Chapter 21: Stormcroft Says the Wrong Thing at the Precisely Right Moment

The east gallery had acquired, in the forty minutes since midnight, the particular atmosphere of a room in which something significant had occurred and no one had yet agreed on what to call it.

The intermediary was gone—departed through the primary entrance under circumstances Miss Chase had arranged with the efficiency of someone who had prepared for this contingency before departing Bath and had simply been waiting for the relevant moment to deploy it. The associate had withdrawn through the secondary entrance at approximately the same time, which Petra noted as either a coincidence or a coordination, and filed away with several other things she intended to examine properly when she was somewhere the clocks worked.

The ring was in Lord Stormcroft's left breast pocket, which was where Miss Chase had placed it with the air of someone returning a borrowed volume to its correct shelf. It would go back to the vault in the morning. The paperwork, Miss Chase had observed, would be considerable. She had appeared genuinely pleased by this prospect.