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speak.”
     
    “I can sympathize with that,” Adrian said.
     
    She thought about it for a minute, and then nodded her head. “All right,” she said. “Let’s do it.” Then she looked at her husband, who had obviously set up the challenge, perhaps as if to say: You’d better be right... or perhaps not.
     
    Adrian could see that the two of them didn’t hate one another, even if they had had to agree to disagree more often than they would have liked. They probably wanted to love one another, he thought, but didn’t quite trust one another, or themselves, enough to believe that they weren’t being bullshitted by the other’s affectations of affection.
     
    “That was good,” Jarndyke said, nodding toward the panel, when his wife had left the room. “Clever, too. I like you, Son—I really do.”
     
    “Thanks,” said Adrian, not knowing what else to say. Spotting the anomalous panel had been child’s play, though. He knew that the acid test was coming up, and that even though Jarndyke liked him, and had been prepared to hire him on the basis of what his spies had told him, he wasn’t yet prepared to believe that Adrian had a superpower. On the other hand, Adrian could now see quite clearly—and cursed himself for not having seen it before—that Jarndyke’s peculiar strategy of interrogation at the Savoy had been guided by a hidden motive.
     
    Angelica came back carrying an easel in her right hand and a cloth-swathed canvas tucked under her left arm. Moving with meticulous order, she set up the easel, and placed the canvas on it, still concealed. Then she removed the cloth.
     
    Adrian had been expecting something akin to a Rothko, or maybe a Jackson Pollock: an exercise in abstract impressionism, playing deftly with the subtleties of color, perhaps even the utmost subtleties of color. He had not been expecting what he actually saw. He had been warned, but he had not been expecting witchcraft. He felt his jaw drop, and was uncomfortably aware that he was speechless. These, he knew, were untested waters.
     
    He had seen a lot of paintings in his time, including a lot by people whose color discrimination was unusually subtle, but he had never seen a painting by anyone who used color discrimination in the way that Angelica Jarndyke did, to hide images from ordinary eyes that extraordinary eyes would be able to see, if not exactly clearly and distinctly, then at least in such a way as to make out what they were.
     
    Angelica Jarndyke was no great draughtsman—her figures were a trifle cartoonish—but she knew what it was that she was trying to represent, and she had skill enough to carry off the representation. She was no genius, by any stretch of the imagination—no Monet, no Rossetti, no Jackson Pollock—but what she had tried to do was real, and ambitious, and, in Adrian’s experience, unique.
     
    “Now that, to me,” said Jason Jarndyke, “is just a big splodge of red with a little dash of orange here and there. Maybe it’s a sunset seen in ultra-close-up, or the middle of a rose petal—and a Lancashire rose at that—but I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. Do you?” The question was addressed to Adrian.
     
    “Yes,” Adrian said, faintly. “I get it.”
     
    “And what do you think of it?” Jarndyke persisted. “Honestly, what do you think of it?”
     
    “It’s very strange,” Adrian said, unable to think, for the moment, of a better adjective. “Technically, perhaps not brilliant, but in terms of coloration, in its way, it’s magnificent. Magnificent, but....”
     
    “But what?” It was still the husband doing the probing, but Angelica Jarndyke was looking at Adrian again, very intently indeed, search for the slightest sign of bullshit.
     
    “...Unsettling,” Adrian admitted.
     
    Jarndyke made a noise with his tongue, like a bullshit-detector going off. “Unsettling! It’s a big splodge of red, damn it!”
     
    “It’s Dante’s Inferno ,” Adrian said, weakly.