Jesus, I’m nervous, Tom thought. You betcha I am.
Meeting Adrienne had been a complex thing, with a lot of highs and lows—more highs than lows right now, but the lows had been doozies. Meeting her grandfather…
Rolfe Manor stood near the head of the Napa Valley, not far from where Calistoga was FirstSide, and the scale was quite different from Seven Oaks. There was a pleasant-looking leafy little town of about a thousand people to serve the Prime’s residence, and beyond it a mile-long paved lane through pasture and vineyards and olive groves—the pavement itself being a sign of something unusual, by Commonwealth standards. It was flanked on either side by a double avenue of redwoods. The king trees didn’t start naturally on the valley floor here, but they grew fast if you watered them well and the soil suited—three to five feet a year, once they were established. These must have been transplanted as saplings about the time Tom’s grandfather got back from Korea, and they towered a hundred and fifty feet into the air, each at least six feet around at head height. The branches just met overhead, and the cool, resin-fragrant shade gave a cathedral feeling to the drive despite the hot morning sun, a tinge of awe and stillness under the hum of the tires.
Which is probably just what was intended, Tom thought, looking aside at Adrienne for a moment.
They’d been together long enough for him to get a handle on her expressions. The careful casualness he saw now hid a tension that probably wasn’t entirely due to the real reason for this meeting: Rolfe Manor was where she’d been born and had grown up to a notably stormy adolescence. Seven Oaks was her home; this was the place she’d escaped from.
The avenue of redwoods ended at an open space with a large fountain at its center; the roadway divided around it. At the other end was a brick wall stretching far on either side, broken by a tall wrought-iron gate. The gate showed the Rolfe lion outlined in iron facing its mirror image; flagpoles bore the domain emblem on one side and the crossed bars of the Commonwealth on the other. There was a small guard detachment there: gray-uniformed, helmeted household troopers with the same lion in red on black on their shoulder flashes. The men reminded Tom of himself, minus a decade and change: big, tough-looking plowboys with serious, solemn faces; their sergeant was older, obviously professional cadre recruited FirstSide, with a scar on his left cheek that was probably from a shell fragment.
From the look of his squad they were disciplined and at least knew which end of the rifles a bullet came out of, and he didn’t doubt they were brave. The skill level of the Commonwealth’s miniature military remained to be seen, though, especially the way they were split up.
The sergeant saluted Adrienne, and matched faces to ID cards for Tom, and for Tully and Piet—who were sitting as far apart as they could in the backseat of the Hummer.
“Pass, Miz Rolfe,” he said.
He signaled for the gates to open. They did, smooth and silent; Tom noticed a pair of discreet surveillance cameras on either side. There were probably a lot of other ones he hadn’t seen; the Commonwealth was a fairly peaceful place, but its lords didn’t take that for granted.
Or maybe it’s peaceful because they don’t take it for granted, he thought mordantly.
Inside the gate was parkland. The road was white crushed rock, and flanked on either side by big glossy-leafed evergreen magnolias; their plate-sized white flowers lent a heavy scent to the warm still air. The avenue curved in a graceful S shape, first through a pretty amendment of nature, with fallow deer grazing under ancient valley oaks and an occasional stream or pond that looked original but probably wasn’t; then as it straightened and turned toward the great house there were flower beds, lawns, a hedge maze, an increasing formality. The house itself was Regency Georgian, redbrick, built in the form of an H with an elongated central bar two stories high. A long walkway of russet tile led up to the main entrance; that was surrounded by eighteen-foot marble pillars with gilded—literally—Corinthian capitals, supporting a second-story balcony; identical columns soared up from that to support the pediment roof.
The doors opened… and a torrent of children poured out, kids just short of adolescence mostly, dressed in riding clothes. They stopped at the sight of the Hummer, then crowded around with cries of “Aunt Adrienne!” and stayed for a few moments of hugs and kisses on the cheek and hair ruffling.
When they’d been shepherded on by a governess—herself in jodhpurs—he turned to Adrienne as they climbed out.
“Aunt Adrienne?” he said with a smile. “Hard to think of you as an aunt, somehow.”
“Hard to think of them as that big,” she replied, shaking her head. “Time’s getting away from me… those were my eldest brother’s larvae, mostly, and some of my sister’s; she’s staying here last I heard while her husband’s on a trade mission in Hagamantash. Nice kids, but it’s a good thing this place has room.”
It did. A secretary—male, middle-aged and taciturn—showed them in. Tom blinked at the entrance hall, with its sweeping staircases on either side and squares of green malachite on the floor, inlaid in larger squares of white marble; they went on from there, down groin-arched corridors where niches held things bizarre or beautiful—one held a shallow twin-handled painted cup whose lines were so numinously perfect he nearly stopped right there—and up another long staircase. The second-story hallway there was the full width of the building, tall windows on either side alternating with paintings that had Tully’s eyes popping—his partner had some nodding acquaintance with art history.
“Kemosabe,” he murmured, “either those are some very good fakes, or a couple of museums back FirstSide are showing some extremely good fakes… and I suspect it’s option number two.”
Adrienne chuckled softly at that. “This is the public wing,” she said. “The business section. One thing I’ll say about growing up here—there was always somewhere you could get away from your folks.”
The secretary frowned but stayed silent, until he led them through an outer office and to the doors of another.
“Sir, Miss Rolfe and party,” he said.
OK, now I’m really nervous, Tom thought.
The inner sanctum was oval, flooded by light from the windows around most of its circumference. There was a fireplace on one side, and an eighteenth-century iron-and-bronze chandelier overhead; a large desk; and settees and chairs around a low table of some rose-colored wood, polished to a high sheen. A maid laid out coffee and biscotti, and the man who’d been leaning on a walking stick before one of the windows that looked out over garden and the side of Mount Saint Helens turned.
“Thank you, Margaret,” John Rolfe said, with a gracious nod as the servant left.
He was shorter than Tom’s subconscious had expected—an inch or so taller than Adrienne’s five-nine—and gaunt with age, but still ramrod straight. His hair was silver-white, receeding only a little from brow and temples; the eyes were pouched and sunk into an ancient eagle’s face, but the same leaf green as his granddaughter’s, and very keen; you could see where she’d gotten the cheekbones, too. He walked forward slowly but firmly, leaning into the walking stick to spare a lame leg—acquired on Okinawa in 1944, Tom remembered—and halted close to them; he was wearing a lightweight linen suit of subdued elegance.
Adrienne stepped forward first, bowing low, taking his outstretched left hand in hers, and kissing it.
“Baciamo le mani,” she said, then stood and kissed him on the cheek. “Hello, Grandfather.”