Hamish is awoken the next morning, abruptly and rather annoyingly, much earlier than he would have liked and in a manner most scandalous (despite the events of the last few days, there still are things Hamish considers scandalous, and this is one): there is a man in his bed. More precisely, a mad, ginger haberdasher.

"Mr. Hightopp!" Hamish scuttles across the mattress and off the bed, pulling the strangled sheets away with him to reveal Hatta curled up on the other side like a child. Huffing severely, Hamish is struck silent for several minutes as he works to be able to speak through his indignation. "Mr. Hightopp, what in the name of our Holy Matron are you doing in my bed!"

Hatta peers over his shoulder, almost (can you believe it!) glaring at Hamish. "Ah'm sleepin, wha' dus i' look like? Keep i' down, ya crowin cock."

And then he simply rolls back over.

Unwilling to deal with the situation, Hamish opts for the gentleman's escape and heads downstairs for an early tea and breakfast. Instead of the calm and comfort an English gent comes to expect from the longstanding tradition of tea, and getting it alone in his kitchen, Hamish finds his servants huddled around the door in a tizzy, and himself unable to enter.

"What's going on here?"

One of the cooks-a young girl, looking rather frightened-steps forward and answers nervously while the others buzz with barely suppressed anxiety. "S-sir, y-you're guest... the, the t-taller man, he's... well, he's been in the kitchens for some time now, since before we woke, and he is refusing to leave."

Hamish sighs, steps past his cooking crew, and makes his way into the kitchen to find Stayne perched on a counter, a basket of apples in his lap. He is chewing on one lazily, staring out the window. For a moment, Hamish thinks he looks rather tired; a dark circle is ringing his good eye, and he blinks slowly, as though fighting to reopen them. Then his gaze turns to Hamish himself and suddenly his eye is sharp and bright again, and his voice as arrogant as ever. "Ah, boy. Good. I desire tea. Make it so."

"I am not a servant-"

"Well, your servants aren't serving, so as the host, it's your responsibility. Make me tea."

"The servants aren't serving because you won't get out of their way!"

He takes another bite from his apple, waving his free hand around in the air. "Tell them to work around me."

"Or you could just go eat in the dining room, like a normal person!"

Stayne actually smiles at that, looking at Hamish fully. "Do I look like a normal person to you?"

Exasperated, Hamish proceeds to, once again, sound the retreat and leaves the kitchen, and Stayne and the help, to settle in the living room, alone. He does, after all, have a lot of new information to process and very little sleep to function on, and is just not prepared to deal with any more irregularities (which his life is sure to continue to be full of, thanks to Mr. Stayne and Mr. Hightopp). He needs to figure out just what he is going to tell Alice now that he has, mostly, Stayne and Hatta's stories.

While Stayne had excused himself not too long after their conversation had begun, Hatta had been more than willing to stay up and talk about anything Alice, including his own past and any holes Stayne had left in his story. This wasn't much help, however, in figuring out just who might have pushed Alice overboard her seaworthy transport, for Stayne himself had seen nothing, and no one else on board had reported seeing anything. The crew had been preparing to dock, and Alice had been admiring the work (she was very interested in what went into sailing a boat, and had more than once been called down from the ratlines, Lord Ascot had informed his son in a previous letter) while keeping out of the way. No one had seen or heard anything until the splash and Alice's cries, to which Stayne had come to the rescue (something that seemed to rather baffle both Hamish and Hatta, who thought Stayne incapable of anything resembling heroics, which this seemed to be). But Stayne wouldn't be pressed on the point; he had been on the docks in London (he wouldn't say why, though this had begun a bad argument most of which Hamish couldn't follow about how Stayne had gotten to London in the first place when he was supposed to be banished somewhere) and had dove in the save Alice (despite seeming not to like her very much, from the sound of it), after which Alice had insisted he return with her. Being extremely grateful, Hamish decided to let the issues go.

Stayne had mentioned, however, that Alice had seen someone, and felt the hands push her. He offered nothing else and had retired.

While thereafter the hatter had been extremely forthcoming with information, he hadn't been extremely helpful (unless you consider an overload of recollections, random deviating tangents, and bouts of sudden, unexplainable anger helpful). Hamish had found it interesting, if not a bit saddening (so much about Alice he didn't know, so much adoration coming from the hatter, and such a great gap between the two and him, Proper Hamish Of London, Not The Adventuring Sort). He has the information he needs to relay to Alice, at least, the most curious of all stemming from encounters Hatta swore were very recent and not from her childhood at all.

Alice, a hero, a warmaiden, the apple of Tarrant Hightopp's eye.

Hamish is not certain what to do with this information. How much of this is truth, and how much the exaggerations of a madman (if any of it is at all-after all, he and Alice had had a perfectly sound conversation about a talking cat the day before)? He knows that Stayne would probably be able to sort it out, but getting that man to help would be more trouble than batting a bee-hive. He hopes Alice is having better luck with finding her cat and mouse. Then he realizes what he is hoping for (what he is thinking about, even!) and rubs his eyes. Life has somehow gotten completely out of his control, and he isn't sure how much more of this he can handle.

"Margaret, really," Lowell chides, catching the boot his wife had tossed his way in her hustle about the room. "There's no need to be in such a hurry. Alice and Helen will still be home no matter when we show up."

"They could go to the Ascot's instead," Margaret counters, pinning up her hair while she uses her hips to unceremoniously shimmy open her vanity drawer. "I know Hamish is very anxious to spend some time with Alice now that she's home whether he admits it or not, and Lord Ascot is always very careful about checking up on Mother."

Lowell sinks back onto the bed, pulling his boot on. "They would send word to us if they did that."

His wife snatches up something from the drawer, swats it shut, and makes her way toward the bathroom while Lowell stares after her. She is barely listening to him, of course, so distracted by the excitement of spending time with her mother and sister again; and, of course, the crazy Scotsman.

Scoffing, Lowell scans the room for his other boot. Carefully, deliberately, he avoids Margaret's looking-glass, then scrunches his eyes, swats his knee, and brings his gaze directly to the reflective surface. He is a man, after all. He won't be frightened of imagined apparitions in the night (and day). His stare is hard, determined, and the only thing looking back out at him. Grunting, he sets out to find his boot again, eventually tracking it to the bathroom where Margaret is hard at work doing... whatever women folk do.

He sits on the edge of the tub, shoving his other boot onto his foot, and opens his mouth to continue his futile pleas for his wife to slow down (he'd wanted to sleep in this morning, curse it all; well, less sleeping, more just not getting out of bed until he'd gotten what he hadn't gotten last night, which he should have, he earned it), but she is already shuffling back out of the room. Aggravated, he lets his now booted foot slam to the floor and fumes silently, missing (not for the first time) the promise of easy company once his wife was away, and refusing to allow himself to dwell on it.

And quite suddenly all lascivious thoughts vanish from his mind. The woman in white is there again, in the glass above the washbasin, staring.

Staring after Margaret.

Lowell leaps up and is before the looking-glass in seconds, hands flat against the surface. There is nothing there. It is blank, cool, solid. Only his own, angry-fearful-face heaving in the reflection.

But for a moment (for one long, terrifying moment) he thought that gentle, desperate face he'd seen the day before had morphed into something fierce and cold and dangerous. And it had been watching his wife.

Unsettled (and even unconvinced he'd seen anything at all), Lowell turns away and decides he no longer is against Margaret's wanting to leave as early as possible.

"Margaret-"

His words cut off. What little air he'd been inhaling chokes out. Long, thin spindles wrap around his neck, coiling like a vice, forcing his throat closed. His hands shoot up in his defense, clawing the restrictions as he jerks against the cabinetry, trying to free himself from the iron grip. Desperately, he throws back an angry elbow, and bone collides with the looking-glass.

It shatters.

Air floods back into Lowell's chest, his neck free, and he collapses onto the floor, gasping.

"Lowell!?" Margaret sounds into the doorway, confusion coloring her face, and picks up her skirts in a rush to sit at her husband's side. "Lowell! Are you alright? Oh my goodness, what happened?"

He raises up, unable to speak, but from the look of shock on his wife's face, he knows he doesn't need to. A shard of the looking-glass lays between them, looking perfectly normal, unthreatening. It reflects part of Lowell's pale face, tousled collar, and thin, purple impressions of ten long, spindly fingers.