‘My goodness me,’ said Sarah, ‘how absolutely wonderful. I wouldn’t tell my mother this, Edward, but I like them, I really do. I think they’re marvellous. Are there any more?’
Edward smiled. ‘Not here. Probably in National Gallery. Nothing else as exotic as Boucher here.’
Sarah lingered in front of the rising and the setting of the sun.
‘Boucher had important patron, Madame de Pompadour, official mistress of Louis the something or other,’ Edward whispered. ‘Kept wolf from door later on by designing tapestries for royal tapestry factory.’
‘Where now, Edward?’
He led them halfway down the Great Gallery on the first floor, past a couple of sombre Van Dycks, a gorgeous full-length Gainsborough, and a sumptuous Rubens landscape. He stopped in front of a young man with a turned-up moustache, an elegant black hat and very fashionable clothes. Even back in the seventeenth century painters were keen to show how versatile their brushwork could be. This young man had a beautifully depicted ruff with a dark grey kerchief hanging from it, and a very intricate white cuff on a richly embroidered jacket. A faint smile played across his lips as if he were thinking of a secret or a joke that only he and the painter knew. It all looked totally spontaneous as if the young man had walked in and parked himself on Franz Hals’s canvas the afternoon before.
‘That’s the Laughing Cavalier,’ said Sarah knowledgeably. ‘Everybody knows him from the advertisements. Isn’t he by Franz somebody or other?’
‘Good,’ said Edward solemnly. ‘But work originally called Portrait of a Young Man. Franz Hals. Dutchman. Early sixteen hundreds.’
‘But why,’ asked Sarah, ‘do we call The chap The Laughing Cavalier?’
‘Painting up for sale,’ said Edward, now firmly back in cryptic mode, ‘forty or fifty years ago. Nobody paid much attention. Nobody heard much of Hals chap. Fourth Marquess of Hertford takes a fancy to it. So does a Rothschild. Big battle in the auction rooms. Sells for six times its asking price. Newspapers drawn to battle between a Marquess and a Rothschild, supposed to be as rich as Croesus. Laughing Cavalier makes better copy than Portrait of a Young Man. Not good title. Look carefully.’
Sarah inspected the gentleman on the wall carefully. ‘I’m afraid I can’t see what you mean,’ she said, frowning slightly at Edward.
‘Look again,’ he replied. ‘He’s not laughing, he’s smiling. And look at his clothes. No indication he’s a cavalier at all. Just the name stuck.’
Sarah looked round the gallery. The place was going to close in ten minutes’ time and they were the last people there apart from a solitary curator lost in his own thoughts in the far corner.
‘Last picture, Sarah. Another portrait. Different story.’ Edward led her ten yards away from the Laughing Cavalier and stopped in front of another young man. He had a head ringed with dark brown curls and a dull red beret on top. His face was pale and handsome. He was looking slightly to the left of the painter. The young man wore a dark brown robe with a gold chain. Some people thought they detected a hint of a smile on his red lips. Others felt he had more serious matters on his mind.
‘Titus,’ said Edward gravely, moving back a few yards to get a different view. ‘Titus Rembrandt. Terribly sad story. Titus’s mother dead. Rembrandt married again. Rembrandt declared bankrupt the year before. Rembrandt not able to sell any pictures. The Dutch people in Amsterdam didn’t care for them, didn’t commission any. God in heaven. It’s as if the English abandoned Shakespeare. Under the rules of the guild, Titus and the second Mrs Rembrandt had to administer the production of his etchings and the sale of his paintings. It’s terrible.’
Sarah noticed that Edward was speaking in perfect sentences now and that he was more animated than she had ever seen him.
‘There’s worse,’ he said. ‘Much worse. The second Mrs Rembrandt died. Then Titus died. This Titus here, the boy in the painting, died before his father. Rembrandt had to bury his own son.’ Sarah thought there might be a tear in the corner of his eye now as he recounted the various disasters that befell the great painter.
‘When Rembrandt died, one of the finest painters who ever lived, all he left were some old clothes and his painting equipment. How very sad! So if anybody ever says to you, Sarah, that the Dutch produced some great painters, that is perfectly true. They also turned their back on the greatest.’
Ten minutes later Edward and Sarah were eating their first muffins in the Powerscourt drawing room. Olivia was there, and Thomas, and both twins, fast asleep. Listening to all these young voices, Olivia asking Sarah what it was like working in an Inn, Thomas discussing football teams with Edward, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of all of them, Powerscourt found it hard to believe that he earned his living investigating violent death and that his latest victim had been poisoned as he tucked into his beetroot soup. After tea they all trooped off to inspect the new typewriter. Sarah pronounced it an excellent model and astonished the children by typing perfectly coherent sentences as she looked over her shoulder. Olivia made her do it again with her eyes closed. Touch typing, Sarah explained, meant that you knew where all the keys were automatically so you didn’t have to look down to find the letter you wanted. Both Thomas and Olivia thought it was a form of witchcraft or magic. Powerscourt wondered how long it would take to learn. He suspected that the young policeman had already mastered it.
‘I want to ask your advice, Lucy,’ he said when Edward and Sarah had gone and their own children had departed to the upper floors.
‘Of course, Francis. Whatever you want.’
‘I’ve been thinking about the Dauntseys and their lack of children. I have no idea if it has anything to do with this investigation. Can you tell me what it would mean to Elizabeth Dauntsey, knowing you couldn’t have children?’
Lady Lucy looked at a child’s picture book left lying on the sofa.
‘I’m sure you know as well as I do, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘I think it must have been absolutely frightful. I presume she didn’t go into any details of what the doctors told them. I presume they have no idea who is at fault, although fault is the wrong word completely and I take it back.’ She bent down to pick up a diminutive teddy bear, bought for one of the twins, sitting upright against a side table.
‘Guilt,’ she went on. ‘I think you’d blame yourself for not being able to have children. I think you’d feel incomplete without them, that you hadn’t fulfilled your duty by being a mother. Every time you went out into the streets and saw all kinds of people, people with less money than you, people with less taste than you, people uglier than you, people stupider than you, carrying their children about or holding their hands as they learn to walk or watching them run about in the park, why, it would nearly break your heart. When you went to stay with people you would have to watch others getting their children up in the morning or reading them bedtime stories at night, it would be awful, just awful. You don’t think we’ve got too many, Francis, do you?’
‘Too many what, Lucy?’ said Powerscourt who had been thinking of Elizabeth Dauntsey going through Lucy’s litany of misery.
‘Too many children.’
‘No,’ said Powerscourt firmly. ‘Four isn’t very many between us. Two each. Lots of people have more than that, ten twelve, fifteen, imagine fifteen of them, Lucy, you could scarcely remember all their names. But tell me, is there anything a woman in such a predicament might try?’
‘I don’t understand, Francis,’ said Lucy, looking confused.
‘Might she try to get pregnant by a different man?’
‘And pass the child off as her husband’s?’ Lady Lucy looked as though she found the conversation distasteful. ‘Well, she might, I’m sure that’s been done often enough in the past. Risky though, if the husband finds out. Or I’ve heard of people who go abroad for nine months or a year and come back with a child they say is theirs. It may be adopted, or the husband may have paid some other woman to have his child and then they pass it off as theirs. At least half the genes will be right that way.’