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He tossed the billfold, which slapped down onto a small serpentine-topped table.

Nina approached cautiously. She could sense it still: an elemental disturbance. De’Ath didn’t move, yet he vibrated the air around him.

Something was amiss.

What?

Now, that’s a very good question, Birdie. I propose you find the answer.

Jack’s voice in her head. Last night, she’d gotten an earful. Her brother had forced her to repeat each of De’Ath’s observations, interrupting every few words to damn De’Ath to hell as the devil’s whelp, or—just as often—to affirm his critiques.

Complained of the blasted cow, did he? Well, sure, and he would. No surprise there. Sticks out like dog’s bollocks! How many times did I tell you? But do you ever listen? It’s like shouting at a bloody post. Christ, Birdie! No, it’s my own fault. I’m the one to blame. I’m too soft with you. Always have been. Hate to chivvy my own sister. Rather take a chance with a deficient picture. A whore’s pox upon my bleeding tender heart because we’re well fucked for it now. What else? What else did he say?

He was still cursing when he’d flung himself into a chair at the writing table, and he’d cursed even as his pen flashed. When he’d finished, he’d given her the letter to read over. It promised Mrs. Beechey such a sum that Nina had felt a pang. Half would come out of her own savings. But she’d agreed. Jack had the right idea. Mrs. Beechey was James Berney’s granddaughter. She was also a gin-pickled old widow, willing to say or do almost anything if she stood to profit. Over the years, they’d paid her a king’s ransom for her provenance. Now they would pay more, to ensure she stuck to her story.

In the end, Mr. Broughton might not accept that the landscapes were forged, not if Mrs. Beechey insisted that she’d found them rolled up in the attic.

De’Ath’s assault might fail on that front.

But what if he kept opening new theaters of war?

Find something, Birdie. Those had been Jack’s final words to her, uttered fiercely as he’d handed her into the cab, his grasp too firm. Anything we can use against him.

She reached the table and scooped up the billfold. “Coffee’s better with cream. Everything’s better with cream.”

“Black,” De’Ath repeated through that horrible smile. He was seething beneath the skin, nerves and muscles perceptibly out of tune. Or at least, the dissonant jangle was perceptible to her. But she’d spent years attuning herself to the weather of men’s moods.

His distress was electric, stirring the fine hairs on her arms.

Alan De’Ath wanted to scream.

She stepped backward. Here was an opportunity. Her quarry lay helpless before her, gripped by a powerful emotion. If she discovered what, or who, had felled him, she and Jack might step closer to freedom.

And yet she stepped backward, again, and then again.

Jack started up again in her head, a rant. He was telling her to keep at it, to natter on, to make the bloody toff snap.

Heat bloomed in her chest. Her hands went damp. De’Ath had treated her well, as well as anyone ever had, and better than most. She liked his amiable, eccentric household. She liked him.

Sorry, Jack. She couldn’t press harder. Deception was bad enough. This would be cruelty.

Turmoil must have shown on her face.

“You aren’t unwell?” asked De’Ath, eyes pinning her.

“I’m very well.” She almost let loose a wild laugh. What a pair they made. Both of them—right as rain. She swallowed hard. “Black coffee.”

She spun around with such force her skirts snapped, and she marched from the room.

—

The crowd in the gallery made for a formidable barrier. Nina imagined herself in Hensthorpe, pushing through a hedgerow, a fantastical hedgerow of particolored silk, with elbows instead of branches and ruffles instead of hawthorn berries.

She hadn’t fully realized how much space De’Ath had been afforded by the throng until now, as she found herself bumped and trampled. She hadn’t considered, either, that she’d been enjoying a feeling of consequence as she’d walked by his side. Now she remembered that invisibility had bruising repercussions.

“Pardon,” she gasped as two laughing gentlemen with linked arms attempted to walk through her. They continued as one, without acknowledging her exclamation or awkward hop to the side.

“Bollocks,” she muttered, before following in their wake.