LITMIR.BIZ

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inn to make sure it’s safe.”

      The footman reached for the painting as he’d been ordered, but John pulled it away. “Here now, Dumont! What’s become of all your reasons not to sell to me?”

      “The lady’s overcome my scruples, my lord,” he said sadly, as if there’d ever been a doubt that his greed would triumph. He took the coins as fast as Lady Mary offered them, sliding them into the inside of his black serge waistcoat. “I’m honored and delighted to concede that the picture is now hers.”

      “If you please, m’lord.” Lady Mary’s footman reached out for the picture, and this time John had no choice but to relinquish it. The girl had already hidden the purse back in her pocket, while Dumont had produced a grubby old coverlet, which he and the footman began tying around the painting.

      Soon she’d step outside that door and into the French bustle of Calais, and be gone to John forever, the way the women he met on his travels always were, leaving a pleasant memory and little else.

      But this time, with this girl, John didn’t want that to happen. He’d never liked mysteries; he’d always preferred answers, and the facts to give those answers meat and bones. He wanted to know why the daughter of an English duke was wandering about Calais without a train of attendants. He wanted to discover exactly how so young a lady had come to possess such expertise about painting from the little training she’d claimed to have. He wanted to know why this particular unfashionable little painting meant so much to her that she’d overpay for it by such an unconscionable sum.

      And, most of all, he wanted to learn what he’d have to do to make her smile at him again.

      Dover could wait. Now Calais seemed worthy of a longer visit—as long as was necessary.

      He cocked his elbow and offered her his arm. “Let me accompany you back to your lodgings, Lady Mary,” he said. “Calais can be a wickedly unwelcoming place for British travelers.”

      She looked at his arm as if it were a large and venomous snake to be avoided at all costs. Needless to say, she did not take it.

      “But you are British yourself, Lord John, aren’t you?” she asked. “You are not French?”

      He sighed, wishing he didn’t have to answer so complicated a question this soon in their acquaintance. “I was born not far from Kerry, in Ireland. So yes, I suppose I am more British than French, or Spanish, or Italian. But I left that place so long ago that I scarce can consider it my home.”

      She tipped her head to one side. “Everyone has a home, some place that calls them back.”

      “Then call me a citizen of the world,” he said, sweeping his arm grandly through the air, as if to encompass the whole scope of his life. “I’m a wanderer, Lady Mary. Wherever I find myself, then that is my home.”

      Most women found this a wildly romantic notion. Alas, Lady Mary was not one of them.

      She frowned. “How can you claim to be at home nowhere, yet everywhere? That makes very little sense, Lord John, very little indeed.”

      “But it’s true,” he said confidently, willing to persist. “I can tell you the most hospitable taverns in the American states, or the least agreeable ones to avoid in the East Indies, and everywhere else in between. Calais here is like a nearby village to me, I’ve visited so many times.”

      “Then you surely you must know a score of different amusements for yourself in Calais that do not require my presence.” She nodded to the footman, who tucked the swaddled painting beneath his arm to open the door for his mistress. “Good day, Lord John.”

      She unfurled her parasol and raised it over her head in a single graceful sweep, and without so much as a glance for John, she was gone.

      “Forgive me, my lord,” Dumont said behind him. “But you played that hand poorly enough.”

      “The game’s hardly over, Dumont.” John could see her still through the grimy window, her back straight and her step quick and purposeful, white skirts flicking back and forth around her legs. He’d find her again, of course. It wouldn’t be difficult. Daughters of English dukes were rare enough in Calais that it would only take an inquiry or two in the right places to find where she was lodging. And then—well, then he’d decide what he’d do next.

      But before he did that, he had a few questions to ask here, questions that, with the proper answers, could make Lady Mary wonderfully grateful to him. “In fact, I’d say the game’s only begun.”

      “Not with that one, my lord.” Dumont sniffed, wiping a gray cloth over the bronze Mercury that John had left on the counter earlier. “A beautiful English lady, yes, a lovely young lady, but also one who is accustomed to having what she wants, and nothing less.”

      The girl and the footman and the painting with them disappeared around the corner, and John turned away from the window. “Then the answer’s a simple one, Dumont. All I must do is make sure I’m what she wants.”

      Dumont pursed his lips into a tight, skeptical oval.

      “You doubt me, Dumont?”

      The Frenchman shrugged, signifying everything and nothing.

      “Please recall that I, too, am accustomed to getting what I wish.” John rested his arms on the counter, lowering his face level with Dumont’s. “And what I wish this moment, Dumont, is to know exactly what is wrong with that painting you just sold.”

      “Wrong, my lord?” Dumont drew back and sputtered with too-nervous indignation. “What—whatever could be wrong with it? You heard the lady herself, vouching for its veracity, my lord, and I would never—”

      “It’s stolen, isn’t it?” John asked. “Isn’t that why you didn’t want to sell it to her?”

      “What you say, my lord! Such an accusation, a defamation, a—”

      “Yes or no, Dumont,” John said, more firmly this time. “The lady might know her antique painters, but at her age she can hardly be expected to recognize the signs of thievery. Was your first reluctance to sell the final kick of your moribund conscience, done in at last by greed?”

      Fear replaced indignation in the old Frenchman’s eyes. “My lord, I cannot say how—”

      “Yes or no, Dumont,” John said, convinced now that he’d guessed right. “It’s one thing to offer new-minted kickshaws as the Caesar’s own to some fat mercer’s wife from Birmingham, but it’s quite another to sell stolen goods to a peer’s daughter. I’m quite certain those sharp-tempered fellows in the governor’s offices down the road would agree.”

      “By all that’s holy, my lord, I swear that I know nothing of thievery, nothing of stolen goods!” cried Dumont, his voice trembling. “If you report me, they’ll close down my shop and take away my goods and I’ll be left with nothing, my lord—nothing! Oh, have pity on an old man in the last years of his life!”

      “I will if you tell me the truth,” John said, too familiar with Dumont’s histrionics to take them seriously. “How did you come by that painting of the angel?”

      Dumont nodded eagerly. “It was brought to me last week, my lord, by a foreign man, perhaps a Dutchman. He told me it grieved him to be forced to sell so fine a picture, but a bank draft he’d been expecting had not come, and his affairs were desparate. It’s a common story, my lord.”

      “I imagine it is,” John said dryly. “How much did you give him?”

      “Three livres,” he answered, so promptly that John was certain the unfortunate Dutchman had received only half that sum. “As you noted yourself, my lord, it is an unfashionable painting, and on most days would be difficult to sell.”

      “Then why in blazes did you refuse to sell it to me?” John asked. “The truth, now.”

      Contritely Dumont bowed his head. “The truth, my lord, is that I knew her ladyship

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