"I could give you something to make it look like you're helping," she had told him as they had come in, "but there's no point to it. There's nothing you can do here that I can't do faster and better myself. So just sit back out of my way, and we'll talk as I go. More whiskey?"
"Thank you," he had said. Sitting with a glass in his hand at least gave him the appearance of a reason for sitting still while she worked.
He had expected to feel self-conscious sitting there, nonetheless; but the essential magic of the house, the warmth of the kitchen with her movement about in it, made all things right. Only, for a second, and reasonlessly, watching her now, he felt an unusually sharp stab of that loneliness that had been always part of him these last four years. Then he put that aside too, and merely sat, sipping the dark, fierce whiskey, wrapped in the comfort of the moment.
"What do you like - mutton or fish?" she asked. "That's our choice, here."
"Either is fine," he said. "I don't eat much."
Strangely, this had been true since his time in the cell on Harmony. His familiar, oversize appetite had been lost somewhere. On the trip from Harmony to Mara, he had eaten only when meals were pushed upon him; and on Mara itself the indifference had continued. It was not that food did not taste good to him once he began to eat - it was just that hunger and appetite had somehow lately become strangers to him. He did not think of eating until he had been some time without food; and then just enough to take the edge off his immediate need was all he would find himself wanting.
He became aware that Amanda had paused at his answer, and was looking back intently across the room at him from the food storage cupboard she had just unsealed.
"I see," she said after a second. She went back to taking things from the cupboard. "In that case why don't we have both? And you can tell me which you like best."
Hal watched her as she worked. It seemed that Dorsai cookery had something in common with that on Harmony. Here, as there, a little meat was made to go a long way by adding a lot of vegetables. Fish, however, was used somewhat more freely. There appeared to be a fair amount of preparation to all the dishes Amanda made; but each came together and went onto the cooking surface with surprising speed.
"Well, tell me," she said, after a few minutes, "why do you want to see Foralie?"
The memory of the burial dream floated unbidden to the surface of his mind. He pushed it back down, out of consciousness.
"Malachi, the tutor I mentioned," he said, "told me a lot about it - about Donal and the other Graemes."
"So you came to see for yourself?"
He caught the unspoken question behind the one uttered out loud.
"I had to come to the Dorsai anyway," he told her. A desire to be open with her, more than he had intended, stirred in him for a second; but he repressed it. "Only, when I got here, I found I wasn't ready to get down right away to what I'd come for. So I thought I'd take a day or two and come here first."
"Because of the stories Malachi Nasuno told you?"
"Stories mean a lot when you're young," he answered.
She sat down at the table opposite him with a cutting board and began to chop up what looked like variforms of celery, green pepper and chives. Her glance came across the table at him. In the warmly yellow illumination of the lights off the golden panelling, her eyes flashed like sunlight on turquoise water.
"I know," she said.
They sat in silence as the bright blade of her knife rocked up and down on the board, dividing the vegetables.
"What was it you wanted to see there?" she asked, after a bit, sweeping the chopped vegetables into a pile together and getting up to carry the board with them back across the room.
"The house, mainly, I suppose," he smiled to himself, talking to her slim, erect back, "I'd heard so much about it, I think I might even be able to find my way around it blindfolded."
"Your Malachi may have been one of the officers the twins or Donal used to use a lot on their contracts," she said, almost to herself. She turned back to face him again. "I've got to visit one of my sisters tomorrow morning. I'll give you a horse - you can ride, I suppose, from what I saw earlier?"
He nodded.
"I can take you to Graemehouse, let you in, go on to make my visit and come back afterwards. Then after I'm back, if you like, we can go around the house and its land, together."
"Thanks," he said. "That's good of you."
Without warning, she grinned at him.
"You haven't been here long enough for people to tell you that neighborliness doesn't require thanks?"
He grinned back.
"Malachi told me about neighborliness on the Dorsai," he said. "No one since I landed has had time to go into the details for me, though."
"One of the ways we survive here is by being neighborly," Amanda said, sobering, "and we Morgans have survived here since the first Amanda, a good number of years before Graemehouse was even built."
"The first Amanda?" he echoed.
"The first Amanda Morgan - who built this house of Fal Morgan and brought our name to this part of the Dorsai, nearly two hundred and fifty standard years ago. That's her picture in the hall."
"It is?"
He watched her, fascinated.
"How many Amandas have there been?" he asked.
"Three," she said.
"Only three?"
She laughed.
"The first Amanda was touchy about her name being pinned on someone who couldn't live up to it - she was a person. No one in the family named a girl-child Amanda until I came along."
"But you said there were three. If you're the second - "
"I'm the third. The second Amanda was actually named Elaine. But by the time she was old enough to run about, everybody was starting to call her Amanda, because she was so much like the first. Elaine-Amanda was my great-grandaunt. She died just four years ago last month; and she'd grown up with Kensie and Ian, the twin uncles of Donal. In fact, they were both in love with her."
"Which one got her?"
Amanda shook her head.
"Neither. Kensie died on Ste. Marie. Ian married Leah; and it was his children who carried on the Graeme family line, since Kensie died unmarried, and neither Donal nor his brother Mor lived to have any children. But after his sons were all grown and Leah had died - in her sixties - Ian used to be over here at Fal Morgan all the time. I remember when I was very young, I thought that he was just another Morgan. He died fourteen years ago."
"Fourteen years ago?" Hal said automatically calculating in his head from what he knew of the chronology of the Graeme family. "He lived a long time. How old was your great-grandaunt when she died?"
"A hundred and six." Amanda finished putting the last dish on the cooking surface; and came back to sit down with a cup of tea at the table. "We live a long time, we Morgans. She was the Dorsai's primary authority on contracts, right up to the day she died."
"Contracts?" Hal asked.
"Contracts with whoever on other worlds wanted Dorsai to work or fight for them," said Amanda. "Families and individuals here have always made their own agreements with governments and people on the other worlds; but as the paperwork got more complicated, an expert eye to check it over became useful."
"I'd have thought all the contract experts would be in Omalu," said Hal. The purpose of his being on this world stirred in the back of his mind. "Who's the leading expert on contracts on the Dorsai, now?"
"I am," said Amanda.
He looked at her.
"Oh," he said.
"It's all right to be surprised," Amanda told him. "We Morgans not only put in long lives, we tend not to look our age. I'm not as young as I might seem; and the second Amanda saw to it I cut my teeth on contracts. I was reading them when I was four - not that I understood what I read until a few years later. The Second Amanda's also the one who saw to it my parents named their oldest daughter Amanda; and she took me over almost as soon as I was born. In a way, I was always more hers than theirs."