a deep blue dimple in her chin. She too was an aristocratic fulgar. A man perhaps in his thirties, dark-eyed and dark-haired with a long almost horselike face, followed her closely. Introduced as Mister Threedice, he was her factotum, a laggard of taciturn manners and blunt address. He stared at Rossamund with a callous yet melancholy intensity. Rossamund returned this untoward attention with a polite incline of his head, to which the other factotum simply looked away.
'Here is an innovation,' said Lady Madigan coolly, speaking with a peculiar familiarity. 'The Branden Rose turned hostess!'
Europe regarded her evenly but said nothing.
'You wish it be known to the world that all is fit and fine with you, sister,' the Marchess of the Pike said as she sat on the edge of a turkoman and folded her daintily gloved hands in her lap.
'I do.'
'I hear, dear one,' Lady Madigan continued, 'that you returned to Brandentown after an especially rugged outing.'
'It is about the street, then?' Europe replied.
'Assuredly so, sister; certain streets, at least,' Lady Madigan added wryly. 'Is there a responsible party for this especial ruggedness?'
'Yes.'
'Are you to do anything about them?'
Europe's eye gleamed as she quickly glanced to Rossamund. 'I may yet, my dear,' she said.
'Am I invited?'
'Perhaps I shall tell you more at my little rout,' the Duchess-in-waiting returned.
'Until then, sister.'
'Indeed.'
The Marchess of Pike stood, bowed and left.
Absorbed in his penmanship, Mister Chudleigh seemed not at all exercised by this odd conversation of lofty women, nor did he notice the Lady Madigan's departure, and Rossamund kept his increasingly bemused ponderings to himself.
Into this contemplative silence there came a muted yet clear stentorian clatter and with it a loud 'Whoop!' sounding very much as if it originated in the floors above. Sent upstairs to investigate, Rossamund soon discovered Fransitart laid out on the ludion floor, cradling his arm, a scale toppled beside him and with it the embellishment he had clearly been attempting to fix to the wall.
'Broke it, lad,' the ex-dormitory master, lying on the boards as the young factotum skidded to stop beside him, explained with wry grimace. 'Tumbled like some self-for-gettin' Old Gate pensioner an' put out me wings to catch meself an' SNAP!.. twice.'
Rossamund went round-eyed at the mangle of oddly shaped sleeve his old master gripped.
Crispus arrived in a puff, physic's bag in hand, calling orders for hot water, towels and directing immediately for a tandem to be brought up.
'My, my, my.' The physician clucked his tongue as he prodded the limb in initial inquiry. He tried lifting it a little and Fransitart roared with pain. 'Well, well, my etiolated friend, not that way then…,' he murmured. 'We will have to cut the sleeve.'
Giving the old vinegaroon the briefest swig of some stupefacting draught-obtorpes, the physician called it-and cord of leather to clamp between his teeth, Crispus began to cut at the cloth of the frock a coat sleeve.
Under the influence of the draught Fransitart bore his discomfort with greater calm, sweating profusely, teeth clenched on the leather bit.
Putting on his complex spectacles, Crispus looked up at the watchers-a veritable audience of staff-with an exaggerated tilt of his head. 'I would depart now if I were of sensitive constitution,' he advised.
Coming to himself, Kitchen shooed the water-bringing maids out of the room and the curious footmen with them. He, however, lingered to watch from the relatively less gruesome vantage of the door.
Uncertain as to whether he wanted to see the doctor at his work, Rossamund nevertheless remained.
With the obstruction of the sleeve removed, Crispus began his investigation in earnest, palpating the swollen flesh… but Rossamund could look no longer, his old master's restrained cries enough to go on.
'My, my,' Crispus breathed, his tone of wonder catching Rossamund's attention. The physician was bending over some obviously fascinating item on the mess of the old salt's forearm.The bandage that Fransitart had retained was gone.
The cruorpunxis!
The mark was there as before.
Rossamund glanced anxiously to Kitchen, who was peering at it with waxing interest.
'Astonishing! Astonishing!' Crispus marveled. 'Simply astonishing! Lah! To think that butchering novice got it correct!'
With the words You know! on his lips, Rossamund checked himself and instead ordered Kitchen from the room.
Looking fit to disregard the young factotum's command, the steward reluctantly departed, closing the double doors behind him with a pointed thump.
Silence hung in the room like an admission.
'Oh, I have heard all about the inquiry,' Crispus said with light factuality, blinking through his apparatus in wonder at the surprise of his listeners. 'I could but not; the bruit of it went all through the manse. Swill marked his own arm with a complete cruorpunxis, then went about with it conspicuously bandaged almost the moment you departed. Add this to his attempt to bully me with the menace of charges of sedornition for supporting you, my friend, and I had clues enough.What he did not divulge through his threats and allusions about the inquiry's progress, Lady Dolours clarified later.' The physician peered now at Rossamund, his wondering eye enlarged and discolored by the apparatus lens. 'To think that quackeen surgeon was correct…' He regarded Rossamund with awe.
'So we keep saying…,' Fransitart muttered darkly through the leather cord. He spat out the gag. 'Well, will ye have to chop my wing, phiz?' he gruffed.
'No, no, not a bit of it!' Crispus almost laughed, quickly restoring his focus to his patient. 'It is a complex break, certainly, but never fear, sir! They might lop off limbs like a storm-cracked mast out at sea, but this is nothing my experienced ministrations will not heal. Breaks are a common hurt in my line of physicking.'
'Oh…' Fransitart looked almost disappointed.
'Being a follower of obligantic ossatomy I shall trice your bones what you might call 'prodigious firm'-even with a wounded wing of my own.' He wagged his own slung arm. 'After that I am sure your old vinegar chum can make for you some of my most excellent draughts to help the whole process along.'
Aided by Rossamund, the physician helped Fransitart to a more comfortable seat and set about washing his battered limb, setting to the task with silent concentration.
'I must say, Rossamund,' Crispus eventually said, 'it is uncommon irony that you now work for a teratologist; almost humorous if its consequence were not so serious.'
'Aye.' The young factotum smiled wryly.
'Ye seem well reconciled to th' revelation, Doctor C,' Fransitart observed, under the calm of the obtorpes, 'but about 'ere per'aps th' less said th' better, aye?' he suggested a little tartly.
'Oh, well, yes, as you say… Very wise… Very wise.' In the dim of the evening a peculiar figure came calling: a woman with a face striped like an animal, her head crowned with a dandicomb of elegantly curved and knobbled horns. She was a wandering caladine, clad in a bossock of prus and sable. In a peculiarly husky voice, she introduced herself as Saphine of the Maids of Malady.
Rossamund recognized her immediately as a caladine Threnody had named while they had sat with Europe months ago in the saloon of the Brisking Cat on the Wormway.
'I wish to speak with the Branden Rose upon the matter of a mutual adversary,' the caladine Saphine explained to him, dipping her head with unselfconscious ease to navigate her horns through first the front and then
