Page 17 of To Sketch a Scandal (Lucky Lovers of London #4)

“What the devil is that?” Warren whispered as they took in the enormous portrait that was the focal point of a small, dusty foyer.

A stately man and a buxom woman stood stiffly side by side, holding paintbrushes in a field of purple lines that might have been lavender.

Between them sat a patchy little dog with its own paintbrush between its teeth.

Their faces were all oddly similar—even the dog’s—uncannily round and staring straight ahead.

It was one of the ugliest things Warren had ever seen.

“Bloody hell, you may not be…you know.” He nodded to Matty, keeping the word investigating from passing his lips.

“But that doesn’t mean we haven’t walked in on a scam after all. ”

Matty prepared himself to go. If Warren walked out, there would be less shame in him doing the same. But Warren was striding up the carpeted stairs like the idea that this might be terrible had increased his enthusiasm considerably.

“Come on,” he coaxed. “From what you’ve told me, even that’s a good step up from what you’ve been making, isn’t it?”

“That’s…” Matty reexamined the painting, where its subjects seemed to stare straight through him. Ugly or not, they were at least recognizable as human and canine. He self-consciously adjusted his scarf. “That’s hard to argue with.”

It was even harder to argue with the perfection of Warren’s teasing grin, beckoning him along.

He had been attractive enough in red club light and thin moonbeams, but was something else entirely in the full light of day.

An edge he’d had in the darkness was softened here, less styled and cunning.

Both he and the topaz earring he wore still twinkled, but more with mischief than seduction.

The effect was irresistible. He followed Warren up the stairs, hoping (but still unconvinced) that it would end better than the last time one of them followed the other somewhere.

Led by the sound of cheerful voices, they wound up in a large salon.

Matty began his mental notes immediately—undercover, he could not write them down until he was alone, so by now, his memory was like a slate on the wall of his mind.

Some two dozen mismatched stations of school desks, easels, and uncomfortable-looking stools were set facing a collection of sketches and paintings in various states of completion.

( Note: they’re as shabby as the rest. A genius cover, if indeed it is a cover.

) There was no figure model yet, though a stool off to the side indicated that there would be eventually.

( Note: they’re not in a rush to replace the model, calling into question the seriousness of the class.

I formally quit that position several days ago.

) The other students were a ramshackle bunch, men and women both in unusually equal number claiming the choicest stations and chatting nervously about the weather.

( Note: who would suspect a female forger? Brilliant choice, potentially. )

Cool autumn air wafted through the open windows, but the stink of oil paint and turpentine was so heavy that Matty hated to think how unpleasant it would be if they were closed more effectively against the chill.

The walls were crammed so tightly with portraits that the frames knocked shoulders.

Each one featured the same eerily round faces as the one downstairs, in spite of differences in sex, race, age, and—occasionally—species of the subject.

“Is that budgie related to the dog in the foyer?” Warren whispered, his warm breath an indecent tickle against Matty’s ear.

He nodded at a painting where said budgie was painted nearly as large as his human companion’s head, his eyes identical to the aforementioned dog, and off-puttingly situated in the center of the bird’s face as it stared directly at the viewer.

The best thing would be to brush off that sort of comradery. Matty had work to do. But a chuckle bubbled in his throat as their eyes met against his will.

Distracted by each other, they drifted to neighboring easels, nearer to the fire and farther from the window, where the odors and warmth combined and Matty felt like he’d downed some gin.

Given the distraction of Warren settling in on his right, he wasn’t thrilled about having his head made foggier by the mantel on his left.

That said, perhaps the proximity to flame would prove a boon.

If he created something so cursed that the subjects of uncanny paintings demanded its instant destruction, he’d have fire at the ready.

Seeing as there were no other options left, he opened his sketchbook to a fresh, unwitting page and propped it on his easel.

Out of the milling throng of students, a familiar woman with hair frizzing out of its bun made her way to the front of the room where she stood between two of the displayed canvases.

She clapped her small hands together to get everyone’s attention.

She was followed by a man with spectacles, one Matty also recognized from the single photograph on his case board.

As the couple stood there, waiting for the buzz and ruffle of the room to settle, a little dog poked its head right out of the woman’s skirts, staring around at the students.

It was always a sober moment, seeing his suspects in person for the first time, and Matty—

“Is that the couple from the painting downstairs?”

The moment shattered before it could fully settle. Warren was leaning toward him, his whisper and the smile that shaped it still lingering on his pretty lips.

Matty was supposed to be assessing these people for hints of serious transgression, but once more he was holding his breath to keep from laughing.

Warren was right. Though he’d known what the Buttersnipes looked like from his photograph, the painting was such a creative rendition of their forms that he hadn’t even recognized them.

The real woman was built straight as a rail from top to bottom, the man plump and shorter than his wife by a good inch that had been generously inverted in the portrait.

But the color of her hair, the perch of the specs on his hawkish nose, and—most saliently—the way their little dog emerged from its tent to settle between them was enough to give the gist.

If they were secretly skilled forgers, they’d sure done an impressive job building a cover of questionable artistry to hide their guilt.

“Welcome, welcome,” the woman said. “We are ever so pleased to have you with us for our tenth session of Artistic Enrichment.”

“I’m Frederick Buttersnipe,” piped up the fellow. “I teach this class right alongside my talented wife, Priscilla, and our greatest treasure, Miss Martha Buttersnipe.”

While there had still been a certain amount of mutters and rustling during this introduction, a silence impressively thick settled on the room at this last pronouncement.

All eyes moved to those of Miss Martha Buttersnipe.

The little lady gave a panting smile, tail wagging so hard it became tangled in her mother’s skirts.

“Each of you is here,” Mr. Buttersnipe went on, “to participate in a most endangered art form. The incessant proliferation of the photograph —” he spoke of it much as Superintendent Frost had recently spoken of Matty “—threatens one of humanity’s greatest gifts: that of one human immortalizing another through the work of his hands . ”

All three Buttersnipes looked round at their students as if daring one to admit he’d once granted immortality using some less desirable part.

“We offer these lessons,” Mrs. Buttersnipe went on, “at a considerable discount, for it is our own common peers who are most tempted by the cheap tricks of the photography studio . Our proprietary methods of portraiture, however, are learnable by all and will produce a beautiful piece of lasting memory in a fraction of the time typically expected of the portrait artist.”

“This,” Mr. Buttersnipe said, “allows for those of lesser means to afford to learn the art—nay, the ministry!—of portraiture. Then members of their own communities can commission meaningful records of their visages for their descendants without bankrupting said descendants in the process nor resorting to the lesser means previously mentioned.”

He shuddered. A few others in the room half-heartedly tried to muster up some disgust of their own, kissing arse before the pencils had even come out.

That was a good idea, for anyone looking to make friends with the teachers.

Matty followed the sycophantic students’ lead, wrinkling his nose at the very idea of photography.

As suspected, Mrs. Buttersnipe spared Matty and these others special nods before she continued.

“Some of our students have gone on to make lucrative careers for themselves serving families who might otherwise have been lost in obscurity. Others have moved on into other forms of artistic expression. We ourselves offer individual, specialized instruction to students who show particular promise in these open classes. We will be assessing each of you to ascertain whether you might warrant an invitation, and fervently hope this class is simply brimming with such talent.”

Those words went right on the mental slate: discount , proprietary , lucrative . Specialized instruction was of particular interest. That went along with Matty’s hunch about their methods, and also gave him a path to the deeper rings of the potential operation.

Though he really shouldn’t have taken his eyes off the suspects, the warm chemical fog of the room made the temptation beside him too great to resist. He glanced at Warren, curious about his response to all this.

The bloke was biting his lip hard, brows up in incredulous amusement.

They caught each other’s eye just long enough to realize that was a terrible idea if they didn’t want to be tossed out on account of laughing.

While Matty had to assume the possibility that the Buttersnipes’ ridiculousness was an act, there was a chance that they were genuinely this batty.

And that idea tickled something inconvenient behind his navel—what if he really was not in a room with clever criminals at all, but just seated beside the man who’d nearly been his downfall, about to follow the artistic instructions of some mediocre eccentrics who were not covering for anything, but were like this all day, every day? It would be bloody preposterous.

When Matty trained his gaze back to the front, holding his breath until the chuckles died in his chest, it was to find that Mr. Buttersnipe was in league to make him laugh. No longer upright, he was now stooped down, tying a basket to the front of his precious dog.

“Miss Martha will be around to collect your payments,” he said. “In full, if you please.”

Never had a creature looked so proud as Miss Martha did, trotting up to each student in turn.

Her tail wagged happily as she accepted what probably amounted to a quite a bit of money, though a pittance, of course, compared with what might be lining their pockets if this was not actually the bulk of their income.

“Worth every bloody penny,” Warren muttered to Matty as he dropped in his envelope.

“Easy for you to say,” Matty whispered back as he came face-to-face with Miss Martha. “It’s your brother’s money.”

Warren looked surprised that his offhand comment on the stairs had been tucked away in Matty’s head for later.

“You don’t miss a trick, do you?”

“Only at the Fox,” Matty quipped very quietly. “I try to miss your lot’s tricks whenever possible.”

Matty was so consistently deadpan that he never really expected a joke to be taken as such.

But Warren’s dark eyes immediately danced, lingering on Matty’s face for two heart-stopping seconds too long before Mrs. Buttersnipe started clapping for attention again and this odd new chapter of their lives began.