“A vase to which we are sentimentally attached was inadvertently added to a box of knickknacks and brought here by a woman named Mrs. Cartwright,” Mr. Marchand informed him. “You purchased it from her for three shillings. Do you recall this, Mr. Fleegle?”
“Quite a lot of gewgaws, dogs, and things? Shepherdesses? Several vases? Little bowls?”
“That sounds like it,” Marchand confirmed.
Ginny crossed her fingers in her skirts.
“We put some of it out on the shelf, if I recall. I sold some of the shepherdesses to a bloke who wanted to line them up on a fence and shoot them for target practice.”
“Oh no!” Ginny’s hand flew to her heart, as if he was talking about murdering real shepherdesses.Men.For heaven’s sake. “Do you have any shepherdesses left?” she asked.
“I think I see one on that top shelf over there, where the staff usually puts out knickknacks that look like people.” He squinted, and pointed.
She pivoted to stare sorrowfully at the homely little shepherdess that Harriet Parker had allegedly cherished.
“Do you keep an inventory list or record of purchases?” Marchand asked.
“What kind of establishment do ye think we are, fine sir, that we wouldn’t keep a list?” Mr. Fleegle said this with cheerful indignation. “We get so many similar things in that we number the items, then cross them off our list when they’re sold. V125 for a vase, and so forth.”
“No description of the item, such as color and shape?” Ginny pressed.
“Not really necessary, is it, if it’s numbered? And we really haven’t the time for that. Much more efficient this way.”
“It’s a clever system,” Ginny confirmed disconsolately.
“How many vases did you sell over the last few days?” Marchand produced a handful of coins and was hefting them in his gloved hand, and Mr. Fleegle thumped what looked like a ledger up onto his counter and opened it to a marked page.
“Five,” he told him. He took the coins.
“Do you recall anything distinctive about the vases sold, or the people to whom you sold them?” Marchand asked.
“If I’d known you’d be in with a handful of coins asking for such things, young sir, I might have made more of an effort to pay attention. We don’t sell things on account here. The transactions are all in coin. We mark sales out of the book as they’re made. We don’t sell antiquities, as you can see. No one even needs to sign a receipt.”
“Efficient,” Marchand finally allowed, after a moment. Somehow tersely.
“Thank you, sir, for your time,” Ginny said, feeling thwarted.
“You’re both welcome to have a look at what we have. If it’s blue-and-white vases you love, we’velotsof chinoiserie. We keep them along the back wall.” Mr. Fleegle gestured to a cluster of blue-and-white odds and ends on a series of shelves about twenty feet long. “And people often come in to buy odds and ends and then go on to sell them again at market stalls about the city. If you don’t find that vase in the shop today, you may yet find it somewhere else.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ginny turned to Marchand. “I’ll take the far end of that section while you take the part nearest the door.”
She smiled when his eyes widened somewhat warningly at her audacity. She doubted anyone ever ordered him about.
But somehow she wasn’t surprised when he obeyed.
Marchand idly plucked up a small white vase patterned in a tracery of vines and flowers, glanced at the bottom, and put it back down again. His search was perfunctory. He had the peculiar sensation that he was floating over himself, watchingGabriel Marchand,of all people, pick up and put down knickknacks.
He in truth had learned nearly a decade ago how to spot Ming from not-Ming fairly quickly—he didn’t own any, but in the first flush of his wealth, he’d contemplated buying a piece as an investment, and had ultimately decided it was too dear for him. There was something softly, subtly otherworldly about the glaze on Ming porcelain, something uniquely graceful about the forms it took—and he would wager his eyeteeth that not one scrap of Ming was currently in this shop.
So why was he doing this?
He felt sympathy for but no real guilt about Miss Woodville’s plight. And while vase hunting distracted him from dwelling upon the beautiful yet excruciating anniversary he would be marking a day from now, that wasn’t the entire reason, either. Though it seemed related in some way he was unable to quite put his finger on.
It was more as though he’d stepped into some sort of undertow against which he had no defenses. St. Giles had prepared him for alotof things. But not this.
A case could be made that it had begun when Miss Woodville first appeared in his office. And he supposed he could assign that cozy bloody boardinghouse some blame.
But if he was forced to trace the origins to a single moment, it would be when he’d swept the soft, scented weight of Miss Woodville up in his arms and deposited her into the hack outside of the Earl of Sydenham’s town house. During those few seconds, something within him had unexpectedly righted when she was in his arms, as if she was ballast and he’d long been a listing ship.
