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He told himself not to be an idiot. He reminded himself that he’d learned, a long time ago, that there was a time and a place for violence. He knew perfectly well that this was not the time or place. He was angry because he hadn’t been prepared for this possibility: that someone would not only dare but succeed in invading Bonnard’s well-guarded house. That was not Arnaldo’s fault.
And so, in smooth, idiomatic Italian, James thanked him for his devotion to the lady—and walked past him, into the most feverishly decorated drawing room in all of Italy—and that, James knew, was saying something.
“Thank God all the putti are still here,” he said. “When I heard something had happened, I thought for sure the children had all flapped their little wings and flown away.”
She started toward him and for a moment he thought she would throw herself into his arms.
But she stopped short, got as stiff as a poker, and said, “I am not receiving visitors.”
“I heard you’ve had a visit from burglars,” he said.
Her jaw dropped.
“Word travels quickly across a canal,” he said. “My gondolier had it from one of the market boats who had it from your cook.”
He looked about him. “Not amateurs, clearly,” he said. But of course they weren’t. Amateurs would never have made it past the porters. “What made you suspect?”
“It was the servants who were suspicious,” she said. “I arrived only a short time ago. Not that it’s any of your affair.”
Arnaldo, who’d followed James into the room, said, “We see that some objects and some furniture are not in the proper place, signore.”
She threw up her hands. “Does everyone cater to you?”
“It’s my charm,” James said. “Irresistible.”
She turned away and threw herself into a chair. She waved at Arnaldo. “Go ahead, then. Tell him.”
In rapid Venetian—which James could barely follow—and in considerable detail, Arnaldo told him.
“Nuns?” James said. A cold knot formed in his solar plexus. “From Cyprus?”
He knew that Venice had once been the center of a vast trading empire. People came from every corner of the globe, even in these unhappy days. The Armenians had their own church. So did the Greeks. The Jews had several synagogues.
Nuns from Cyprus would be nothing out of the ordinary.
The trouble was, he was aware that so-called nuns from Cyprus had been responsible for several spectacular thefts in southern Italy in the last year. It was one of these thefts that had brought James to Rome, and his encounter with Marta Fazi—the ringleader…who was mad for emeralds. If she hadn’t been mad and thus indiscreet, flaunting them in very public, if low, places, they might have gone missing forever.
But Marta was supposed to be in prison. Her gang had been broken up. Was this the work of an imitator? A coincidence?
Arnaldo must have finally noticed the baffled expression his listeners wore, because he reverted to Italian when he answered, “Everyone knows this accent. In Venice we hear it almost every day.”
James recalled the trace of foreign accent in Marta Fazi’s speech. She’d been born in Cyprus.
Anyone could claim to be from Cyprus. But the accent was distinctive, to Arnaldo at least.
The chances of this being a coincidence or the work of imitators were shrinking by the moment.
Someone could have got Marta out. She’d been imprisoned in Rome, and the Papal States were notoriously corrupt. Powerful friends with money could have arranged her release.
All while James’s mind was scrambling through details and arranging them and making its way to the logical conclusion, he maintained his calm, casual pose.
“Your jewelry?” he said to Bonnard. “Gone, I daresay?”
She blinked at him. “My jewelry?”
“That’s what Piero said they were after the last time,” he reminded her. He’d doubted the story then, both logic and instincts telling him there was more to it than Piero told. Now a pattern was emerging. It wasn’t pretty. “Your jewelry’s become famous among the thief community, it seems.”
She bolted up from the chair and hurried from the room.
James followed her.
Francesca’s private quarters were not so neatly searched as the other rooms. She felt chilled as she took it in: The mattresses hung partly on, partly off the bed. The bric-a-brac of her dressing table was tumbled about, and some of it had fallen to the floor beneath.
This was nothing like what had happened at Mira. Then the intruders had left very little trace of their doings.
This was…disturbing.
Thérèse stood on the threshold of the dressing room. She was weeping.
Francesca had never before seen her maid shed tears. It had not occurred to her that the haughty, self-sufficient lady’s maid was capable of weeping.
“Thérèse?” Francesca said, and went to the maid and put her arms about her shoulders. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, madame.” The maid turned and pressed her forehead against Francesca’s upper arm and sobbed.
“It’s all right,” Francesca said. “Everyone was sick but no one was hurt.”
Thérèse lifted her head, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and said in rapid, angry French, “It is despicable. Filthy brutes. To dare to touch your beautiful gowns, your jewels—”
“Gone?” came a masculine voice from behind them.
For a moment, shocked at seeing Thérèse in tears, Francesca had forgotten Cordier was there.
Tearful or not, Thérèse ignored him, as she always ignored the men in Francesca’s life. “They throw everything everywhere,” she said. “They empty your jewel box on the floor.” She nodded at the dressing room’s interior.
Everything was on the floor. Including her jewelry.
“That’s interesting,” Cordier said. His voice came from much nearer behind her. He was looking over the maid’s head into the dressing room. “They didn’t take the jewelry. What on earth could they have wanted, then? Those memoirs you mentioned? Had you started writing them already?”
This had nothing to do with the memoirs Francesca doubted she’d ever write. It had nothing to do with simple robbery, either. Ordinary robbers did not throw expensive jewelry on the floor and leave it there. They—whoever they were—were after something far more valuable: the letters.
Francesca shook her head. She spoke lightly while her heart beat too hard. “Perhaps someone simply dislikes me. Perhaps it’s a prank.”
“An elaborate prank,” he said. “Dressing up like nuns and poisoning your ser
vants.”
“It’s very strange they didn’t take the jewelry,” she said. “Perhaps they truly were nuns. Who else could exercise so much restraint, and leave my pearls and sapphires behind?”
There they were, glinting up at her from among heaps of dresses, petticoats, corsets, chemises, gloves, and stockings.
Like a taunt. She’d taunted Elphick with reports of her jewels, her conquests. He’d taunted her, too, with his achievements, his conquests. A game, not very mature, perhaps.
Now it had turned ugly.
“Perhaps the nuns did this as a warning to me to mend the error of my ways,” she said. “Or to tell me that all is vanity or some such sanctimonious rubbish.”
“Your letters,” the maid said, moving into the dressing room. “The box where you keep them is there, on the floor, madame, but I see no letters, no papers of any kind.”
It was impossible, James told himself. Had she kept Elphick’s incriminating letters in so obvious a place, Quentin’s men would have found them when they searched her various residences.
They had searched the obvious places and the not-obvious places. Agents had obtained access to all the banks with which she did business. In the vaults they’d found jewelry—saved against the rainy day that often came to harlots as age took its toll—and her will and various financial and legal papers, but not the letters.
If it had been as simple as opening a portable writing desk or looking for secret pockets in her clothing or the bed curtains or hidden compartments in the furniture and such, they would not have needed James Cordier.
Yet he heard her sharp intake of breath and was aware of how she struggled to maintain her composure. She knew she was in trouble. The trick would be getting her to admit it.
“This grows more absurd by the minute,” she said. “It’s impossible to try to determine what’s gone and why in this chaos. Summon some maids to help you restore order here, Thérèse. Then you can make a list of what, if anything, is missing. Whatever these naughty nuns were up to, I shall be much amazed if they left without taking a single piece of jewelry.”
