“It’s a good thing it was drawn with a graphite pencil,” she observed. “Ink or charcoal or watercolor, and we’d be out of luck. As it is …” She’d brought down something that looked like a photographer’s finishing tray as well: a shallow box with raised sides, the seams sealed with pitch. Holding her breath, she lifted the paper screen and slowly lowered it into the tray.

“Water, please, nurse,” she murmured, reaching out a hand toward the big mulberry-colored pitcher that sat on the sideboard, always full of clean water. Roger edged off the bench—leaving a small puddle on the floor, he saw—and fetched it.

She sprinkled water carefully over the drawing until it was quite saturated—“So it will stick to the screen and not float,” she explained—and then poured more water into the tray, letting it rise until it just covered the sheet of paper.

“All right.” She set down the heavy pitcher with a small sigh of relief. “Now we let it soak for … oh, twenty-four hours should be plenty. That will dissolve the fiber of the drawing paper, which will then bond with the fiber of the patch—while not disturbing the lines of the drawing.” Roger saw her cross her fingers briefly behind her back. She smiled at Fanny.

“So then we press it, dry it, and we’ll essentially have a new sheet of paper—but with your drawing just like it is.”

Fanny had been watching the pouring with the hypnotized gaze of a frozen rabbit watching a fox, but with Brianna’s words, she looked up and let her breath out in a huge “Ohhhhh!”

“Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!” She pressed her palms against her cheeks, gazing at the drawing as though it had suddenly come to life.

And Roger had the sudden feeling that it had. To this point, he’d seen it purely as something Fanny valued, without really noticing the drawing itself. Now he saw it.

Whoever had drawn it had been a talented artist—but the girl on the page had been something special in herself. Beautiful, yes, but with a sense of … what? Vitality, attraction—but she also gave off an air of challenge, he thought. And while the beautiful mouth and sidelong glance offered a seductive half smile, they communicated also determination—and a sense of simmering rage that raised the hairs on Roger’s nape.

He remembered that this girl had killed a man with her own hands, and with premeditation.

To save her little sister from a fate she knew too well.

He wondered briefly whether the man who had drawn her that night at the brothel had then taken her, knowing what he was buying, and perhaps relishing it. He instantly suppressed the visions conjured up by the thought, though there was no suppressing the thought itself.

Fanny was standing next to him, still looking at the last physical remnant of her sister. He put an arm around her shoulders, gently, and thought to the girl whose face glimmered in the water, her memory surviving wreck and dissolution, Don’t worry. We’ll see that she’s safe, no matter what. I promise you.