And, to some extent, that was his fault. If he’d stayed home, perhaps none of this would have come to pass. Perhaps he could have stopped . . .

His mother’s head turned as if she’d caught scent of him standing there. “Duilinho?”

He smiled. She persisted in calling him by his childhood pet name. He settled next to her at the table and covered her hand with his own. “I’m here.”

Her seal-brown eyes fixed on him, a rare moment of concentration. “Are you well?”

He must look tired after his sleepless night. Even as distracted as she was, she always worried for him. “I’m fine, Mother.”

Her eyes slipped back toward the window, and she turned that direction as if she heard the sea itself calling her.

Duilio pressed his lips together. It troubled him that she spent most of her days cooped up in the house. His father had been dead more than a year now. Duilio expected that his mother would prefer to remarry eventually. She was a lovely woman, even approaching fifty as she was. But her social reemergence must be put off until she was better.

One of the footmen brought him his regular breakfast, a large plate of eggs and chouriço along with a pot of coffee. Duilio waited until the man left before starting in on his food. Between bites, he told his mother of the bizarre information he’d gotten very early that morning. He wasn’t certain she was attending. Her coffee was almost untouched, and she’d eaten only half her croissant. Her preferred newspaper—the trade daily rather than the Gazette—lay unopened next to her elbow. He talked to her anyway, in the hope that she caught something of his words. He would hate for her to feel neglected.

“So I’m going to go see Joaquim,” he finished, “and ask if he can help me find her.”

His mother continued to stare at the window.

“Shall I bear your greetings, Mother?”

That caught her attention. She blinked and turned halfway toward him. “To Filho?”

Apparently she had been paying attention. Just as she addressed Duilio by his childhood name, she called Joaquim so also. Joaquim Tavares and his father shared a name, so Joaquim was simply Filho—“son”—to her. He set down his napkin. “Yes, Mother.”

Joaquim and his younger brother had lost their mother at an early age and had come to live with their cousins, the Ferreira family. They had stayed for the next eight years, until their father retired from his sea travels to take up boatbuilding. The younger son, Cristiano, had joined that business, but Joaquim had chosen to make his career in the police.

Duilio might have selected that profession himself, had his own father not been set on his sons being gentlemen. He’d dutifully studied law at the university in Coimbra—an acceptable profession for a younger son—but then had proceeded to travel abroad for the next five years to work with various police agencies on the continent and in Great Britain. His father had not been pleased. But when his elder brother Alessio died, Duilio had been forced to return home to shoulder the responsibility of managing the family’s considerable investments . . . and to take care of his mother.

She brushed her hands along her skirts and picked up her newspaper, a rare show of energy. “Please tell Filho to come visit me.”

“I’ll ask him, Mother,” he promised.

“I wonder . . .” She laid down her paper and touched the smooth brown hair dressed in a simple knot at the nape of her neck.

Duilio hadn’t inherited that hair. He had his father’s, darker and with a tendency to curl. The only feature he’d inherited from his mother was her eyes. He wished he resembled her more, as Alessio had.

He waited for her to finish her sentence, but instead she stared down at her newspaper as if she had no idea what it was doing there. Sighing inwardly, Duilio rose and took his leave of her, kissing her cheek in farewell. Her maid, Felis, bustled past him, no doubt eager to get her mistress up and about her silent day. Duilio paused and watched the elderly woman fussing over his mother’s unmoving form.

His mother’s pelt was missing, stolen from the house three years before. In a feat of magic that Duilio’s intellect never could grasp, a selkie could remove his or her pelt and be left in human form. Half-human, Duilio couldn’t do that himself, but he’d seen it done many times. It still baffled him. And even in human form, that pelt remained part of the selkie, an eternal tie to the sea and her life there. Without her pelt, his mother couldn’t go back to the ocean she loved.

Duilio hadn’t been around at the time of the theft. If he had, he might have stopped it, but he’d been in London instead, studying the police force there. Alessio had written and mentioned a theft, but hadn’t told Duilio what was stolen, a gross oversight. He would have come back to hunt the thief himself if only he’d known. But Alessio and Father had thought they could find the thing without help. Unfortunately, that hadn’t been the case.

Then Alessio had died.

His death nearly a year and a half ago had been suspicious. He’d gotten involved in an argument over a lover and ended up dueling another gentleman in a clearing outside the city. Both parties had seen it was foolish and in the end both men deloped, firing their guns into the air. Yet somehow Alessio was shot through the heart. Duilio had talked to witnesses, and none had any idea from where that fatal shot had come. With no evidence to the contrary, the police had called it an accident.

Duilio wondered if that stray bullet was linked to Alessio’s hunt for their mother’s pelt. In his journals, Alessio had indicated he was close to a breakthrough right before his death. But he hadn’t recorded that breakthrough, whatever it was, leaving Duilio in the dark.

It turned out they actually knew who’d taken the pelt from the house: a footman hired only a month before. The man had pinched both the pelt and a strongbox from the desk in the library. When Alessio had located the footman’s apartment, the strongbox and the pelt were already gone. And they couldn’t question that false footman about it. He’d been strangled to death. That made it likely he’d merely been hired to find the pelt and steal it. Whoever hired him had probably killed him to keep him quiet.

Duilio’s father had continued the search for the pelt, but one damp night while out hunting, Alexandre Ferreira contracted a chill that all too quickly became pneumonia. He died before Duilio could make it home from Paris. In the intervening year, Duilio had reconstructed every last step his father and brother had taken in their searches, with no more success. His gift had proven singularly unhelpful in this particular quest.

The thief hadn’t destroyed the pelt; Duilio knew that much. His mother would have died if that were the case. No, it was secreted away somewhere, an item of indescribable magic. Without it she would never be whole again. If she were to answer the call of the sea, she would be as vulnerable to the waters as any human. She fought that desire constantly.

After one rueful look at his mother, Duilio headed to the door to collect his things from the long mahogany table in the front entryway. He hadn’t found her missing pelt yet, but perhaps he could find one missing servant.

The butler, an elderly man who had served the Ferreira family his entire life, bustled up the hall in time to hand Duilio his gloves. “I’ve heard your sleep was disturbed last night, sir. I am so sorry . . .”

Duilio tugged on the kid-leather gloves and shook his head. “No need to worry, Cardenas,” he said reassuringly. “It was an important message, and I was awake anyway.”

“I’m concerned about security is all, sir.” The butler handed over Duilio’s top hat. “I don’t like strangers in my house.”

“I do understand, Cardenas. I’ll ask Erdano again not to send others from his harem here.” He hoped that would placate his ruffled butler. He didn’t want the man worrying himself into an early grave. “Is the young lady still in the house?”