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“Because you’ve always wanted one.” Neal shrugged. “And you’re the sort who gets what he wants.” He leapt from the bench before Alan could react. “Help me find my jacket? I can’t sit through Chopin’s ‘Impromptu’ in my shirtsleeves.”

Disconcerted, Alan rose from his seat. “I think I saw it in the rhododendrons.”

On the walk back up the slope to the earl’s house on the hill, he glimpsed a little monkey darting around the base of a tree.

This time, his heart’s thud felt bone cracking.

Miss Finch hadn’t packed the few belongings she’d brought into his house. He’d checked her room. Three sober-looking gowns still hung in the wardrobe. Her hairbrush lay on the table.

Didn’t that mean she’d intended to return?

But she’d taken Fritz.

Perhaps, that fateful morning, she hadn’t yet made up her mind. By taking Fritz, she’d given herself the option to go and stay gone. Everything else was dispensable.

He stopped walking, eyes tracking the monkey. But it wasn’t a monkey. It was an ordinary squirrel.

That a squirrel could produce in him this yearning—laughable, really.

He should tell Neal the whole story, turn Miss Finch and her marmoset into a little joke at his own expense. It would illustrate how very far he was from living up to Neal’s expectations. Children of his own. Marital bliss.

He wasn’t in a joking mood. He continued up the hill in silence, deafened by the thud-thud-thud of his heart.

Chapter Thirteen

On her third day back at the Knack, Nina decided to tear apart the studio. Jack would have fits if he could see her, but, well, he couldn’t.

Jack was gone.

When she’d discovered this, the morning she’d departed from Casa De’Ath, she’d considered taking the train to Norwich herself. But Jack safeguarded their money—where she’d no bloody idea. Perhaps a bank account. More likely, a locked box under a floorboard. In any case, she couldn’t scrape together more than a few shillings. Without cash, she’d provide Mrs. Beechey nothing extra by way of incentive. Besides, Mr. Broughton knew her face. What if they crossed paths at the station or outside Mrs. Beechey’s house?

She’d almost headed straight back to Chelsea. She’d stacked her cake tins in a box. She’d pulled her dough docker from the drawer and stared at it, running her finger over the metal spikes.

De’Ath had never heard of this useful little tool. She wanted to show it to him, to introduce him to something. A person could feel powerful emotion in front of a Botticelli. And also, in front of a tray of golden brown Scotch shortbread.

She’d turned her head, and there was Polly, in the sink, fixing her with a bright yellow eye.

“Give me a kiss,” creaked Polly, and puffed up her feathers.

“Hush,” Nina muttered, feeling hot and faint, a notably absurd reaction to a parrot’s routine patter.

Hearing the word kiss in the Knack’s tiny, grimy kitchen twisted her insides. In that very room, she’d let Jack convince her to spy on De’Ath. The space was acrid with the smell of cooking paint. Probably that smell clung to her hair, the odor of deceit. It was only a matter of time before De’Ath sniffed it out. If she gave him the chance.

She’d put away the cake tins and headed out, not to Casa De’Ath, but to Jack’s favorite haunts. Two thankless days spent alternately combing the streets and waiting at the window, like a faithful dog.

The time had come to act.

At the moment, she was sweating profusely, arms overloaded with rolls of worm-eaten canvas. She heaved them onto the pile and heard one of the antique picture frames crack. She didn’t pause her labors. She began to fling Jack’s supplies off the shelves. Chipped dishes of old glue and flour paste. Boxes of rusty nails. Vials of soot and bone dust for tinting and foxing.

The pile grew bigger and bigger as she added their library, partially dismembered books of prints and heraldic emblems. She tipped her own novice canvases away from the walls.

The more items she shoved into the middle of the room, the more flagrantly the studio announced itself as what it was: a forger’s workshop.

She needed to dispose of the proof. If Jack had been nicked, the bobbies might pound up the stairs at any moment. As soon as night fell, she’d bring the whole mess to the river and dump it in. She’d sink this whole bad endeavor and start fresh. That meant goodbye, Knack. Goodbye, London.

Goodbye, Alan De’Ath.

She hadn’t said goodbye. A pang sharpened in her chest.