In the library, Matthew lifted the lamp a little, as if that explained everything.
Rhea lifted her teacup in return.
Neither of them believed the other, and they both knew it.
She had seen him pay for the lamp in cash, just as she had paid for her teacup.
Rhea had her own reasons for keeping her name out of the cashier’s book, though she couldn’t imagine why a Voss would need to do the same.
“That lamp, sir?” she said.
He only smiled.
“And the teacup, Miss Ellis?”
“It was the cheapest thing in the room, sir.”
That made him laugh, and for a moment he looked so pleased that Rhea almost forgot she didn’t trust him.
Being seen there by anyone from the Voss was the last thing she had wanted.
A night concierge was free to spend her afternoon off at an estate sale, of course.
Still, if he mentioned it to Graff, she would need a better reason for coming than a single teacup.
The quickest way out was through the hall.
Coco was still sitting on the stairs there, filming herself, while the woman from the window now stood by the front door, watching everyone who left.
Rhea was working out how to walk past her without being noticed when Matthew turned the other way.
“I’d rather not end up in that young lady’s video,” he said.
“My father would hear about it by dinner.”
He opened the garden door at the far end of the library and went out, making sure not to damage the lamp in the process.
Rhea followed him, glad to have a reason not to walk past the woman.
It had started to snow while they were inside.
The garden was already white, and the only footprints in it were their own.
Behind them, Rupert’s disco music was still thudding faintly through the walls.
Crossing the garden, Rhea couldn’t help looking up at the study window.
The memory of climbing down from it a week ago, with the ring in her hand and the peacock screaming somewhere inside the house, came rushing back to her.
Matthew was too busy keeping the snow off his lamp to notice anything.
Even so, walking under that window beside a Voss felt awkward, even for her.
A set of stone steps led down from the garden to the road, and the snow had already turned them to ice.
On the way down, his foot slid out from under him.
The lamp flew out of his hands, and Rhea caught it just in time.
Matthew went the rest of the way on his back, landing in the snow at the bottom, where he lay laughing up at the sky.
“Is it all right?” he asked.
“The lamp is fine, sir.”
“Then so am I.”
“You might hold the railing next time, sir.”
“Right.”
He got up, brushed the snow off his coat and took the lamp back from her with great care.
At the bus stop, Rhea offered to call him a car, since that was what she would have done for any guest at the Voss.
“Please don’t,” Matthew said.
“I came up on the bus. The hotel’s drivers tell my father everything.”
It was an interesting piece of information.
Rhea added it to what she had already noticed, that he had paid in cash and chosen the garden door as a way out of the mansion.
They stood at the stop with the lamp between them while the snow settled on its shade.
She would have just enough time to go home and change for her shift, provided the bus came at all.
“Do you live far, Miss Ellis?”
“In the city, sir.”
“That narrows it down,” he said.
“Do you always spend your afternoons off at sales like this?”
“Not that often, sir.”
He didn’t ask anything else, and Rhea was glad.
She had no intention of telling a Voss where she lived.
Her room was her refuge, and it held things she would never want anyone to see, like the seven photographs on the wall.
The bus came slowly through the snow a few minutes later.
The driver took one look at the lamp and shook his head.
Matthew spent some time talking to him through the open door, very politely, until the driver finally waved them in.
The lamp was too tall to sit down with, so he stood in the aisle holding it upright while it swayed at every turn.
“Where on earth did you find that?” an old woman across the aisle asked at last, unable to contain her curiosity any longer.
“At a sale,” Matthew said cheerfully.
“Nobody else wanted it.”
She moved two seats further away.
The windows had fogged up in the warmth.
With his free hand, Matthew drew the old woman on the glass beside him, a few quick lines with his fingertip, frowning at the lamp exactly as she was frowning at it now.
It was so good that Rhea nearly laughed.
He wiped it away with his sleeve the moment he saw her looking.
When the bus braked hard at a crossing, the lamp tipped toward her, and Rhea caught it a second time.
“I think it likes you better,” Matthew said.
At the bottom of the hill, the road joined the lake, and across the water the seven stars on the roof of the Voss came on, one after another.
Matthew watched them through the clean patch he had made on the window.
“If anyone steals that comb at our ball,” he said lightly, “I suppose they’ll blame the Nightjar.”
Rhea kept her face still.
He laughed at his own joke, then went quiet.
Rhea used the silence to think it through.
She wondered whether he knew that the comb had once belonged to his own family, or whether he was only repeating what Coco had told everyone.
If he did know, what did it mean?
She couldn’t tell yet whether Matthew was hiding something from his father, or whether it was something else entirely.
The bus stopped by the Voss.
Matthew lifted the lamp and made his way to the doors.
On the step, he turned back.
“You asked about the lamp, Miss Ellis,” he said.
“It’s the only thing in that house that man ever paid for.”
The doors closed while she was still deciding what to say.
As the bus pulled away, Rhea watched him through the window, standing in the snow under the seven stars with the ugliest lamp in the city in his arms.
So Matthew knew that Emeric Vidal had dealt in stolen things.
Rhea wondered what else the Vosses knew.