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She froze, watching a dark, handsome man lean toward a frozen woman from different angles.
“I know the forger’s identity,” he said.
She cut into her éclair. She had the crazed urge to gobble it, to devour every pastry on the tray.
“A sensational revelation.” He tilted his head. “It will bring down the house.”
She swallowed. Yes, the roof seemed to be caving in, the walls tipping forward.
“Who?”
He wasn’t wearing his spectacles. His eyes danced.
“It should have occurred to me at once. He was notorious for a time. Flooded the market with fakes. Rembrandt was a favorite. Brueghels. Van Dyck. He served a sentence at Pentonville over a decade ago, and no one in the art world has seen hide nor hair of him since.”
“But why should it be him?” She lifted her cup and set it back on the saucer with a clatter. “You’ve made it sound as though forgers are in every corner.”
“There are plenty of middling forgers. To possess such skill, and to misapply it so colossally—that’s rarer. It indicates a man who received the best training and yet holds everything it represents in contempt. A man with an ax to grind. A man who spent a decade improving his methods. I saw a few of his Rembrandts back then. He’s gotten better.” Alan paused, thoughtful.
Nina lifted her cup again and this time she drank. The liquid felt cold all the way down to her stomach.
“His name is Reeve. The forger.” Alan glanced at the cup as she returned it to her saucer, took up the teapot, and poured out more tea with casual grace. “He was a student at the Royal Academy. I talked with Academicians who knew him then. They said Reeve was as ill-mannered as J. M. W. Turner, with twice the talent.”
Absurdly, the compliment shattered Nina’s composure. She felt her lips tremble.
Twice the talent of Turner, the greatest British artist of all time. Had anyone ever said it to Jack himself?
“Reeve went to earth after Pentonville. Not to reform. To plot new crimes. The more I consider it, the more certain I am.” Alan didn’t notice her emotion. He was toying with his spoon. “If Reeve is working with Sleaford, the colormen and suppliers on the street might know him, if not by name, by description.” He glanced up, smug. “It won’t be long now.”
For a single blinding instant, Nina hated him with all her heart.
He credited himself with winning the game when people like him had rigged it all up in the first place. It was Jack’s voice in her head.
She couldn’t bear to see his elation, his self-congratulatory expression, the smirk on his lips.
His lips. When he’d asked her about ambrosia, she’d remembered the taste of his lips. Thank God she hadn’t told him.
“He’s a thief as well as a forger.”
“A thief?” She did look at him now, her gaze like flint.
“He was expelled from the Royal Academy for theft. Of the founder’s silver inkstand no less.”
No. She shook her head. Jack hadn’t stolen anything. The wealthy, powerful men who’d made the accusation—their only proof was his relative poverty, their own assumptions.
After his expulsion, he couldn’t join the faculty of an art school or give private lessons as a painting master. Respectable society slammed its doors. No one would hire him to paint a portrait of a bride, a child, a dog. His name was ruined. He was all but forced to borrow someone else’s name, to paint as anyone but himself.
She had to write to Jack at once. He had to leave London immediately.
“Nina?” Alan sounded far away. She turned her head, but he was everywhere, reflected, black hair, white teeth.
“Excuse me,” she managed, pushing back her chair. She walked briskly to the door and pushed out onto the street, where she vomited exquisite French pastry into the gutter.
Chapter Nineteen
The day after Alan’s performance review of Signorina Bonaccorso appeared in the Illustrated London News, he received a call from his brother, the first Geoffrey had ever paid to his Chelsea address.
“Shall I give you the tour?” he asked. He’d come around his desk in greeting. Geoffrey’s ice blue eyes were pinned to a charcoal drawing on the study wall, an elephant, indubitably Rembrandt’s.
