“Scandal?” she said, arching her brows.
“On the afternoon news; the elopement.”
“Who?” she asked curiously.
“Siegfried von Traupitz,” he said. “A sudden marriage before a magistrate. In Santa Barbara, most naturally.”
Adrienne whistled. “The von Traupitz heir?”
In an aside to Tom: “Santa Barbara is Commission territory, like Rolfeston—common ground, not part of any domain. The justices of the peace there are elected neutrals who have to take anyone who comes; and it’s a holiday resort, a lot of honeymooners go there.”
To the cooper, she went on: “Who with? Tell me instantly, Marcelle!”
The ex-Frenchman’s grin turned enormous, and the cigarette worked at the corner of his mouth.
“With the child of another Prime,” he said, stretching out the delicious tension as she considered and rejected the limited pool of young women it could be. “With… Rebecca Pearlmutter!”
“With Rebecca?” Adrienne gasped. Then she gave a peal of laughter that set all the men within earshot grinning in sympathy—and stealing glances at her face, which lit with an inner glow. At rest, her face was beautiful; when she laughed, it went several notches up from there. Tom wrenched his attention away from her to her words.
“I don’t believe it.”
“But I assure you.” The old man cackled triumphantly. “What a scandal!”
“Romeo and Juliet,” she said, shaking her head. “I knew they got on fairly well at UNV—they were both in one of the post-Alexandrian history courses I took, and neither of them had much time for the old feuds—but… old Otto will plotz! He’ll have an apoplexy. He’ll melt down into a steaming puddle thinking about Rebecca’s children being his heirs! Abe Pearlmutter won’t exactly be happy, either.”
“And your grandfather will laugh comme un loup until he has an apoplexy,” Boissinot replied happily.
Adrienne shook her head. “Ah, that will be a year’s sensation,” she said. “But unfortunately, time presses, Marcelle, and I must get down to business.”
“Bon,” the old man said briskly. “You wish?”
“I need one hundred and fifty new, standard-size aging barrels this fall before the crush,” she said. “And fifty reconditioned. First quality, Oregon oak, and from north of Puget Sound.”
Tom made a curious noise, and she turned her head. “California oaks don’t make good cooperage. Too porous and splintery. French oak staves are impossible to get here, but Oregon oak—that’s Quercus garryana—is just as good. Particularly if you can get slow-grown wood from northern stands.”
“Oregon oak is nearly as good as French,” Marcelle replied pedantically. “Bien, I can have those for you by September. Twenty-five dollars a barrel for the new, eight for the reconditioned.”
Adrienne threw up her hands. “Twenty-five dollars! Extortionist! Assassin!”
Boissinot’s face was calm as he lit another cigarette and made an expansive gesture with it. “Mademoiselle, as a young man in the OAS I was an assassin, and a very good one, even if we unfortunately didn’t get that overgrown Alsatian pimp. Now I am a old man, head of a family, with expenses and a payroll to meet.”
“Fifteen for the new. Four for the old,” she said.
He made a contemptuous sound deep in his throat. “Fifteen? I am offering finished work, not raw logs off the dock. Is mademoiselle’s name Rolfe, or Pearlmutter?”
“If I were a Pearlmutter, you old fraud, I’d be off to Cressaut in Tara as easy as salmon in spring,” she said. “I wouldn’t let sentiment make me pay a ridiculous price to you just because you’ve been a Rolfe affiliate forever.”
“Mademoiselle is a wealthy aristocrat. She can afford sentiment. I, however, am a man of business; and I need at least nineteen dollars for each new cask. Possibly I might concede six dollars seventy-five apiece for the reconditioned barrels. Transport costs on a special shipment would make up any difference on a quote you could get in Tara, and while Cressaut’s barrels are good enough in their way, mine are better.”
“Nineteen is only slightly less ridiculous than twenty-five,” Adrienne said with passionate sincerity. “And the best is the enemy of good enough. You try this with me every summer, Marcelle, and it never works.”
Tom sipped his wine while the haggle went on; personally he detested bargaining, but he had to admit both parties here were skillful, and thoroughly enjoying themselves. This Marcelle Boissinot seemed like a nice enough old duffer, undoubtedly a fine craftsman, beloved by his grandkids and a pillar of the local church and boule club… except for that one disquieting glimpse of something else.
Sort of like the Commonwealth of New Virginia, he thought.
“Ai!”
Jim Simmons swore quietly under his breath as the doctor probed the healing wound in his back.
“Not bad,” the physician said.
“Not bad for you,” the Frontier Scout replied.
“Healing well, considering it’s been only two weeks since you were hurt,” the doctor said.
“You try lying on your stomach for two weeks,” Simmons said.
There were only two beds in this hospital room: his and Kolomusnim’s. The Yokut looked even more absurd in a patient’s gown than the Frontier Scout, but he lay with an infinite hunter’s patience, eyes fixed on the window and the glimpse of blue sky beyond; both of them were here under the Scout medical insurance program. Kolo’s arm was healing well, but he’d lost more weight than Simmons despite the latter’s more severe injury; probably because he couldn’t adjust to the hospital’s idea of “food” as easily, possibly because the environment was just too weirdly alien for him.
“Well, here’s some reading material, then,” the doctor said.
Simmons brightened; he already had a stack of books on the adjustable bedside table, and a computer with access to Nostradamus, but a fresh one would be welcome. One of the advantages of having lots of relatives was that there were plenty of people who felt obliged to send you stuff. Of course, they also felt obliged to visit, but you couldn’t have everything, could you?
It wasn’t a book, though: It was a letter, a single cream-colored envelope. Without, he saw, a postage stamp.
“I wonder who couldn’t just send an e-mail?” he said to himself, as the doctor finished with his poking and prodding and left the room. “Ah, Adrienne! What a woman!”
He read the letter once, and whistled softly. Then he read it again and again, to make sure the elliptical wording meant what he thought it meant. When he’d finished, he called out to the other man—in his own language.
Simmons wasn’t really fluent in Yokut; no more than a hundred or so souls still spoke it, and more than half of those could get along in pidgin English. Still, he’d learned enough to carry on an elementary conversation; Kolo and he had worked together for years, and Simmons had been raised on the frontier, at Scout outposts and stations. It was an interesting tongue; there were things you could say in it with a word or two that required paragraphs in English, and there were English concepts that you couldn’t put into Yokut at all.
Some things, however, worked quite well in both their mother tongues. Kolomusnim’s face lost its blank look of endurance and came alive as the Scout spoke.
Revenge was a concept that translated quite easily.