Chapter 3: Lord Stormcroft Calls Without Being Invited

The knocker sounded at half past ten.

This was, by any reckoning that Henrietta Street's more established residents would have cared to make, a full hour and a half before any person of quality was expected to announce themselves at a private door, and a full hour before even the most anxious or presumptuous caller might arrive without giving clear offence. Mr. Fennwick, who had eaten his scrambled eggs with the focused gratitude of a man reprieved from a worse fate and was now re-annotating a secondary chart at the parlour table, looked up with an expression of mild professional alarm, as though the knock were a footnote he had not expected. Petra, who had been standing at the window regarding the street below with the distracted intensity of someone cataloguing facts she had not yet consented to organize, turned her head.

Mrs. Calloway's voice floated up from the floor below, deploying the particular register she reserved for persons of potential consequence.