“And have her heart broken.”

“Have it broken open, yes.”

Bernard could no longer contain himself. “God!” he said, setting his mug down by his keyboard with a careless thud. “Talk about arrogant. You’re as arrogant as Iago.”

Harper nodded slowly. “He works his work, I mine.”

The factotum swung away from her, swung round to his computer. Laid a hand here and there aimlessly about the workstation, looking for something to occupy his attention, to keep him from showing his feelings—which he generally hated to do. That was how he came to hit upon the manila folder that Harper had placed in one of his pigeonholes. He drew it out. Opened the clasp. Pulled a page from within.

“So what’s this?”

“Ah. Yes. That is what I meant about tonight.” Harper set her mug down on an endtable, rose to her feet. She stretched, gathered her pipe, her satchel. “That is a fourteenth-century ballad called ‘Young William,’ which I recovered from an anthology in the London Library. I translated it from the Middle English for you, in light of your progressive education.”

“Cheers.”

“I take it to be evidence that my suspicions were correct and that ‘Black Annie,” The Alchemist’s Castle,’ and the Magi panel were all inspired by a single earlier source, probably English, and probably predating the thirteenth century. The similarities are too obvious to ignore.”

“And this strikes you as interesting somehow?”

She had recovered her stick, had paused beside the mantelpiece. Was regarding him sternly from there, her squat figure not much taller than the grotesque telamon howling beside her. “Bernard,” she said, drawing out the syllables reprovingly. “Bernard, Bernard. It strikes me as everything. Reason it out. Iago is after the Rhinehart triptych and he doesn’t seem to care who knows it. He wants people to know it so that the owners of the other two panels will come forward. What does worry him is that someone might find out exactly what it is about the triptych that interests him.”

“And the answer is buried in all these stories?”

“Exactly. They are the trail, at least—the trail our warlock friend Dr. Mormo kept raving about—a trail of ghost stories, which I suspect led Iago to the triptych in the first place, and which now may lead us to the answer as well.”

Bernard examined the ballad, frowned at it.

“That must be it,” Harper continued. “You’ll notice: Iago did not become concerned with us until I had Jorge unearth ‘The Alchemist’s Castle’—the one story that forms an essential bridge connecting the tales to the paintings. When I discovered that, he sent his thugs to attack us. Now, if I can continue to follow the story trail to the common source of all these works …”

“Then perhaps he’ll send his thugs to kill us.”