Page 16

When she and Jack had first moved to the Knackatory, Laddie’s offerings had been even more haphazard and disorganized. Junk he collected from job lots heaped the divans. Old parchments made drifts on the naked floorboards. Napoleonic memorabilia threatened to collapse the spindly-legged cabinets. Clocks beyond number told motley time and chimed continuously.

Thanks to Jack’s practiced eye, the type, quality, and arrangement of objects had improved markedly.

The men, though, hadn’t gasped at an unexpected treasure.

They’d spied Fritz.

Nina saw him too, curled up on a shelf beside a stack of French novels. He looked nothing like a rat. He was rat-sized, perhaps. But his nose didn’t protrude rudely like a rat’s. He had a sweet, squashed little face, with big black eyes. They were closed at the moment. His long tail curled around him.

She opened her mouth but Laddie spoke first. The rumble of his voice—loud, startingly deep—silenced the general chatter.

“Rat? You’re off your chump.”

Nina’s gaze flew to him. He stood by an open display case, where he was fanning out hand-painted German playing cards for the admiration of potential buyers. He swept the cards back into the deck, split it, and shuffled the two halves together.

“That charming creature,” he said, pointing the deck at Fritz, “has no more rat in him than Grigsby.”

The man who’d exclaimed By gad—presumably Grigsby—turned to glare.

“Pure South American marmoset.” Laddie grinned. He bleached his teeth religiously. They were white as an advertisement.

Until today, Nina had thought them matchless in brilliancy.

Alan De’Ath’s Cheshire cat smile materialized before her eyes.

She blinked. She blinked again. It lingered.

“How much?” asked the first man, he of the elbow and the bull neck. He’d reached the shelves and was straining upward, pinching at Fritz with beringed fingers. His offending elbow swung perilously close to a faience vase filled with peacock feathers.

Nina glanced at Laddie. Surely he’d direct Bull-neck’s attention elsewhere, perhaps to the case of artificial gemstones, which Ruby shone with vinegar. The bloke already twinkled with colored glass, but Jack always said Laddie could sell clouds in Cardiff.

“Twenty pounds.” Laddie snatched two cards from the deck and held them aloft. Both tens. One patterned with hearts, the other bells.

Nina gasped. Treacherous blighter! Was this his return on her friendship? How many times had she mended his broken lamps? Baked him Victoria sponge and shortbread? The morning she’d left for Umfreville House, she’d fried thin rosy-gold pancakes for the lot of them—Jack, Laddie, Ruby, and Fritz—mixing plenty of wine and cream into the batter, the way Laddie liked it. They’d all been pally then.

“Lawrence Ladbrooke, you’re the rat!” She pushed aside the gaping oafs who blocked her path and charged at him. “You’d sell your own mother!”

He caught sight of her, and his face registered surprise, then chagrin, then a droopy, overacted sorrow.

“What’s this the girl says of the dear departed?” he rumbled to the men around him, pressing the cards—the ten of hearts the topmost—to his breast. “She was a saintly woman, my mother, God rest her soul.”

“She raised a reprobate!” Nina stopped short, gripping the finials of a tall-back chair. She glared, neck craned. Laddie was a mountain of a man, widest around the middle, body tapering toward his head, sunny blond hair shining with macassar oil. His grass-green corduroy suit completed the impression. “If you knew any saints, you’d be fencing haloes.”

A few of the bystanders hooted, so she widened her glare.

“The marmoset is a member of my family and most definitively not for sale.”

She whirled and almost smacked into a bust of Homer. The blind bard gazed at her blankly, without a shred of sympathy.

“You’re as bad as the rest,” she muttered, and edged around him, looping toward the shelves. She could hear Laddie’s low rumble.

“A sweet girl, but, as you can see, a bit daffy. Never had a mother herself.”

The nerve. Nina sucked in her breath. Laddie and Jack had met as boys in the schoolroom and had maintained a friendship through all Jack’s vicissitudes of fortune. Laddie knew more than almost anyone about their mother. He knew Nina wasn’t motherless, not in the way Ruby was motherless. Ruby, who’d lost her mother—Laddie’s sister—the day she was born. Maybe he erased Nina’s mother out of delicacy, because he thought the truth more damning.

Now Nina’s face felt hot. After Jack’s father died and her own father disappeared, their mother had managed the best she could. She hadn’t many options, a young Irishwoman from County Cork, still legally married, with a toddling daughter and a son on the brink of adolescence. She’d met Mr. Farrar while selling combs on the street outside his jewelry shop. After Mr. Farrar, there was Mr. Nelson. And then Mr. Hessey. And then Mr. Bowes. Mr. Dilly. Mr. Thistleton. The list went on.

They weren’t all rotters. Mr. Bowes had broken a chair on Jack’s back, but Mr. Thistleton, a color mixer for a cloth-printing firm, had recognized his artistic talent and facilitated his application to the Royal Academy Schools. Mr. Dilly used to pull toffees from behind Nina’s ears.