‘New York?’ said the girls in unison, social isolation suddenly at an end in a glittering succession of soirees on Fifth Avenue and boxes at the Metropolitan Opera House.
‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at their enthusiasm, ‘I don’t think it’s opened quite yet.’ That did not diminish the eagerness of the girls. Lady Lucy saw them both sink into a kind of reverie, a dream of escape.
‘Does Edmund manage to find the time to visit you and the family here?’ asked Powerscourt in his most innocent voice.
‘He is very busy with his work, you understand, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Mrs de Courcy, pouring Lady Lucy another cup of tea, ‘but he has been to see us twice. He stayed for four days and a morning the first time, the second time he could only manage three nights and an afternoon before he had to go home.’ Powerscourt could imagine how every detail of the visit would have been discussed time after time by the three women after Edmund had left, a piece of treasure to last them into their lonely future.
‘We are able to help him in his work,’ said Sarah. ‘We collect old pictures and old picture frames for him and send them over to London.’
Old pictures, old frames, thought Powerscourt. Did forgers need old frames, old canvases on which they could produce fresh works in the manner of the past?
‘But tell me, Lady Powerscourt,’ said Julia, ‘did you attend the exhibition yourself? Did you see Edmund? Was he with anybody special?’
‘And what about his great friend,’ said Sarah, ‘George Carrington, the one who was going to marry that Emily Morgan? Has he married her yet?’
‘And his other friend, the one Mama always liked,’ Julia carried on the interrogation, ‘Robert Packard, is he married yet?’
‘And,’ said Sarah, carried away on the flood, ‘our own dear friend Harriet Ward. Has she married that army officer of hers?’
‘Philip Massie?’ said Julia, blushing slightly. ‘Any news of him?’
‘Ladies, ladies,’ said Lady Lucy, banging her spoon against the side of her cup to plead for silence, ‘please, please. Let me try to answer your questions where I can. I did indeed see your brother at the Venetian exhibition, but he was talking to a huge man, well over six feet, who looked like a prize fighter.’ Roderick Johnston, thought Powerscourt, he of the National Gallery, the large house on the river in Mortlake, recent inheritor from the munificence of Mr Raphael. He suddenly wondered about Mr Raphael’s picture frame. ‘As to the rest of your queries,’ Lady Lucy went on, ‘I can only help you with one of them. George Carrington did marry Emily Morgan, last year I think. The daughter of one of my second cousins was a bridesmaid, I seem to recall. As for the rest I cannot help you now. But if you would like to give me a list of your questions I shall see what I can do and I shall write to you from London. I don’t suppose your brother is of much assistance in such matters. Men usually aren’t.’ She smiled ambiguously at her husband, who nodded sadly in agreement.
‘May we go and write our list, Mama?’ said Julia, as she and Sarah prepared to depart.
‘Of course,’ said Mrs de Courcy, ‘how very kind of Lady Powerscourt to take the trouble to assist you.’
Powerscourt had walked over to the window. Below him in the untidy yard was a miscellaneous collection of old cartwheels, bits of broken furniture, dead sofas whose springs were hanging out in the afternoon sun. He raised his eyes.
‘The view is magnificent, Mrs de Courcy. Mountains and sea, the perfect romantic cocktail. Do you tire of it?’
Alice de Courcy winced. ‘You may call me unromantic, if you wish, Lord Powerscourt, but I tired of it very quickly. It leaves me cold now. I think the girls like it, however.’
‘And are there any plans,’ Powerscourt turned to face his hostess, ‘forgive me if this sounds a rude question, but do you have any plans to come back to England?’
‘I’m sure the girls could come and stay with us during the season, if they would like that,’ said Lady Lucy, offering support and the prospect of unlimited supplies of young men to aid her consort.
‘You have both been very kind,’ said Alice de Courcy. ‘I will tell you, but I would ask you not to pass it on to anybody else.’ The surest way, in normal circumstances, thought Powerscourt, for a piece of news to be disseminated as widely as possible inside a week. But he and Lady Lucy would be true.
‘Edmund has always said,’ the pride in her son rang through Alice de Courcy’s words, ‘that when he has made enough money from the gallery to repair our house in Norfolk and for us all to live comfortably, then he would bring us back. He thought it would be two years from now. But he wrote last week to say that things had gone better than expected with the gallery.’ She paused. They could hear a pair of horses’ hooves fading away down the hill.
‘We could be home for Christmas,’ she said. Lady Lucy could see tears of happiness forming in her eyes. ‘But please don’t tell the girls. I want it to be a surprise.’
Powerscourt was wondering how much money it would take to repair a house near the Norfolk coast left empty for three or four years as they set out down the stairs of the eighteenth-century house in Aregno. Maybe the estate needed improvement as well. Thirty thousand? Forty thousand? He thought of the eighty-five thousand paid for the Raphael. Suppose it was a forgery. Suppose a number of other forgeries had been sold by the outwardly respectable firm of de Courcy and Piper, art dealers of Old Bond Street. Suppose de Courcy took half the proceeds. Surely he could bring his family home now? And suppose some of the forgeries might have been exposed by the late Christopher Montague? Much better to have him out of the way.
His thoughts were interrupted at the front door.
‘Wake up, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘The carriage has gone. It’s simply disappeared.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs de Courcy anxiously, ‘that does happen sometimes with the local coachmen. They forget they’re meant to wait, or they have to be somewhere else. One of ours ran off one day because he had to go to his cousins’ hunting party on the other side of the island.’
‘Damn,’ said Powerscourt, striding to the front of the little drive to see if the coachman had joined the drinkers in the cafe in what passed for Aregno’s main square. He hadn’t.
‘How long would it take to walk down the hill?’ he asked the girls.
‘Much better to be going down the hill than up it,’ said Sarah, handing over their letter to a better world. ‘We’ve done it in just over half an hour. You should be able to catch the train back to Calvi in Algajola down at the bottom. There’s one in about an hour and a half.’
They set off down the slope, a pealing campanile at the edge of Aregno’s main square observing their passage down the hill. Ahead of them, sometimes hidden by the folds in the track, lay the pale sands of Aregno beach. To their right the scrub stretched out across the valley to another campanile in the village of Corbara, staring out towards the red rocks of Ile Rousse. Calvi was, for the moment, invisible. Behind them the mountains, cast in deep shadow, watched over their island.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Powerscourt, slipping slightly on a hairpin bend. ‘Why should that fellow have gone off like that? We paid him well enough, heaven knows.’
‘Had you given him the money for the whole day Francis?’ said Lady Lucy practically.
‘Well, I had, as a matter of fact,’ replied Powerscourt. ‘I thought it was the decent thing to do.’
‘Well, there you are,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘He’s probably gone off to drink it all away in some bar with his friends.’
Powerscourt muttered inaudibly to himself. All Lady Lucy could catch was the word savages, repeated several times.
They had gone about a third of the way, walking in the shade where they could, when it started. From somewhere higher up on the hill, a shot rang out. Powerscourt’s instant reaction was that it was Corsicans hunting, a chase for wild boar or the wild goats that sometimes came down from the mountains. Then there was another shot. Powerscourt pulled Lady Lucy to the ground at the side of the path. The bullet had ricocheted off a rock in front of them and shot off down the valley. It had been only feet away.