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She shook her head. “No you haven’t, Solomon. If you had, you would not keep things as important as this from me. You would not dissemble and lie to me.”

“I did not.”

“But you did. You told me you were going to the locksmith and the solicitor yesterday afternoon, but in reality you went this morning, didn’t you? That’s why you were late.”

A gleam of something very like amusement lightened his serious, dark eyes for an instant, and then vanished.

“It is. I…I don’t know why I didn’t tell you, but I do know it was nothing to do with trust, or anything to do with you, in fact.

It is my…habits, if you like. I am used to being alone, to finding my brother always being my first priority, however weak the clue to his whereabouts.

I managed to keep my mind on the Lloyd case for much of the afternoon, but only if I did not speak of David. ”

“It did not once enter your head that I could help?”

He looked bewildered by that. “But you did. You do. Your very existence is my anchor, my salvation.”

“But not as your partner. We have been here before.”

“ Yes , as my partner! Damn it, Constance, how could I take you to a place like the Crown and Anchor?”

“Sol, I cut my eyeteeth in festering holes like the Crown and Anchor. And worse. It is pleasant to be treated as precious and delicate sometimes, but I am not.”

His arm slipped around her waist. “You are to me. I am flawed, Constance. I would be the first to admit it. In my shock, David was my business, not ours, not anything to do with the case.”

“Only he is, isn’t he? He’s in the photograph, one of Lloyd’s crew.”

“They took him on at Madagascar and he seems to have remained in London a bare couple of nights. He has already sailed and I don’t even know if he was David.

They called him Johnny, and his features are not so very clear in the photograph.

On top of which, neither Lloyd nor Sydney looked twice at me.

Wouldn’t they if I had truly looked like this Johnny? ”

“I don’t know. It strikes me that neither of them pays a great deal of attention to anyone but themselves. Not to a lowly, mixed-race sailor, and not even to you or me.”

“Oh, they pay attention to you,” Solomon said cynically.

“They don’t see me. They could walk up to me in my establishment and see only my figure, the supposedly beddable female, not the woman helping them find their blasted treasure.”

A frown tugged his brow. “Do you believe that?”

She waved one warily dismissive hand. “Up to a point. How do you know Johnny-possibly-David has sailed?”

“I found the ship’s captain and he directed me to the Crown and Anchor, where I found two of the sailors who had disembarked with him. They told me he’d sailed the previous day.”

“And you believed them?”

He blinked.

“Solomon, people who drink at the Crown and Anchor are not the sort of people who always want to be found. The men you spoke to might have been from a different ship entirely. They might not have even met Johnny. They just clam up or tell you a bunch of nonsense in the hope you grease their palms. Which I presume you did.”

“I did leave our address with them, too. At least they didn’t throw it away in front of me. Are you saying I should go back to the docks?”

“I’m saying we should. And that we could do worse than speak to Lloyd, father and son, about all the crew, including Johnny-possibly-David. He was with the treasure chest in—”

She broke off as a vision of the real chest flashed through her memory, lying on the strong room floor, open and empty. And before that, closed and empty. Her eyes widened as she stared at Solomon.

“Oh, Sol…”

“What is it?” he asked, clearly unsure whether to be excited or alarmed.

“It’s a different chest,” she blurted. “The original has initials carved beneath the lock. The one in the strong room doesn’t.”

Solomon caught his breath, staring back. “Are you sure?”

“No, but we really, really have to look at it again.”

*

Inevitably, Garrick greeted their request to see inside the strong room again with haughty skepticism.

“Mr. Lloyd is not at home and left me no instructions about making the strong room available. Come back this afternoon.”

“No,” Solomon said frostily. “We shall see Mrs. Lloyd. Now.”

Reluctantly, the butler showed them into the morning room, where Mrs. Lloyd was writing letters.

Solomon repeated their request to Mrs. Lloyd, who also looked somewhat doubtful.

“The strong room?” she repeated. “Do you think it will help?”

“We think it will. We want to examine the chest.”

“Well…I shall have to come with you.”

“Of course.”

Mrs. Lloyd led the way across the hall to the staircase under Garrick’s expressionless gaze. Childishly, Constance wanted to stick her tongue out at him.

“Wait here,” Mrs. Lloyd said, abandoning them outside the strong room door, while she continued up the next flight of stairs.

Beside Constance, Solomon flexed his fingers, a sign of excitement she recognized. She brushed her knuckles against his and he smiled. Mrs. Lloyd was not long in returning with the familiar ring of keys.

“I have just realized I cannot help you,” she said. “Only my husband and my son know how to open the strong room, or even which key to use.”

“If you will allow me, I believe I can remember,” Solomon said.

“He showed you?” The words seemed involuntary, blurted in sheer surprise.

“He did.”

Solomon found the large, complicated key and turned it the requisite number of times before finding and lifting the flap that revealed the second lock. Constance glanced at Mrs. Lloyd, who seemed to gazing everywhere except at the door.

Because in fact, she already knew how? Or because she genuinely wasn’t interested? Perhaps Lloyd had somehow trained her to be so, with his humiliating withholding of treats and information.

Solomon swung the door open and Constance walked in, deliberately ahead of Mrs. Lloyd. She crouched down, feeling the rough old wood of the chest, repeatedly fingering the wood beneath the broken iron flap of the fastening.

She raised her eyes to Solomon’s. “Nothing is carved there. No initials. Nothing.”

*

Christine Lloyd was sure she had done the wrong thing admitting strangers to the strong room.

She’d known it as soon as she walked into her husband’s bedchamber.

On the other hand, since he had made it clear that the entire household should co- operate with Mrs. Silver and Mr. Grey, she didn’t see what else she could do.

For a few moments, she hoped she might be saved by the fact that no one except Barnabas and Sydney knew how to open the door. But she was wrong in that too.

Squashed into the strong room with them, she could almost feel her sense of superiority slipping away. She looked from one to the other.

“What does it mean?” she asked. “Whose initials do you expect to see on a chest dug out of an island swamp?”

Mrs. Silver rose to her graceful feet.

Mr. Grey said, “In your husband’s photograph, taken on the island, the initials are clear. And they are just as clearly absent from this chest.”

“Someone rubbed them off?” she hazarded. “Why would anyone do that?”

“I can think of no reason,” Mr. Grey said. “I think this is a different chest.”

“But…how can that be?” She frowned with incomprehension, floundering. With relief, she heard Sydney whistling casually as he sauntered downstairs from his own room.

When he saw them, he staggered back theatrically. “Aha! The burglars are it again! I shall send for a policeman forthwith. Stop, thief!”

“Oh, be quiet, Sydney,” Christine said, not quite able to laugh. “Mr. Grey believes this to be a different chest.”

“Different from what?” Sydney asked, apparently as mystified as she, although his mother doubted that he was.

“Look at the chest,” Mrs. Silver invited him. “Is this truly the one you dug up on the island?”

“Of course it is.” Sydney glanced in some amusement from her to Mr. Grey. “What on earth makes you think it isn’t?”

Mrs. Silver explained about the initials in the photograph and Sydney scratched his head.

“Well, that’s odd,” he admitted, squeezing inside the room in place of Christine and inspecting the place on the chest where the initials were, apparently, meant to be carved.

He glanced up again. “I don’t recall any initials.

I just recall a dirty old chest full of sparkly things.

Could the chest have been rubbed so hard in cleaning it that layers of the wood came off and obliterated the carving? ”

“I don’t see how. We believe the original chest never left the ship.”

Sydney’s eyebrows flew up. “Do you, by God?” He met Christine’s gaze and laughed. “Lord, no wonder the old devil wouldn’t open the chest for you and the girls!”

“Sydney!” Christine exclaimed. “What on earth do you mean? That your father put the treasure somewhere else? They why employ Mrs. Silver and Mr. Grey to find it?”

Sydney shrugged. “Because he never thought they would? I don’t know how his mind works.

Perhaps he thought it was a safety measure.

Or something.” He frowned down at the chest. “But are you absolutely sure about this? It looks like the same chest, right down to the grubby old wood. You can even see where it was cleaned.”

Mr. Grey moved, bending to rub his fingers over the wood, inhaling, almost like a sniffing dog.

Sydney’s dancing eyes met Christine’s.

“Salt,” Grey said. “I can smell the sea and must off this chest. The wood has been damp, but…”

“The nails are old too,” Sydney said, rubbing at one or two. “And dirty. How can they be exactly the same, apart from the damned initials—sorry, Mama, Mrs. Silver.”

“Because someone went to a lot of trouble to copy the shape and materials of the first,” Mr. Grey said. “Who would have had opportunity to do that? Or the skills?”

“No one,” Sydney said. “The treasure stayed with my father in his cabin. But I suppose we had all seen it. I still don’t understand how anyone could have swapped the chests, though.

I saw Papa open it for customs before we left the ship, and the treasure was definitely in it at the time.

Good Lord, do you mean the treasure stayed on the ship for anyone to steal, while we brought back an empty chest? ”

He scowled. “Wait, though, it wasn’t empty. Harry and I had to heave it up here from the drawing room, and I can assure you it weighed a great deal! None of this makes any sense.”

Mr. Grey kicked at the little pile of rubbish that Barnabas had raked out of the trunk on opening it for Rachel the morning after he had come home with it. Could that have been what Harry and John had carried into the house inside the chest? What Harry and Sydney had carried up here before dinner?

Unease tugged at her chest. Something more complicated than simple theft was going on here, and her mischievous son was a little too amused…

“Sense?” Mr. Grey said calmly. “No, not yet. I suggest we repair to the Queen of the Sea as soon as possible.”

“You truly believe the treasure is still there?” Christine asked in astonishment.

“No,” Mr. Grey replied. “I’m sure it has long gone, but some clues might be left behind.”

Christine’s mind was swirling with alarm. Somehow, this would be her fault. She really needed to speak to Sydney before they went haring off to the ship.

“You had better collect your father,” she said instinctively. Surely it was his devious hand, not Sydney’s, that she sensed in all of this, whether a secret insurance cheat or some other, more Machiavellian maneuver. He would have to get himself out of it.

She had never seen the so-called treasure. For all she knew, it could have been glass beads and base metal that would never revive the family fortunes. Barnabas had gambled everything on this trip that everyone else had told him was foolish.

As his inquiry people and Sydney went rushing out of the house, she stood still on the landing, deep in thought.

“What on earth is happening, Mama?”

Jemimah and Rachel stood on the stairs above, leaning over the banister.

“I really don’t know. It seems someone might have played a trick on us. Your father’s clever detectives believe the treasure was never in our house.”

Jemimah’s eyebrows flew up. Then she laughed. “No wonder we weren’t allowed to see inside the chest,” she said cynically.

Like Christine, she assumed the trick was Barnabas’s. Was it?

“Oh, no, it wasn’t Papa who tricked us,” Rachel said. “Don’t you remember how furious he was? He really did mean to show me the treasure that morning.”

“Of course he did, dear,” Christine said hurriedly. “I’m sure it’s Mr. Grey and Mrs. Silver who have misunderstood everything. To the schoolroom with you, Rachel. I shall be along in a moment. Jemimah…”

She waited until Rachel had dragged herself back to the top of the stairs and Jemimah stood beside her on the landing before she continued in a low voice, “Don’t go telling people all this.”

“As if I would,” Jemimah said innocently.

But there was a spark of mischief in her eyes that was almost excitement. And God help them all, she was Barnabas’s daughter.

Christine caught her arm. “Jemimah, you’re not playing some kind of foolish trick on your father, are you? Imagining you are avenging some other trick, or out-tricking him?”

“Of course not!” Jemimah laughed, more amused than shocked.

“Because if we don’t get this treasure back, it affects all of us. Do you understand?”

Jemimah tugged free. “Talk to Sydney, not me.”