"Honor, I've been married to Hamish for over seventy T-years. I know him, and I love him, and I see how this is tearing him apart. It was already there before this smear campaign was launched, but it wasn't destroying him the way it is now. I think . . . I think that what happened is that the lies and the false accusations forced him to look closely at things he'd held at a distance, somehow. They made him admit the truth to himself on some deeper level, and the combination of how much he loves you—loves both of us—and his guilt at having discovered that he can love someone besides me is like a bleeding wound. Worse," she looked directly into Honor's eyes, "he's afraid he's going to tell you openly how he feels. That he is going to 'betray me' by taking a lover he truly loves.
"I don't know how I'd react if that happened," she admitted frankly. "I'm afraid to find out. But what I'm even more afraid of is that if the two of you did become lovers, the secret would be impossible to keep. There are too many ways to spy on anyone, and too many people with too much to lose who must want desperately to find proof of his infidelity with you. If they do, that proof will be made public, and any good I may accomplish by telling the world I was never wronged will be instantly undone. In fact, my protestation of his innocence will only make it even worse. And to be totally honest, I'm very much afraid that if the two of you continue to work so closely together, eventually he will act upon his feelings. I don't know what that would do to him, in the long run, any more than I know what it would do to me, but I'm afraid we may both find out. Unless . . ."
"Unless what?" Honor's voice was tight, and her hands tightened on Nimitz's softness, as well.
"Unless you do what he can't," Emily said steadily. "As long as both of you are on the same planet, you must work together as political partners. Because you two are—or were, before this all happened—our most effective political weapons, and because if you stop working together, it will be taken as proof of guilt. But for that to be possible, you must ensure that nothing else ever happens between you. It isn't fair. I know that. And I'm not telling you this as an anxious wife, fearful that her husband will find someone he loves more than her. I'm telling you because it would be political suicide, and not just for you and Hamish, if the two of you ever became lovers, especially after I come forward and assure the entire Star Kingdom that you never have.
"For more than fifty T-years, my husband has been absolutely faithful to me in every way that truly matters, despite my confinement to this chair. But this time, Honor—this time, I don't think he's strong enough. Or not that, so much, as that I think this time he's up against something too strong for him. So you have to be his strength. Fair or not, you have to be the one to maintain the distance and the separation between you."
"I know that," Honor said softly. "I know that. I've known it for years now, Emily. I have to maintain the separation, never let him love me. Never let myself love him."
She looked at her hostess, her face tight with pain.
"I know that . . . and I can't," she whispered, and Lady Emily White Haven stared at her in horror as Admiral Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Duchess and Steadholder Harrington, burst into tears.
Chapter Thirteen
Dinner was indeed cold by the time they got to it.
Honor had no idea how the complex, jagged-edged situation was going to resolve itself. For that matter, she didn't even know what she herself felt. She only knew she was afraid to find out.
It was odd, especially for someone with the supportive, loving parents she'd had, not to mention her link to Nimitz, and even more her ability to sense the emotions of those about her. Odd, yet true.
There remained one thing in the universe which could absolutely terrify her: her own heart.
She couldn't understand it—had never been able to understand it. Physical danger, duty, moral responsibility . . . those she could face. Not without fear, but without the crippling sense that somehow her fear would betray her into failure. But not this. This was a different sort of minefield, one she had no idea how to navigate, and one she had no confidence in her ability to face. Yes, she could taste and share the emotions of both Hamish and Emily, but simply knowing what they felt was no magic spell to suddenly make all right.
She knew Hamish Alexander loved her. She knew she loved Hamish Alexander. And she knew Hamish and Emily loved each other, and that all three of them were determined not to hurt the others.
And none of it did a bit of good, because whatever they did, whatever happened, someone was going to be hurt. And looming over that deep immediate and personal dread of pain to come was the chilling knowledge of how many other people would be affected by what ought to be their deeply personal decisions.
Perhaps it would have been different if she'd had more self-confidence, she thought, sipping her wine as she sat across the table from Emily and Hamish. She envied Emily's serenity, especially because she'd felt exactly how dismayed and shaken Emily had been by her own admission in the atrium. The older woman had already known what Hamish felt; the sudden confirmation that Honor returned his love had hit her like a blow. There'd been anger in her reaction. Not a lot, but a sharp, knife-like flicker of fury that Honor should dare to love her husband, an automatic response that was built of raw instinct and her awareness of how much more danger Honor's emotions threw all of them into. She'd made herself accept that Hamish's struggle against his feelings was a losing battle; now she'd discovered that the person she'd hoped would be her ally had already lost the same fight. There was enormous potential for jealousy and resentment alike in that moment of realization, and the fact that she'd put her rage aside so quickly and so completely astonished Honor.
But there were a lot of things about Emily Alexander that astonished Honor. She was totally unlike Honor's mother, except in one way: both of them radiated that calm sense of knowing exactly who they were, not just in matters of duty, but in those of the heart, as well. Honor had always envied that in her mother, almost as much as she'd envied—and resented—Allison Harrington's beauty and unabashed sensuality when she herself had been an ugly-duckling, raw-boned, too-tall, gawky adolescent. She'd known even at her most resentful that she was being foolish. Her mother couldn't help her beauty any more than she could help being who she was, and even if she could have been someone else just to make her daughter feel less outclassed and homely, it would have been wrong for her to do so. Wrong for her to be anyone but herself.
She and Honor's father had taught their daughter that, almost without realizing they had. They'd done it by example and by loving her, without limit or qualification. They'd made her whole in all of the ways that mattered most, even while she was wounded in that one secret regard. The quiet place in her heart where she'd been supposed to keep the belief that anyone could truly love her . . . unless they had to.
It had been stupid, stupid, stupid, she told herself. If anyone in the entire galaxy could know that, then certainly with her parents and Nimitz she'd been that one person. But it hadn't helped, and then, at the Academy, had come Pavel Young and Mr. Midshipman Carl Panokulous—the would-be rapist and the man who had hurt her more cruelly still. The damage they'd done had been terrible, yet she'd survived it. Survived and, with Paul Tankersley's help, actually learned to heal. To know that there were people who could—and would—love her. She'd actually, physically felt the love of so many people in her life now, in so many ways. Paul. Her parents, James MacGuiness, Andreas Venizelos, Andrew LaFollet, Alistair McKeon, Jamie Candless, Scotty Tremaine, Miranda LaFollet, Nimitz . . .
Yet deep inside her, somewhere all the healing had failed to reach, there was the fear. No longer the fear that they would not love her, but that they would not be allowed to. That the universe would punish them if they dared to, for all too many of those who had loved her had also died because of it.
It wasn't logical, and she knew it, but she'd lost too many lives, and every one of them had torn its own hole in her soul. Officers and ratings who had served with her and paid with their lives for
her victories. Armsmen who had died so that their liege lady might live. Friends who had knowingly faced Death—and lost to him—for her sake. It had happened too often, cost too many too much, and the terror that anyone who dared to love her was marked for death mocked her, for logic was a weak weapon when matched against the unreasoning assurance of the heart. She'd made progress in her fight against that irrational certainty. She knew that, too. But if she'd won a few battles, she had yet to win the war, and the tangled weave of emotions and needs, fear and the obligations of honor, that wrapped about her feelings for Hamish Alexander like a shroud threatened to cost her even more ground in the fight.
"So," Hamish said finally, his voice almost startling after their long, mutual silence, "did the two of you decide how we ought to tackle this?"
He kept his tone light, almost droll, but he didn't fool anyone at the table, including himself, and Honor looked at Emily.
"I think we've found a way to at least start getting a handle on it," his wife told him with a serenity Honor was half-surprised, even now, to realize was genuine. "I don't say it will be easy, and I'm not sure it will be quite as effective, under the circumstances, as I would have liked—" she glanced sideways at Honor for a heartbeat "—but I believe we can at least blunt the worst of their attack."
"There's a reason I've always relied on you for the necessary political miracles, Emily," Hamish told her with a smile. "Give me a fleet problem, or a naval battle to fight, and I know exactly what to do. But dealing with scum like High Ridge and Descroix—?" He shook his head. "I just can't wrap my mind around how to handle them."
"Be honest, dear," Emily corrected him gently. "It's not that you really can't do it, and you know it. It's that you get so furious with them that you wind up climbing onto your high moral horse so you can ride them under the hooves of your righteous fury. But when you close your knight errant's helmet, the visibility through that visor is just a little limited, isn't it?"
Her smile took most of the bite from her words, but he winced anyway, and that wince was at least partly genuine.
"I realize any good political analyst has to know when and how to be brutally honest, Emily, but somehow that particular metaphor doesn't do an enormous amount for my self image," he said so dryly Honor chuckled despite herself, and Emily looked at her with a twinkle.
"He does the affronted-but-too-polite-to-admit-it, stiff-necked, aristocratic naval officer quite well, doesn't he?" she remarked.
"I don't think I'll answer that question," Honor replied. "On the other hand, there's something to be said for the . . . directness of a Don Quixote. As long as the windmills don't hit back too hard, at least."
"Granted, granted," Emily conceded. She was eating one-handed with the grace of decades of practice, but now she paused to set down her fork so that she could point with one finger for emphasis. "I'll even grant that the political process needs people willing to shatter themselves on the rocks of conviction rather than countenance deception or deceit. We'd be better off if we had more of them, and the ones we do have have a responsibility to serve as the conscience of our partisan bloodletting. But they can do that effectively in isolation, maintaining our concepts of morality by serving as examples of it whether they ever accomplish anything else or not. But to be effective in the political process requires more than personal rectitude, however admirable that may be. You don't have to become the enemy, but you do have to understand her, and that means understanding not simply her motives but her tactics. Because when you understand those two things you can design counter tactics. You don't have to descend to the same level; you simply have to recognize what the opposition is up to and allow for it."
"Willie understands that a lot better than I do," Hamish admitted after a moment.
"Yes, he does, and that's why someday he'll be Prime Minister and you won't. Which is probably just as well," Emily said with another, wider smile. "On the other hand, much as I love Willie, he'd make a terrible admiral!"
All three of them laughed, but then Emily cocked her head and looked thoughtfully at Honor.
"I haven't had as long to observe you, Honor," she said, "but I'm a bit surprised by the fact that you seem to be rather more . . . flexible than Hamish. Not that I think you're any more willing to sacrifice your principles on the altar of expediency, but in the sense that you clearly do a better job of putting yourself inside the other person's head."
"Appearances can be deceiving," Honor replied wryly. "I don't begin to understand how a High Ridge or a Janacek thinks. And to be perfectly honest, I don't want to."
"You're wrong, you know," Emily disagreed so firmly that Honor looked at her in some surprise. "You don't understand why they want the things they want, but you can accept that they do. And once you've done that, you also do an excellent job of analyzing how they might go about getting them."
"Not always," Honor said in a darker tone. "I never saw this—" she waved one hand around the table in a gesture which encompassed all three of them "—coming."
"No, but now that it's here, you know exactly what it is they're trying to accomplish. That's why it hurts you so much to see them getting away with it," Emily said gently. "No one can fault you for being surprised by gutter tactics so alien to the way your own mind works, Honor, but even at your angriest, you haven't let anger blind you. And from what I've seen of you both in the 'faxes and on HD, as well as here, now that I've had a chance to meet you in person, I think you could turn into a very effective politician, with time."
Honor stared at her in disbelief, and Emily chuckled.
"Oh, you'd never be a natural politician the way Willie is! And, like Hamish, you'd always be most comfortable in the sort of collegial atmosphere the House of Lords is supposed to be. But I've viewed your speeches, and you're much more effective as a public speaker than Hamish is." She smiled at her husband. "That's not an aspersion on him, you understand. But he gets impatient and starts to lecture, and you don't.
"There's more to being politically effective than giving good speeches, Emily," Hamish objected.
"Of course there is. But Honor has already demonstrated her ability to analyze military threat situations and devise strategies to meet them, and just listening to her speak in the Lords, it's evident to me that she can bring that same analytical ability to bear in other arenas, once she learns the conditions which apply there. She still has a lot to learn about politics, especially the cutthroat version practiced here in the Star Kingdom, but it seems to me from watching her over the past few years that her learning curve is steep. She's spent forty T-years learning to be a naval officer; give me half that long in politics, and I'll make her Prime Minister!"
"Oh no you won't!" Honor said roundly. "I'd cut my own throat in less than ten!"
"That seems a bit drastic," Emily observed mildly. "Perhaps there's more of Doña Quixote in you than I'd realized."
Her green eyes flickered for just a moment, and Honor felt her brief flare of regret over her choice of words, but the countess brushed it off quickly.
"No, just more sanity," Hamish observed, oblivious to the quick glances the two women exchanged. He wasn't looking at them, anyway. His attention had strayed back to Samantha, as it had done periodically all evening, and he took another celery stalk from the bowl on the table and offered it to her.
"You're going to make her sick, Hamish," Emily scolded, and he looked up quickly, his expression so much like that of a guilty schoolboy caught in the act that Honor chuckled.
"Not without a lot more celery than that, he's not, Emily," she reassured her hostess. "Mind you," she went on more sternly, transferring her attention to Hamish, "too much celery really is bad for her. She can't digest it, and if she gets too much of it, she'll get constipated."
Samantha turned to give her a dignified look of reproval, and Honor was relieved to feel the female 'cat's amusement. Despite the transcendent joy of having bonded with Hamish, Samantha had been almost instantly aware of the dismay and consterna
tion which had afflicted both Honor and her new person, and that awareness had sent its echoes reverberating through her, as well.
From the feel of her emotions, she still wasn't entirely certain why they were so upset. Which, Honor thought, only served to emphasize that despite all of their centuries of association with humans, treecats remained an alien species. For Nimitz and Samantha—as probably for all of their kind, given their ability to sense one another's emotions—there was absolutely no point in trying to conceal what one felt. Nimitz had accepted over the years that there were times when it was inappropriate, among humans, at least, to show his emotions, especially when they consisted of anger directed at someone senior to Honor in the Navy. But even for him, that was more a matter of good manners (and of making concessions to an inexplicable human code of behavior because it was important to his person) than because he saw any real sense in it. And neither he nor Samantha would have dreamed of attempting to deny how they truly felt about something—especially about something important.
Which explained the growing frustration Honor had received from both of them as the pain of suppressing and denying her feelings for Hamish grew within her. They knew how much she loved him, they knew how much he loved her, and by treecat standards, it was willfully insane for the two of them to subject themselves—and one another—to so much hurt. Which, to make things still worse, was also a hurt the 'cats had no choice but to endure with them.
Intellectually, both Nimitz and Samantha realized that all humans, with the notable exception of Honor herself, were what their own species called "mind-blind." They could even understand that because of that mind-blindness, human society had different imperatives from those of their own. But what they understood intellectually hadn't affected what they felt, and what they'd felt was not only frustration but anger at the inexplicable human willfulness which prevented Honor and Hamish from simply admitting the truth which was self-evident to any treecat and getting on with their lives without all this pain and suffering.