THE EXILED PRINCE SON-IN-LAW STRIKES BACK

Chapter 5: The Ashworth Mule

The next morning, I came back to Ashworth Hall at seven to find my things on the lawn.

Not all my things. I didn't own much. Two driver's suits, a grey coat, a few shirts, a shaving kit and a box of old books. Someone had carried them out of my small room above the carriage house and dumped them in a pile beside the garden shed at the bottom of the lawn, next to the lawnmower and the bags of fertilizer.

Beatrice stood on the terrace in a silk robe, drinking coffee.

"Oh, good, you're back," she said. "I've given your room to the new gardener. He's a hardworking man, and he deserves it. You'll sleep in the shed from now on."

I looked at the shed. Its door hung crooked on one hinge. "The shed."

"You'll be leaving by summer anyway." She sipped her coffee.

"Does Victoria know?" I asked.

"Victoria agreed it was sensible." Beatrice smiled. "She didn't argue at all. Doesn't that tell you something, Leon?"

I didn't know if it was true. With Beatrice, it rarely was. "You may as well get used to sleeping somewhere cheaper. I hear refugee hostels aren't very comfortable."

From the window of the breakfast room, Charles was watching. When I looked up at him, he looked away and pulled the curtain closed. For three years, that had been Charles Ashworth's answer to everything: a curtain, a newspaper, a closed door. I had never been able to decide if he was cruel or only tired.

I picked up my things and carried them into the shed.

Inside, it smelled of oil and wet earth. Someone had set up an old camp bed between the lawnmower and a stack of clay pots. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling on a wire.

I sat down on the bed and looked at my hands. Twelve years ago, I slept in a room with a painted ceiling and a guard outside the door. Tonight I'd sleep next to fertilizer.

It didn't matter. A prince who can't sleep in a shed has no business asking his people to sleep in prison cells.

At ten o'clock, the van from Rask Energy arrived at the back door of the auction house on Regent Row. Rupert was waiting on the steps in a cream suit, his unlit cigar between his teeth. Beside him stood three photographers with big cameras, and a reporter from a society magazine with a notebook.

"Ah, there you are!" Rupert shouted when he saw me. "Our mule! Come here, mule. We've got precious cargo."

Two men from the van slid a huge wooden crate onto the pavement and opened it. Inside, wrapped in thick white padding, was Winter Over Kestrograd, bigger than I'd imagined, in a heavy golden frame.

"Anton wants pictures of the masterpiece arriving," Rupert said. "Something dramatic for the magazine. So you're going to carry it inside. On your back."

"It's too heavy for one man," I said. "We have a cart."

"Carts aren't dramatic." Rupert grinned at the photographers. "And you're not a man, you're the Ashworth mule. Come on. Bend down."

The reporter laughed and wrote something in her notebook.

"What's his name?" she asked Rupert. "For the caption."

"His name?" Rupert laughed. "Does it matter? Write 'Ashworth staff.' Nobody will ask."

I bent down slowly.

The two van men lifted the painting and laid it across my shoulders. It was heavy, very heavy, the golden frame pressing into the back of my neck. I straightened slowly, holding the edges with both hands.

The cameras flashed.

"Smile, mule!" Rupert shouted. "Look at that, everyone! The only thing he's ever carried that's worth more than he is!"

The photographers laughed and kept shooting. People on the pavement stopped to stare. A boy on a bicycle took a video with his phone.

I walked up the steps one at a time, through the back door and down the long hallway, with the painting on my back and Rupert behind me narrating every step for the reporter.

But as I walked, I wasn't thinking about Rupert.

I was thinking about the small black flashlight in my coat pocket. Sasha had given it to me last night. It didn't shine white; it shone a dark purple, the kind of light art experts use to see what eyes can't. Old paint and old canvas look one way under that light. New paint and new canvas look different. They glow.

In the storage room at the end of the hall, Rupert told me to set the painting face down on the padded table, so the workers could check the back for damage. I set it down gently. Then Rupert's phone rang, and he wandered into the hallway, laughing into it.

I had maybe thirty seconds.

Through the half-open door, I could hear Rupert in the hallway, laughing into his phone. "No, no, Anton, it's perfect. The pictures will be in the magazine on Sunday. The mule carried it like a donkey. You'll love it."

I took the flashlight out of my pocket, switched it on and swept the purple light across the back of the canvas.

It glowed.

Not a little. The whole back of the canvas shone a bright, clean blue-white under the light, like a new shirt. Real canvas from eighty years ago doesn't do that. Old canvas turns brown and dull with time. This canvas was barely a few years old.

I took out my phone and took three photos, fast.

Footsteps came back down the hallway. I switched off the light and slipped it into my pocket just as the door opened.

But it wasn't Rupert.

It was old Edmund Ashworth, leaning on his silver-headed cane, his snow-white hair neatly combed. He was seventy-nine, thin and upright, and he moved more quietly than any old man I had ever known.

He looked at me. Then he looked at the painting lying face down on the table.

"I saw the photographs on the street," he said. "Rupert made you carry it."

"Yes, sir."

"And you carried it, all the way."

"Yes, sir."

He nodded slowly, as if I'd answered a question he hadn't asked out loud. "Good," he said. "A good servant knows his place."

He turned and walked out, his cane tapping softly down the hall.

I stood in the empty room for a long time, my neck aching where the golden frame had pressed into it. I had lived under that old man's roof for three years, and I still had no idea what went on behind his eyes.

That night, in the garden shed, I lay on a camp bed between a lawnmower and a bag of fertilizer and looked at the three photos on my phone.

Blue-white light, bright as a lie.

Victoria would know what it meant the moment she saw it. She was the best forgery expert in Westmarch. But if I showed it to her, she'd ask how I got it, and why a driver was carrying an art expert's flashlight in his pocket.

I needed her to find the truth herself. If she found it, she would trust it. If she found it, nobody could ever say a stray had put the idea in her head.

I sat up, turned on the small lamp and took a sheet of plain white paper from my box of books.

Then I started to write, in careful capital letters that looked nothing like my own.