“Perhaps I should go,” Charlotte murmured, chilled to the bone. “Perhaps we’re done here.” She had risked everything coming to see this man. No one knew she was here. Only the bored hackney driver she had paid to bring her here, who had agreed to wait for twenty minutes and no longer. She was utterly on her own, and if she were to disappear, there would be no trail to follow. Which was probably just as well. At least they wouldn’t carve fool on her headstone.

“I think not, Lady Charlotte,” he said, moving with a lethal grace to block the door. “For I am not done with you at all.”

Charlotte’s heart stopped before it resumed again. “How do you know my name?” she whispered. She had not given it to King. Only identified herself as Miss Hawkins, using the surname of one of the kitchen maids. She didn’t look like a refined lady—she was too tall to be elegant, too broad shouldered to be sophisticated. And she had twisted her plain brown hair into a forgettable plait. Left every trapping of wealth at home in favor of homespun wool and worn leather purchased in Petticoat Lane to cover her unremarkable figure.

“I asked you not to insult me further,” King repeated coldly. Which told Charlotte nothing. But then, that was probably the idea. “The forgery,” he said, leaning over his walking stick. “Tell me who painted it.”

Charlotte swallowed hard. Should she lie? Tell the truth? Would it matter at this point, or would she simply become a footnote in history either way? A woman who had badly underestimated a very dangerous man and didn’t survive to tell the tale. “Me,” she finally said. He wouldn’t believe her, but at least she wouldn’t meet her demise as a liar.

“Good.” King nodded like she had just passed some sort of test. “And the original? Where is it?”

Charlotte blinked, trying to find her voice. The sneering censure and mocking disbelief she’d expected at her declaration were absent. “Um…”

“The original,” King repeated as though he were talking to a half-wit or a panicked filly. “It must be somewhere where you had access to it to execute a forgery of this quality. Where is it?”

“Jasper House,” Charlotte blurted. “In Aysgarth. North of York.” One of the many estates that her father, the Earl of Edgerton, owned. Her solitary prison every summer and every winter for as long as she could remember. And one that she would be returning to within a fortnight unless she did something drastic. Like this.

“I know where Aysgarth is, Lady Charlotte,” King replied, sounding pleased. “Can you be more specific?”

“Specific?”

“Where is the painting? In a drawing room? A ballroom? A gallery—”

“The attics.”

King’s expression flattened. “The attics,” he repeated, his lip curling.