Wattle-necked women in stiff headdresses and long-nosed men glowered at Mary from their coffered prisons. The fabric of Sibley Court hadn't changed much since the Armada. It suited Letty brilliantly. She looked right against the finicky paneling and the musty old tapestries, right in a way that Mary never would have. If Mary had had her way, she would have torn the whole monstrosity down and started all over again in good clean marble.

Lucky for Sibley Court, then, that Geoffrey hadn't married her. Lucky for Geoffrey, lucky for Letty, lucky for everyone.

If she was being honest, lucky for herself as well. All through the era of his adoration, Pinchingdale had been a crashing bore.

Even a boring husband was better than being left on the shelf, forced to rely on the charity of her relations, pointed at and whispered about by giggling girls fresh in their first Season.

Reaching the end of the upper gallery, Mary slipped beneath an elaborately carved lintel, no proper destination in her head except away. She found herself in a seemingly endless corridor, where the plastered ceiling stabbed down in regular points like pawns suspended upside down. After a moment of disorientation, she realized where she was. Originally constructed during the reign of Henry, before being "improved" during the tenure of his daughter, the house had been built in the shape of an H, in a rather obvious compliment to the monarch. She was in the crossbar of the H, a long and narrow gallery that connected one wing of the house with the other.

On either side of her, narrow-faced Pinchingdales gazed superciliously down on her, their gilded frames spotted with age. There was at least half a mile between the two wings of the house, long enough to display three centuries' worth of relations and even one or two particularly prized pets. Mary wandered aimlessly among them, absently noting the dull sheen of painted jewels, repeated over and over.