7
“It certainly seems as though le beau ténébreux had been much more shadowy than any of us suspected,” said Princess Amalie.
“Frankly, I am astounded! Astounded!” said Prince Max, who liked to multiply his verbal effects. “I remember Cornish well. Charming, reserved fellow; spoke little but was a splendid listener; handsome, but didn’t seem aware of it. I thought Tancred Saraceni lucky to have found such a gifted assistant; his picture of the Fugger dwarf was a little gem. I wish I had it now. And certainly the Fugger dwarf looked very much like the dwarf in The Marriage.”
“I remember that curious man Aylwin Ross saying precisely that when the Allied Commission on Art had a chance to look at both pictures. Ross was no fool, though he came to grief in a rather foolish way.”
The speaker was Addison Thresher. He is the man to watch and the man to convince, thought Darcourt. The Prince and Princess Amalie know a lot about pictures, and a very great deal about business, but this man knows the art world, and his Yes or No is decisive. Until now he has given no hint that he had known The Marriage at Cana in Europe. Watch your step, Darcourt.
“Did you know Francis Cornish well?” he asked.
“I did. That’s to say, I met him in The Hague when he made that astonishing judgement on a fake Van Eyck. He played with his cards very close to his vest. But I had a few chats with him later in Munich, during the meetings of the Art Commission. He told me something then that clicks with your surprising explanation of this picture, that we have all loved for so many years. Do you know how he learned to draw?”
“I have seen the beautiful copies of Old Master drawings he made when he was at Oxford,” said Darcourt. He saw no reason to say more.
“Yes, but before that? It was one of the most extraordinary confessions I ever heard from an artist. As a boy he learned a lot about technique from a book written by a nineteenth-century caricaturist and illustrator called Harry Furniss. Cornish told me he used to do drawings of corpses in an undertaking parlour. The embalmer was his grandfather’s coachman. Furniss was an extraordinary parodist of other men’s styles; he once showed a gigantic hoax exhibition in which he parodied all the great painters of the late Victorian era. Of course they hated him for it, but I wish I knew where those pictures are now. Drawing lies at the root of great painting, of course—but imagine a child learning to draw like that from a book! An eccentric genius. Not that all genius isn’t eccentric.”
“Do you really think our picture was the work of le beau ténébreux?” said the Princess.
“When I look at these photographs Professor Darcourt has been showing us, I don’t see how I can think anything else.”
“Then that smashes the favourite in our collection. Smashes it to smithereens,” said Prince Max.
“Perhaps,” said Thresher.
“Why perhaps? Isn’t it shown to be a fake?”
“Please—not a fake,” said Darcourt. “That is what I am anxious to prove. It was never intended to deceive. There is not a scrap of evidence that Francis Cornish ever attempted to sell it, or show it, or gain any sort of worldly advantage from it. It was a picture of wholly personal importance, in which he was setting down and balancing off the most significant elements in his own life, and doing it in the only way he knew, which was by painting. By organizing what he wanted to look at in the form and style that was most personal to him. That is not faking.”
“Try telling that to the art world,” said the Prince.
“That is precisely what I shall try to do in my life of Francis. And I hope I’m not immodest in saying that I shall do it. Not to unveil a fake, or smash your picture, but to show what an astonishing man Francis Cornish was.”
“Yes, but my dear professor, you can’t do one without the other. We shall suffer. We shall be made to look like fools, or collaborators in a deception. Think of that article in Apollo that Aylwin Ross wrote, explaining the sixteenth-century importance of this picture. It’s well known in the world of art history. A very clever piece of detective work. People will think we kept our mouths shut to save our picture, or else that we were victims of Francis Cornish’s little joke. No—his big joke. His Harry Furniss joke, as Addison has told us.”
“Incidentally, that figure of the fat artist who is drawing on a little ivory tablet is Furniss to the life, now that I know what we know,” said Thresher.
“Francis was not wanting in humour. I admit it. He loved a joke and particularly a dark joke that not everybody else understood,” said Darcourt. “But that again is an argument on my side. Would a man who intended to deceive put such a portrait of a known artist—and an artist at work—in such a picture as this? I repeat: this is not a picture for anyone but the painter himself. It is a confession, a deeply personal confession.”
“Addison, what would you say was the market value of this picture, if we didn’t know what Professor Darcourt has told us?” said Princess Amalie.
“Only Christie’s or Sotheby’s could answer that question. They know what they can get. A good many millions, certainly.”
“We were ready to sell it to the National Gallery of Canada a few years ago for three millions,” said Prince Max.
“That was when we wanted to raise some capital to expand Amalie’s business. Aylwin Ross was the Director then, but at the last minute he couldn’t raise the money, and not long after he died.”
“That would have been cheap,” said Thresher.
“We were rather under the spell of Ross,” said the Princess.
“He was a most beautiful man. We offered him several pieces, at an inclusive price. This was by far the cheapest. But in the end they went to other buyers. We decided to keep this one. We like it so much.”
“And you have so many others,” said Thresher, not altogether kindly. “But three million was certainly a bargain. Now, if it weren’t for what we have heard this evening, you could treble or quadruple that money.”
This was Darcourt’s moment. “Would you sell now, if you could get a price that pleased you?”
“Sell it as a distinguished fake?”
“Sell it as the greatest work of The Alchemical Master, now known to be the late Francis Cornish? Let me tell you what I have in mind.”
With all the persuasive skill he could summon up, Darcourt told them what he had in mind.
“Of course, it’s extremely conditional,” he said when he had finished, and the Prince and the Princess and Thresher were deep in consideration.
“Very iffy indeed,” said Thresher. “But it’s a hell of a good idea. I don’t know when I’ve heard of a better in forty years in the art world.”
“There is no hurry,” said Darcourt. “Are you willing to leave it with me?”
And that was where the matter rested when Darcourt flew back to Canada.
8
“I really think one of the names must be Arthur. After all, it was my father’s name, and it’s my name, and it’s a good name. Not unfamiliar; not peculiar; easy to pronounce; has good associations, not the least of them being this opera.”
“I entirely agree,” said Hollier. “As a godfather, with a right to give the boy a name of my choice, I declare for Arthur.”
“No regrets about Clement?” said Arthur.
“It’s not a name I’ve ever liked much.”
“Well, thank heaven one name is settled. Now, Nilla, you’re the godmother. What name have you chosen?”
“I have a weakness for Haakon, because it was my father’s name, and it is a name of great honour in Norway. But it might embarrass a Canadian child. So also with Olaf, which is another favourite of mine. So—what about Nikolas? He need not even spell it with a ‘k’ if he doesn’t want to. A fine saint’s name, and I think every child should have a saints name, even if it isn’t used.”