A Counterfeit Heart

by K. C. Bateman

  Sabine stiffened, unsure whether that was a veiled insult or not. “I suppose you’re right. But wasn’t it Plato who said, ‘Everything that deceives may be said to enchant’? Are you not enchanted by these paintings?” She waved her hand at the masterpieces around them.

  “Of course. I have nothing but admiration for those born with such talent.”

  He sounded sincere, and Sabine sniffed, slightly mollified. “Drawing someone’s portrait isn’t so different from printing money. In both cases I am using my artistic skills for profit.”

  “Except one’s lawful and one isn’t.”

  She selected a new pencil from her bag and began sketching again, mainly to avoid looking at his hands, which were resting on his knees, tantalizingly close to her own. For some reason she found the veins running along the back of them particularly fascinating. She shot him another sideways glance from beneath her lashes. “Such an innocent pastime, drawing…and yet it’s how I got into forgery.”

  Hampden raised his brows at her unprompted admission. “I must admit, I’m curious to know how one goes about becoming a notorious counterfeiter.”

  She shouldn’t tell him anything. The less he knew the better. But a perverse part of her wanted to see how he’d react to her additional misdemeanors.

  “I had no choice. My mother died of a fever when I was eleven, my father when I’d just turned seventeen. I had no relations to protest when the emperor requisitioned the family house on Rue Saint-Honoré and granted it to one of his generals instead.”

  Sabine bit her lip against the bitterness of the memory, the awful sensation of powerlessness. “A friend of my father’s took me in. He owned an art gallery and print shop on Rue du Pélican.” She met Hampden’s gaze squarely. “You’ve been there, monsieur. In addition to picture restoration, printing pamphlets, and selling antiquarian books, Jacques Carnaud had a rather lucrative sideline in forgery.”

  She went back to sketching.

  “Jacques used to send me to the Louvre three times a week to improve my draughtsmanship. One day I made a copy of a Bernini sketch on some original fifteenth-century paper I’d taken from the flyleaf of an old book. Not with the intent to deceive, you understand. Just a technical exercise to see if I could do it. I used the same color charcoal, the same loose style as the original.”

  She peeked up at him again. As usual, she couldn’t tell whether he believed her or not.

  “Jacques was impressed. He said he couldn’t tell mine from the original—and he was an expert at handling old master drawings. He put it in the window of the shop, unsigned, with no claims as to its genuineness, and sold it the very next day for thirty sous to the French foreign minister.”

  Sabine shook her head. “To a trained eye there are many differences between a copy and the original. The original is fluid, like your Rembrandt. A copy is more…deliberate, somehow. It’s hard to explain, but the strokes are different, constrained, because you’re trying to replicate what you see in front of you, not simply capture a moment.” She shot him a conspiratorial smile. “Ah, but a drawing in the style of an artist, that’s much easier. I sold quite a number of those to Napoleon’s ministers and friends.”

  “You don’t seem particularly repentant.”

  She chuckled. He didn’t seem at all shocked or censorious of her admission. “None of those uneducated upstarts would know a Rembrandt from a rat’s arse.” She blew a speck of charcoal from the corner of her paper. “They had no interest in the artwork itself. It was just something to brag about at dinner parties to impress their friends.” She folded her arms. “Once I even added a mustache to a portrait and the buyer still didn’t notice!”

  Hampden shook his head. “You are truly subversive.” He made it sound like a compliment.

  Since he didn’t seem particularly scandalized, Sabine decided she might as well confess the worst of it. “I even swindled Napoleon once.”

  Hampden covered his eyes with his hand and let out a deep groan. “Go on, tell me.”

  “He sent to the Louvre demanding a painting be cleaned and restored. It was a big job, and while it was in Jacques’s workshop I made an exact copy. Same size, same colors, everything. We took the original out of the frame and replaced it with the copy. Jacques excused the smell of new varnish as left over from the cleaning process. Napoleon never suspected a thing. He even said how delighted he was with the restoration and commented on how bright the colors were after it had been cleaned.”

  Hampden shook his head. “You are a dangerous woman, Sabine de la Tour.”

  She inclined her head in a graceful nod. “Why, thank you. I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  Chapter 24

  Hampden stood and offered his arm. “Come on, I need to stretch my legs.”

  Sabine laid down her pencil and sighed in resignation, even though her bottom had been going numb on the marble seat. “Very well, I’ll give you a quick course in how to identify the various artists.” She laid her fingers on his forearm and tried to ignore the prickle of awareness that pulsed through her fingertips. They began a leisurely tour of the upper galleries.

  Sabine had spent much of her life in the presence of great art, but until that very moment she’d failed to appreciate how many of them featured nudes. Everywhere she looked, nipples peeked out from diaphanous dresses. Naked putti waved their peachy little bottoms in the air; nymphs and satyrs chased one another, hands outstretched to grasp fleshy buttocks or bobbing breasts. Scantily clad ladies reclined suggestively on velvet sofas or lounged in verdant gardens. Even the canvases depicting warlike scenes were filled with glistening thighs and bulging biceps. She fanned herself discreetly with her hand.

  Hampden slowed in front of a pen-and-ink study of a muscular woman in an exotic headdress.

  “Ah. Michelangelo Buonarroti,” Sabine said, not even glancing at the small explanatory label beneath the picture. “He really can’t draw women. You can always tell which ones are his; they look like brawny men with breasts stuck on later as an afterthought.”

  Hampden chuckled.

  “Michelangelo was a forger, you know. He buried his own statues in the ground to age them and then sold them to the Medici as antique Greek and Roman ones. When he was found out his works only got greater acclaim. It just proved his superior skill.”

  She drew him toward the next painting, a huge canvas of cavorting nudes. “Rubens. His women are all fat and red-haired, with enormous bottoms and hardly any clothes.”

  She distinctly heard him stifle a snigger and suppressed a smile of her own. She’d only ever spoken so freely with Anton. To do so with Hampden was surprising. Exhilarating. Except she really shouldn’t be having this much fun with her persecutor.

  They came to the next canvas. “If it’s a dark background and all the men look like pale, sick, cow-eyed women,” she said, “it’s Caravaggio.”

  She pulled him farther along the wall. “If it’s a dark background, but everyone has a tortured expression, it’s Titian.”

  They reached a frothy garden scene with a woman on a swing. “If it’s got cherubs, sheep, and garlands of flowers, it’s French. Either Boucher or Fragonard. There, your lesson is complete.”

  “Irreverent chit,” Hampden murmured, but it sounded more like an endearment than a criticism.

  Unfortunately for Sabine’s heart rate, the sculpture gallery was no better in terms of flesh on display; it was full of writhing, muscled bodies. Honestly. Did nobody wear any clothes in ancient times? Didn’t they have winter in Classical Greece?

  Hampden stopped to admire a particularly provocative piece by Bernini, entitled The Rape of Proserpina. Good Lord. Sabine stepped sideways to study it from a new angle, marveling at the artist’s astonishing skill in capturing such frenzied movement. Pluto’s hands encircled Proserpina’s waist just as she threw her arms out in an attempt to escape.

  There was something disturbingly erotic about the way Pluto’s fingers pressed indents into the
flesh of her waist and thigh. How could cold, unyielding marble be coaxed to look like heated, dimpled skin? Even the natural striations in the stone resembled faint veins. There was something about the pose that reminded her of all those dreams she’d had of Hampden chasing her, catching her…kissing her.

  Sabine cleared her throat and tried to banish the awful thoughts swimming through her brain. Of Richard Hampden’s hands on her waist. Her thighs. She dragged her gaze away from the statue to the equally provocative man beside her.

  “Art is in my blood, you know,” she said, desperate to focus on anything other than the coiling sensation in her stomach. “My grandfather was court painter to King Louis. He painted Madame Pompadour, Voltaire, Rousseau. Have you ever seen any of his portraits? His sitters all look as if they’re about to laugh, which is a lovely way to be captured for eternity, don’t you think? There are far too many glowering portraits in this world.”

  Hampden tilted his head. “I’ve seen the portrait he did of my mother, back at Hampden House in Dorset. She does look like she’s smiling. I always liked it.” He turned to face her fully. “And what of your father? Did he paint too?”

  “He did. But his main job was acquisitions director at the Louvre—except it was called the Musée Napoléon back then.” Sabine couldn’t keep the bitterness from her tone. “The emperor renamed it in his honor.”

  She shook her head and forced her voice to be matter-of-fact. “Father survived the revolution by being irreplaceable. No commoner had the necessary education to work as art director, or had his skills in restoration. He was too knowledgeable to be disposed of. Napoleon needed talented men like him.”

  It was a lesson Sabine had learned early and well. Aristos with no skills perished. Those who sullied their hands with trade, with a profession, survived. It was imperative to make yourself indispensible.

  She allowed Hampden to escort her to the entrance and into his waiting carriage. As they rolled along Bond Street, she gazed out at the rows of galleries and antiques shops, all filled with outrageously expensive items only a lucky few could afford.

  It had been the same in France after the revolution. What the aristos had sold in haste, the newly rich merchants had snapped up, eager for the appearance of centuries of inherited wealth. Shops like these provided them with portraits of other people’s descendants they could pass off as their own to hide the fact that their money came not from land and property, but from munitions factories, shipping empires, and textile mills.

  The general who’d been given her family home in Paris had kept her family’s furniture and paintings. Generations of de la Tours now gazed down on ill-bred strangers. Sabine clutched her pencil box on her lap and refused to think about it. It was too depressing.

  Hampden’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “You’ll be dining alone this evening. I’m out again tonight.”

  Sabine shrugged, as if it mattered little to her, and returned her gaze to the window. He’d probably be going to a woman. Unmarried men like him always had a mistress to see to their physical needs.

  She told herself she was grateful he wasn’t focusing his attentions on her. And knew she lied.

  Chapter 25

  Richard was not, as Sabine’s lurid imagination would have it, disporting himself with a team of experienced harlots. He sat, instead, in one of the smaller private rooms at White’s, his club, with Raven and his superior at the Foreign Office, Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh.

  “Any more news on Visconti?”

  Castlereagh shook his head with a frown. “Nothing yet. He’s keeping a low profile. But he’s here. And he’ll make a move soon.” He glanced at Richard over the rim of his half-empty brandy glass, his gaze shrewd. “I know how much you want to bury that bastard, Richard. Not one of us doesn’t, after what happened in Paris, but I want no bloody heroics from you, you understand?”

  Richard bit down a curse. “When the time comes to take him down, he’s mine.”

  Castlereagh nodded. “Agreed. But you’re not to face him alone, is that clear? When he surfaces we will find him and eliminate him. But we will do it as a team. I will not have you going off on some half-cocked crusade on your own.”

  Richard gave a reluctant nod. He, of all of them, had the most reason to want the French assassin dead. The scars from that disastrous mission in Paris were seared into his brain. He shook his head to banish the familiar ball of grief and rage that churned in his gut whenever he thought of it. Eight years, it had been, but it was still as fresh in his mind as if it had happened yesterday. That murderer Visconti had lived far too long.

  Castlereagh gave Richard one last, hard look, drained his glass, and stood. “I’ll keep you informed. In the meantime, keep an eye on your guest. She could prove useful to reel in Visconti when we find him.” He nodded. “Good evening, gentlemen.”

  Raven poured himself another brandy and slouched back in his chair. “So how are things going with your lovely little counterfeiter? Heloise tells me you’re taking her to Lady Carstairs’s ball as your soon-to-be-announced fiancée.” He took a sip of his drink and shot Richard a wicked, teasing glance. “That was fast work, Dickie, even for you.”

  “It’s not what you think,” Richard said irritably. “I’m just using her to keep the tabbies away for a few weeks, that’s all.”

  Raven’s smirk was full of cynical disbelief. “Of course. The fact that she’s talented, fascinating, and beautiful enough to give a man heart palpitations has completely escaped your notice.”

  Richard ran a hand through his already disordered locks. “She’s dangerous and unpredictable.”

  Raven smiled into his drink. “I find peace and tranquility awfully overrated. And so do you.”

  Richard sighed. Raven was right. Working for Castlereagh provided them both with the challenge that had been missing from their daily lives. Richard deliberately endangered himself in plots and treasons because he needed an outlet for all the frustration and aggression he could not show in the ton. He loved the excitement of spying, the intellectual challenge of pitting his wits against other competent men. Or women. He relished the chance to use his skills. Not in a carefully choreographed dance like fencing, with no real danger of being hurt, but real, dirty, back-alley fighting. Those brawls were real in a way the artifice of the ton was not.

  He’d worked hard to overcome his gentlemanly reluctance and the spirit of fair play that had been ingrained in him since his days at Eton. He’d had to learn how to fight. Not gentlemanly fighting, all form and elegance, but no-holds-barred boxing, street fighting, where the goal was survival, not glory. He and Raven had engaged in scuffles in parts of the capital few gentlemen dared to go. He’d seen the seedy underbelly of the city, honed his reflexes with a knife and brass knuckles. He knew how to fight dirty. And win.

  Richard took a slow sip of his drink, savoring the warm burn of the brandy down his throat. He still hadn’t answered Raven.

  “I admire her, if you want to know,” he admitted finally. “Life dealt her a terrible hand, and instead of folding, as most people would have done, she played on, bluffing when necessary, doing whatever she had to do to survive.” He took another swallow. “And she’s done more than just survive. She’s thrived.”

  Raven nodded, but his smile was sly. “But you’re a man who loves to chase, to pursue. You love the satisfaction of bringing criminals like her to heel.”

  Richard narrowed his eyes. “What’s your point?”

  His best friend chuckled. “Only that Sabine de la Tour is that rarest of things: an enemy you failed to catch.” He ignored Richard’s narrow-eyed glare and carried on. “She gave herself up voluntarily. In fact, if you think about it, she’s your only official failure. She beat you, my friend. Fair and square.”

  Richard frowned into the amber liquid. “She scored points this first round, but the bout is far from over.”

  Raven raised one dark brow. “Are you sure you’re the one in control?” he taunted softly.

&nb
sp; Richard scowled. “Yes. Being in control is the best way I know to keep the people I care for safe. Tony went beyond my reach. I couldn’t save him. All the money and influence in the world couldn’t prevent his death.”

  He rubbed the tight muscles at the back of his neck with his free hand, surprised at what he’d just said. He rarely discussed losing his younger brother with anyone, even Raven. “The situation in Paris, with Visconti, was the same. We lost control of the situation and innocent people died. That’s just unacceptable.”

  Raven nodded his agreement. “So what are you going to do about your little forger?”

  Richard knew what he wanted to do with her: take her to bed and keep her there for a week. Screw her until neither of them had the strength to care which side they were on. He frowned, irritated with himself. He could use sex as a weapon to bind her to him. What stopped him was how much he wanted to. It wouldn’t do to become emotionally attached to her. Sabine de la Tour couldn’t be trusted. He might as well take a cobra to bed.

  “I’m not sleeping with her, if that’s what you mean,” he growled.

  Raven grinned, perfectly aware of his frustration. “Well, if you’re not sleeping with her, have you found a new mistress yet?”

  “No.”

  “Ah. That explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “Your current mood.”

  “I’m not in a mood.”

  Raven shot him a look.

  Richard sighed. He didn’t want to find a mistress. Or go to a whorehouse. He wanted Sabine. His cock ached, just thinking about her. He got hard as a nail whenever she came near. But spending any more time with her in his volatile condition was just plain stupid. He ground his teeth. “Bloody women.”

  Raven raised his half-full glass in an ironic toast. “Bloody women. How we love them.”

  His friend’s faintly pitying expression made Richard want to smash his fist into Raven’s jaw. Or throw him out the window. His fingers actually curled into a fist as he contemplated it.