Artfully Yours, page 5
De’Ath released a breath and his face cleared. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m interrogating you.” His voice was smooth again. “Geoffrey and I inhabit different realities. I have to glean my information from other sources.”
“I have no information.”
“I gleaned that.” His mouth tipped up.
She smiled back at him, relieved. His eyes had lost their tarnish and shone with silvery brightness. His mood seemed light again, and hers lightened too. With every step, she drew nearer the street, ginger beer, freedom. Her blood began to sing. Suddenly, he shook his head and laughed.
“We even see different paintings. I look at the painting he hung in pride of place in the drawing room, and I see a picture manufactured by a criminal, someone who aped seventeenth-century techniques to dupe insensitive buyers. He sees a Rembrandt.”
Bloody hell. Her whole body tensed.
“That,” she said, with all the composure she could muster, “is rather minor, in the scheme of things.”
“Minor?” He drew to a halt. They’d entered an enchanting wilderness in miniature, the manicured trees divided by narrow, winding footpaths banked with tulips. A tiny pond glimmered between the trees. It was spanned by a high-arched wooden bridge. Just beyond, the tall iron gate offered passage through the garden wall.
So close.
“No, Miss Finch, a lethargic imitation passed off as an original work of art is nothing minor. Do you know—until the 1850s, collectors bought old masters nineteen to the dozen. Counterfeits, for the most part. Why so many fakes?” He gave a professorial flourish of his cane. Nina didn’t answer. She understood the genre of masculine lecture, its various cues.
This pause—it was mere punctuation.
“Because the rising demand all but required fakes,” he continued. “One of the perversities of the art market, but that’s another conversation.” He shrugged. “I credit the Art Journal with reversing the tide. Its writers appointed themselves watchdogs, sniffed out forgeries, did whatever they could to stamp out the trade. And what happened?”
Again, a perfunctory pause.
“You’ll tell me,” predicted Nina in a murmur, before biting the inside of her cheek.
De’Ath’s eyes flashed, but then his mouth quirked.
“I’ll tell you,” he agreed wryly. “The public shifted its attention to living artists. Contemporary painting blossomed. New styles, new movements, began to usher British art into the modern era. But we must remain on our guard. Forgers and crooked dealers don’t merely respond to the market; they shape it. There’s no such thing as one fake Rembrandt.”
His gaze swept the pretty grove and his chiseled lips softened into their habitual half smile. “Forgeries crop up in rings, like toadstools. Find a fake Rembrandt in the drawing room of this imbecilic aristocrat, check the drawing room of that imbecilic aristocrat. You’ll discover that the whole social circle has gone and paneled their homes with them. Soon, the next tier of society will be foaming at the mouth for their old masters. Which will prompt the forgers to double their efforts. Which, Miss Finch, sets us back forty years and imperils the interests of artists painting now. Imperils art itself.”
He brushed a row of tulips with his cane, and she had the sense that if a toadstool had presented itself, he would have whacked cap from stalk.
“So. Not minor.” He flicked his eyes to her. “But I’ll grant you, more easily resolvable than some of the other issues.”
A chill dove deep into her bones. He was standing in front of her, not a yard away, tall and strongly built, a man who could overpower an adversary with sheer brawn. But he used a steel nib instead, black ink.
With his smiting pen, he could condemn her, Jack, Sleaford, Laddie, even Ruby, to a British dungeon. If he was determined to resolve the issue of the forgeries, how long would it take him to trace Sleaford to the rest of them?
“Well.” She dragged her valise up to her hip. Her dry throat—it was like a rusted bell without a clapper. “There’s the gate.”
He pivoted. “No countesses yet. Let’s both make our escape, shall we?”
On the street, she turned from him immediately and could have kicked herself.
Don’t bolt, you ninny, like a bloody cutpurse.
She schooled her leaping nerves, forced herself to rotate.
“This is goodbye, then,” she said.
“I rather wish it weren’t.” He studied her with an odd expression. “Now I have to go to an agency.”
He smiled. She smiled.
“Miss Finch,” he said, “it was a privilege to know you. I’d doff my hat, but at the moment, my doffing isn’t up to snuff. If you were my amanuensis, I’d ask you to doff it for me.”
Her lips parted involuntarily at the idea. How close to him would she have to stand to doff his hat?
“If I see you again,” he continued, “I hope it’s a serendipitous encounter in a village pastry shop. Your village pastry shop.”
“Me too.” The phrase emerged as a croak. Ginger beer, now, gallons of it. But for a moment, she didn’t turn. She watched him walk away. His movements were leisured. His gait rolled slightly, the suggestion of a hitch smoothing out as he stepped. He didn’t look back.
With luck, they’d never see each other again.
If they did, she might not be in a bakery. She might be with a bailiff. Clapped in irons. Her ankles felt heavy as she ducked her head and hurried blindly down the sidewalk, racing to put as much distance as she could between herself and Lord Alan De’Ath.
Chapter Four
The relief Nina felt arriving home lasted all of a minute. Home was a relative term. Even though she and Jack had lived above Laddie’s barbershop for nearly seven years, the commotion in the downstairs parlors still jangled her nerves. Laddie didn’t limit himself to barbering. He’d inherited his trade—and the house—from his father, slowly transforming the establishment into a wonder of the world—the underworld, at any rate. It wasn’t known as Ladbrooke’s anymore, or even Laddie’s, but rather as the Knackatory. The Knack for short. Knickknacks galore.
Most days—and nights—assorted swells, swindlers, and the occasional uppish collector circulated through the rooms, poking the mummified crocodiles, trying on the morbidly dented morion helmets, nudging one another with ribald significance and chortling at the sight of the narwhale tusks. This afternoon was no exception.
Nina sidled through the front parlor. Customers were clinking through Laddie’s bottles of shaving lotions and hair oil. One man was standing on the leather barber chair, batting at a gilded sunfish that dangled from the rafter. His friends crowded around the basins, trying to teach Polly the parrot a dirty limerick as she splashed in the water.
“There was a young lady of Trent.”
Nina ducked around the folding screen, heading for the back stairs. Flash gentlemen filled the gaps between the furniture, paste jewels glittering on their watch chains. She shoved, making unsteady progress, tripping over male feet. The cologne in the air was thick enough to pickle the tapestry pillows.
“I’ll be blowed!”
Nina staggered as an elbow clipped her shoulder. The elbow owner was young and bullnecked, dressed in a howling mauvine cutaway jacket and checked trousers. He was making a beeline for the shelves that laddered the far wall.
“By gad.” Another man started after him. “Is that a rat?”
Nina jerked around, barking her shin on a trunk. She scanned the highest shelves, cluttered with a dusty hodgepodge of trinkets, antiques, and curios.
When she and Jack had first moved to the Knackatory, Laddie’s offerings had been even more haphazard and disorganized. Junk he collected from job lots heaped the divans. Old parchments made drifts on the naked floorboards. Napoleonic memorabilia threatened to collapse the spindly-legged cabinets. Clocks beyond number told motley time and chimed continuously.
Thanks to Jack’s practiced eye, the type, quality, and arrangement of objects had improved markedly.
The men, though, hadn’t gasped at an unexpected treasure.
They’d spied Fritz.
Nina saw him too, curled up on a shelf beside a stack of French novels. He looked nothing like a rat. He was rat-sized, perhaps. But his nose didn’t protrude rudely like a rat’s. He had a sweet, squashed little face, with big black eyes. They were closed at the moment. His long tail curled around him.
She opened her mouth but Laddie spoke first. The rumble of his voice—loud, startingly deep—silenced the general chatter.
“Rat? You’re off your chump.”
Nina’s gaze flew to him. He stood by an open display case, where he was fanning out hand-painted German playing cards for the admiration of potential buyers. He swept the cards back into the deck, split it, and shuffled the two halves together.
“That charming creature,” he said, pointing the deck at Fritz, “has no more rat in him than Grigsby.”
The man who’d exclaimed By gad—presumably Grigsby—turned to glare.
“Pure South American marmoset.” Laddie grinned. He bleached his teeth religiously. They were white as an advertisement.
Until today, Nina had thought them matchless in brilliancy.
Alan De’Ath’s Cheshire cat smile materialized before her eyes.
She blinked. She blinked again. It lingered.
“How much?” asked the first man, he of the elbow and the bull neck. He’d reached the shelves and was straining upward, pinching at Fritz with beringed fingers. His offending elbow swung perilously close to a faience vase filled with peacock feathers.
Nina glanced at Laddie. Surely he’d direct Bull-neck’s attention elsewhere, perhaps to the case of artificial gemstones, which Ruby shone with vinegar. The bloke already twinkled with colored glass, but Jack always said Laddie could sell clouds in Cardiff.
“Twenty pounds.” Laddie snatched two cards from the deck and held them aloft. Both tens. One patterned with hearts, the other bells.
Nina gasped. Treacherous blighter! Was this his return on her friendship? How many times had she mended his broken lamps? Baked him Victoria sponge and shortbread? The morning she’d left for Umfreville House, she’d fried thin rosy-gold pancakes for the lot of them—Jack, Laddie, Ruby, and Fritz—mixing plenty of wine and cream into the batter, the way Laddie liked it. They’d all been pally then.
“Lawrence Ladbrooke, you’re the rat!” She pushed aside the gaping oafs who blocked her path and charged at him. “You’d sell your own mother!”
He caught sight of her, and his face registered surprise, then chagrin, then a droopy, overacted sorrow.
“What’s this the girl says of the dear departed?” he rumbled to the men around him, pressing the cards—the ten of hearts the topmost—to his breast. “She was a saintly woman, my mother, God rest her soul.”
“She raised a reprobate!” Nina stopped short, gripping the finials of a tall-back chair. She glared, neck craned. Laddie was a mountain of a man, widest around the middle, body tapering toward his head, sunny blond hair shining with macassar oil. His grass-green corduroy suit completed the impression. “If you knew any saints, you’d be fencing haloes.”
A few of the bystanders hooted, so she widened her glare.
“The marmoset is a member of my family and most definitively not for sale.”
She whirled and almost smacked into a bust of Homer. The blind bard gazed at her blankly, without a shred of sympathy.
“You’re as bad as the rest,” she muttered, and edged around him, looping toward the shelves. She could hear Laddie’s low rumble.
“A sweet girl, but, as you can see, a bit daffy. Never had a mother herself.”
The nerve. Nina sucked in her breath. Laddie and Jack had met as boys in the schoolroom and had maintained a friendship through all Jack’s vicissitudes of fortune. Laddie knew more than almost anyone about their mother. He knew Nina wasn’t motherless, not in the way Ruby was motherless. Ruby, who’d lost her mother—Laddie’s sister—the day she was born. Maybe he erased Nina’s mother out of delicacy, because he thought the truth more damning.
Now Nina’s face felt hot. After Jack’s father died and her own father disappeared, their mother had managed the best she could. She hadn’t many options, a young Irishwoman from County Cork, still legally married, with a toddling daughter and a son on the brink of adolescence. She’d met Mr. Farrar while selling combs on the street outside his jewelry shop. After Mr. Farrar, there was Mr. Nelson. And then Mr. Hessey. And then Mr. Bowes. Mr. Dilly. Mr. Thistleton. The list went on.
They weren’t all rotters. Mr. Bowes had broken a chair on Jack’s back, but Mr. Thistleton, a color mixer for a cloth-printing firm, had recognized his artistic talent and facilitated his application to the Royal Academy Schools. Mr. Dilly used to pull toffees from behind Nina’s ears.
But none had done right by their mother in the end. During her last illness, Mr. Mucklow hadn’t called the doctor until it was too late. Fever dwindled her to bones and staring eyes. Nina was nine that bitter December. Old enough to remember plenty. If she concentrated, she could still feel the gentle tug of her mother’s hands in her hair. She could still hear her voice.
Much comfort in cats, little in men. That was one of her mother’s sayings. Unforgettable. The world provided constant reminders.
For example, in the form of Laddie. The lying, scheming backstabber.
“Fritz!” She stepped on Bull-neck’s heel, then, when he turned, wedged herself between his body and the shelves. “Fritz!”
The white tufts on Fritz’s ears pricked, and his eyes opened. He ricocheted off the French novels, zigzagging his way to the floor, and jumped up onto Nina’s skirt. She nuzzled his fur with her cheek as he settled onto her shoulder, tail wrapping her neck.
“Look lively.” She scowled at Bull-neck and Grigsby and barreled forward. They sprang out of her way.
“Cheeky maid.” She heard Bull-neck behind her. “I’d give her the sack, Laddie.”
“That’s not what I’d give her!” The shout came from across the room. Nina spared a single glance for the offender, who was waggling one of the narwhale tusks for emphasis.
Rats. The lot of them.
Guffaws followed her down the hall.
* * *
—
Jack wasn’t upstairs. Nina poked her head into the empty painting studio, then banged on his bedroom door. She went down the back stairs and found him in the small, foul-smelling kitchen, kneeling by the open oven in his shirtsleeves.
“Laddie tried to sell Fritz,” she announced, and moved a sauceboat off a chair so she could sit. There was a dormouse in the sauceboat. She set it carefully atop the plates stacked on the table.
“Dirty-arsed little bugger.” Jack shut the oven door and rose, wiping his face with his sleeve.
“Do you mean Laddie? Or Fritz?” She grimaced as Fritz snapped a strand of her hair. He liked to groom her, fingers scratching over her scalp. He groomed Boggs, the spaniel, too, and Dora and Mop, the cats, when they allowed it.
“Laddie, of course.” Jack grinned the dimpled grin that made the girls at the Baited Bear sigh. Sweet Jack, they called him and forgave his displays of temper. “Fritz is a prince. He missed you sorely.”
Nina bit her tongue. Jack had pledged to watch over Prince Fritz in her absence. He should have kept the marmoset close. And cleaned up after him! Laddie roared whenever Fritz rubbed himself on the upholstery or piddled down the curtains. If Jack had let Fritz run wild, ignoring the puddles, she should thank her lucky stars Laddie hadn’t gutted and stuffed him.
She would not be thanking Jack.
“I expected you yesterday.” Jack’s smile faded. “You didn’t run into any trouble?” He held out his hand. “Let me see the letter.”
“Yesterday!” Was he accusing her of lollygagging? She frowned. “You can’t just put on a mobcap and waltz into a duke’s study saying la-di-da, your documents could use a dusting.” She felt on her head for the cap and wiggled the fabric free of the pins.
“The job required cunning.” Cunning, and Ruby’s lockpick set. She tossed the cap and stood to fetch the biscuit tin down from the shelf above the sink. The sink was filled with greasy pans. To think, she’d left the kitchen spotless!
“I had to bide my time.” She sat back in the chair, piling crockery to make room for the biscuit tin on the table. “And by biding my time I don’t mean twiddling my thumbs. They run servants off their feet in that house.”
“Poor Birdie.” Jack curled his fingers, a quick, repeated motion. “Hand it over.”
He didn’t doubt that she had the letter. Nor should he. When had she ever failed him?
They had a pact, the two of them. They were bound to each other. By blood and by love, and by their collective enterprise, source of profit and peril.
Of course he didn’t doubt. She was his Birdie. His best and only apprentice. Best accomplice. Best friend. She worked miracles with her clever fingers.
Sighing, she fished Sleaford’s letter from her boot and passed it over.
Jack gave a short laugh as he scanned the lines. He crumpled the paper and sent it sailing through the air toward the dustbin.
“You did well,” he said, and dropped again into a crouch. “Umfreville’s an easy mark. And a damn good client.” He opened the oven door and warmth wafted out. The acrid smell in the room intensified. “He’ll like this Titian.”
Nina yanked the lid off the biscuit tin and peered inside. Crumbs gathered in the corners. Not a biscuit remained. She plucked up the biggest crumb and offered it to Fritz, who shifted his weight on her shoulder and emitted a happy chirp. The rest of the crumbs she shook into the sauceboat for the mouse.
