Fitzgerald gazed back to the chessboard, his King lying on its side, a magnificent Mughal crown and sceptre lying in the dust of the battlefield. ‘What’s real? What’s fake? What’s genuine? What’s a forgery? Are these art dealers going to say one is the other? Or the other way round, if you see what I mean? Are they genuine? Or are they fakes too? My auntie has in her collection one genuine twenty-four carat Titian. She has one Leonardo which everybody says is not a Leonardo at all. I think I’ll take the fake Leonardo round the art galleries to see what price it would fetch. That might be very interesting indeed.’
‘Excellent, Johnny, very good.’
‘And what is your next move, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy, looking carefully at her husband.
‘I am going to Oxford, Lucy. That young man who came here, Thomas Jenkins, I suspect he has been telling me a lot of lies. I am going to the city of dreaming spires and lost causes to find out the truth about the late Christopher Montague.’
William Alaric Piper was waiting for his new American friend William P. McCracken outside the de Courcy and Piper Gallery in Old Bond Street. He looked again at his watch. Ten minutes to go. But then Americans were known for arriving early sometimes. Piper reviewed his courtship of the Boston railroad king. He had secured an introduction by the simple expedient of sitting next to him at breakfast one morning at the Piccadilly Hotel. This manoeuvre was easier to accomplish once some banknotes had been disbursed to the hotel staff. From there it had been a short step to a weekend in a very grand country house near Leatherhead. The house belonged to Piper’s banker, and as the pictures from the de Courcy and Piper Gallery on Lord Anstruther’s walls had not yet been paid for, such invitations, an enormous advantage in the seduction of rich American clients, were easy to obtain.
He had taken McCracken to the National Gallery. They had been greeted warmly by senior members of the gallery staff who had offered to close off any particular sections McCracken and Piper might want to see.
‘We couldn’t possibly let you do that.’ Piper had beamed happily at the recipients of his earlier largesse. ‘We couldn’t keep the ordinary citizens of London from their artistic heritage.’
‘Now, Mr McCracken,’ Piper had said, leading his new friend up the National Gallery steps, ‘I can tell that you are a man of considerable refinement. Your compatriots, as you know, are beginning to buy pictures from Europe in considerable numbers.’ He paused before the entrance to the Italian Old Masters. ‘They are buying the wrong things, Mr McCracken. They buy mediocre works by the Barbizon school, people like Rosa Bonheur and Constant Troyon, the French peasantry transferred to canvas. Can a group of cows sitting about in a field, literally chewing the cud, compare with the works of Leonardo and Raphael? Can a group of peasant girls, carrying strange French produce in baskets on their heads, be compared with the landscapes of a Rubens or a Gainsborough? Art is meant to uplift, to transcend, to make us raise our eyes towards the glory of man and his achievements, not to contemplate the mud on our own boots.’
William P. McCracken nodded sadly. Only the year before he had paid a lot of money for his Troyon. It reminded him of the fields where the McCracken family farmstead had stood on the plains of Iowa before the railroads took him away. Maybe he would have to sell it. Or hide it away in one of the attics.
Piper led him towards a dark Crucifixion by Tintoretto, a suffering Christ surrounded by the two thieves, weeping women in anguish on the ground.
‘Why is it so damned dark?’ said McCracken, peering at the picture. ‘If this Tintoretto guy wanted us to feel sorry for what was going on there why did he paint it so we can hardly see the damned thing? It all looks pretty upsetting, what you can see of it. Not sure Mrs McCracken would want anything so sad in her house, Mr Piper, not sure at all.’
McCracken had admired a group of Venetian portraits hung together on a side wall.
‘Now these,’ he had said to Piper, ‘these are really fine. This red guy, Count whatever he’s called, looks rather like my banker back home in Concord, Massachusetts. And that one over there, Doge Lorenzo is he called? He looks like he was a mighty fine businessman. What do you say to half a million dollars for the four? Would you get a reduction for the bulk buying?’
McCracken was used to obtaining heavy discounts for rails purchased in great quantities. Maybe the same principle should apply for the four pictures.
Piper had explained that none of the paintings in the National Gallery were for sale. He led McCracken to the National Gallery Raphael, the Ansidei Madonna. A grey arch framed the picture. Behind it a flat Italian panorama lay bathed in a gentle sunlight. In the centre, seated on a wooden throne that extended right to the top of the archway, was a Madonna in a red dress with a dark blue cape. Her right hand cradled an infant Christ, her left hand, finger outstretched, pointed to a page of scripture. To her right John the Baptist, better clad, Piper thought, than usual, in a brown tunic and a red wrap, gazed up at the Madonna. On her left the studious figure of St Nicholas of Bari, crook in hand, great cloak fastened with a rich brooch, was consulting the scriptures.
‘Look at it,’ whispered Piper. ‘The colours, the composition, the way the arch frames the whole so perfectly.’ McCracken seemed impressed. ‘Above all,’ Piper whispered on, ‘look at the grace, the restrained beauty, the tranquil expression on the Madonna’s face.
‘And,’ Piper went on, ‘think of this, Mr McCracken. The Ansidei Madonna is one of the most expensive paintings in the world. The National Gallery paid seventy thousand pounds for it less than twenty years ago. Seventy thousand pounds.’
‘They wouldn’t take a hundred grand for it now? Cash rather than stock options?’ McCracken asked without much hope. Piper assured him that the Raphael was not for sale. Sadly he informed the American that not even cash would make the gallery part with it, so popular had it become. But inwardly Piper rejoiced. McCracken, if not completely hooked, had swallowed a fairly hefty section of bait. It only remained to bring the fish ashore.
And there he was now, in a bright check suit and brightly polished brown brogues, advancing towards the front door of de Courcy and Piper.
‘Mr McCracken, how very kind of you to call upon us in our humble gallery!’ Piper was his normal effusive self.
‘Kind of you to invite me,’ said McCracken, leaving his coat with a porter in the hall.
Piper said he proposed to take his friend round the Venetian exhibition still on show. He had closed the gallery to the public for the morning. And then, said Piper, taking McCracken by the arm to steer him towards the Italians, then he had something very special to show him in the private viewing area on the top floor. Nothing, Piper assured McCracken, was for sale. All the items on display were marked down elsewhere.
At first everything went well. William P. McCracken was much taken by the portraits. ‘Seems to me, Mr Piper,’ he said, staring at a Portrait of a Man attributed to Titian, ‘that human nature doesn’t change very much over the years. No, sir. Man over there looks rather like a character I came across in business some years ago. Bastard tried to close down my railroad. Damned near succeeded too.’
Then disaster struck. They had turned a corner and arrived at Piper’s favourite painting in the exhibition, described as the Sleeping Venus by Giorgione. The background was an idyllic Italian landscape, a plain in the centre with some distant mountains. On the right a small town in brown climbed lazily up a hill. Lying across the centre of the picture on a satin sheet with a dark red pillow was a woman. She was completely naked. Sensuous and sensual, the sleeping Venus looked as though she had dropped down from heaven for a peaceful afternoon nap in the Italian countryside.