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She looked at Anthony, who shook his head in warning.

“Oh, as an artist, surely,” said Lavinia. “No one on a social call ever said anything interesting.”

“From the outside, it looks like a warehouse,” said Miss Coover promptly. “And from the inside, it looks like a gilded warehouse. All the rooms are overlarge, with fathoms of air overhead. Lifelessness on a grand scale. Of course, I’m speaking of the general impression only. I’m sure the furnishings are lovely.”

She shifted dubiously on the sofa, a horror in rose damask, with cushions that made no concessions to the human form. Her self-satisfaction was almost comical. She liked hearing her own aesthetic judgments and did not restrain herself from expressing them. Anthony knew her to cleave to them.

You are not my subject, she’d said to him, adamant. Love. Beauty. Those are the subjects of the painting.

Lavinia was a minx, but Miss Coover might not have walked so blithely into her trap.

“Papa designed the house.” Lavinia spoke with relish. “He studied architecture at the Royal Academy, then took a degree in structural science at University College. He’s very proud of Weston Hall.”

Miss Coover pressed her lips together. Yardley’s face was red. His architecture career had largely focused on commercial structures, none renowned for their beauty. Long before Anthony was born, he’d been commissioned by Anthony’s mother’s family to design a new warehouse for their shipping firm, Rodis & Metaxas. That was how he met Anthony’s mother and, eventually, his father.

His work on Weston Hall had failed conspicuously to garner him more commissions from lords with mansions to remodel. He’d returned to warehouses, and, under the aegis of the Board of Works, roads.

Unfortunate, Miss Coover’s critique. But astute.

“The house was built in the era of George the Second.” Yardley pressed his hands flat on his knees.

Effie always said Lavinia hadn’t a malicious spirit. Rather, self-absorption made her oblivious. Watching her lips curve into an expectant smile, Anthony doubted she’d realized that the subject of Weston Hall had touched a nerve. She was waiting for her father to give Miss Coover a good setting down.

“I was charged with alterations only,” said Yardley. “I amalgamated smaller rooms.”

“And created the double height in the hall, the dining room, and the gallery?” asked Miss Coover.

Anthony bit his tongue. Had she surveyed the whole house at a run, footmen trailing behind like gulls after a steamer?

“It was easily done. Several of the upstairs bedrooms were outmoded, entirely superfluous.”

“Ballrooms instead of bedrooms,” said Miss Coover thoughtfully. “That was my point. Display is the reason for being, not day-to-day living.”

Lavinia seemed to find her tone inadequately incendiary.

“Which you despise?” she proposed.

The look Miss Coover gave her boded ill, but her response was matter-of-fact.

“As a domicile, it isn’t to my taste,” she said. “But I was not the patron.” She nodded at Yardley. “I don’t doubt your design answered to his specifications.”

Anthony had shoved his hand into his jacket to prevent his fingers from drumming. Now he realized they were twisting his watch chain.

“It did at that,” said Yardley. He relaxed his shoulders, draped one of his arms across the back of a chair.

Anthony’s father had commissioned Yardley for the alterations shortly after Anthony’s mother had died. It had never occurred to Anthony until now that destroying his mother’s chambers had been his father’s aim.

“Miss Coover, you’re still chilled.” Anthony said it mechanically and rose, moving to the fireplace. He leaned on the marble mantelpiece and stirred the coals in the grate. Yardley rose, too, and joined him. He was nearly as tall as Anthony, and wider, a big, bluff man who gave the impression of being in the prime of life. Anthony’s father had been only a few years his senior, but he’d seemed brittle, feeble, old, by the time he died.

Lavinia was leaning forward on the sofa, pouring out tea.

“Which do you prefer,” he heard her ask Miss Coover, “Paris or the Riviera?”

“Horse painting.” Yardley chuckled. His amiability seemed fully restored. “You and your horses. I heard that yesterday the grooms couldn’t flush you from the stables.”

Yardley never mentioned how he heard what he heard. He and everyone else around Anthony seemed to talk a great deal given how much they all prized their bloody discretion.

Anthony grunted. His visits to the stable were only in part a cover for his visits to the glasshouse. The coach horses were strong, well-fleshed, stouthearted beasts, and the saddle horses, creams and blacks, were big and splendid. He preferred their stalls any day of the week to his study, where Yardley would have him stare himself cross-eyed at his father’s files. Yardley urged him to comb through blue books, records of parliamentary sessions, reports authored by the Committee on Intemperance, to prepare himself to fill his father’s shoes as a statesman.