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Timov's sisters had assured her, back in the day, that there were much worse husbands than Londo Mollari, and Timov had always known that it was true. Unfortunately, none of that actually made Londo a good husband.
She had been willing to try, and he had not. Then he had wanted, and she had not. She had still been willing to try, but he had wanted something-- someone-- she had never learned how to be. Wild passion and enticing sexuality were outside her training and experience, and he had no patience to teach her.
He had no patience in general. No ability to meet other people where they were and then find common ground.
Timov thought that had been the slow poison in their relationship. Trading verbal barbs could have turned into banter. Shared meals or shared walks or shared something could have turned into rapport. Instead the table became an abyss between them that could only be bridged by how thoroughly they despised each other.
That, at least, was mutual.
For many years, she'd thought that she was the problem in the marriage. Watching Londo's other wives, however, led her to suspect that no common ground could have been enough.
Perhaps, if there had been a child from one of those early couplings, their marriage might have been different. Londo might have shifted her from unwanted wife to other parent of my child. She had wanted children.
Daggair and Mariel had both tried hard to get pregnant, and neither had.
Timov suspected that Londo couldn't father children. Or perhaps he had decided not to and gotten secret medical treatment to prevent the possibility.
Londo had certainly done stupider things while drunk or angry or drunk and angry.
Timov had considered her options carefully after she concluded that she was done with their marriage except as an inescapable legal bond. She didn't have the temperament for intrigue and politics or, even, social climbing. She wasn't interested in breeding hunting or riding animals. She quite liked flowers but found growing them inutterably tedious. Arranging cut flowers was depressing because she empathized with those blossoms as they withered and died.
What else was Timov, wife of Londo Mollari?
She enjoyed listening to music and viewing works of art. Playing badly and painting badly were perfectly respectable but unsatisfying unless Londo was near enough to be appalled. She thought about writing poetry, but, anything she wrote down, especially if it was less than perfect, would be turned against her.
Anything outside of her own head could be turned against her, and she cared more about her words than she did about music or painting.
Mostly, she wanted to travel and, maybe, to attend a university. There was so much out there that she didn't know and couldn't touch. But she was who she was, and the universe was as it was. No Centauri woman had that sort of opportunity.
So she turned to charity work. She dabbled with boards of directors and fundraising, but it felt a lot like the bad painting and the bad music. Unsatisfying.
So she poked and prodded at the details of how different organizations functioned and demanded documentation about outcomes. Then she speculated about what factors affected the outcomes. She thought about better approaches.
She didn't write any of that down.
Instead, she narrowed her focus. She gave her time to charities for children. Then she limited herself to charities for houseless orphans. The outcomes there were terrible, and no one particularly cared because those children didn't matter. Most of them would end up slaves or, at best, two steps up from slaves.
And it wasn't that those children-- or the adults they would become-- had less potential than other Centauri did. They just had fewer opportunities.
She might not get it right, but no one else was even trying. More importantly, no one else would notice if-- when-- she succeeded.
So she funded a school for foundling girls and orphan girls. She named it for Voiema of the Thousand Graces, the goddess favored by the Emperor's Mother. It proved a wise choice of name because the Emperor's Mother added to the endowment and so did several people who hoped that their charity would buy them favor with her.
Timov then found a few widows willing to teach letters and arithmetic. Budgeting and accounts. Meal planning. Calligraphy. Anything she could justify as a useful skill that might work to make the girls' minds more valuable than their bodies. She couldn't protect them after they left her school, but she could put her thumb on the scales while pretending she wasn't, that she would never.
Within a decade, Timov's proteges, the best of them at least, were stepping into positions as personal assistants to a few of Timov's female relatives. They weren't maids or cooks; instead they kept schedules, managed correspondence, and acted as social gatekeepers when asked. They all knew how to fade into the background, and they'd learned to notice everything.
Timov regretted that she couldn't make them scientists or diplomats. She regretted that removing them from Centauri Prime wasn't a real option.
If Londo ever realized she was emotionally invested, Timov's girls would be at risk. As it was, he seemed to view Timov's charity work as a duty, a grinding, joyless undertaking, and he resented the money she spent on it less than he resented the much smaller amount she spent on her clothing and her servants.
Londo had somehow not noticed that Timov's girls wrote to her and to each other, that she gave them little reunion gatherings with finger food and mild alcohol, or that women outside of Timov's family began to prize getting one of Timov's girls-- they even called them that-- as a status symbol and then kept them because they were useful. Londo had no idea how much information Timov had or could get.
She didn't write any of it down. She didn't need to. She'd learned all six thousand verses of Larsa's Ride when she was eight, and she could still recite it perfectly. No dropped verses. No stumbles. Training memory had remained part of expectations for proper Centauri ladies even after women started being encouraged to learn to read. She'd never have married a Mollari if she hadn't been perfect in all the expected arts.
And there were so many worse husbands than Londo Mollari.
Mostly, she used what she knew in small ways-- funding for the orphanage, warnings for any of her girls that might be in households at risk, warnings for ladies of her family and of her broader acquaintance who she valued for one reason or another. Playing too deep would make people notice her, and the things she actually wanted-- Well, reading histories from elsewhere implied that stable social change came slowly.
Unless it came catastrophically. Timov preferred to avoid that. The odds that people she cared about would die horribly made her distinctly unhappy. She would probably be too dead to mourn, but the principle mattered.
Daggair, of course, noticed the social prestige of having one of Timov's girls and demanded one.
Timov selected Vehnyi with extreme care because Daggair needed someone exceptional. Well, managing Daggair needed someone exceptional. It was rather like planting an orchard, something that would take years to bear fruit but that was absolutely worth the investment.
Daggair had a great store of other people's dirty secrets, and she was not as discreet as she thought she was when she used them.
Timov didn't need those secrets, but getting them was a thing she could work toward.
And, really, one never knew. Maybe, someday, she'd want something. It only made sense to gather what tools she could.
By the time Londo went to Babylon 5, Timov's girls were simply an accepted part of life. Very few people realized that their school was only two decades old.
After the first decade, one of her sisters had asked for a girl to help her son manage his first administrative position. Once Timov had confirmed that this was in no way a euphemism for providing a competent concubine or disposable mistress, she grasped the opportunity firmly and offered one of the graduates from her first class who had been working for their grandmother.
Timov trusted Adlain not to be foolish enough to try to seduce the boy, and young Denyev would associate her with an old woman who had rather frightened him when he was small. It wasn't foolproof, but it would do.
There were so many more dangers for her proteges in those positions that she remained extremely selective about allowing any of them to work directly for men.
Londo was never getting within sniffing distance of any of Timov's girls, but Timov did send someone to Vir Cotto while he was serving as Ambassador to the Minbari.
That was equal parts Timov wanting someone to send back videos of Minbari festivals and architecture and Timov being deeply curious about Vir.
Watching Londo with Vir, Timov got some idea of what Londo would have been like as a father, and she found herself glad that they hadn't had children.
Even if he had loved them-- and he might have-- Londo would only have ruined them. The only reason he hadn't ruined Vir was that the boy had a hidden spine of steel. Or, perhaps, not steel because he could bend without breaking like a reed in wind. The steel only showed sometimes.
Vir's scheme with Narn death certificates was technically treasonous, but it was clever and compassionate in a way that caught Timov's attention.
Timov suspected that Vir's steel would show more as he aged into true adulthood and independence. She put a little extra effort into making a list of eligible ladies in Vir's age range who might suit him well. She weighted ethics over morals and for kindness and intelligence over money or connections. She didn't ignore money and connections, but Londo would be Emperor so they mattered less.
That gave Timov considerable latitude to meddle.
She forwarded the annotated list to Londo, on parchment marked as 'personal' so that there was no risk any member of his staff would open it first, with a note that said, In hopes that the boy might end up happier than we have been. She half expected to get it back as ashes or as shredded bits, but Londo only started making surprisingly discreet inquiries about the ladies on the list.
Londo becoming Emperor changed Timov's life very little. He didn't want her at court, and she preferred to avoid going there anyway. Mostly, it meant that she could sponsor more orphanages and schools.
And that people didn't ask questions about why the children learned certain skills. They never had asked, but she'd always been aware that they might. An Emperor's wife training spies was only sensible.
For certain very paranoid values of sensible.
Timov suspected that she and Londo were only still married because he had to be married to someone. She, at least, wasn't going to make unexpected demands, and he could use her as a threat against other matrimonial prospects. She told Londo as much when she wrote to congratulate him on his coronation. Tell the fathers and brothers of your potential second wives that they'll have to live with me. For safety, perhaps, or because I'm a domineering nag. Some such. A girl who vanishes so completely from court will do little good for families wanting influence.
Living at such a remove from court meant that Timov only gradually noticed the changes in Londo. She had to piece them together from reports she received from her girls and from her relatives. None of those showed the complete picture, and she had to reshuffle the fragments of information several times before she understood that something was profoundly wrong.
She regretted, deeply, that she had so few connections outside of Centauri Prime and its colonies. She had no idea how the situation looked from outside, but she suspected that some things would be clearer if she had that additional view. Even fragments of it would help.
Londo's decisions were harming the Centauri people. They were harming House Mollari. The harm, viewed through Timov's sources, looked deliberate, malicious even, rather than incompetent or proud or greedy. He seemed to make better, kinder decisions when he was drunk than he did when sober.
That was not the way that men usually worked.
So she started writing down the things she knew, more than two decades worth of rumors, secrets, and petty incidents that revealed patterns. She needed to use the information which meant she needed to be able to share it without reciting it. That would be tedious, time consuming, and unsubtle. Better the risk of having physical records.
Then, she summoned Vir. Officially, it was a visit for him to meet some of her marriageable nieces, and she had several of those hanging around the place, trying to look attractive.
Londo considered matchmaking a perfectly acceptable female occupation, and she'd submitted her list of nieces to him in advance. His response was a drunken video call in which he said, "Vir is at risk. He's yours now. Do what you will." He looked dreadful, exhausted and more than a little terrified.
Timov understood that Londo meant, Vir is at risk from me. She wondered how much Vir knew about that.
Possibly more than she did. Vir knew Londo better and had been present for the events that led to him becoming Emperor.
When Vir came, Timov took him for a walk in the garden. "You should have come to me," she told him. She held up a hand to forestall his denial that there was anything to worry about. "I've spent most of my marriage building resources I thought I'd never need. It was-- mostly-- a game. Now-- When you need to know something about court, about the great houses, about the bureaucracy, about what color socks my husband is wearing, you come to me. Or send someone to me. Any of my girls can visit without drawing attention."
She was less than certain that that was true for any member of Vir's off-world staff, but it was truer for them than it was for Vir.
"Consider," she added, "how much I know about your time on Minbar."
He didn't quite blanch. His court mask was improving.
"Exactly," Timov said. "Tell me. I'm willing to spend my capital if matters are as bad as I fear."
Vir looked away. "I don't actually know," he said after almost a minute of silence, "but there's definitely something wrong. Could you-- Do you have any hints of-- I think there are aliens at court, not the Shadows-- They're definitely gone. but... But like that." He sighed. "He doesn't even want me in the same room anymore, not even on the same planet."
Timov nodded. "I can change the planet part. Flirt with my nieces at dinner but make no promises. They'll tell people that's why you're here because they want it to be true. It's entirely acceptable for me to keep calling you back to Centauri Prime to meet potential brides." Her own famously bitter marriage would cover the fact that Vir wouldn't normally be allowed to choose. "I'll be sending several of my people with you when you go."
They probably couldn't stop the catastrophe entirely, but maybe they could steer it a little.