“That’s…interesting.”
“Very.”He nodded.“I suggest we go to my sitting room because it would give us more privacy for the conversation we need to have,” he encouraged huskily.
“You have your own sitting room?”
“We all have our own suite of rooms.”
“Wow.”
He grimaced.“Castle, remember?”
“Something else we need to talk about.”She kept her hand on his arm as she turned fully to face him.“But first I want to know how you came to own those amazing frescoes that have never, to my knowledge, ever been shown to the public.”She gave a derisive shake of her head.“One of my tutors has a theory regarding the identity of the artist.”
“Which is?”Ranulf indulged, already having heard many theories over the years as to who the master carver could be.
“That it isn’t just one person, but many people who have taken on the persona over the centuries.My tutor says it’s the only explanation as to how some of these carvings can be dated back many centuries and others are clearly more recent.”
“It’s one theory,” Ranulf allowed.
She nodded.“He also claims to have found a tiny dragon hidden in each of those more recent carvings,” she added slowly.
“Hm.”Ranulf had included the first one in a moment of whimsy almost a century ago.But he had liked it so much that he had continued to add a single tiny dragon to all his carvings since.
“We’re back to dragons again,” she realized.
“Hm,” he rumbled again.“Will you please accompany me to my suite so we can talk in private?”
She gave an abrupt nod.“But I should say good night to your brothers and their partners first.They have all been so kind?—”
“They’ve all already retired for the night,” he dismissed.“They asked me to pass on their good nights to you,” he excused.“Shall we go upstairs now?”He invited Sephie to precede him up the stone staircase.
* * *
Sephie was even more confused now than she had been earlier.Of course, the brothers were all steeped in mystery, but those frescoes on all four walls in that huge room had taken it to a whole other level.
Even the carvings and furniture kept in private collections had been in the public domain at some time and were not only listed but photographed and discussed in the books Sephie had read on the subject.There had never been so much as a mention of these lengthy panels depicting different eras in history.
The fact that the Drake brothers owned unseen works that art experts would consider virtually priceless was an indication of how mega-rich they all were.
To a student who was working part-time as a waitress in a restaurant to help pay her way through university, it was a little scary to realize how rich the Drake family was.
Sephie came to a halt when Ranulf opened the door of the sitting room she assumed must be his.
It was in a completely different part of the castle from her parents’ guest suite.The room was larger too, with two doors opening off it, probably the bedroom and bathroom.
But that wasn’t what had stopped Sephie in her tracks.That was all down to the huge pieces of furniture in the sitting room.An eight-foot-tall, shelved bookcase, completely filled with leatherbound books.A sofa that would comfortably seat six people, two matching chairs, and a couple of side tables.
There were also a couple of tapestries on the walls and a thick Aubusson carpet on the floor.
But it was the furniture that held her in rapt attention.The size of the furniture she could understand: Ranulf and his brothers were all six and a half feet tall, and they all had wide and muscular shoulders and long legs.
No, it wasn’t the size of the furniture that surprised her.It was that each piece had obviously been lovingly created, and by a master at the craft that she easily recognized—again—because of her obsession with other carvings by the same carver.
She was also very sure, with the same certainty as she was about the panels downstairs, that none of this furniture had ever been photographed or listed under the master’s works.
Perhaps it was time—past time—that she confronted the elephant in the room.
She had been ignoring the obvious since she had first seen the panels.
