Farragut stirred, raising his head from her lap. Miranda turned her head to see what had caught his attention, and a wry smile twitched her lips as the newest citizen of Harrington Steading walked down the path towards her. In some respects, there could not have been a worse time for Doctor Harrington to arrive on Grayson, but Miranda was devoutly grateful that she was here.
She had dived into the task of organizing the clinic with an energy every bit as formidable as her daughters, and the results had been impressive. Manticoran physicians had flooded into Grayson over the past few years. Almost a third of them had been women, and the huge gap between modern medicine and that of Pre-Alliance Grayson had gone a long way towards demolishing any reservations about female doctors. It was difficult for any physician to argue that women must be less competent than men when the medical knowledge of the women in question was at least a century in advance of their own. Of course, nothing was impossible for the sufficiently bigoted. A certain percentage of the most conservative Grayson doctors had managed to maintain their prejudices, but they were a distinct minority. Despite that, however, some members of the Grayson medical profession, and not all of them bigots, by any means, had been prepared to assume that Dr. Harrington’s relationship to the Steadholder, more than her own abilities, helped explain her selection to head the clinic.
So far, the longest anyone had managed to hang onto that assumption after meeting her was less than twenty minutes, and it didn't matter whether they'd come to consult her on an administrative matter or a medical one. She'd been trained at the finest medical university and best teaching hospitals in the known galaxy; she had sixty-five T-years of experience to draw upon and an energy and enthusiasm anyone a quarter of her age might have envied; and, like her daughter, she was simply incapable of offering less than her very best. She didn't even have to try to impress her critics; she simply had to be herself.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately; Miranda’s mental jury was still undecided, the differences between her background and her daughter's had quickly become apparent. In fact, a disinterested observer might have been pardoned for wondering whether or not Grayson society would find Doctor Harrington’s impact survivable.
Miranda was certain there wasn't a malicious bone in Allison Harrington’s body, but that didn't make her sense of humor a bit less wicked, and she was only too obviously aware of how Grayson’s conservative elements must feel about Beowulf's reputation. That first nights dinner with the Clinkscales had made that abundantly clear, for she really had turned up in a smoke-gray backless gown of thin, very thin, neoworm silk from Naismith with a deeply plunging neckline. The simplicity of its styling had been almost brutal, but the opaque fabric had clung and flowed like the smoke it so resembled, outlining her body so frankly that, for the first few seconds, Miranda had feared for the Regents health. He was no longer a young man, after all, and that gown's potential impact on his blood pressure had been enough to worry anyone. But he'd clearly taken Dr. Harrington's measure more accurately at their first meeting than Miranda had expected, and he'd evinced neither confusion, consternation, nor outrage. In fact, he'd actually smiled as he bent over her hand to welcome her with exquisite formality, then escorted her to the dinner table to introduce his wives.
Miranda didn't know whether or not he'd warned them ahead of time. She tended to doubt it, but over the past several years, all three of them had demonstrated a flexibility which she was certain would once have astonished their husband. Their response to Allison’s gown had taken the form of appreciation of its fabric and simplicity of design, and they'd plunged into a comparison of Grayson and Manticoran styles. Rather to Miranda's amazement, Allison had jumped right into it with them, eyes sparkling with delight, and Miranda had realized something she hadn't really expected.
Allison Harrington was vain. Oh, not in a negative sense, but she was certainly well aware of her own attractiveness, and her love for "dressing up" was at least as deep as any Grayson woman's. Somehow Miranda had assumed Lady Harrington was typical of all Manticoran women. Certainly the Steadholder took pains with her appearance, and certainly she enjoyed knowing she looked her best, but that had always been secondary for her. And, in a sense, it was secondary for her mother, as well. Professionally, working to organize the clinic and begin the enormous task of mapping the genomes of every citizen of Harrington Steading, she was as efficient and ruthlessly disciplined as the Steadholder, and she couldn't have cared less what she looked like. But once she left the clinic behind, she took an almost childlike glee in clothes, jewelry, cosmetics... all those things her daughter seemed all but totally indifferent to.
That glee was accompanied by a merciless delight in puncturing the overinflated and hypercritical, and the combination of her beauty, her undisputed stature as the best geneticist ever to visit Miranda's planet, her sense of humor, and her Beowulf rearing made her a lethal weapon on Grayson. Traditionalists who had already been outraged by "that foreign woman" were sitting targets for the foreign woman's mother. She was poised, confident, and, unlike her daughter, she loved parties, dinners, and balls. She reveled in them with unfeigned, almost giddy delight, and where the Steadholder had felt out of place and ridiculous when she first began easing her way into "proper" Grayson female attire, Allison, aided and abetted by the Regent's wives and, especially, Catherine Mayhew, had plunged into the most extravagant fashions she could find. Very few Graysons could have worn the clothes she chose, but she was clearly a law unto herself, and her almond-eyed beauty and devastating charm made all things possible.
It must have been tempting for the members of the old guard to write her off as a frivolous ninny from a loose-living and licentious society, but anyone who made the fatal error of allowing her youthful exterior to draw them into underestimating her never got a chance to recover. It was obvious she missed, and loved, her husband deeply, but she'd also spent seventy-plus T-years delighting in her ability to attract the male of the species. So far she'd been careful to avoid doing anything which could embarrass her daughter, although Miranda suspected that that was only because it might embarrass Lady Harrington. But she most certainly would trade shamelessly on Beowulf's reputation to lure the social vultures into false positions expressly so that she could cut them off at the knees. Miranda had only had to watch her at a single party to realize where her daughters ruthless tactical instincts had come from.
But there hadn't really been time for Allison to scandalize Grayson properly before the parties were brought to a shattering halt by the news of the Steadholder’s loss. A cloud had descended on all of Harrington Steading, yet it was centered on Harrington House and the people who knew her best. Lord Clinkscales had immediately dispatched the Tankersley to Manticore to transport Lady Harrington's father to Grayson, and Protector Benjamin and his entire family had prepared to comfort Allison in his absence. Yet it hadn't worked out as they'd expected, for they'd discovered that at the heart of her, when all the jokes and fashions and poses were left behind, there was a vast, personal serenity and a bottomless strength. She'd drawn deeply upon it when her daughter was reported missing, and somehow she'd extended it to all of Lady Harrington's people. What the Steadholder had laughingly called her inner circle, MacGuiness, Miranda, and Howard Clinkscales, had found themselves especially in need of her serenity, and she shared it with them willingly. She had been on Grayson for barely two months, yet already Miranda could scarcely imagine Harrington House without her. More to the point, perhaps, she had no desire to imagine it without her.