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But Forbes seemed not to hear him. He was gazing at the painting bitterly. “Adelaide left for Inverness day before yesterday. Her sister’s lying-in, and her mother went to visit and took a bad fall on one of those cursed Scottish walks. Hit her head on a rock. You think it’s all moss and heather, but there’s granite beneath. She might die.”

Now he looked daggers at Anthony, his lips twisted.

“Imagine my surprise when porters appeared on my doorstep with a crate. For Mrs. Forbes, they said. I’ll take it, I said. Bring it here.”

Anthony could hardly follow what Forbes was saying. His senses had all gathered in his eyes. His staring must soon bore a hole in the canvas. Someone had stolen his image. The idea opened up onto further impossibilities. A wild-eyed artist making a pact with the devil, who then flew him into the bedchambers of the aristocracy with an enchanted paintbrush. Madness. But maybe . . . maybe the artist hadn’t needed the devil.

Perhaps he was all the devil it took.

The gaps in his memory accused him. Lost hours. He’d never been discovered on those nights he roamed the city, and so he’d counted himself lucky. The reporters, the solicitors, Yardley, Collins—as far as they knew, the Duke of Weston retired at half past eleven and slept like a baby.

But the artist who’d painted his naked form? What did he know?

The ache between his eyes sprouted teeth and claws. Something was chewing inside his skull. He drew a deep breath.

“Your wife bought this painting.” He said it carefully. “From whom? Who painted it?”

“Coover, L. Coover. Look there, in the corner.” Forbes stabbed at the painting with his finger and stared accusingly at him. “I went through Adelaide’s letters. None from you.”

“There wouldn’t be.” Anthony thumbed his eyebrow, hard. “We’ve never exchanged as much as a how-do-you-do.”

Forbes tucked his chin and marched to his desk, snatched up a letter.

“And I found this, an introduction from that Coover. Said he showed mostly on the Continent, where the art was daring. He’d heard what she was looking for and he had the picture that answered to her specifications.”

This clarified nothing.

“Nice way to dance around it,” said Forbes bitterly. “She was looking for you.”

“Give it here.”

Anthony tugged the letter from Forbes’s fingers and studied it. He looked up.

“He signed it ‘Royal Academician, Visitor in Painting.’ Visitor in Painting?”

Forbes shrugged. “Chaps who teach the classes at the Academy. But, I’d think you’d know better than I do who this man is and what he does. Or do you kick off your trousers for strangers?”

Deuced difficult to explain a scenario he couldn’t fathom himself.

“This painting,” Anthony began. He stopped. Began again. “This painting you see here, I don’t know how or why your wife ended up with it, but it’s not what you think.”

Again, that infernal honking. Forbes leaned forward, pantomiming amusement by aiming a slap at his knee. He missed his leg completely.

“Oof,” he said, overextending his arm with a look of surprise, staggering.

Anthony was familiar with all the forms of drunkenness, could author a taxonomy on the subject. Forbes was exhibiting the violent, the maudlin, and the hilarious tendencies. Better, perhaps, than George’s perversity, his pursuit of pleasure derived from increasingly sophisticated cruelties, but still, insufferable.

Forbes righted himself. He rubbed the corner of his mouth where moisture had gathered.

“So my wife is innocent? I wrong her? Prove that, Your Grace.”

“Innocence is harder to prove than guilt.” Anthony dropped down by the canvas, tossing his remark over his shoulder. “I’ll assign myself the easier task.”

Grimly, he heaved the painting forward so the frame braced against his chest. If anyone saw this image—the Duke of Weston, in puris naturalibus—the gossips would invent their own stories. The Pall Mall Gazette would run those stories. He would lose his right to control his inheritance.

He pulled the knife from his boot. No, he couldn’t cut it free. Something in him refused to put the blade to canvas. Instead, he used the back of his knife to lever out the nails that held it to the stretchers.

“What are you doing?”