Titus looked back at the painting. There was something nagging at him.
The background was very roughly indicated in deep green brushstrokes, but suggested an opulent room. A table behindthe Queen had been worked in more detail. It bore a wide bowl full of daffodils, their garish colour sharp and aggressive on his palate. They had been intended to stand out against the room, he thought, not to mention the clear glitter of a thousand diamonds.
“You are selling it?” he asked Nico.
“I must. It is all I have left from a damaged name and a wasted inheritance. Even now, it offers me more danger than profit. If I sold this at public auction—a piece of history as you say, monsieurs—it would go for a fortune. I cannot.”
He’d addressed that to the room at large. Titus wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t like it.
“Why can’t you sell it?” Augustus asked. The noon light was good in here. Titus picked up the canvas and turned it to see the brushstrokes.
“Because I do not care to attract the attention of the French crown or its agents. I should rather sell it privately for a tenth of its real value, and live in peace. Someone else may buy it and make it public if they please.”
“It should be kept private,” Baynes said doggedly.
“It should be shown to the world,” Augustus retorted, adding less boldly, “Perhaps in some years’ time.”
“Oh, bien sûr,” Nico agreed. “Times will change. The present Roi Louis is not long for this world, and if the crown goes to Charles Philippe, I doubt the French monarchy will be long for this world either. If I could retain this picture for, oh, fifteen years, I could sell it freely and be a rich man. But.” He turned up both palms in an elegant shrug, and Titus saw one of them bore a cut. “My circumstances do not permit me to wait fifteen years. I sell now and accept the loss.”
“Fifteen hundred,” Augustus said. “It is a most reasonable offer for a painting that cannot be hung.”
“Eighteen hundred,” Baynes snarled.
“Gentlemen, you toy with me,” Nico said. “Two thousand five hundred is the least I can accept.”
Titus leaned in so his nose was almost at the canvas, peering at the brushstrokes, the garish daffodils. Marie Antoinette looked back at him, and her heavy-lidded eyes were laughing.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Nico had had a wonderful night, just him and Titus in a room together. It was the next morning, as soon as he’d headed downstairs, that things had started to go wrong.
Eve had grabbed him wordlessly in the hall and dragged him into the mews behind the house, where Alma stood, tense and tear-stained, with two large men. One held a knife too near her neck. It seemed that Jacky Gaskin wasn’t waiting for his money with patience.
“Take that knife from her throat,” Nico said with more calm than he felt. “Do it now.”
“It’s her throat or yours,” remarked a seedy sort of man leaning against the wall. “Want to volunteer?”
“What’s this about? I told Gaskin I’d get his money! I have till tomorrow!”
“He told you he’d remind you. This is the reminder.”
One of the thugs grinned and pulled on Alma’s arm. She gave a terrified, hiccupy gasp.
“Let her go,” Eve and Nico said in chorus, and Eve went on, “This is nothing to do with her!”
“You think Jacky cares whose fault it is? This ain’t the Bench, and he ain’t a magistrate. And if we need to prod your girl with a bit of cold iron to make the point—get it? Make the point?”
“Brilliant,” Nico said through his teeth. “You are Grimaldi himself. Get the fuck off her!”
He moved as he spoke, flicking out the navaja. The vicious rattle took the knifeman’s attention, and Eve dived in, pulling Alma away. The knifeman lunged; Nico recoiled, but not fast enough. He felt the scratch of a blade under his chin, twisted, slashed, missed, and felt pain sear across his other, outflung palm.
“Oi!” the seedy man said. “If Jacky wants him dead, he’ll tell you! And you, Frenchy, stop pissing about.”
The knifeman growled and stopped his advance. He didn’t lower his knife, though, and Nico had no illusions about who would win if he restarted the fight. The seedy man shook his head in disgust. “What a fuss. Money, tomorrow. No more playing the fool.”
Alma had taken the whole thing surprisingly well. That was to say, she cried a little, cursed Jacky Gaskin and his men at length, and then turned her fire on Nico and Eve with a really admirable vocabulary for a well-brought-up girl. It was far better than going into a fit of hysterics, which was what Nico felt like doing. He was out of time. Out of road. Nowhere else to go.
He’d left Eve to calm her down with kisses and promises that he hoped to God wouldn’t be lies. And then he’d come back to the house, braced to tell the truth and see everything fall apart, and realised that Titus wasn’t there, but Chilcott Baynes was.