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it. “This where they all come in? This is the right door?” She nodded, smiling now at his fatuity instead of his wit, and he carried his heavy bags over the threshold. They seemed fatuous too. Everything inside the entrance seemed very bright—the woman’s smile, the gleam of mirrors and polished floorboards and brass and lustrous fabrics. “You’re not carrying a candle,” he said.
    â€œBritain isn’t that old-fashioned, Mr. Standish. You needn’t have carried your bags by yourself, you know. The staff is here to make things easier for you. I’ll get someone to take your things to your rooms straightaway, and you may go up to relax a bit after your journey. Then we shall see you in the dining room. Mr. Wall has been waiting for this moment.” Now the beautiful smile was pure warmth again. “You must be famished, poor man.”
    Standish wondered if there was even the slightest chance that this woman might marry him.
    â€œI take it there’s nothing else in the car?”
    She clearly expected him to say no. The light in her eyes informed him that he had brought too many clothes, and that she held out these two great straining bags to him as a joke she trusted him to share. He wished that the car and everything inside it would sink down into the drive and disappear.
    â€œI guess I did bring a lot of stuff,” he said. “I had to leave some things in the car.”
    â€œWe’ll fetch them up for you. We don’t want you straining your back before you set to work.”
    She smiled as if in forgiveness of his inexperienced packing and turned away to lead him toward his rooms. Standish paused after a few steps. She hesitated and looked back at him. He gestured toward his ridiculously heavy suitcases, which sat like intruders in the polished entryway. “They’ll be seen to,” she said. “Everything will be seen to. You’ll learn our ways, Mr. Standish.”
    He set off after her down the entry hall, which he now saw to be a screened passage lined with vast tapestries. Between the long tapestries he looked into a hall the size of a ballroom in which brightly upholstered furniture had been arranged before a tall stone fireplace with Ionic columns. Big gloomy paintings of huntsmen, children, and horses hung on the paneled walls. The next time Standish came to one of the openings between the screens, he saw a gallery running above the far side of the room. Curved wooden beams and arches overhung the gallery.
    â€œThat’s the East Hall, the oldest part of the house,” the woman said, looking back at him. “Elizabethan, of course.”
    â€œOh, sure,” Standish said.
    They reached the end of the screened passage and turned left toward a staircase that seemed nearly as wide as the stairs in front of the house. Portraits of eighteenth-century noblemen glowed dully on either side of the staircase, which divided into two smaller, curving staircases at its top. Standish’s guide began ascending the stairs, and he followed.
    â€œI’m afraid there are more stairs, but you will be staying right above the library, in the Fountain Rooms. It’s where we always put our scholarly guests, and they’ve always seemed quite comfortable there.”
    â€œIs there really a fountain?”
    â€œIn the courtyard, not in the room, Mr. Standish.” Turning into the left branch of the staircase, she smiled again at him over her shoulder. “You have an excellent view of the courtyard from your rooms.”
    A question that had occurred to him in Zenith came to him now.
    â€œAm I the only one? I mean, aren’t there other people working in the library now?”
    â€œNo, of course not,” she said, giving him a rather severe, questioning look and at last pausing to allow him to catch up with her. “I assumed you would have known. Excuse me. I seem to have forgotten that you’ve never been here before.