Bad as it was for White Haven, it was even worse for Honor. For all his continuing vigor, Hamish Alexander was one hundred and three T-years old, almost fifty T-years older than she was. In a society with prolong, where life spans would be as much as three T-centuries, that gap meant very little. But Hamish was from the very first generation of Manticoran prolong recipients. Most first- and second-generation prolong recipients had grown to at least young adulthood surrounded by pre-prolong parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts. Their fundamental attitudes towards what age meant, and particularly towards the significance of differences in age, had been formed in a society which had not yet developed a true acceptance for how long people, themselves included, were now likely to live.

Worse, perhaps, the earlier, less advanced generations of the prolong therapies stopped the physical aging process at a later stage, cosmetically, at least. So, as a first-generation recipient, Hamish’s black hair was liberally threaded with silver, his face more deeply graven by character lines and crows feet. In a pre-prolong society, he might have been taken for a vigorous man in his mid-forties or very early fifties. But Honor was a third-generation recipient. Physically, she was no more than into her late twenties, and so for many of those following the story, she was the “younger woman.” The Jezebel. In their eyes, his “betrayal” of Lady White Haven after so many years of unwavering fidelity could only have resulted from the way she had tempted and systematically pursued him.

The one thing for which she was truly grateful at the moment was that she’d managed to convince both her parents to stay safely on Grayson. It would have been bad enough if her father had been in the Star Kingdom, because as gentle and compassionate a man as Alfred Harrington was, Honor knew perfectly well from whom she had inherited her own temper. Very few people had ever seen her father actually lose his temper; of those who had, not all had survived the experience, although that had been in his own days of naval service, and he seldom discussed it even with her.

But her mother would have been worse. Far worse. On Allison Chou Harrington’s birth world of Beowulf, public opinion would have laughed itself silly at the hysterical thought that matters of the heart were the business of anyone except the individuals actually involved. The nature of the Alexanders’ marriage vows would have weighed heavily in the scale of Beowulf opinion, but the Beowulfers would have concluded, with healthy rationality, that if the individuals in question-all the individuals in question—were prepared to modify those vows, that was their own affair. In any case, the notion that any of it could have any impact on Honor’s public responsibilities would have been ludicrous.

Allison Harrington, despite almost a T-century as a citizen of the Star Kingdom, remained very much a Beowulfer in that respect. And Honor’s mother. Her recent letters to Honor radiated a bare-clawed ferocity which was almost frightening, and Honor shuddered every time she thought of Allison loose on something like “Into the Fire.” Or, even worse, in the same room as Regina Clausel. Her mother might be tiny, but so were treecats.