Judith Ivory (27 page)

“You could go,” Stuart said. He studied her. “Though I’d suggest one of the new, more open-minded universities. The girls’ colleges at Cambridge fritter away more than a little time on things like domestic organization, dancing, art, which
I don’t think are your inclination. I think mathematics would be good for you. I think you’d be a prize at it.”

Emma stared at him, then let her…what? Surprise? Fear? Agitation? Challenge? Whatever emotion, she let it break through on peals of laughter, pure giddiness. “Oh, Stuart. You think you can do anything. It’s one of your great charms, but it’s also one of your most aggravating qualities when you think you can move unmovable mountains. I have a farm to run. I love my sheep.”

He asked, just as a matter of fantasy, “So what might you envision yourself reading at university? What would you like to learn?”

“Not mathematics,” she said quickly. She thought a moment, though it didn’t take more than that to know her mind on the subject. “I’d like to learn to write, to express myself better. I might like to write a book someday.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. Something I know about.” Like a sudden bright idea, she said, “Yorkshire,” then looked down, laughing at herself. “Sheep and swindling. That’s what I suppose I know about.” She shook her head, dismissing the whole notion.

Only later did she realize he didn’t much care for London and cared even less for his house here. The place where he offered to let her live, while she went to school, had been in the city, in the very house, of his despised father. She shuddered to think of living in
that
place. (Would the cellar have torture contraptions? Or skulls wobbling on their spikes. Ugh.) Yet Stuart was apparently willing. To please her. She was touched. Deeply. Though she couldn’t think how to say it without starting the whole educating-Emma conversation again. So she said nothing.

But she made a point of being nice to him all the rest of the afternoon. Stuart responded politely, then even enthusiastically. They ended up having a peaceable, very enjoyable time at the museum, where they met their young artist and
paid for the art case he gave them. Before, though, they just wandered together, going from room to room to look at the paintings. Emma loved the idea of art museums: so many beautiful pictures all in one place, till one was overwhelmed by it all. She and Stuart settled simultaneously on one particular bench, staring up together in long, mutual silence at a painting of Christ by El Greco, struck dumb by it together. Not unlike a moment half an hour later, wherein they were both, at the one and the same time, struck by a fit of mirth over a fellow in a bowler who carried a long, neatly folded and wrapped black “walking” umbrella, the long, thin sort that was becoming a fashionable accoutrement of the understated gentleman in London.

They grinned at each other as he went by.
“Umbraculum,”
said Stuart, the happily sartorially overstated. Latin.

Which made Emma blush because she liked it so well that he knew the Latin or Russian or French for nearly everything.

When he saw her pleasure in his word, he added, “
Cuniculus
.”

She asked eagerly, “What does
that
mean?”

“Underground passage,” he said with a kind of secretive, smug smile, then gave her that once-over he could do, from head to toe.

Sexual, she knew immediately, and glanced away.

Though she was so, so curious. What was he thinking?
Cunicu
-what? Like the song, “Funiculi-funicula.” Say it again. He wouldn’t. Nor explain, not even when she worked up the courage to prod bluntly a few minutes later. It had to be not only sexual, but raw, she decided. Stuart, with his silk top hat and silk manners, could say the craziest things.

But he was the nicest lunatic she knew. Her sort of lunatic. They enjoyed the paintings of the museum together as much as they enjoyed laughing at the occasional pompous Englishman around them—goodness, but she and Stuart were
of a piece. In an understated country, they both overstated themselves regularly and loved doing so.

Renegade and misfits. Outlaws in their hearts somewhere, even if one of them sat in the House of Lords, both of them chose to push the limits, abiding only by their own.

And so it went, as they had a photograph taken of Emma, as a friend of hers superimposed this in his darkroom over a photograph of a real Rubens that truly had been stolen, then found several months before, as the result printed on newsprint, as they withdrew two thousand pounds from an account of Stuart’s that opened up, became fully functional—as they tidied the final details: They got along so well, with such care and interest in the other, it seemed impossible they could argue as fiercely as they could, as they had on paper for the first four months of their acquaintance.

“Emma, don’t disappear down to the bottom of the hill, when this is over,” Stuart murmured to her in the dark of his carriage. They were stopped in the street, about to transfer her to a hansom again, send her back to the Carlyle alone. “We’re lovers. Admit it. Let’s play pickle-me-tickle-me until—” He paused, teased. “You never did say what you call it.”

The nicer things were between them, though, the more they seemed to exchange places; as Stuart became happier, more at ease, Emma was given to bouts of all-but-sullen quiet.

“Coitus,” she said. “Sexual congress. I use adult names for it.” She scooted forward, a woman preparing to leave the carriage.

He leaned near her, touching her arm, and whispered, “Oh, my apologies. We’re grown-ups, how nice.” He enjoyed tormenting her too much; it was impossible not to. “Of course, your names are a little clinical, aren’t they? ‘Adult’in a rather intellectual, constrained way.” He laughed.

“It’s not funny. It results in children.”

“Ah. Well,” more soberly, “if you’re—Well, if it turns
out—” He frowned at her shadow in the dark. The clop of her arriving hansom stopped beside them. He whispered, as she leaned forward to go, “You couldn’t know if you were pregnant yet, could you?”

“No.” The silhouette of her hat shook in negation. “I doubt I am.”

“Good. No point in worrying in advance—and I’m a responsible man. I wouldn’t leave you to cope alone. Just let me know, if—Well, you know.”

She snorted. “There’s some solace. If I’m pregnant, you’ll own up. I’ll be sure to remember how responsible you are when mean people cross the street so they don’t have to walk near me and my bastard.”

“Why are you angry? There’s no bastard yet. As to mean people, yes, I know there are a lot down in Malzaard, enough to keep an ugly, frightened woman in her house.”

Emma sat back a little again, trying to see him. She could discern his knees and the upper part of his body, but the streetlight left his face and shoulders in shadows. She could see no expression.

He referred to his mother. There had indeed been those in the village who had been horrid to her, called her names, made fun. Emma herself had known the woman by the name “Ugly Ana” long before she’d known her true name, title, or history—acquainted with the woman’s vulnerability before she’d been aware of her mysteriously untapped power: a viscountess so reclusive that she rarely came out, so skittish that, when she did, she usually ran away quickly, taunted for her fey, outmoded ways and unattractive appearance.

He said, “I can’t protect you from mean people, because they’re everywhere, but
I
would be nice. That much, I can promise.”

“Fine,” she said. “If I’m pregnant, you can marry me.”

He folded his arms and contemplated her motionlessly from the darkness. Then said, “Not that nice.”

Because he was a snob, she thought. An arrogant, upper
class
yah
, who thought it was his perfect right to play pickle-me-tickle-me with the local women, so long as he was “responsible”—never mind that his idea of responsibility made whores of the women themselves.

How Stuart’s mind actually worked, though, was a long way from how Emma imagined: He himself sighed as he looked toward her, as he watched her step out into the light of a streetlamp.

Stuart despaired of his own romantic nature. He wanted to marry a woman because he was in love with her, completely, enraptured in love, no other reason. He wanted a marriage like—

Like what? Whose? Certainly, his own parents’ marriage had been a horror.

The Stunnels suddenly came to mind again. The funny old couple with the delayed Christmas tree—smiling, bumping up against each other, so content in their joint purpose, their joint lives. He marveled at them. How had they begun? What had connected them so indivisibly for sixty-seven years?

It didn’t matter. Stuart would not have married a princess royal simply because he’d impregnated her. No one could make him. No one. Not the queen of England herself. The fact that his own parents were married had not improved his childhood, quite the contrary.

Was he in love with Emma? He didn’t know. He only knew that nothing short of loving her was enough, not for him, and neither did she deserve anything less.

By the gaslight of the overhead streetlamp, Stuart watched the cab driver open the half door, then Emma stepped inside and leaned back out of sight.

L
EONARD
Aysgarth, Stuart’s father’s younger brother by fifteen months, could be said at age fifty-six to be, at least from certain angles, a handsome man. He was tall, had a thick head of hair, graying in a pattern that was often called
distinguished
, and the angular build—long-fingered, long-limbed, a deep brow with a wide jaw and cleft chin—that characterized the men of his family. His dark hair and dark eyes had not missed an Aysgarth in generations, the family joke: Even the Aysgarth genes were dominant.

Here, though, was fairly much where any similarity to his nephew ended. His long, lanky body had developed enough of a sagging paunch that, when his frock coat was open, a strip of shirtfront showed between his waistcoat and trousers—alas, he saw the need to button his trousers under his belly rather than admit their waist needed five inches more to fit his middle.

While the waist of his trousers was too small, everything else about him was designed to aggrandize. His house, to Stuart at least, had become downright amusing: a shrine to Leonard Aysgarth. Any award, since he was twelve, a ribbon
for jumping, a mention in the social columns, a note from a peer, anything was worthy of hanging on a wall. If a knight’s wife wrote him a thank-you letter for attending a funeral, he framed it. As if his esteem in the world would be weighed, pound for pound, at the end in written certificates, as if he needed visual proof of his worth.

Stuart greeted him with, “Good evening.”

Leonard sat at a window table in the early evening at the Carlyle’s first-floor restaurant, La Tosca. “To you perhaps,” his uncle answered. “By my standards, the weather is wanting, and you are three minutes late.”

Ah, the joy of Uncle Leonard. It was never an issue to measure up: No one could.

Stuart sat, determined to enjoy what would be an excellent meal despite the company. All he had to do was think of what the evening held in store.

The waiter came and took their orders, Leonard ordering roast beef, Stuart, a breast of quail. A bottle of champagne arrived with a starter of Russian caviar, crème fraiche, and toast points.

“Are you still eating fish eggs?” Leonard asked with distaste as he poured the champagne. When he lifted his head to look at Stuart, his chin did something similar to his belly: a battle between his newly acquired beard and his collar left a new flap of flesh showing above his cravat.

“Yes.”

“So why are we dining together tonight, Stuart? We don’t like each other.”

“The statue. Have you sold it yet?”

“I don’t have your damn statue, I keep telling you.”

“I found its provenance.”

“Its what?”

“Its bills of sale over the last two centuries, that sort of thing, that proves it’s authentic. It makes it much more valuable.”

Leonard shrugged. Though he eyed Stuart now over his soup as it was set before him.

He’d tried to sell it, Stuart concluded, and was having trouble, something Stuart and Emma had been counting on. The collectors able to spend the large money were more sophisticated buyers than Leonard was a thief.

Stuart pushed his own soup aside to finish the caviar. “I was going to suggest we come to an agreement and both profit from its sale.”

Leonard gave a haughty guffaw. “Last I heard, you didn’t want to sell the thing for some sort of sentimental reason involving the troll.”

“Excuse me.”

“Your mother.”

Stuart looked down, smothering a zing of rage by digging the edge of a small toast directly into the thick cream. To his knowledge, his uncle never had the temerity to say anything mean to Ana Aysgarth’s face. And there was no point in being wounded on her behalf now. His expression must have given him away, though.

“You’re miffed, old man,” Leonard said.

“Insult someone else’s mother.”

Irritably, as if he was being censored unfairly, “You aren’t going to tell me she wasn’t the most hideous thing on two legs.”

Stuart stared up at him, rigid. “She was a lot of things.
Hideous
is not one, though, that comes to my mind. She was gentle. She never faulted anyone, outside his or her hearing, or within it, for that matter. She never did a mean thing to a soul.” Which made him look down at the pearly gray caviar, mounding it. Her lack of willingness to assert herself, to hurt someone when necessary, had been his mother’s downfall.

Leonard frowned a moment, looking perplexed, as if Stuart had just posed a difficult riddle. Then he laughed suddenly, awkwardly, and reached across to give Stuart a good-natured gouge on the shoulder. “You’d never guess you were related to her,” he said like a mate offering consolation.

“Actually, it’s my mother I’d prefer to favor,” Stuart murmured, but Leonard didn’t hear him. He was already signaling the waiter for something.

Stuart shifted in his chair, then said, “Sorry. Was that your foot I was on?”

“No.” Leonard followed Stuart’s suit and lifted the white table linen on his side, both men looking under the table.

It was Leonard who brought forth the lady’s blue, beaded silk drawstring purse.

“What do we have here?” Stuart asked and reached for it.

Leonard pulled it back. “A lady’s bag, it seems.” He didn’t even hesitate, but opened it immediately.

Stuart had to hide his amusement at the bottom of a champagne glass.

While onto the table, Leonard laid out a lady’s satin change purse—it contained four shillings and eight fifty-pound notes—and a silver card case with a dozen cards in it: Lady Emma Hartley, Appraiser of Fine Art, Representative to the Insurance Consortium, Valuable Collections, New York, Paris, Lloyds of London. In addition, there was an unopened telegram, also to E. Hartley, and a newspaper clipping from a French newspaper, with a captioned picture of a woman using her arm, trying to avoid her photo being taken. The caption read, “Lady Hartley, la veuve du chevalier anglais, Sir Arthur Hartley.”

Leonard handed the article over for translation. Reading it, Stuart said, “She’s a widow to an English knight. The article goes on to say that the lady is the leading sleuth these days in finding stolen art and seeing it returned, the very large and valuable Rubens on the wall at the Louvre behind her being only one of four such paintings in the last year.” He looked up at his uncle. “So do you imagine this Lady Hartley is staying here?”

“I would think. Or only had dinner here and left her purse behind.” He kept digging in the bag, though, bless him.
Ah!” he said, triumphant. “Here is a key!” He held it up. “It’s to one of the suites. Number 3 at the very top. Egad, posh.”

Stuart wiggled his eyebrows. “Shall we let ourselves in? I’ve never seen one of the suites.”

Leonard pursed his smug mouth. “We should return the purse to the lady immediately. She must be damned worried.”

“What about dinner?”

“Finish up quickly.” A rich, pretty woman with a lost purse turned out to be a lot more interesting than an irritated nephew.

Leonard raced through his beef, motioning with his fork for Stuart to hurry along. He could speak of nothing else the rest of the meal, but speculation as to this Lady Hartley and exactly how grateful to them she might be.

Leonard did not stand on the formality that a gentleman did not approach a woman’s door uninvited either. “She’s going to be thrilled to see us,” he assured Stuart as he took the lift up.

The lovely Mrs. Hotchkiss-cum-Lady-Hartley, his dear Emma, surprised Stuart, however, by being decidedly
not
thrilled. Not in the least.

She cracked the door. “What do you want?” she said as if annoyed.

Leonard cleared his throat. “We, um—”

“If you’re from the newspaper, I have nothing to say. Now get out.”

“We’re not,” Stuart said quickly. “We found your purse.”

The door cracked a bit more. “You what? My purse? You’re joking.”

Leonard held it up. “We most certainly are not. Is this yours?”

Emma’s door came all the way open, as her beautiful blue eyes went wide. Stuart saw past her into her suite himself for the first time. “Please, come in,” she said.

She’d made herself rather graciously at home. A shawl they’d bought her the day before lay draped over the back of a stuffed chair by a bay window. Her bags were tucked away
somewhere, the whole place perfectly neat. One of her nightgowns lay out on the pillow of her bed, her slippers on the floor, as she’d been getting ready to sleep.

On the writing table—ah, on the writing table, were three rolled canvases. Stuart could hardly wait.

Leonard didn’t notice. He drew himself up, then asked, “You can identify the purse as yours, of course.”

Quite politely, Emma recounted, “Yes. It has my business cards in it: Emma Hartley. I’m an art insurance agent and appraiser. My coin purse has some loose change in it and cash: about three or four hundred pounds in large bills.” She frowned. “And a telegram I didn’t read.” Then she made a face. “Oh, and there’s a newspaper clipping in the bag as well. Those newspapermen have barely left me alone since I tracked that Rubens to a janitor’s closet.”

“It absolutely is yours.” Leonard offered the purse to her.

Very casually, she turned her back on it, and instead went to a cabinet, opening it. “Would you gentlemen care for some brandy? Let me pour you some while I read that telegram. I didn’t have a chance to before I lost the blasted thing. You have no idea what trouble you’ve saved me.” All the while, she was getting out glasses and brandy—the expensive French cognac they’d bought that morning. “I am so in your debt. Here.” She brought a tray of three brandies, set it down on a side table, then took up the purse. Opening it, she said, “Let me pay you.” She looked from one man to the other. “Fifty pounds each?”

Stuart quickly waved his hand. “Certainly not. Our pleasure.”

Leonard sputtered for a moment, but then contented himself with picking up a glass, looking through the perfect, amber liquid. “A bit of brandy would be nice.”

She lifted her glass then and smiled so radiantly even Stuart was taken aback. “To gallantry,” she said. “So long as you gentlemen exist, it shall live.”

Leonard blushed, cleared his throat. Stuart couldn’t keep his eyes affixed on her. He glanced at the rolled canvases
again. He was frankly flabbergasted—she was so good at this it was frightening.

“I can’t tell you how indebted I am,” Emma continued. “I was in some considerable distress over my loss. Now, if you’ll excuse me a moment, while I read my telegram.” Quietly, as they watched, she opened it, followed the lines with her eyes, then smiled broadly. She looked at them. “Three,” she emphasized, “
three
buyers. My, this
is
a good night. Please.” She smiled again that brilliant smile that simply bowled Stuart over—he couldn’t imagine how his uncle was dealing with her, when he himself knew what was going on and still was having a hard time. “If you won’t take my money, let me show you my gratitude another way then.”

That got Leonard’s attention.

She paused, rubbing her earlobe, a delicate gesture of thoughtfulness, as if debating how far to trust them. All the way, her forthright voice said as she told them, “You see, I have a little business that is highly profitable. Suppose I could make you a good deal more money than fifty pounds in twenty-four hours that would cost none of us anything and did no harm anywhere?”

“I’m all ears,” Leonard said, staring over his glass.

“Well.” Emma held out her hand, gracefully indicating her writing table. “Over there. No, here, let me show you.” She went over and unrolled a canvas. “You see?”

She looked over the edge, while Stuart and Leonard stared directly at the young redheaded artist’s facsimile of Rembrandt’s
Christ at the Column
.

“It’s fake,” she said cheerfully. Then invited, “Come closer. Look.” She reached behind her and opened the writing table’s one drawer. “And here are their provenances.”

Leonard jerked, scowled at the word, then watched her remove from the drawer a thick stack of pages as she said, “They’re bills of sale, letters, some exhibit contracts and brochures, some newer, some aged, anything having to do with
the painting’s history that proves it—them”—she laughed—“authentic: These were also forged.”

Leonard frowned for a moment. “I thought you were a legitimate art expert of some sort.”

“I am. I work for Lloyd’s among others. I’m quite respectable. A few of my smaller companies and I, though, have a bit of business on the side that leaves everyone happy. You see, here is how it works.

“An insurance company is the key. First, as a matter of course, the company can’t help but end up with lists of art collectors who buy heavily, fanatics. I get to know some of these people, take them to dinner. It is simply part of my job, in general, to foster good business relations. In the course of my association with these clients it comes out who might and might not be covetous for great art that is impossible to obtain legally. Second, the guards at the museums are often hired by the insurance companies. When one of my associate companies finds, shall we say, a guard who is willing to put a painting in an out-of-the-way spot for a day or two in exchange for some extra cash, well—that’s where I come in.

“I wine and dine the people who might long for a masterwork owned by a museum, finding out how sincere they are until I get the one with fire in his eyes, who wants his heart’s desire. At the museum, thanks to the guard, the artwork disappears for sometimes no longer than an hour or two—enough to make the newspapers, often as a kind of chuckle. But the client now knows that ‘the switch’ has taken place. A ‘fake’ has been substituted for the ‘real thing,’ which is now on its way to him. Because I’m so ‘clever,’ I find the work, oh, like the last one, in a mail room or such, packed up, just about to be mailed out to a post office box that is a dead end.

“The art is returned. The insurance company not only doesn’t have to pay, they look like heroes for finding an irreplaceable piece of art. I tell the buyer that no one will check the museum piece’s authenticity because they found what
they were expecting to find—or if someone does insist on verifying it, I do it or arrange for it. Meanwhile, an insurance company appraiser quietly assures the client that his new art and provenance are genuine, and he privately pays a fortune for it: I can usually make three or four copies and sell one ‘stolen’ work a number of times. Like these little paintings. As you can see, the enterprise is risk-free, since the people in charge of arresting anyone are essentially the people who have taken the art. It’s absolutely foolproof; everyone wins.”