“Nonsense, everyone has a price.”

Trust Jonathan to think so. Vincent had known the viscount long before Jon came to him to find La Nymph for him. It was common knowledge among the ton that Hale was obscenely rich, which had heretofore made it a simple matter for him to be able to obtain anything his heart desired.

He was used to naming a price and getting what he wanted. That he’d finally found something that he couldn’t have was not a matter of the item being unavailable; it had merely not been found as yet. Which was why he had approached Vincent and offered him a ridiculous sum of money merely to locate the painting for him. Jonathan would then negotiate with the current owner himself to buy it.

It was one of the harder commissions that Vincent had accepted. He was more in the habit of barter, of give and get, of finding out what was needed to obtain something, and supplying it. But what he was doing for Jonathan Hale was more or less searching for a rumor.

The actual existence of a painting called La Nymph was confirmed, but not the notoriety about it. It was reputed to be of a beautiful young woman so erotically depicted that it had an aphrodisiac effect on anyone gazing upon it, male or female. It was reputed to have kept one of its previous owners, an earl in his seventies, in a constant state of sexual readiness. It had caused marriages to be ruined. It had caused one man to go insane. It had sent another to the poorhouse.

Hearing of all this, Jonathan had decided he had to have it in his collection. Whether the painting did what it was reputed to do erotically didn’t matter to him, he wanted it because it was so notorious.

Some said La Nymph had been commissioned by one of the kings by the name of Henry, that it was of his favorite mistress, but with so many kings of that name, no one had ever figured out which one. Some said it had been created in revenge by the artist, that the young woman in the painting had been his love and had spurned him. Most people who heard about the painting simply didn’t believe in its existence. It was a joke. A hoax. Titillating dinner conversation.

Vincent would have been inclined to believe the latter if his search hadn’t produced some valid information about the last known owner of the painting. He had been a gambler by the name of Peter Markson who had won a painting called La Nymph in a card game several years ago. A lucky stroke for him, since he was apparently not very good at gambling, and in fact had had to leave the country to escape debtor’s prison. He’d used the painting to pay for his passage, then was taken ill at sea and died aboard ship.