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Anthony ignored the question, working his way slowly around the perimeter. Nail by nail. At last the canvas was loosed. He rolled it up into a neat tube, about the length and width of a telescope barrel. Without ceremony, he rose, rolled canvas in hand.

“Thank you for the picture,” he said pleasantly, reaching inside his coat to rip off the makeshift bandage. He dangled the stained handkerchief. Forbes’s monogram was picked out in cream thread. “And thank you for the handkerchief. Very good of you to initial the evidence.” Anthony gripped Forbes’s shoulder and pulled him close. His whisper was infused with menace. “One word about any of this, and it’s straight to Newgate.”

“Adelaide . . .” began Forbes, and Anthony stepped back and smiled.

“The easier task,” he said, inclining his head. “I swear to you I didn’t touch your wife. But perhaps you should write to her sister in Inverness and inquire after her mother’s health.”

Forbes’s eyes were popping again.

“Are you implying . . .”

Indeed Anthony was. Forbes, despite this bout of unexpected fire, didn’t seem likely to satisfy a woman of appetite.

Anthony was no longer a betting man, but he’d become a cynic.

“I wish the fair Adelaide a merry cuckolding. Wherever she may be.”

He sketched an ironic bow and let the door bang on his way out.

• • •

When he reached Weston Hall, head pounding, he slipped around to the garden, to the small glasshouse in the walled-off southeast corner. Long ago, his mother used it to grow grapes, figs, and flowers. It was empty now, had been for years and years, more than two decades. Anthony ducked inside, crossed to the lead-lined brick tank. Once, that tank collected rainwater. Now it held bottles of rum, gin, and whiskey, as well as shirts, jackets, cloaks, and trousers.

Anthony unlidded it and stowed the rolled painting carefully, wrapped in a linen shirt. He shrugged out of his coat and took a long pull from a whiskey bottle, sitting on the edge of the tank. The sound of footsteps jerked his head around, but he relaxed when he saw the blocky figure cross the threshold. His valet, Humphreys, come to check the store of liquor. The only member of the staff he hadn’t inherited with the house. He’d brought Humphreys on himself, and the youth—who couldn’t clean a collar and tied a cravat as though he were haltering a horse—performed splendidly as his lookout and confederate.

They’d developed their bond in the jaws of death. Anthony counted it dear.

“The bugger. He blasted a hole in you.” Humphreys was at his side in an instant. Anthony fended him off with the bottle.

“Nicked me,” he said. “Once I’ve bathed, you can tie it up, and I’ll be as good as new.”

Humphreys rubbed his jaw, staring, then shrugged. “Right-ho. I’ll get a bath drawn, then.” His concerned look gave way and he grinned. “You won’t mind when I burn that shirt.”

The other day, he’d singed Anthony’s linens as he tried to dry them by the fire.

Anthony glanced down at the bloodstained sleeve and laughed. “Do your worst.”

But as soon as Humphreys was gone, his smile faded. With the lad’s help, he could cover up this imbroglio with Forbes, but a larger problem remained.

That problem was one L. Coover.

What to do? He drummed a heel against the tank and tipped the bottle again.

Chapter Two

When Lucy had set up her easel by the classroom doorway, she had been thinking purely of the angle the position afforded her. The model sitting for the female students of the Upper School of Painting possessed an extraordinary pair of nostrils. Only three-quarter profile would do them justice.

She had not been thinking of the potential interruptions.

Every half hour or so, Maude rose, stretched, and drifted out of the classroom. Which meant that every half hour or so, she passed behind Lucy on her way to the door. She was approaching now.

Ignore her.

Lucy tightened her fingers on her chalk stone. She blew grit from her lines and leaned back to inspect them. Not bad. This was her second attempt at a life-sized study of the model’s head. The first had been dreadful. The model was a handsome woman in the prime of life, and the head Lucy painted did look strong and splendid. It also looked, less happily, as though it belonged on the shoulders of a retired general. In fact, whiskers and a bicorn might still rescue the picture from the rubbish heap. With such modification, she could sell it to a public house as a portrait of a military hero. She’d decided to put the canvas aside for later as she attempted a better likeness.

The classroom was top lit, sunlight filtering down from fish-scale panes of glass set in the sloping ceiling. So illuminated, her underdrawing already showed promise.

She felt the air behind her stir.