Cordelia shivered, and Oliver glanced at her in concern. “Cold, Cordelia? You shouldn’t be standing around wet.”
“You could come up to the house,” said Penney. Another sheet of rain blasted past, droplets ricocheting up onto the porch to brush their faces. He pursed his lips. “Or there’s a fire laid on in the shack—it might warm up quicker.”
“That sounds good,” said Cordelia, thinking about how the influx of wet guests might discombobulate Ma Penney, who, as she recalled from their prior meetings, did not share her spouse’s class-unconsciousness.
Oliver raised his brows and rubbed rainwater from his face. “Good thinking!” he said, and promptly took over, bundling her inside, starting the fire in the fieldstone fireplace, and dispatching the already sodden Rykov for their picnic cooler. Even after all these years, it gave Cordelia a Betan frisson to be burning wood for warmth, but the orange flames flickered up cheerily in the damp shadows, and she edged near and held her chilled hands to the radiant heat.
Penney’s first shack reminded Cordelia of many old cabins she had seen up in the Dendarii Mountains back in Aral’s district, though its one room was, if possible, even smaller. In the architectural progression up the shoreline from primitive to rustic to backcountry-comfortable, it possibly qualified as primordial, its plank door secured with a rope latch, its windows made of old bottles stuck in frames. But its roof, thickly shingled with random sheets of scrap plastic and metal, kept the rain out. It was furnished, at the moment, only with a lone bed, a table doubling as a washstand, and a few rickety chairs. A line was coiled on one wall, obviously Penney’s old clothes dryer. Oliver collected it and played it out past the fireplace to hook to the wall opposite, then put it to its intended use by flopping his wet shirt over it.
“You…?” he said, glancing at Cordelia.
Cordelia decided her sports bra qualified as a top by camping standards, and followed suit, or unsuit. She took off her squeaky wet deck shoes and sodden socks, as well, setting the first on the hearth and the latter over the line. Oliver nodded approval and imitated her.
A knock at the door heralded the return of Rykov with the cooler, and dry towels protected in plastic. He handed it all in, declining to stay; apparently the blow had interrupted his lunch up at the main house. Cordelia sent him back to his beer and company, and with luck some more dry towels from Ma Penney.
They pulled up the table and chairs in front of the fire and laid out sandwiches and fruit; a couple of thermoses even yielded a choice of hot coffee or tea. Oliver stretched his damp pale feet to the fire with a sigh of satisfaction. “This isn’t so bad.” He glanced across at her with a crooked smile. “Though not what I’d pictured, quite.”
“The mandate for today is Get away from Kareenburg,” said Cordelia. “Anything after that is gravy.”
Thoughtfully, Oliver extended her another sandwich, which she took. He said, “Good to see you getting your appetite back. I thought you’d lost too much weight. After.”
“Well…yes.” Cordelia chomped. Oliver drummed his fingers on the table and cast her another thin smile. An unusual silence fell. He sighed again, though this one sounded less satisfied than tentative. Cordelia sipped tea, sluicing out her mouth with its pleasant astringency, and studied him. Always an aesthetic pleasure. But he seemed a trifle on edge, opening his mouth as if to speak, then closing it again. Cordelia tried to imagine anything whatsoever that Oliver couldn’t say to her, after all these years, and came up blank. She essayed curiously, “What’s on your mind, Oliver?”
He made a little throwaway gesture. “Well…to tell you the truth…you.”
Her brows rose. “What have I done?”
“Nothing.”
“Huh? Should I have?” Her mental review of tasks she might have left unaddressed was derailed by his firm headshake.
“Not at all.”
She stared at him, nonplussed. He twisted uncomfortably in his wooden chair. She drank more tea. He drank more tea.
He rose to throw another log onto the fire, sat, and started again: “You haven’t found anyone, after. I mean, on the personal side. For yourself. Lately, I mean. I know not earlier, you don’t have to explain that to me.”
I haven’t what? It took her a moment to unravel this one. He meant a…lover, partner, bed-friend, spouse? Something in that general direction, anyway. “Oh. Good heavens, no. Never even thought about it. It’s just not…never made it to my to-do list, no. And where would I find time?”
“There is that.” He gave a conceding head-duck.
She blinked at him. “Yourself?”
“What? No!” He hesitated. “That is to say…not. Not been looking.”
She frowned. “Would you like to?”
“I’d thought not. At first, you know.” She nodded. He went on, “But lately…I’ve been thinking. New thoughts. You know.”
She didn’t know, but she was willing to try to catch up. After all, this was Oliver, whose happiness she certainly valued, possibly more than anyone’s outside her own family. She ran a quick mental review, but she couldn’t think of anyone that she’d noticed, young officers or diplomatic fellows or any worthy-enough man he’d be likely to run across in Kareenburg, who’d been doing the old flag-down-Oliver dance around him. Lately. Not that she’d been noticing a whole lot, lately. “That sounds good. That sounds like…recovery, actually.” The real kind.
The head-tilt this time suggested this was a fresh thought, and not an entirely comfortable one. “Eh…maybe.” His stare at her was becoming beseeching.
Sorry, my telepathy is on the fritz today, kiddo. Wait. Could it be that he feared she would think less of him for this desire to move on?
“Have you found someone who looks likely? Oliver, I think that would be a fine thing for you. But you don’t have to ask me for permission, you know!” She sat up straight, considering. “And certainly, Aral—and if you have any such silly qualms, I’m telling you flat out right now—Aral would have wanted you to find happiness, too. He always did.”
Among the many secret doubts Barrayar’s Great Man had confided to her over the years, as he’d confided to no one else—because after a certain point of history, nobody’d wanted to let him down off the bloody pedestal they’d erected under him and allow him to be so scarily human as to admit doubts—was a fear that their intense and abiding relationship might have been impeding Oliver in some way, professionally or personally. That Aral had diverted him from some more proper or better destiny. Well, better, anyway. Almost anything would have been more proper, by Barrayaran standards. And many others, she admitted ruefully. Betans generally wouldn’t have blinked at the gender thing, but the age and rank disparity would have made them choke sand. She’d been pretty alarmed herself, at first.
A not-disagreeing head-jerk from Oliver; good, she wouldn’t have to pound that bit of sense into him. But it was followed by another ambiguous hand wave that indicated she hadn’t got to whatever was eating him even yet. There were many less entertaining ways to beguile a rainy hour than to play guessing games with Oliver about his emotions—and what was it about Barrayaran males that made them so, so, so…Barrayaran about such things?—but it would make it a lot easier if he would just be more frank.
So what was he trying to say? That he’d spotted a potential heartthrob, but it wasn’t going well? How could it possibly not go well? Unless he’d set his eye on someone especially difficult, and he’d certainly experienced at least one life-model about how to manage the difficult. This was baffling.