Piper was going through his third explanation of the day to Gregory Hopkin, the director of the National Gallery, at ten to four that afternoon. William P. McCracken, purchaser of a fake Gainsborough for fifteen thousand pounds and a real Raphael for eighty-five thousand pounds, was due in ten minutes’ time. Roderick Johnston, senior curator of Renaissance paintings, was sitting on the director’s left, hoping that he would not be interrogated about his role in the attribution of the Raphael.
Hopkin was virtually certain that he was being told a pack of lies. He did not see how it was possible for Piper not to have known what de Courcy was doing. He did not see how the instructions for the creation of the forgeries could have been devised without the approval of both of them. In an ideal world he would have thrown William Alaric Piper out of his office and left him to the wolves. But, as Gregory Hopkin reminded himself sadly while he listened to the flow of injured innocence and personal betrayal pouring out of his visitor, it was not a perfect world. There was nothing the art circles of London or any other international centre feared more than scandal. The dealers and the galleries knew far better than their customers how fine a line divided a fake Van Dyck from the real thing, a genuine Titian from one of Orlando Blane’s accomplished forgeries. The whole edifice depended on trust. It depended on the customers being reassured by the elegant offices, the fine suits, the languid tones of the English upper classes. The clients had to think they were dealing with a world with the highest possible standards, rather than one permanently on the edge of fraud.
If scandal broke, the whole London art market would be plunged into chaos. Clients would go elsewhere, to Paris or to Rome. The Americans who were reviving the market and bringing enormous prices to Old Bond Street would go elsewhere. Nobody would believe a word the London art market said. They would have the mark of Cain upon them. It could take years to recover, if they ever did. So far, Hopkin admitted to himself, Piper had extricated himself from his first two Americans rather well. But the third had paid the most money. Eighty-five thousand pounds for a Raphael was a world record at the time. Another fifteen thousand for an Orlando Blane purporting to be a Gainsborough. So, at whatever cost, William P. McCracken had to be placated.
The opening exchanges were not propitious. ‘What about these bloody forgeries then?’ said McCracken, no longer a rich foreign visitor in the National Gallery, but an American rail tycoon, a ruthless millionaire. He unwrapped a parcel and placed the two paintings on a chair beside him.
Piper went through his customary routine of how the rotten apple had been removed, the boils lanced, the Augean stables cleansed, how a bright new dawn had arrived for The Salisbury Gallery.
‘I’m seeing my lawyers in the morning,’ said McCracken. ‘That thing,’ he pointed to the Gainsborough, sitting innocently on their chair, ‘is a fake.’
‘Let me assure you, Mr McCracken,’ the director of the National Gallery thought that McCracken might respond better to a man with clean hands, ‘that if you wish to back out of the deal, Mr Piper here will refund you the money immediately.’
‘I have a cheque here, Mr McCracken. Made out to you.’ Piper fished about in his jacket pocket and produced a cheque made out to William P. McCracken for fifteen thousand pounds. He laid it on the table.
‘That’s peanuts,’ snarled William P. McCracken. ‘You took eighty-five thousand pounds of my money for this other forgery, conceived in your gallery, Mr Piper, and executed by your confederate, the forger, up there in Norfolk.’
‘That’s not a forgery, that Raphael, Mr McCracken, it’s real,’ said William Alaric Piper.
‘After what we heard in court these last few days, gentlemen,’ McCracken was scornful, ‘no jury anywhere in the world is going to be convinced that it’s real.’
‘I wouldn’t be sure about that,’ said Piper carefully. ‘In any case I have prepared a further cheque for you for eighty-five thousand pounds.’ Piper laid down a second cheque beside the first as he might lay down a hand of cards.
‘That is a very fair offer,’ said Gregory Hopkin. ‘As for the authenticity of the Raphael, Mr McCracken, I think you would have considerable difficulty in establishing it as a forgery. Mr Johnston here on my left is the foremost authority on Renaissance paintings in Britain, if not in Europe. He believes it to be genuine. So do other experts here in the National Gallery. So do I. We would all testify in court that it is a genuine Raphael. You would have to find other witnesses to attest to its false provenance. That might be difficult.’
Something snapped in William P. McCracken. He was tired of the smooth talking, the sophisticated veneer of all these wretched English people. Suddenly he wanted the clearer air of New York and Boston and the simpler certainties of the society of Concord, Massachusetts. Art was something he thought you could acquire like houses, or racehorses or yachts. Now all he could see was a kaleidoscope of mirrors with these slippery people trying to bamboozle you at every turn. No more.
‘I think I’ll take the cheques, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of the whole lot of you. I’m going back to the States. You can keep your lousy pictures, real or not. I couldn’t give a damn.’
With that McCracken picked up his cheques and strode angrily from the room. He slammed the door behind him.
‘Mr Piper?’ said the Director of the National Gallery. Two terrible thoughts had just occurred to him. ‘That Raphael. Real or fake?’
‘It’s real,’ said Piper.
‘And the cheque,’ Gregory Hopkin went on, ‘the cheque for eighty five thousand pounds. Is that real ? It’s not one of your fakes or forgeries or anything like that?’
‘The cheque, Mr Director,’ Piper was wondering if there was any money left in his bank account, ‘the cheque, like the Raphael, is genuine.’
‘Don’t take off your coat, Francis.’ Lady Lucy was waiting for Powerscourt at the front door of Markham Square. ‘This letter came for you just after you left the party in Mr Pugh’s chambers. It’s from the Prime Minister.’
Lady Lucy did not say how close she had come to opening it. Powerscourt picked up a paper knife and slit the envelope open. He read it aloud.
‘“My dear Powerscourt,”’ he began, ‘“the Prime Minister is most anxious to see you, this evening if possible. He has a most important mission to discuss. I hope we shall see you very shortly, Schomberg McDonnell, Private Secretary to the Prime Minister.”’
Powerscourt looked pale. He held Lady Lucy very closely for a long time. After he had gone Lady Lucy glanced absent-mindedly at the evening papers. They were full of dramatic accounts of the closing day of the trial. A headline on the opposite page caught her eye. ‘Further disasters in South Africa,’ it said.
Oh no, Lady Lucy said to herself. Please God, not that. Anything you like, but not that.
29
‘I’ll come straight to the point, Powerscourt.’ The Prime Minister was sitting at an enormous desk in his study on the first floor of 10 Downing Street. Schomberg McDonnell was hovering in an easy chair by the fire.
‘Damn it, man,’ the Prime Minister went on, looking closely at Powerscourt, ‘we’ve met before. In this very house, if I’m not mistaken, when you sorted out those German fellows trying to bring down the City at the time of the Jubilee.’
‘I did have that pleasure, Prime Minister,’ said Powerscourt, wondering if he had been called to sort out another financial scandal.
‘Not bloody Germans this time, Powerscourt,’ the Prime Minister went on, ‘bloody Boers. Bloody Boers!’ He repeated himself angrily.
‘This is the problem, Powerscourt,’ said the Prime Minister with real passion in his voice. ‘The whole structure of military intelligence in South Africa is wrong. War Office can’t sort it out. Useless bloody generals can’t sort it out. They think the Boers are here. They’re not. They’re over there. The generals plod over there. By the time they arrive, Mr bloody Boer has disappeared again. Difficulties in the terrain, they keep telling me. Rubbish. Faulty intelligence, maybe no intelligence at all.’