Mad for Love (2 page)

“Ahh,
non
!” He snatched the plate back. “My dirt. Careful.” He stored the tea saucer carefully in a cabinet. “That is not ordinary dirt. It is Hals dirt. Dutch dirt. I have cultivated it from the backs of these ancient canvases.” He picked up one of the small oil paintings ‘liberated’ from Papa’s cousin, the
comte
’s
hotel
in Paris—one amongst the few such small paintings they had been able to conceal and bring to London just as the revolution began.
 

Because scoundrels like her papa were always able to smell the stink of trouble on the wind far better than honest men like her dear dead cousin.

“I have to scrape it off, you see”—he demonstrated his technique by taking a stiff brush to the back of the canvas—“and mix it with my pigments and oils from Holland for the Dutch masters. I use the Masaccio”—he gestured to a tiny, jewel-like
Madonna and Child
—“for my Italian paintings, so all their scholars and experts cannot possibly tell the difference. Haha!” He could not contain his glee at the thought. “Science is nothing compared to art!”

And art was nothing compared to commerce. And commerce did not like to be duped—it would get resentful. “Papa, you cannot go on producing an infinite supply of Hals and Vermeers.”

He waved away her concern. “True, there are others just as deserving of my genius. But think, my darling—in his lifetime, Vermeer was always poor and in debt, while I, in loving homage to his great genius, have bought myself this house, and live in style! You like living in such style, don’t you?”

She liked living quietly, which was almost impossible with her papa. “Papa, that is not the point. I keep telling you, when you sell a forged masterpiece, it is a crime.”

“But I don’t sell them to poor people. I sell them to rich aristocrats, and they get something for their trouble—they get great art! I give them taste! I help them become the great men they want to be seen as by giving them this art, this
caché
.”
 

“It is a public service then, is it?”

Papa was immune to sarcasm. “They should give me a knighthood.”

“They are more like to give you a swim in the Channel. And then where will you be? Having a very one-sided conversation with
Madame Guillotine
.”

“Pah.” He shrugged such negative thoughts off. “Then we will go to America. I’m told the Americans are in great need of art, and in even greater need of taste.”

Chapter Two

Rory Cathcart knew he was about to do something he would live to regret the moment he opened his front door. But that didn’t bother him in the least. Because his three best friends in all the world were standing on the other side. And such a ramshackle assemblage always meant for trouble.
 

The best kind of trouble.

Damn, but he was glad to see them. London had been a lonely place without friends this past winter. But it would never do to tell them so.
 

“Ain’t ye fellows got any manners,” he drawled from the doorstep. “This isn’t Edinburgh. In London, one doesn’t impose oneself before breakfast.”

“Don’t be absurd.” Alasdair Colquhoun, heir to the Marquess of Cairn, and lifelong damned wonderful pain in the arse, brushed by without waiting to be invited in. “It’s nearly noon, ye lazy hoist.”
 

“Do come in.” Rory waved the other two—his two other school chums, Ewan and Archie—in. “Not that it would do any good to try and keep ye three manky skivers out.”

“Never has.” Ewan Cameron, Duke of Crieff, shook Rory’s hand, and signaled to the carriage in the street. “By the way, we’re moving in.”

“What, all of ye skiving blighters?” Rory used the blunt Scots rudeness to keep his delight from his tone. “A call is one thing, but an encampment is entirely another. Hain’t ye got enough blunt to get yer own digs?”

“Certainly, but where would be the fun in that?” Ewan slapped him consolingly on the back. “And Alasdair already has his own place, though it’s not quite so nice, or spacious, as yours. And after all the trouble he’s taken to clear the stink of rumor from his name, the last thing the mon needs is Archie and me reviving the odor. Which is why we are moving in here. Archie is establishing himself in London.”

This was welcome news to Rory. “Excellent. But why must ye establish yourself at my home, and not yer own?”

Archie Carrington, youngest son of Marquess of Aiken, finally spoke for himself. “Haven’t got the time, have I? I’m the newest writer for
The Spectator,
and I reckon to come on the town with a splash.”

Rory clapped him on the back. “Congratulations, ye scribbling piker.”

Archie accepted his friendly insult with a flourishing bow. “Thank ye, ye damned dilettante.”

“No longer a mere dilettante,” Rory countered. “Have ye not heard that I am now the principal authority—a
connoisseur
, if ye please—in the Old Masters at Mr. Christie’s Auction Houses?”

“Who’d have ever predicted all that study would have rubbed off on ye,” Archie joked.

“I did.” Alasdair, young Member of Parliament, and the most ambitiously serious of the four—which was also why he had most successfully scrubbed the Scots from his accent—brought the teasing to a halt. “I predicted it years ago. Which is exactly why we have come to see you.”

A lovely low hum of anticipation tightened in Rory’s chest. “Is one of ye in trouble?” Because trouble was what he liked best—trouble was his middle name.
 

Actually, his middle name was Andrew, but if re-consulted on the choice, even his father would admit that Trouble would have been a more appropriate name for his ramshackle by-blow of a youngest son.

And trouble—the ability to get in and out of it with equal felicity—was why he had made such steadfast friends, and what had brought them all to London. Rory was eager to try his hand again after their last episode—a malignant tide of false rumor and damning innuendo that had nearly pulled poor staid, upright Alasdair under, and which had resulted in their relocation from Edinburgh to London—had been concluded in such satisfactory fashion with Alasdair’s bruised reputation not only repaired, but burnished to a smart town gloss.

“Not trouble,” Ewan, the most cautious of their group, hedged. “We’re not actually sure, yet. At least, I’m not sure.”
 

“I’m sure.” Archie contradicted. “I’ve got a nose for this sort of thing.”

From the other side of the room Alasdair made a rude sound. “But not the brain.”
 

“It’s not the brain I’m lacking, but the eyes. And the fingers,” Archie countered. “Rory has both. Always has.”

Rory tried to make light of his less than savory skills, learned well before he had ever met his friends. “Ye’re just jealous of my gloriously mis-spent youth.”

“No. We just want to put that well-spent youth to good use,” Alasdair said flatly. “For the good of your friends.”

Alasdair knew just how to appeal to him. Loyalty to these three men was the beginning and end of who Rory was as a man. They’d been through thick and thin together, these lads and he. Mostly thick. As sons of Scots peers, the four of them had been shipped off to school in France to acquire airs and graces befitting their status, though Rory always thought his father had shipped him off to keep his embarrassment of a by-blow out of the way. But through school, and then through university at St. Andrews—where they had raised considerable hell—his friends had never once seemed to care that he was a bastard, never treated him as lesser, and in so doing had cemented his lifelong devotion to them.

But he would be more devoted to them once he had coffee. “Breakfast first, trouble after.”

“As much as I would love to laze about all the morning like you fine
gentlemen
,” Alasdair gave the word a wry intonation, “I have to get back to the Home Office, where I have important work to do. So I should like to sort out this little matter of a potential crime before I do.”

“Potential crime?” The pleasurable tingling of excitement spread from his chest to his fingertips. To keep from drumming his fingers against the table in anticipation, Rory busied himself by filling his cup and taking a scalding sip. “Tell me all.”

“As I’m sure you know,” Alasdair began, “things are all-hands-to-the-whip in the art market these days, with all these dispossessed French aristos setting up house in London with nothing to show for hundreds of years of life in the nobility but a Holbein or Titian salvaged from the family chateau.”

“Yes.” This was not news to Rory. “I’ve been making a very good living out of helping them turn such artistic assets into cold hard cash with the help of good Mr. Christie. We had a particularly successful auction just last night.”

“We know. We were there. Oh, you were working so diligently we didn’t like to bother you,” Alasdair explained. “But we were there because Ewan spotted something that gave me pause. This one painting”—Alasdair held out a dogeared copy of the sale catalogue—“listed as
Girl with a Guitar
by Vermeer, sounded a great deal too like that gem of a Vermeer that sits next to the chimney piece in Ewan’s study at Crieff.”

Rory had seen the painting only last night—even though it was an Old Master, and his area of expertise, his employer, Mr. James Christie had personally handled the consignment. But he had not seen, nor heard, anything to alarm in the sale. “Vermeer often painted these drolleries, or genre paintings. Ewan’s subject has a lute. This one has a guitar.” He put his feet up on Alasdair’s chair, just to bother him. “I still cannot find within your narrative sufficient motive for ye to violate the sanctity of my breakfast room before noon.”

“But…” Archie looked to Ewan.

Ewan obliged him with an explanation. “But my father bought the painting—many years ago, ye understand—from the same family collection that is selling this other Vermeer, now.”

“And I thought ‘Who buys two Vermeers of almost exactly the same subject?’” Alasdair brought the discussion back under his control. “Because it seems very much like the case that got you started.”

“Ah.” Rory had indeed ‘got started’ in his present career by a similar circumstance. He had studied art, both at school in France and at university in Scotland, and as a result he had been tasked by his father, the Earl, with cataloguing the family art collection. Whereupon he had found discrepancies, and uncovered at least two very old, very well-made forgeries that had been sold into his father’s collection as being by the famed French portraitist François Clouet. In doing so, he had made a name for himself as something of an expert in the detection and uncovering of forged masterpieces—it had less to do with an artistic ‘eye’ than with an eye for details and discrepancies in the paperwork.
 

“And so we went to see it, the three of us,” Alasdair went on. “And the painting hanging on the wall at Mr. Christie’s is remarkably similar to Ewan’s.”

“Remarkably.” Ewan confirmed. “And what makes it remarkable, is that my father bought that painting from the Comte du Blois himself, back in ’78.”

“And,” Archie was quick to add. “The piece was put up for sale by the current head of the house of Blois, the old count’s rapscallion nephew.”

“Charles Blois.” Rory looked from one to the other, and felt his smile widen—he had a bit of a soft spot for rapscallion youngest sons. “Who studied painting in his youth. Who in the short time he has been in London, has sold paintings into at least half of the important collections in England. Who has been everything discreet and above board.” Rory felt that glorious tingle paint straight down his spine. “And whom I suspect
you
suspect of forgery.”

“Yes.” Alasdair was characteristically to the point. “And from the point of view of the Home Office, we can’t have
that
in London.”

“Of course not.” For his own part, Rory was rather glad they had ‘that’ in London—he’d have no work otherwise.
 

“And what’s more”—Alasdair was not done—“we can’t have someone forging our Ewan’s paintings. It simply won’t do.”

And that was why he loved these men—loyalty. “It won’t.”

“No,” Archie agreed. “And I talked to him as well, Charles Blois, and he was more than happy to tell me about a Hals also in his possession, that sounded entirely fishy to us.”

“And just imagine,” Alasdair went on in his magnetic way, “if you could expose a living, breathing, money-making forger in the heart of the London art market. Your career would be made.”