It was his aunt who opened the door, which did not surprise him. He’d never known the maid’s name, but she did little in the way of work and could usually be found lounging in one of the inner rooms. “Hello, Aunt Celeste.” He put his arms around her and kissed a withered cheek. She was quite old, his aunt; the wife of his father’s oldest brother, who was the first of nine children—all dead now, leaving just the two of them with no blood in common and minds in different worlds. She wore a dark green dressing gown, and had bare, pale feet.
“Hello, Adrian.” He was one of the few people whose names she kept straight.
“This is Iolanthe; I told you about her.” Aunt Celeste focused uncertainly on Iolanthe, but said nothing. Adrian suspected she had no idea why they’d come. Long experience with his aunt told him to just press on. “And Will here you’ve already met.”
“Yes!” For a moment the old face lit up with the success of recognition. “The pretty boy. Yes, I know him.”
Will flushed. People had occasionally called him goodlooking before, but nobody had ever called him “pretty.” Particularly not little ancient women in dressing gowns whom he didn’t even know. Io seemed to be smiling, which only made it worse.
But they all went inside and Adrian talked to his aunt for a while and listened solemnly to her chatter; and Will put his overnight bag down on die cot he’d set up in the common room earlier that day. As a guard he was neither fish nor fowl, a sometime social companion but still a hired body, not really expected to join in the conversation unless invited. This time he was glad of that. Old people made him nervous; you didn’t see many of them in Sangaree. He looked around the quarters at the embroidered pillows and the endless pictures on the shelves of people dressed in clothing popular decades ago. It was the sort of place he could never feel comfortable in.
Meanwhile, Iolanthe settled into a bedchamber farther in, dislodging the so-called maid, a girl with blonde hair who looked at her resentfully as she moved. But Will had designated this room for Io, and she wasn’t going to make his job difficult. She picked up some old perfume bottles on a vanity nearby and unstoppered them. The stoppers still smelt faintly of former days, though the perfumes had all mostly evaporated.
“Io?” said a voice from the doorway. It was Adrian. “I have to go now. I guess … I’ll see you at the wedding. I’ll send a chair for you at eleven to take you back to your rooms. Is that all right?”
“That’s fine, Adrian. Thank you.”
There was an unexpected fondness in her tone and Adrian took a step toward her. She thought for a moment he was going to kiss her again, but then he turned a little uncertainly and left.
She put down the perfume bottle she was holding, a beautiful thing of frosted glass. She was impressed with the way Adrian dealt with his aunt, at how he stood and listened to anything she had to say and never revealed a trace of irritation or annoyance. There was something moving about the strong showing patience with the less strong.
She stopped suddenly and blinked. She hoped that she wasn’t the less strong, too.
They ate cold meat and bread from Aunt Celeste’s larder that night, and the maid sat silently with them at the table. Will ate by himself, but Iolanthe suspected it was more from a feeling of discomfort than from an effort to maintain social distinctions. Aunt Celeste talked of this and that, of dresses and dances long out of fashion, and of Adrian and Adrian’s dead relatives, making it hard to tell whom she meant at any one time. When nobody else showed any inclination to clear the table, Io did it herself. The dirty dishes offended her sense of neatness, and her complete lack of experience made her find the job intriguing. Coming back to the dining table she spied a picture she hadn’t noticed before: a wide, cloud-filled sky with shafts of light, some rocks by a sea, and a young girl. “Oh, where did you get that from?” she asked. “It’s lovely.”
Aunt Celeste peered up at it. “That’s me, in my birthplace.”
Iolanthe stared at her. “You’re planet-bom?”
“Of course I am. I married the ship, oh, let’s see—it must be almost seventy years ago.” She was doing arithmetic on her old pale fingers.
Io was still staring. Aunt Celeste smiled. She sat down on a peach-colored couch and patted the cushion beside her. “Sit down, child. Would you like to hear about it?”
Io suspected she used the word “child” because she couldn’t remember names. She sat down beside Adrian’s aunt and said, “Yes, please. Tell me the story, Aunt Celeste.”
The aunt said, “I grew up on Lilyflower. My family were Redemptionists, of course, and we had quite a lot of money. We called ourselves ‘comfortable.’ My father was an architect, and we had three houses—oh, do you want coffee, child?”
“No thank you, Aunt Celeste.”
“Well, it was quite a day when the Diamond came to trade. I was sixteen when they appeared in our system, and eighteen when they were preparing to leave. I was at the unveiling of ‘The Long Call’—the painting the Diamond had brought us from Seville 3 as a hospitality gift. Magnificent. Afterward Adrian’s uncle came up to me and asked if he might button my gloves. We had not then been introduced.”
Io was tired, and she settled on Aunt Celeste’s shoulder.
“He called on me all that summer. Carriage rides through the lanes with my little sister in the back, and
