Mister Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater [uplifting novels txt] 📗

Her first theory had been that a piece’s sweetmetal value was linked to its artistic merit, but she’d had to abandon it for lack of evidence. Several of the pieces that felt the strongest to Jordan at the Boudicca demonstration were the least artistically accomplished, after all, and there were many masterpieces that left her cold in the sweetmetal department. Her next theory? She had no next theory. She’d decided her next step was to do a deep dive into the backgrounds of each of the sweetmetals she found, to see if there were clues there, but then Declan had invited her on this boat ride.

Boat ride.

It was a fine distraction, she told herself. She shouldn’t let herself feel hurried by Boudicca’s timeline. By Hennessy’s silence.

“Have you thought about stealing one?” Declan asked casually. Not from the Gardner, but from somewhere.

“Of course.”

“Which?”

“Easiest would be nicking one like Sherry Lam’s, but it hardly seems worth the crime, does it? It’s not got a lot of oomph to it. If I stole one, I’d go big.”

He leaned the wheel to the left, sending them deeper into the harbor. “Tell me how you’d do it. Blue-sky thinking.”

Jordan ducked under his arm on the wheel in order to sit on his lap. He matter-of-factly sorted out her voluminous ponytail as she leaned her head back on his chest to gaze up at the shifting evening sky. He bent his head prayerfully, eyes still on their destination. Now mouths and ears were close enough for speaking at regular volume in this fast-moving boat. “The Provenance Game always makes the most sense to me.”

Provenance was the real work of a forger. The show your work of the art world. Beauty was nothing without bloodline. Creating the art in the style of a master was only the first step. Then came paperwork and research, fastidious work that began and ended with a story. A forged piece couldn’t just spring into being; no one would believe one had suddenly found a new Monet, a new Cassatt, a new whatever it was. An alibi had to be invented, proven, knit into truth. Where had it been all these years? The more desirable the work, the better the story had to be. Hidden in a recluse’s private collection. Misattributed for years by bumpkins. Discovered in a hidden basement after a house fire.

But one could not just invent reclusive collectors or uncertain bumpkins or hidden basements. The forger had to find ones that already existed and slide the story in, making as small an incision in the truth as possible in order to promote unscarred healing to the timeline. Sometimes, depending on the buyer, this was as simple as including a news clipping of a recent manor house fire. For good museums or discerning buyers, bills of sale or insurance claims for stolen works or letters from contemporaries mentioning the work or photographs of the work next to relatives of the artist sometimes needed to be forged.

Provenance.

“The crux of it, the crux of the plan,” Jordan said, “would be convincing the museum what they already had on their wall was a forgery, had been a forgery all along. Probably I’d get a slick young fella with good teeth to convince them the original was swapped at some prior time, ideally before their tenure, so no hard feelings. I’d pick a year before it had got the hardest scientific evidence, the most scrutiny, all that noodly stuff that would make it tricky to forge. Before it was X-rayed. Lead soap damage analysis, all that. I’d convince them all the things they’d been studying and writing up in their academic papers were actually attributes of the forgery, that the original has entirely different layers and damage.”

Declan had followed along beautifully. He said, “You’d need a whipping boy.”

“Of course.” She was always surprised by how well he knew this sideways world; he just didn’t seem to fit the part. She supposed that had been the point of his camouflage all along. Look like a man who takes his dates to cheesy tourist attractions. Be a man who steals paintings. “You’d have to place the blame for the first theft on someone who is currently there or stands to suffer from it.”

“Then you’d sweep in with your ‘original,’ ” Declan said. “And tell them you’re willing to secretly swap it for the forgery on display, and let their negligence stay secret, too, if they help you.”

“You’ve got it.”

“The Dark Lady play.” He didn’t sound sore that the theft of his mother’s portrait had been what brought them together in the first place. “But you don’t want to do that.”

“I don’t understand how to live that way,” Jordan said. “I can’t carry around, like, a famous painting while I go about my day in order; I’d be trapped in the same room as it. A painting. A whole painting. Could I cut it into little pieces?” She felt Declan’s body recoil at the prospect. “There’d be no way to find out until you ruined the thing you just worked very hard to steal. And could I live with knowing I’d chopped up a Sargent? Not bloody likely.”

She shifted her head on his chest; he tilted his chin. She felt his breath suck in.

“The very concept gives me indigestion,” Declan said. Then he twitched his shoulder to tell her to move. “I need to steer us in. We’re there. Tie us off, can you?”

To her surprise, they were not at a scenic point or romantic destination. They were at a private pier attached to a development of very choice row houses jutting directly out onto the harbor.

“Matthew, the painting,” Declan said. “Please don’t drop it in the water.”

“What’s all this?” Jordan asked as Matthew trundled gingerly up toward them with a parcel in very familiar wrapping: The Dark Lady. The dreamt portrait of Declan’s birth mother, Mór Ó Corra, invested with the magical property of making whoever slept under the same roof as it dream of