Excerpt: Parabellum

The door to her aunt's house was answered by the downstairs parlor maid, who acted as general gatekeeper when the butler and housekeeper were elsewhere occupied. Footmen had fallen out of favor years ago, when it was felt that the efforts of strong men could be better appreciated farther away from home and with far more bloodshed. It was, Sophie had to admit, exceedingly more comforting in her current state to be greeted at the door by plain little Nancy than by some tall young man hired on basis of his looks.

"Miss Sophie!" the maid exclaimed when Sophie had blown in through the door. "Did you walk all the way from the office? Why didn't you take a hansom?"

"There weren't any to be had," she replied, depositing her copy of The Daily Standard with grim precision in a jardinière held aloft by two fat, naked babies. One was cross-eyed, but the other looked at her reproachfully. She felt inclined to give it a good kick, but feared she might slip in her wet shoes on the highly polished floor of her aunt's foyer. "The rain, you know."

"What? Even the ones without horses?" Nancy waited for her to undo the clasp on her cloak and then helped her out of it.

"Those went first."

Relieved of a wealth of soggy wool by her aunt's downstairs parlor maid, she removed the hat pin from her hat and set both it and the hat on the hall table. Bracing herself for the worst, she looked up and, instead of the mirror she had been expecting, found nothing but a blank wall.

"What's happened to the hall mirror?"

"Mrs. Parmenter thought that she saw the silver flaking off the back of it and she sent it out to be redone."

"Redone!" Sophie glanced again at the space where the mirror had hung. "But she only bought it last month."

"Madam deemed it insufficiently reflective."

"My aunt has deemed me insufficiently reflective on more than one occasion and she has never sent me out to be resilvered."

"I reckon that's because you're not a hall mirror, miss," Nancy said.

"And if I were one, the glaziers would be tired of the sight of me?" Sophie returned, and they both giggled.