‘How right you are, Mr McCracken,’ Piper smiled. ‘Absolutely correct.’ And, he said to himself, I shall certainly drink a glass of champagne with you this evening. The Gainsborough, after all, was something very special.
Lady Lucy intercepted her husband as he was hanging up his coat in Markham Square. ‘Francis,’ she whispered, ‘that young man from the gallery is here. He’s waiting for you upstairs.’
‘Is he a nice young man, Lucy?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile. ‘Why are you whispering?’ Powerscourt was at the bottom of the stairs now. Lady Lucy put her hand on his arm.
‘It’s Christopher Montague, Francis.’
‘What about him?’ said her husband, his mind already engaged with Jason Lockhart of Clarke’s Gallery, presumably sitting peacefully in the Powerscourt drawing room.
‘It’s this.’ Lady Lucy’s whisper was even quieter now. ‘Somebody left Christopher Montague a great deal of money about six months before he died.’
‘Did they indeed?’ said Powerscourt, fresh avenues of investigation opening up before him. ‘How do you know?’
‘I bumped into a cousin of mine coming out of the shops in Sloane Square. I’d been buying clothes for the children. Sarah, you know Sarah, Francis, you met her at Jonathan’s wedding a couple of years ago, she said everybody in the family knew about it.’
Jason Lockhart of Clarke’s Gallery was sitting nervously on the sofa. He was about thirty-five years old, wearing a dark blue suit with a white shirt and a discreet tie. ‘Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘I came as soon as I could when I received your note. My apologies to your wife for arriving before you had returned. How can I help you in your inquiries?’
‘You were going to start a magazine, I believe,’ said Powerscourt, thinking about Lockhart’s voice. He sounded very like most of the other inhabitants of Old Bond Street but there was something wrong about the vowels. ‘With Christopher Montague. What can you tell me about it?’
‘It was going to be called The Rembrandt,’ said Lockhart, ‘a magazine for the art connoisseur.’
‘And what about the article by Christopher Montague, Mr Lockhart? Did you read it?’
‘I did not,’ said Jason Lockhart, ‘but I knew what it was going to say.’ Powerscourt waited. ‘The article was going to be called “Fakes and Forgeries in Venetian Painting”. It was based on the exhibition that recently opened at the de Courcy and Piper Gallery. There are something like thirty-two paintings supposed to be by Titian. Christopher thought only two, maybe three, were genuine. Fifteen Giorgiones, only four by the master. Twelve Giovanni Bellinis, only one by the hand of Bellini himself.’
Master, thought Powerscourt, returning to Lockhart’s voice, master spoken with a very short a. Somewhere in the north of England? Yorkshire perhaps?
‘Forgive me,’ said Powerscourt with a smile, ‘forgive me for asking such a stupid question. But how does a gallery like yours or de Courcy and Piper know whether a painting is genuine or not?’
Jason Lockhart laughed. ‘That’s just the point, Lord Powerscourt. The gallery finds as many works of Titian or Giorgione as it can. It arranges with the owners to lend them to the exhibition, to be returned or sold afterwards. The gallery always accepts the attribution of the lenders. If the Duke of Tewkesbury says his Titian is a Titian, then the gallery accepts that it is, indeed, a Titian. There’s always a clause in the small print of the catalogue that all attributions are the owners’ not the gallery’s. That lets the gallery off the hook.’
Powerscourt had decided that the original accent, now heavily overladen with the upper crust of Mayfair, was definitely Yorkshire. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘So the Christopher Montague article would have been a bombshell. It would have offended everybody, the owners, the galleries, the dealers, the purchasers who would not have known whether they had bought the real thing or a fake.’
‘Exactly,’ said Lockhart. ‘There was absolutely nothing else that could have offended so many people so deeply.’
‘Would de Courcy and Piper have been hardest hit,’ asked Powerscourt, ‘seeing that it was their exhibition that was being torn to pieces?’
‘Initially, yes,’ admitted Lockhart. ‘They would have been very hard hit. But it wouldn’t have taken long for it to emerge that every other gallery behaved in exactly the same way.’
‘And what of your position in your own gallery?’ said Powerscourt, his mind racing. ‘Would your employers have been pleased that you were associated with such a venture?’
‘They knew all about it,’ said Lockhart. ‘I suspect they thought it might be enough to force de Courcy and Piper out of business altogether. All’s fair in love and war in Old Bond Street, Lord Powerscourt, believe me.’
Powerscourt remembered the Italian books Christopher Montague had taken out of the London Library or ordered from elsewhere. ‘What did the article say about the false Titians, Mr Lockhart? That they were bought on the Grand Tour, and the buyers were deceived by unscrupulous dealers?’
Lockhart looked at a painting of the lower Himalayas on Powerscourt’s wall, purchased since his return from India. Powerscourt wondered if he was going to pronounce it a forgery.
‘Christopher thought that was where most of them had come from,’ he said. ‘But there was something else. Christopher intended to say that at least three, if not four, of the paintings on display were very recent forgeries. That would have caused a sensation.’
‘And what of these Americans, the very rich ones who have been buying works of art at a fairly rapid rate lately? Have they all been taken in? Have they spent their thousands of dollars on junk?’
‘God knows, Lord Powerscourt, God only knows.’
One thing struck Powerscourt with absolute certainty as he showed Jason Lockhart out of his house. The real beneficiary, the absolute winner out of the whole affair would have been Christopher Montague himself. His second book was about to come out. His article destroyed the provenance of most of the Venetian masterpieces in England. Who could a poor purchaser turn to in order to be sure that his Veronese was genuine? That his Tintoretto wasn’t a forgery? That his Giorgione wasn’t a fake? Why, the expert was at hand. Christopher Montague is your man. Powerscourt wondered how much he would charge for verifying the attribution of the masterpieces. Ten per cent? Fifteen? Twenty-five? He might have inherited a large sum in the past six months, but he was about to become richer yet. Much richer. Was there somebody else in the London art world who enjoyed this position of Attributer in Chief at present? Would such a somebody want Montague dead?
Part Two
9
The rats. They would have to do something about the rats. They had become quite shameless, no longer bothering to scuttle away into the wainscoting or disappear through the holes in the floorboards. Soon they would be sitting up in rows and demanding food, or eating away at the paintings. Orlando Blane walked up the length of the Long Gallery, hoping against hope that the sound of his footsteps would drive them away.
As he reached the end of the room he stared sadly out of one of the five great windows. Outside it was a blustery autumn day. Chaos was continuing its relentless advance across the gardens. The roses had run wild, threatening to strangle the other flowers that had once lain beside them in neat ordered beds. The fountain in the centre of the garden had long ceased to flow. The cheeky statue of Eros on the top was turning a dark metallic green. Way over to his left he could still see the edge of the lake, the water dark and forbidding. In the summer evenings Orlando had been allowed to wander round its rim, the watchful guard the regulation twenty steps behind.
Orlando Blane was a prisoner. He was still not absolutely sure where he was. Occasionally he thought he could smell the sea. The vast house, unoccupied now except for himself and his jailers, sat alone in its thousands of acres, the long drive to the nearest road blocked by a rough barricade of trees. There were four of them, watching round the clock to make sure he did not escape. He was forbidden alcohol, even weak or watered beer, for alcohol had played its part in his downfall. His function was to paint to order, for Orlando Blane was a very talented artist. In better times, with a less chequered past, he might have had a prosperous career in London or Paris.