Chapter 23: Tyrwick's Gambit in the Queen's Drawing Room

The queen received him at ten o'clock, which was, in Tyrwick's considerable experience of his sister's scheduling, precisely calculated to suggest that she had other matters of greater consequence occupying the earlier portion of her morning, and that his request for an audience had been accommodated with the generous condescension of a woman who considered the accommodation an act of charity.

He arrived four minutes early and was made to wait six. The arithmetic was not lost on him.

Cerissa's private drawing room occupied the western corner of the upper floor, where the windows looked out over the ornamental gardens and, beyond them, the river, which was conducting itself this morning with the pleasant indifference of water that has no opinion about succession politics. The room itself was everything Cerissa's rooms invariably were: precisely ordered, aesthetically impeccable, and furnished in such a way that every seat except her own required its occupant to look slightly upward. Tyrwick had noted this arrangement twenty years ago and had never once sat in the appointed chair without thinking about it.