For what I did next, I do not apologise. Too many secrets had been kept in our house already. I went straight to Father’s study, closing the door softly behind me. Grimquorkedat me from his cage and I let him out. With a whirr of black wings, he came to settle himself on Father’s desk, watching me with great interest. I took the letter from Plum’s book and retrieved Father’s Italian dictionary. It was slow going. My command of the written language was poor, and for all the purity of the Florentine dialect, the letter was liberally sprinkled with colloquialisms I could only guess at.
When I had at last deciphered it, I sat back in Father’s chair, musing.
“Sweeties,” Grim demanded, bobbing his glossy dark head at me. I gave him a pat and tossed him a sweetmeat. He devoured it happily, then toddled across the desk, looking for more.
“No, you shall get fat,” I scolded him, pushing the box out of reach. He cocked his head at me, then lowered his beak and began to peck at Plum’s sketchbook.
“Don’t do that, Grim.” But ravens are somewhat less obedient than dogs, and he did not listen. He worried at the cover until he managed to open it.
“That is quite enough,” I told him, pulling the book onto my lap. He gave me an irritablequorkand withdrew to his cage, turning his back to me.
“You needn’t sulk,” I began, but then my eyes fell to the open book. Something about the image Plum had sketched there caught my attention. I ruffled through the rest of the book. There were a few sketches of me, one of Charlotte, an assortment of Italiansignorinas,and one form in particular, rendered in a variety of poses. He had caught her unawares, it seems, for most of the sketches were of her profile, sometimes laughing, once in tears. But for one sketch, she must have sat for him. She looked out from the page, her expression at once both apologetic and triumphant.
I snapped the book closed, sorry I had seen it. But now that I had, those few lines of charcoal had changed everything.
I went directly to Plum’s room. He called irritably for me to enter when I knocked. He was sitting in the window embrasure, looking out at the melting snows, scratching at the glass with a fingernail. He glanced up when I entered, then turned back to the window.
“If you’ve come to call me a fool, be content. I’ve done it a hundred times. I understand she stole your pearls?”
I crossed the room and levered myself up into the embrasure to sit next to him. It was cool there, and I wrapped my skirts about my legs as I gathered them under me.
“Apparently, she did. But she will not say where she has them hid, and the Abbey is simply too massive to search. She cannot leave with them, and I am sure they will turn up one day.”
He rested his head on the stone wall behind him, one hand draped over his knee, the fingertips smudged softly black with charcoal. “I ought to have known better. I ought to havebehavedbetter. It was bad form to dally with Brisbane’s fiancée, even if the engagement was a sham.”
I shrugged. “We are all of us stupid at times. Perfection is dull, my love.” I brandished the sketchbook. “You dropped this outside the drawing room. I thought you might go looking for it.”
I laid it on the bit of window seat between us. He made no move to touch it but simply looked at me, his eyes half-lidded in pain.
“I suppose you looked through it.”
I nodded slowly. “I did. And I’m sorry. Perhaps that is why you behaved so badly with Charlotte. Because you cannot haveher.”
He made a little sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sob. “No. And now that she carries my brother’s child, I never will.”
He thumped a fist against the windowpane, the glass shuddering lightly under his hand.
“Plum, you would never have had her in any case. She loves Lysander. She married him,” I said, my voice low and soothing.
He looked at me with something like pity. “You still do not understand. I saw her first, I loved her first.”
I blinked at him. “But how? Lysander came back to Florence already married to her.”
Plum stared out at the winter landscape, but I knew he was seeing another place and another time. “It was last summer. Lysander and I were in Rome, awaiting your arrival. We went to a church, something about a new organ Lysander wished to hear. She was there, just across the aisle, her head draped in a veil of Venetian lace. I saw only her profile, but it was enough. I sat and listened to the music and worshipped her for an hour. And when it was done, Lysander simply rose and left, complaining about the organist’s sense of timing. He never sensed her, never realised that she was there, like a goddess stepped from Olympus to grace mere mortals with a glance.”
I suppressed a sigh. It was very like Plum to romanticise his feelings for Violante, and I knew it would be fatal to remind him that she was simply a pretty girl with lovely eyes and indigestion.
He went on, dreamily. “You cannot imagine what a shock it was to me when Lysander brought her into the room that first night and made his announcement.I have taken a wife, Plum. Come and kiss your sister.And I had to press my lips for the first and only time to that alabaster cheek, knowing she would never be mine.” He roused then, smiling from faraway. “Lysander has always been generous with me. Anything I admired, he gave me freely. But she is the only thing of his I have ever envied, and the only thing I cannot have.”
“And that is why you have been beastly to him? And cold to Violante? This is what was behind that ludicrous display in the billiard room when you punched him on the nose, is it not?”
“Julia, you do not know. You cannot imagine the torment—”
“Eglamour Tarquin Deiphobus March, don’t youdaretell me what I do not know,” I began, rising from my perch. “I know a very great deal about eating your own heart out over someone you cannot have. And do you know what I have learned? It is pathetic and sad. You are a strong, healthy, passably handsome man with a reasonably good intellect, if you would care to use it, and a talent for drawing that Michelangelo himself would have approved. And what do you do with all those virtues? You flirt with betrothed women and moon about over your own sister-in-law. You are maudlin and sentimental, and it is high time you took a rather hard look at yourself and realised you are in danger of becoming ridiculous.”
He gaped at me, open-mouthed. He did not even attempt to speak.
“Now, I am about to go and bruise the heart of your friend. If you can have a care for anyone other than yourself, you should make preparations to take him back to Italy. It would be the best thing for the both of you. Alessandro can get on with the business of his life, and you can do something with yourself.”