Parsefall
- Parsefall looks around the Wintermute home and immediately starts looking for something to steal. There's just so much expensive stuff lying around everywhere; he can't help himself.
- Grisini heads off to get something to drink and leaves the two children to set up the puppet theater. They're both super impressed by the fancy house and its inhabitants.
- A maid comes in with a tea tray, followed by a little girl with blue eyes and shiny black hair. Parsefall thinks she's the prettiest girl he's ever seen, and she introduces herself as Clara Wintermute.
- She asks them if they'll take tea with her, and they all sit down together. Lizzie Rose introduces Parsefall as her brother, but he denies it—they're not biologically related, after all.
- Then, Lizzie Rose points to a painting on the wall of five children in a garden. One of them is obviously Clara, and Lizzie Rose asks if the other kids are her siblings.
- Clara goes very still and doesn't answer right away. Lizzie Rose realizes her mistake immediately: The other children are all dead, and Clara is the only Wintermute child left.
- At that, Parsefall asks what happened to all of them, and Clara responds that there was cholera. It spread through the watercress they ate, but Clara didn't have any because she hates greens.
- All of her siblings died—including her twin, Charles Augustus—when she was five. That was seven years ago.
- She tells them that her mother had an artist come to do the painting, and she also keeps plenty of photographs and death masks around the house so that they'll never forget the children. Her mother has nearly died of grief and isn't the same even today.
- Lizzie Rose pipes up and says that her parents died of diphtheria a year and a half ago and that she still misses them.
- They finish up the tea and toast, and then Lizzie Rose asks Clara if she wants to see and hold the puppets, hoping it will cheer the girl up after all this talk of death.
- As Clara works a puppet, she glances over and is shocked to see that Parsefall is missing a finger. He has no idea what became of it, but it's been like this for a long time.
- While Lizzie Rose is busy showing Clara the puppets, Parsefall sneaks off to the side and snatches a photograph in a silver frame with tiny pearls along the edge. That should fetch a pretty penny when he pawns it.