Stung at this public solicitude for his weakened condition, Grey forced himself to his feet, coming to stand beside the Hanoverian, who—with the butler in full rout—had now removed his helmet and was looking quite pleased with himself.

“You are better now, Major?” he inquired, dabbing sweat delicately from his hairline with a linen handkerchief.

“Much, I thank you. I take it that both Reinhardt Mayrhofer and his wife are out?” Reinhardt, he reflected, was almost certainly out. But the wife—

“So the butler says. If he is not out, he is a coward,” von Namtzen said with satisfaction, putting away his handkerchief. “I will root him out of his hiding place like a turnip, though, and then—what will you do, then?” he inquired.

“Probably nothing,” Grey said. “I believe him to be dead. Is that the gentleman in question, by chance?” He nodded at a small framed portrait on a table by the window, its frame set with pearls.

“Yes, that is Mayrhofer and his wife, Maria. They are cousins,” he added, unnecessarily, in view of the close resemblance of the two faces in the portrait.

While both had a delicacy of feature, with long necks and rounded chins, Reinhardt was possessed of an imposing nose and an aristocratic scowl. Maria was a lovely woman, though, Grey thought; she was wigged in the portrait, of course, but had the same warm skin tones and brown eyes as her husband, and so was also likely dark-haired.

“Reinhardt is dead?” von Namtzen asked with interest, looking at the portrait. “How did he die?”

“Shot,” Grey replied briefly. “Quite possibly by the gentleman who poisoned me.”

“What a very industrious sort of fellow.” Von Namtzen’s attention was distracted at this point by the entrance of a parlor maid, white-faced with nerves and clutching a small dish containing the requested egg whites. She glanced from one man to the other, then held out the dish timidly toward von Namtzen.

“Danke,” he said. He handed the dish to Grey, then proceeded at once to catechize the maid, bending toward her in a way that made her press herself against the nearest wall, terrorized into speechlessness and capable only of shaking her head yes and no.

Unable to follow the nuances of this one-sided conversation, Grey turned away, viewing the contents of his dish with distaste. The sound of footsteps in the corridor and agitated voices indicated that the butler was indeed assembling the household, as ordered. Depositing the dish behind an alabaster vase on the desk, he stepped out into the corridor, to find a small crowd of household servants milling about, all chattering in excited German.

At sight of him, they stopped abruptly and stared, with a mixture of curiosity, suspicion, and what looked like simple fright on some faces. Why? he wondered. Was it the uniform?

“Guten Tag,” he said, smiling pleasantly. “Are any of you English?”