“I’d like to view the interior of Rolfe House,” Adele said, offering the doorman her visiting card. “Please inform your master, or whoever’s in charge in his absence.”
The doorman took the card, read its face, and sniffed. “The master’s not entertaining spacers, that I can tell you,” he said. “I’ll put it in the tray for him to see when he comes down if you like. You can come back another day for your answer.”
He held the card back toward Adele. “Or you can just save your time.”
Adele took her card and turned it over as she removed a stylus from her breast pocket. The face of the card read:
Adele Mundy
RCS Princess Cecile
On its reverse she wrote Mundy of Chatsworth. She smiled at the servant. “Take this to your master,” she said pleasantly, tucking the card between his lapel and shirt front. “Now. I will await him in the anteroom for a reasonable time, which I have set at two minutes. If he hasn’t come to greet me by the end of that period, I will go looking for him.”
“But—” the doorman began.
Tovera pinched the man’s lips closed. “And I’ll come looking for you, laddy,” she said. “Let’s not learn what’ll happen when I find you, all right?”
The servant stumbled as he reached for the door because he was patting Adele’s card to keep it safe as he moved. He started to close the panel behind him, then remembered the visitors were following. He was leaving the entrance hall on the way to the servants’ stairs as Adele entered.
Adele glanced at the floor, then stared in horror and disbelief. What she’d expected was the beewood of her childhood, twenty-inch boards cut from trees on Chatsworth Major, the country estate, and set edgewise. Every generation or so the surface was planed flat, but even so the patterns of wear had an organic reality that bound the house inextricably into the fabric of Cinnabar.
“Good God,” Adele said under her breath. She was standing on the cravat of the male half of a pair of mosaic portraits. Gold letters curving like a halo above the man’s hair read ligier rolfe. The woman facing him was Marina Casaubon Rolfe, if her caption was to be believed.
A housemaid carrying a laundry basket stepped into the hall from the door under the formal staircase. She called over her shoulder toward the basement, “Well you can tell her for me that—”
She saw the visitors, fell silent, and gave them a half-nod as she scurried out the back door. Adele caught a glimpse of doors at close intervals on both sides of the hall beyond: the servants’ quarters here on the ground floor. That at least hadn’t changed in the past fifteen years.
“Ligier is your cousin, mistress?” Tovera asked mildly. Her eyes danced across doorways and up the four levels of the staircase, covering angles from which someone might spy on them—or shoot.
“A second cousin of my mother’s, I believe,” Adele said. Her lips formed the words while her mind still tried to cope with the desecration beneath her feet. The mosaic was quite recent; the glazing of the chips in the center of the pattern showed no sign of wear from grit tracked in on the feet of visitors. “I never met him.”
She smiled without humor. “If he’d been close to the family, of course,” she added, “his head would have been on Speaker’s Rock instead of here on the floor.”
Two servants started down from the top of the formal staircase. One of them ducked into a room on the third floor and shouted a half-intelligible demand. Moments later he returned with two more footmen in tow, one of them adjusting his cummerbund.
At least the stairs were still honey-colored beewood; though the newel posts, once Mundy arrows, were now capped by barking dogs. It was an ugly—and worse, a silly—crest, but Adele grudgingly admitted that the woodcarver knew his business.
A man smoothing a hastily donned jacket came to the head of the stairs. The footmen arrayed on the third floor started down; he followed in their wake.
“Just inside the two minutes,” said Tovera. She sounded regretful.