War Of Honor

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 quietly. '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