Any ofherblunders, he’d meant.
She did not want to let her father down. She took Gravesmuir’s arm and pinned a smile to her face as the marquess led her around the circumference of the drawing room.
Inside a small sculpture gallery, more of the party guests milled and drank champagne. It was a lovely room, freshly decorated, still smelling faintly of varnish and sawdust. Gravesmuir had had octagonal columns installed to frame the chandeliers, and Ruby suspected that whoever had designed them had been inspired by the peristyle of the Temple of Theseus in Athens. A dozen midnight-blue draperies hung from a paler-blue ceiling, and each curtain framed a gleaming white statue centered upon a white marble plinth.
Ruby blinked.
“Well, my dear?” demanded Gravesmuir. “Tell me what you think of it.” He smiled at her and then at the assembled company. “I had the whole gallery designed for these sculptures, you know. Can’t let a treasure like this be hidden away in some dusty museum.”
“A treasure?” Ruby repeated blankly.
“Why yes, of course. I had the marbles brought over from Monastiraki just last month. Safer here than there, I always say.”
“From Monastiraki?” She couldn’t seem to stop echoing his words as she stared at the sculptures, spiderwebbed with cracks and bright, bright white against the drapes.
“Indeed. Have you heard of it?” He chuckled. “Of course you have, with your hobby. Tell your father here he ought to take you there next time he’s on the Continent. My friend who brought the statues over could no doubt fill you in on the region. A great man, Professor Quenby—an archaeologist—”
“I’ve been there,” Ruby got out. “But your statues have not.”
Gravesmuir stopped speaking, his face fixed in a half smile. “I beg your pardon?”
“These statues did not come from Greece.”
Gravesmuir laughed again. Too loud. A flush rose on his cheeks like a slow cloud. “Of course they did. Quenby brought them over himself.”
“He didn’t,” Ruby said. “No one did. They’re fakes.”
In all her four Seasons, Ruby had never before brought an entire room to a hush before. Something cold and terrible sank in her stomach like a stone.
“Ruby,” her father said. He was trying to make it a joke, a scrap of amusement, but even the noted diplomat couldn’t quite manage it. Her name in his mouth sounded like a warning.
Gravesmuir, meanwhile, had gone from red to white. “I paid a fortune in scaffolding—and the excavators—the firman—I assure you, child, the cost of the ship journey from Greece to Malta alone was—”
“These statues have never been to Greece,” Ruby said. “They’re all wrong. The color’s off. There’s no shading. There ought to be a crust on the marble—a patina. It shouldn’t bewhitelike that. And the—the stone isn’t the right texture, it’s cracked—”
“That’senough, Ruby,” hissed her father.
“That’s weathering,” Gravesmuir said. “Thousands of years of—”
“That’s not how stone weathers in Greece.” Her voice sounded odd. Far away. Part of her was shouting,Stop talking, Ruby!But just as she had in the dining room, and in the middle of the ballroom, and a thousand other times in her too-blunt, too-enthusiastic life, she couldn’t call the words to a halt. “These sculptures look more like Coade stone, only perhaps not properly fired. Devon clay, I’d say.”
Gravesmuir seemed half strangled by his own ire. “And now we see why a little learning is a dangerous thing, don’t we, my dear?” He turned back to the room at large. “Quenby? Come over here and tell Lady Ruby the story about bringing the statues through the Tyrrhenian Sea in a maelstrom. Sliding across the decks with ropes tied to the masts...”
His words trailed off.
At the side of the room, Ruby caught a glimpse of a well-built man of middle height—gray hair, stooped, spectacles—just as he slipped out the door.
A very peculiar feeling seemed to be rushing down her body, chilling the tips of her fingers, freezing her legs to the ground.
“Quenby?” Gravesmuir said again. “Did you hear me?”
There was no answer. The party had gone strangely still, the guests all frozen with their champagne glasses halfway to their mouths.
“Quenby!” Gravesmuir said again, a bit louder. And then, very suddenly: “Stop him! Stop him before he gets away!”
The room rushed back into sound and motion. Eyes—there were dozens of eyes on her, fans fluttering across faces, bodies swirling toward her and then away.
Fakes, did she say? Gravesmuir’s marbles, yes—fakes—
