“Thank you, Colonel,” she said, and then went on, sighing, “My family has been on this side of the Atlantic for almost a hundred and fifty years, but people still judge me by my surname. I can’t help that. And women have been taking jobs that require skill for even longer - ever since the typewriter was invented, I suppose.”
“Ah, the typewriter,” Bushell said. “If you knew how many times I’ve listened to Sam go on about how the typewriter made his family what it is today - ”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” Kathleen answered.
“A lot of Negroes left the southern plantations when the Empire outlawed slavery in 1834,” Bushell said, “and got the education they couldn’t have in bondage. And because they were newly free and looking for work and willing to work cheap - ”
“ - They’ve been typists and clerks and petty officials ever since,” she finished for him. “How did your adjutant end up a RAM instead?”
“He says the army made him realize he didn’t want to be chained to a desk and a file drawer the rest of his life.” Bushell let out a wry chuckle. “That only shows he didn’t know much about police work when he took it on.”
Kathleen Flannery left the stairs at the first-floor landing. Bushell followed her down a hall ornamented with a mural of Royal Navy steamships bombarding Franco-Spanish Los Angeles and landing red-clad marines to cement Britain’s hold on it.
“The Two Georges is in the Cardigan Room,” Kathleen Flannery said. “Here.”
The two RAMs standing in front of the famous painting came to rigid attention as Bushell walked into the room. Each of them was but a stride or two from a button that would set off an alarm at the slightest hint of trouble. Bushell pointed to one of the buttons. “I presume that’s been checked recently?” he asked in a voice that presumed nothing.
“Yes, sir, this afternoon,” the RAM nearer that button answered. “Makes a h - ” - he glanced toward Kathleen and revised his choice of words - ”quite a racket, it does. And if that doesn’t do the trick, we’ve got these.” He rested a hand on the grip of the long-barreled Colt revolver he wore on his right hip.
“Are armed guards really necessary?” Kathleen asked, frowning.
Bushell understood why the notion upset her; civilians who weren’t hunters rarely saw or had anything to do with firearms. But he answered, “I think they are. I have to act on the assumption that someone will try to steal The Two Georges, no matter how farfetched it may seem.”
She still looked unhappy, but said no more. Bushell paced the Cardigan Room, making sure arrangements were as he’d ordained. The room had no windows, and only the one door to the hallway. There were also connecting doors to the chambers on either side, but at the moment they did not connect. To make sure they did not and would not connect, they had been reinforced and fitted with stout new locks, the keys to which resided in the RAM guards’ trouser pockets.
“It should do,” Bushell said grudgingly. “It should.” He didn’t want to admit anything of the sort.
“Emergency exit - ”
“There’s a service lift two doors farther along the hall,” Kathleen Flannery answered, as if she thought he didn’t know. “Two days from now, we’ll take the painting down on it, load it aboard our steam lorry, and move it to the Provincial Museum for public display.”
As soon as she said that, Bushell saw in his mind a floor plan for the Provincial Museum, and began to worry about security precautions there. Things in the governor’s mansion seemed safe enough, but there was so much more to plan for with the general public involved. The guest list here had been carefully screened. You couldn’t do that at the Provincial Museum no matter how much more convenient it would make things. So many people wanted to see The Two Georges. . . .Kathleen brought him back to the here and now: “In case of fire, there’s another stairway just past the lift.”
“Good,” he said, nodding. “Now, about earthquakes - ”
“Colonel Bushell, if in the next two days there is an earthquake strong enough to reduce the governor’s mansion to a pile of rubble, I admit that The Two Georges is unlikely to survive,” she said tartly. “In that unhappy event, however, I am also unlikely to survive, and so I shall spend very little time fretting over it.”
One of the RAM guards snickered, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. Kathleen could tell off his boss without getting called on the carpet for insubordination.
Bushell started another circuit of the Cardigan Room. He pulled out his cigar case; the smoke would help him think. “Do you mind?” he asked Kathleen Flannery, and reached for a cigar in anticipation of the permission that almost always came.
But she said, “I’m afraid I do. There’s no smoking in this room, both to protect the colors of the painting and to reduce the risk of fire.”
Told off again, Bushell thought. But the objection made sense. He tucked the case back into his tunic pocket. After a last look around the room, he reluctantly concluded he could do no more to make The Two Georges safe than he had already done. For the first time, he paid serious attention to the canvas itself.
In one form or another, he, like everyone else in the NAU, saw the painting every day. Taking a long look at the original, he realized how much about it he had never noticed. It was more than a symbol of the union of the colonies with the mother country; it was a great work of art in its own right. A master of color and texture, Gainsborough had outdone himself on the uniforms the two Georges wore. Every fold, every crease in the crimson wool of George Ill’s coat was marked by a subtle gradation in shading. The rough, light-drinking texture of the wool contrasted with the lace at the king’s cuffs, the smoother linen of his breeches, and the shimmer from his silk stockings. Lamplight glittered from the gold buckles of his shoes and from the large sunburst of a medal he wore on his left breast. Bowing before the king, George Washington was made to appear shorter than his sovereign. The blue coat that proclaimed his colonial colonelcy was of wool like that of George III, but of a coarser weave speaking of homespun. Not all its creases were those of fashion; with a few strategic wrinkles and some frayed fringes depending from one epaulette, Gainsborough managed to suggest how long the garment had lain folded in its trunk while Washington sailed across the Atlantic to advance the colonies’ interests on the privy council George III had established.
As a portraitist, Gainsborough more often succeeded with women than with men. Both protagonists in The Two Georges broke that rule. Here was George III, perhaps not the most able of men but earnest, serious, plainly anxious to be doing the best thing for England and her American colonies, his small head leaning slightly forward from its perch atop his pear-shaped body. And opposite him, Washington. The colonial leader was a man to be reckoned with. In his bow, Gainsborough had caught the strength and athleticism that informed his body. The artist also captured a look in his eyes, a set to his expression, that Bushell had seen in any number of veterans: here, without doubt, stood a man who’d known combat.
You could gather so much from any four-shilling lithograph, or indeed from any banknote in your wallet. But the devil, as always, lay in the details. “There’s so muchto see!” Bushell breathed. Kathleen Flannery nodded. “Almost anyone who was anyone in England in the 1760s is there, regardless of whether he was really at the ceremony: Gainsborough was working to produce a piece that would symbolize unity, not just between England and the colonies but also between Tories and Whigs.”