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“Prudente,” Angelo agreed. “Prudent. Though I admit I never thought to try it.”

“That is because you cannot keep away from people,” Nicholas said. “You are, at root, ruinously sociable. It must wear you out.”

Lorenzo, already melted into the chair by the fire, made a sound that was half laugh and half groan. “He has you there, Angelo. You walked straight into that breakfast room knowing what waited. Why?”

“Because …” Angelo hunted for a reason that did not sound pitiful. “Because Marco is my brother. I thought today might break the pattern.”

“Hope,” Nicholas said, with the gravity of a man naming a fatal complaint, “is only disappointment getting dressed.”

“Che filosofo …” Lorenzo muttered. “Listen to him. Nicholas Scott, household sage and sworn enemy of hope.”

“I prefer realist.”

Angelo studied his uncle over the rim of the cup. Nicholas looked better than he had three months past. The gauntness born of too much drink and too little care had filled a little. Color had come back. The shake in his hands had nearly gone, thanks to Lady Trafford’s treatments, which Angelo had been asked to carry on while she was away. The bitterness remained. A shell against further hurt.

He has been wounded, Angelo thought. By kin. By his own body’s revolt. Skepticism costs less than hope.

Lorenzo sank back into the moody silence that had plagued him ever since they learned that Miss Henrietta Bigsby, now Lady Trenwith, had left London for parts unnamed. The first relief, that the young lady had been found unharmed after vanishing a week earlier, had already thinned. The riddle of where she had gone began to press on him. So did the sketch Lorenzo had lent her. That drawing might at last open the question of Matteo di Bianchi’s fate, after the man quit Italy three hundred years ago to serve unnamed English patrons. An ancestor Lorenzo swore had been an Old Master no one credited. A hand to stand beside da Vinci himself.

“At least they are happy,” Angelo offered, returning to Marco and Molly more to fill the hush than from any fresh interest. “Is that not the point?”

“Happiness.” Nicholas spoke the word as if it belonged to another tongue. “A brief delusion that blinds sensible folk to what is real. Mark me. Within six months they will be at one another’s throats over whose relations are the duller.”

“I think Marco and Molly will prove you wrong. They suit. They are compatibile …” Angelo paused. “Compatible.”

“Compatibile,” Lorenzo echoed with a stage sigh, his accent making the word sing. “How I long for a country where people speak as they ought. English is all bone and phlegm. Italian is verse.”

Nicholas lifted his eyes from the page at last. One dark brow rose. “If English offends you so, the door is not locked. I doubt anyone here will weep at your going.”

“You wound me.” Lorenzo clapped a hand to his heart in sham distress. “After I have shown you such friendship. Such loyalty.”

“You put up with me because Angelo puts up with me, and you need Angelo for that absurd treasure hunt of yours.”

“It is not a treasure hunt.” Lorenzo’s voice sharpened. The play went out of it. “It is a labor to restore my family’s honor. To prove Matteo di Bianchi was a master whose works belong beside Botticelli and da Vinci.”

“Ah yes.” Nicholas drawled the words and looked back at his book. “The fabled lost pictures. How handy that they stay lost, so you may keep the dream of their greatness without any inconvenient proof to spoil it.”

Angelo watched Lorenzo’s jaw lock and saw the familiar spark leap in his friend’s eyes. He set down his cup and leaned in, putting into his voice the gentle firmness learned from years of managing hot-tempered kin at the family farmacia.

“Nicholas, that was unkind.”

“Unkind, perhaps. True all the same.”

“Truth without compassione is only cruelty in a better coat.”

The hush that followed had an edge. Nicholas’s gaze flicked to Angelo. Something near surprise crossed his face before the old cynicism settled again. He shrugged, a lift of the shoulders, and went back to his book without another word.

Lorenzo was not so quickly soothed. He surged up and paced toward the window with the restless heat of a creature in a cage. When he spoke, old grievances weighted the sound.

“You mock what you do not understand, Nicholas Scott. My family has preserved Matteo’s letters for three centuries. We have studied every word, traced every hint. He was commissioned by a group calling themselves the Regis Aeterni. The Eternal King. He traveled to England believing he would create masterpieces that would secure his legacy. Instead, he disappeared. No paintings were ever found. No frescoes. Nothing but silence and mystery.”

“And a painting in Sebastian’s keeping,” Angelo reminded him, mild. “That is not nothing.”

Lorenzo spun, dark eyes burning. “One painting, Angelo. Uno. A man of Matteo’s schooling, at work for decades. There should be dozens. Hundreds of studies. Where are they? What became of him?”

Angelo opened his hands, helpless. “We will find answers, amico mio. When Miss Bigs—Lady Trenwith comes back from wherever she has gone⁠—”

“If she comes back,” Lorenzo cut in, bitter. “Days have passed since she showed herself, only to vanish again. Days without a word. For all we know she has carried my sketch to some scholar in Cambridge who will steal the credit for discovering it. Or worse, she has put it in the fire as worthless foolery.”