Chapter 7: A Conversation with a Painted Headmaster

The portraits in the third-floor corridor were, by seven minutes past eight in the morning, fully awake and in considerable disagreement about what they had just witnessed.

Holmes walked beneath them without looking up, which seemed to agitate them further. A red-faced Admiral in oils leaned out of his frame to demand whether he'd seen the ceiling, and Holmes said 'Yes' without breaking stride, which was apparently not the response the Admiral had anticipated. A medieval herbalist clutched a painted bunch of dried lavender to her painted chest and whispered loudly to her neighbour that she didn't like the look of him, and her neighbour, a seventeenth-century magistrate with excellent taste, whispered back that she was entirely correct. A small dog in the corner of a hunting tableau had begun to bark, though at what was unclear.

Holmes did not slow until he reached the door to the library's secondary entrance, where he stopped and stood for a moment with one hand flat against the stone wall, thinking.