the shuttle about to touch down contained a person his brain knew had to be one of the smartest, most capable individuals he was ever likely to meet... and she was a woman. The fact that she was also the mother of his Steadholder and thus, whether she knew it or not, one of the two or three hundred most important people on the entire planet, didn't help, and neither did where she had been born and raised.
Dr. Allison Chou Harrington was a native of Beowulf in the Sigma Draconis System, and Beowulf's society had a reputation for... liberal mores which would have curled a Manticorans hair, much less a Graysons. Clinkscales was fairly certain (or, at least, he thought he was) that that reputation had grown in the telling, but there was no denying that Beowulf was as famed for the many, and
