Lady Emily’s lips quirked in another wry smile, and she shook her head.

“Your Grace, I think that whatever else happens, the two of us are going to come to know one another much too well to continue with all these formalities. Unless you object, I shall call you Honor, and you shall call me Emily.”

“Of course… Emily,” Honor agreed. It was odd, she thought. Emily was older than her own mother, and a tiny part of Honor recognized that seniority and responded to it. But only a tiny part. And that, she realized, was because although she could taste Emily’s awareness of her own relative youth, the countess radiated no sense of superiority. She was aware of her own age and experience, but she was also aware of Honor’s, and her sense of sureness, of being the one who knew how to proceed in this painful instance, arose from the fact that her experience was different from Honor’s, not greater.

“Thank you,” Emily said, and her chair tilted slightly backwards in mid-air while she gazed thoughtfully at her guest.

“You realize that Hamish asked you here at my suggestion,” she said after a moment, more as someone observing an unexpected truth than as if she were asking a question or making a statement, and Honor nodded.

“I’d hoped you would, just as I’d hoped you’d come,” Emily continued. “I meant it when I said I regret meeting under these circumstances, but I’ve been curious about you for years now. So in a way, I’m happy to finally meet you, although I could certainly wish it hadn’t come about this way.”

She paused for a moment, then gave her head a small toss and continued more briskly.

“You and Hamish—and I—have been made the victims of a concerted, vicious attack. One that depends for success on innuendo and hypocrisy in the service of the belief that the end justifies any means whatsoever. And ugly as it may be, and for all the potential for public opinion to recoil on the accusers in disgust, it’s unfortunately effective. Because it relies on the knife in the back rather than open confrontation, it can never be answered by reasoned argument or proof of innocence, however genuine and however convincingly presented. Even if you and Hamish were having an affair, which I don’t for a moment believe you are, it ought to be your business. And mine, perhaps, but no one else’s. Yet even though almost anyone in the Star Kingdom would agree with that statement in the abstract, by now it’s completely useless as a defense. You realize that, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Honor nodded again, stroking Nimitz’s silky pelt.

“I don’t know that there is a defense, really,” Emily said frankly. “It’s always harder to prove a negative, and the more you two or your surrogates deny the lies being told about you, the more a certain portion of the electorate will believe them. Worse, all of the Government newsfaxes and commentators are beginning to take it as a given that you’re guilty as charged. Very soon now, they won’t even bother to argue the case any longer. The assumption of guilt will simply be there, in everything they write or say, and the taint will cling despite anything you can do.”