Lord Dain eyed her up and down. “No, I don’t think I should make that mistake.”
“I should say not, after listening to her scold and insult a chap,” said Bertie.
“On the other hand, Miss Trent,” Dain went on just as though Bertie did not exist—which, in a properly regulated world, he wouldn’t—“if youarenaughty, I might be tempted to—”
“Qu’est-ce que c’est, Champtois?” Miss Trent asked. She moved down the counter to the tray of goods Dain had been looking over when the pair had entered.
“Rien, rien.” Champtois set his hand protectively over the tray. He glanced nervously at Dain. “Pas intéressante.”
She looked in the same direction. “Your purchase, my lord?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Dain. “I was, for a moment, intrigued by the silver inkstand, which, as you will ascertain, is about the only item there worth a second glance.”
It was not the inkstand she took up and applied her magnifying glass to, however, but the small dirt-encrusted picture with the thick, mildewed frame.
“A portrait of a woman, it seems to be,” she said.
Dain came away from the jewel case and joined her at the counter. “Ah, yes, Champtois claimed it was human. You will soil your gloves, Miss Trent.”
Bertie, too, approached, sulking. “Smells like I don’t know what.” He made a face.
“Because it’s rotting,” said Dain.
“That’s because it’s rather old,” said Miss Trent.
“Rather been lying in a gutter for about a decade,” said Dain.
“She has an interesting expression,” Miss Trent told Champtois in French. “I cannot decide whether it’s sad or happy. What do you want for it?”
“Quarante sous.”
She put it down.
“Trente-et-cinq,” he said.
She laughed.
Champtois told her he’d paid thirty sous for it himself. He could not sell it for less.
She gave him a pitying look.
Tears filled his eyes. “Trente, mademoiselle.”
In that case, she told him, she would have only the watch.
In the end, she paid ten sous for the filthy, foul-smelling thing, and if she’d dragged negotiations out much longer, Dain thought, Champtois would have ended by paying her to take it.
Dain had never before seen the hard-nosed Champtois reduced to such agony, and he couldn’t understand why. Certainly, when Miss Jessica Trent finally left the shop—taking her brother with her, thank heaven—the only agony Lord Dain experienced was a headache, which he ascribed to spending nearly an hour, sober, in Bertie Trent’s company.
Later that evening, in a private chamber of his favorite den of iniquity, which went by the innocent name ofVingt-Huit, Lord Dain regaled his companions with a description of the farce, as he called it.
“Ten sous?” Roland Vawtry said, laughing. “Trent’s sister talked Champtois down from forty to ten? By gad, I wish I’d been there.”
“Well, it’s plain now what happened, isn’t it?” said Malcolm Goodridge. “She was born first. Since she got all the intelligence, there wasn’t a crumb left for Trent.”
“Did she get all the looks, too?” Francis Beaumont asked as he refilled Dain’s wineglass.
“I could not detect the smallest resemblance in coloring, features, or physique.” Dain sipped his wine.
