“Well, it’s nothing to do with me,” she said aloud, and hurried into the next hallway.
Mostly, this one held more bedrooms, all of which had clearly been vacant for a while. The doors were unlocked, the blinds drawn, and the furniture covered with white cloths. In the dim light, the draped sofas and chairs made Mina think of ghosts. In truth, the whole place had a spooky feel to it, of places meant for people and action and life that now held only stillness.
Maybe all big houses felt like that when the family wasn’t about. She’d have to ask Alice after all of this was over.
Hunting scenes and landscapes hung on the walls. Mina saw one of a castle somewhere green, at sunset. Shadows flew across the background. To a casual observer, they might have been birds.
The picture looked like something out of a book of fairy tales, like it should have had a knight in armor at the bottom of the castle and a princess leaning out a window at the top. Or maybe those were sensitive subjects to dragons. Mina giggled, then heard herself and stopped. In the empty room, she felt conspicuous, as if she’d laughed in church.
The ground floor should have been more familiar after four days, but Mina paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked around with the same uncertainty that she’d felt upstairs. She knew the drawing room where she and MacAlasdair ate breakfast; she knew the kitchen; she was passingly familiar with the rooms between them; and otherwise she’d kept to her room or Mrs. Hennings’s like…
Well, there was that image of a mad wife again.
She turned right and started off boldly, though she made sure that she was heading away from the room where MacAlasdair kept himself. Curiosity was one thing, foolhardiness quite another.
She opened a door and found a library, shelves covering three of the four walls. The books on them ranged from red-leather-bound volumes that looked almost new to haphazard bundles of peeling binding and crumbling papers. She lingered there for a while, testing the inviting armchairs in front of the fireplace and flipping through a few of the hardier- looking books.
When she opened the next door, she found the room where she’d broken the window.
Mina paused in the doorway for a few seconds that felt much longer, then stepped inside and pulled the drapes apart. The window was whole again—that could have been magic, but was more likely an expensive and hasty bit of work on the part of a glazier—and the lights of the London evening came shining in through it.
By those lights, dim as they were, she could see a long sword hanging over the fireplace. It was in a scabbard with lots of brass, and the twisted handle looked like silver. Although Mina didn’t know much about swords, this one wasn’t shaped like any kind of officer’s saber she’d seen, even from a distance. She thought it was older than most Army swords, maybe even older than the Army as she knew it.
Below the sword, little ornaments marched across the top of the manteclass="underline" a giraffe, carved out of what was probably ivory; a portrait of a gray-haired woman; and a small bronze box set with red and blue gems—most likely real rubies and sapphires, Mina thought, though small ones. On top of the box was a bronze bird, its mouth opened to sing.
Very carefully, Mina picked the box up. As she’d thought, there was a key on the bottom. When she wound it, a slow, graceful melody began to play, one that sounded as old as the sword looked. She’d certainly never heard the tune before.
Then she heard something else: footsteps in the hall outside.
After the transformation had passed, Stephen’s human form felt new and foreign. Before Bavaria, it had never done so—one shape had been as natural as the other. Now every night was an adjustment, and when he didn’t have the pressure of manes and strange women in his house, relearning his human body went, or seemed to go, much more slowly.
At home, he’d walked in the woods, secure that he could handle any threat there. The London streets weren’t nearly as safe, and Stephen didn’t wish to accidentally break a pickpocket’s arm, so he wandered through the halls of his house—trying, he’d thought sometimes, to make it feel his as he made his body do the same.
Music was one more new element in a world full of them. Pleasant as it was, the tune brought his head up and his senses to full alert. Someone was nearby. Stephen hurried down the hall toward the sound, opened the drawing room door—
—and saw Miss Seymour.
She stood in front of the windows, the city lights casting a pattern of light and shadow over her coiled hair, with her hands cupped around something that gleamed bronze.
As Stephen entered, she lifted her head and turned, full lips parting in surprise before she spoke. “Good evening, Lord MacAlasdair.”
Over the past few days, he’d come to know that careful, polite tone as the sound of drawn steeclass="underline" not striking out, but very prepared for an opponent’s blow and letting him know it. Even if that opponent hadn’t thought of himself as an opponent. Even if he was in his own house.
“Miss Seymour,” said Stephen, “I wasn’t expecting to find you here.”
“Oh? It looked like a public room,” she said. Very carefully and very visibly, she put the music box back on the mantel. “I thought I’d look around a bit. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” he said, as he more or less had to at that point. “Any room I care much about is locked.”
“And you won’t give me a ring of keys to test me?” Miss Seymour smiled thinly. “Probably just as well.”
“Yes,” said Stephen. “I wouldn’t be sure of you passing.”
“I’ll have you know I respect privacy quite well, once I know something is private.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Stephen leaned against the mantel. He could turn the lamps on, of course, sit down in one of the chairs, and wait for the staff to come back, but somehow he was disinclined toward any of those actions. In the dim light, with him and Miss Seymour both standing, talking to her felt more natural, as if they were in some scheme together—which, in a way, he supposed they were.
It had been a long time since he’d had a partner in anything he did. His siblings and his cousins had their own interests; few other people knew exactly what he was, and those were either servants or had different loyalties as well. Miss Seymour wasn’t a real partner, of course, he reminded himself, but he’d take what moments he could.
“Any news?” she asked.
“A little. The Americans had a gentleman resembling Ward in custody a few years ago. In Boston, it was. There was a young man bringing accusations. Breaking and entering, he said, but it never came to anything, and they released the man. It might not have been Ward. Though it did take place in…esoteric circles. Spiritualism and that. Rather a troublesome sect, too, from what little I could find.”
“What happened to him then?”
“We’ll be trying to find that out. Among other things. If he’s in London now and still interested in magic, I’ve a few places I can go with that.”
Miss Seymour nodded slowly. At her side, her long, graceful fingers played with the plain material of her dress. “This might take a while, then,” she said.
“That it might,” said Stephen. Was the girl that impatient to be gone? Not that he wanted her as a visitor, but God knew he’d treated her well enough. “I told you as much.”
“You did,” she said almost absently, and then went on in a much firmer voice. “When do you go see Professor Carter?”
“Tomorrow, most likely.” The professor had probably been right about his danger, or lack thereof, now that he had the bracelet. All the same, Stephen wanted to keep checking since Carter wouldn’t be able to sense something like the mist.