“What?” She turned back to him at once, but she did have time to realize that this was completely normal. Just what he would say, what he should. The Magi was German Romantic, right in their period, exactly their kind of thing. They’d be expected to bid on it.

“Yes,” she said carefully. “Absolutely. If the price is right. Thirty? Forty, maybe?”

“No.” Sir Michael tilted back that impressive head, hoisted that powerful countenance to the heavens. “I don’t care if it’s twice that. Three times. I don’t care. I want it. Buy The Magi,” he said. “Buy it—no matter what.”

Her mother’s portrait hung on the wall across from her bed. Her old bed, upstairs at the Grange, her childhood four-poster. As she lay beneath her duvet that night, she could see the painting below the fringe of the canopy.

It had been done shortly after her parents’ marriage. Ann must have been almost exactly Sophia’s age. In an evening dress of ivory satin. Looking gloriously over one shoulder, her throat bare above the drape neckline. A ludicrous pose nowadays. And the picture was flattering to the point of sycophancy, every individual quirk glossed away. But the likeness to her younger daughter was plain: the same black hair, the same high cheeks, the same brown eyes and pearl complexion. Only in her mother, Sophia thought, it was all warmer somehow, kinder, sweeter. The gaze more gentle, the smile more forgiving and amused. The whole posture seemed to be one of offering …

Looking at her, Sophia found the ache of loneliness almost insupportable.

Now, all of a sudden, she was drawing the duvet back. Slipping out of bed. No idea what she was doing or why she was crying. She stepped from the room into the dark of the second-floor corridor. There was a grandfather clock at the far end. Tick-tick, tick-tick. The noise was maddening. It clouded her brain. As she went towards the stairway, the worn runner gritty under her bare feet, the landing’s perspective seemed to skew. The walls seemed to angle inward overhead. The portraits on them seemed to glare down at her from a great height, as if she were a child. She was afraid. Her heart was beating fast. Her nightgown, so white it seemed to glow, seemed to heave and flow around her; she seemed to be swimming in it as she headed down the stairs.