“I did,” James said. At her surprised look, he added, “Perhaps I should show you around the house? And Risa, perhaps Effie could set out a simple supper? I believe you said something about tea.”

“Who’s Effie?” Cordelia whispered, while Risa, Cortana in hand, led the coachman upstairs with the bags.

“New maid. Risa hired her. Apparently she used to work for the Pouncebys,” said James, as Cordelia followed him into a large dining room with a thick carpet, a marble fireplace, and tall windows overlooking Curzon Street. Her eye was immediately drawn to a set of four illuminated drawings arranged on the wall. James watched her nervously, the fingers of his right hand tapping against his leg, as she approached them.

They were Persian miniatures done in richly pigmented shades of scarlet and cobalt and gold. She spun to look at James in astonishment. “Where did you find these?”

“An antiquities shop in Soho,” James said. She still couldn’t quite read his expression. “They were selling off the estate of a Persian merchant living abroad.”

Cordelia leaned close to examine the beautiful nasta‘ lı¯q calligraphy above the images of prophets and acolytes and musicians, birds and horses and rivers. “This is by Rumi,” she whispered, recognizing a verse: The wound is the place where the Light enters you. It had always been one of her favorites.

Her heart beating quickly, she turned to take in the rest of the room, with its silk-covered walls, its elaborately filigreed chandelier and rosewood table and chairs with carved details.

“The table expands to seat sixteen,” James said. “Though I’m not sure I know that many people I’d want to have dinner with. Come see the rest of the house.”

Cordelia followed him into the corridor, her full skirts barely fitting through the doorway. There was a beautiful drawing room, papered in blue and white, with a massive piano; skipping the study, they headed downstairs to a kitchen full of warm yellow light. A small door in the wall led out to a patch of garden—snow-covered now, but there were rose trellises whose flowers would bloom in summer.

A maid in a black dress—Effie, Cordelia assumed—marched into the kitchen, an empty tray in her hand. She eyed James and Cordelia speculatively, as if sizing them up for sale. She had steel-gray hair swept up in a pompadour, and a gimlet eye. “I’ve laid on some food for you in the study,” she said, without bothering to introduce herself. “It won’t be nearly so good when it’s cold.”

The corner of James’s mouth twitched. “Then I suppose we’d better eat it now,” he said to Cordelia, with an expression of great seriousness, and led her upstairs.