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Lydia, Countess nose of Wantresse; Genevieve’s great-grandmother, Mercia, Duchess nose of Sealand, and so on and so on. And, in the place of highhonor, many times great-great-grandmother; dark skinned, dark haired and mysterious, Stephanie, who had become Queen of Haven by virtue of marrying the Lord Paramount.
    “Besides,” Glorieta continued, “if the nose was good enough for a queen, it’s good enough for you. And since there’s no male heir, you’ll be Countess Genevieve of Evermire and Wantresse, Duchess of Langmarsh, Mistress of the Marches, so any nose you have will be quite all right.”
    Which rather summed it up. Genevieve’s father, the Marshal-—i.e. Arthur Lord Dustin, Duke of Langmarsh, Earl of Evermire etcetera, Councilor to the Lord Paramount and Marshal of the Royal Armies—had desired a male heir. The Duchess Marnia had become pregnant four times after Genevieve’s birth, each pregnancy ending in miscarriage or stillbirth, as had the pregnancies of other wives married into the Dustin clan. The subject of genetic defect (whispered by the physicians) could not, of course, be mentioned to the Marshal and as was her covenantal duty, Marnia tried for a fifth time. Her physicians had strongly advised otherwise, and as they had feared, the baby had been stillborn and Marnia herself had died soon after.
    The Marshal should have had sons. He was at his best as a leader of men. At the first sound of an alarm trumpet, his cold intelligence would turn from its mundane aggravations, ubiquitous as the itch, to focus his smoldering angers upon the matter at hand. Even when outnumbered, the Marshal won battles, and facing equal forces, he swept the field. Though malcontents were rare on Haven, though battles were few, the Lord Paramount felt any battle was one too many. Therefore the Lord Paramount—though not fond of many men—was very fond of the Marshal.
    A dozen sons might have diverted his attention from Genevieve, giving her some peace. As it was, she fell often beneath his reptilian eye, her dreamy insufficiencies and languishments tabulated and filed away for future reference. Though she was attentive to her duty, she seemed to him insufficiently blithe. Men liked women who were untroubled, and Genevieve too often seemed to be thinkingabout something. He had, therefore, simplified his life by packing Genevieve (then eleven) off to Mrs. Blessingham’s school, which was conveniently located in Avanto, the county seat of alpine Wantresse, only one long day’s ride from Langmarsh House.
    Subsequently the Marshal, to the surprise of most everyone, had remained a widower, though he had sporadically shopped about for a son-in-law to be the future Duke of Langmarsh. During the summer festivals or when Genevieve was home during the Northerlies, the Marshal made a habit of introducing her to likely sons of the nobility, always without consequence. After one such holiday, the Marshal wrote to Mrs. Blessingham suggesting that his daughter was “too like her mother to be satisfactory,” “couldn’t something be done to her face?” and she should be “livened up a bit,” a message which was received with something very like despair.
    “Did you meet any new men? What did you think of them?” Glorieta asked after each interlude, eager for sensation.
    Genevieve refused to titillate. “That’s what father always asks me. I always say each one is very nice, but mostly they aren’t. They always look at my nose.”
    “How did you like
them?
I’m not your father, you can tell me the truth!”
    “My loins did not twitch,” Genevieve replied. It was quite true, though she wasn’t at all sure she would know if her loins did twitch. Barbara said twitching was unmistakable, one couldn’t miss it, but if one had never experienced any such thing, how would one know? Genevieve had invented a dozen persons that she could imagine being; she had invented a hundred scenarios in which those characters might act; she