Chapter 7: Glass

Ianthe didn't change her dress.

She walked straight out of the front door in it, stained with mustard and wolf and kitchen floor, and crossed Lantern Row.

The milkman stopped his cart to watch.

She went right up to the carriage window with the silver boar on it.

"Your meat didn't take, my lord."

The Marquess of Morcaine looked at her with polite interest.

"I have no idea what you mean, Lady Ianthe."

"It was wrapped in brown paper. It had foxglove in it, or something worse. He brought it all up on my yard."

"How dreadful. You should keep better gates."

"You should keep better men. Yours can't throw."

The milkman snorted.

Morcaine's eyes moved to him and back to Ianthe, a little flatter.

"I came to tell you something, as a kindness," he said. "The Hunt Master has had your pearls looked at by a jeweler."

"And?"

"Glass." He smiled. "Paste, painted. Very good paste, but paste."

The street seemed to tilt.

"They were my mother's."

"Then your mother wore glass. It suits a family that pays its debts in promises."

Ianthe put her hand on the carriage door so he wouldn't see it shake.

"You know they were real."

"I know what the Hunt Master has sworn. A sale paid in glass is no sale."

"It's theft from the Crown's own hunt. The wolf belongs to His Highness."

He leaned a little closer to the window.

"Tell me. Has it done anything strange?"

"Strange?"

"In the house. Wolves are odd creatures indoors. I wondered if it had surprised you."

He was watching her face very carefully.

"He bit a bailiff," Ianthe said. "Is that strange?"

Morcaine sat back.

"Not at all," he said, and rapped on the roof, and the carriage pulled away.

By three o'clock that afternoon everybody in the Dowager's drawing room had heard the word paste.

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