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You start to hem and haw over this decision ... but then you manage to stop yourself. There are too few hours left in the day for you to be able to overthink and overcomplicate things like this. There are parts of this Construct that you haven't seen yet, parts that are on the second floor - or at least, one of the floors above you. Either way, the quickest way up is going to be the servant's stair. You are not going to back-track all the way to the ashbox of the other chimney, to run the risk of the remediation knocking you out cold; and likewise, you are not going let the prospect of passing through the servant's quarters deter you from taking the most direct route available. How many times now have you concluded that you are alone here, that there isn't another soul in this house - only to turn around and keep acting as if you are going to find someone around the next corner? Now, to be fair to yourself, the idea that the family, their servants, the guests and the guest's servants have all just ... wandered off to points unknown ... well, that is admittedly hard to swallow. But ... is it not possible that one or even some among this number were working with father and his 'professional friends'? Or that one of his 'professional friends' was actually someone already in this house? From all the work that went into the Constructs in the chimneys, you know for a fact - an absolute fact - that a great deal of thought and concern was spent on how this scene was to Cleansed and ... 'presented'. Surely then, there was a similar amount of thought and concern put into the ways and means of removing potential witnesses from the scene while the Cleansing and 'presentation' work was undertaken.
No doubt if you knew more about Aldoin, his household, and everything he was involved in, you'd be better suited for figuring out how they got everyone out of the house - but still know very little; so little that nearly everything you do know you got off of a slip on a crate. The long and the short of it is that you need to accept that you don't have all of the pieces here, and considering that this place has been combed over, you might never have enough of them to figure out how they drove everyone away without raising the hue, cry and alarums. So long as they are not here, and they don't come back, the 'how' and the 'where' are of no consequence. You need to get that through your head - and you need to get upstairs. So you quit the kitchen by the hallway that is closer to the stairs that brought you into it, and immediately you find yourself - as you had expected - in the servant's quarters. The individual rooms are all shut up tight; no sound emanates from behind the doors, neither light nor shadow plays out from underneath them. You pass a bank of hither-bells mounted to the walls, and some stuffs and stocks under a sheet - overflow perhaps, or just articles that haven't been taken down into the basement yet.
