“ ‘Thou look’st like Antichrist in that lewd hat,’ “ said he, in greeting.
“Jonson, I suppose. What’s wrong with my hat?”
“It is the epitome of what you have become, my dear Frank. It is an Anthony Eden hat. Sedate, gloomy, and out of fashion. Come with me to Locke’s and we’ll get you a decent hat. A hat that speaks to the world of the Inner Cornish, the picture-restorer—but of the highest repute.”
“I haven’t restored a picture for years.”
“But I have! I most certainly and indubitably have! I’m restoring it to its proper place in the world of Art. And it’s a picture you know, so why don’t you take me to Scott’s for lunch, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Over the sole Mornay at Scott’s Ross told his news with exuberance extraordinary even for him.
“You remember that picture we saw at Munich? The Marriage at Cana? You remember what happened to it?”
“It went back to Schloss Düsterstein, didn’t it?”
“Yes, but not to oblivion. No indeed. I was tremendously taken with that picture—that triptych, I should say. And don’t you remember that I spoke about a link between it and the Drollig Hansel we had seen earlier? The picture that was clearly marked as having belonged to the Fuggers of Augsburg? I’ve proved the link.”
“Proved it?”
“The way we prove things in our game, Frank. By the most careful examination of brushwork, quality of paint, colours, and of course a great deal of flair backed up with expertise. The full Berenson bit. Short of all that really rather inconclusive scientific stuff, I’ve proved it.”
“Aha. A nice footnote.”
“If I weren’t eating your lunch, I’d kill you. Footnote! It makes clearer the whole affair of that unknown painter Saraceni called The Alchemical Master. Now look: this is obviously a man who loves to deal in puzzles and hints to the observant. That device in the corner of Drollig Hansel could have been the Fuggers’ family trademark, or it could have been a gallows. A hangman, you see? A dwarf hangman. And who turns up in The Marriage at Cana but the same dwarf hangman, and this time he is holding his rope! And he is glorious in his dress armour!
“That bothered me for years, until at last I was able to get a grant—never do anything without a grant, Frank—to go to Düsterstein and persuade the old Countess to let me see The Marriage. She’s tremendously chuffed with it now, you know. It hangs in the best gallery. I stayed for three days—she was very hospitable (lonely I suppose, poor old duck)—and I’ve cracked the code.”
“Cracked what code?”
“What The Marriage is really about, of course. The Alchemical Master cloaked it all in alchemical mystery, and for a very good reason, but it’s not really an alchemical picture. It’s political.”
“You astonish me. Go on.”
“What do you know about The Interim of Augsburg?”
“Not a thing.”
“It’s not on everybody’s tongue, but it was important when that picture was painted. It was a scheme to reconcile the Catholics and the Protestants in 1548. It was a compromise that led up to the Council of Trent. The Catholics made certain concessions to the Protestants, the biggest one being communion in both kinds, if you know what that means.”
“Don’t insult me, you prairie Protestant. It means the laity receive both the bread and the wine at Communion.”
“Good boy. So—the Marriage at Cana, where Christ certainly gave everybody the wine, the best they’d ever had. But look who’s the principal figure in the picture: Mother Church, personified as the Virgin Mary, offering the Cup. So that’s one-up for the Catholics because they are graciously yielding something very precious to the Protestants. The married couple are the Catholic and Protestant factions united in amity.”
“There’s a hole in your explanation. Mary may be yielding the Cup to the Protestants, but she certainly isn’t giving it to the Catholics, and they haven’t got it yet.”
“I thought of that, but I don’t think it really matters. The ostensible point of the picture is not to shout its message to every chance visitor to the Düsterstein Chapel, but to offer an altar-piece representing the Marriage at Cana.”
“Well—what about the other figures?”
“Some can be identified. The old man with the writing-tablet is obviously Johann Agricola, one of the framers of the Interim of Augsburg. Who is holding his spare writing materials? Who but Drollig Hansel, the hangman with his rope, but he is in parade armour and thus dressed for a celebration, which he assists by holding the pens. Symbolic of the cessation of persecution, do you see? The Knight and the Lady in the right-hand wing of the triptych are surely Graf Meinhard and his wife—the donors of the picture, just where you would expect to find them. Even Paracelsus is there—that shrewd little chap with the scalpel.”
“And what about all the others?”
“I don’t see that they really matter. The significant thing is that the picture celebrates the Interim of Augsburg, by linking it with the Marriage at Cana. The message of the angel, about the good wine, obviously refers to the Protestant-Catholic reconciliation. Those women quarrelling over Christ—Protestant preaching versus Catholic faith, obviously. And The Alchemical Master has laid out the whole squabble so that the picture, if necessary, could be explained in a number of different ways.”
“What did the Gräfin say to all this?”
“Just smiled, and said I astonished her.”
“Yes, I see. But Aylwin, I really do think you ought to be careful. It’s ingenious, but a historian could probably blow it full of holes. For instance, why would the Ingelheims want such a thing? They were never Protestants, surely?”
“Perhaps not avowedly so. But they were—or Graf Meinhard was—alchemists, and they chose a painter with this obvious alchemical squint. Graf Meinhard probably had something up his sleeve, but that’s not my affair. I shall simply write about the picture.”
“Write about it?”
“I’m doing a large-scale article for Apollo. Don’t miss it.”
Francis certainly did not miss it. He worried for many weeks before the article appeared. Obviously he should tell Aylwin the history of The Marriage at Cana. But why “obviously”? Because conscience required it? Yes, but if conscience were given a foremost place in the matter, it would be Ross’s duty, as a matter of conscience, to denounce Francis as a faker, who had sat in silence while The Marriage was praised by the Munich experts. Conscience would involve the Gräfin, who, if she were really as innocent as she seemed about The Marriage, was certainly not innocent in the matter of Drollig Hansel. And if the Gräfin were involved, what about all those other pictures that had been so stealthily prepared by Saraceni and palmed off on the collectors for the Führermuseum? This was not a time to expose impostures practised on the Third Reich by Anglo-Franco-American entrepreneurs, which had involved the loss to Germany of genuine and splendid pictures; Germany, as the loser, was in the wrong, and must be firmly kept in the wrong for a time, to satisfy public indignation. Francis’s dilemma had a bewildering array of horns.
And there was the matter of Ross himself. He counted on his article about The Marriage to provide a fine step upward in his career. Was Francis to hold him back by a confession which, if it were to be made at all, should have been made years earlier?
Finally, Francis had to admit, there was sheer pride in having brought off a splendid hoax. Had not Ruth Nibsmith warned him about the strong Mercurial element in his nature? Mercury, who added so much that was uplifting and delightful in the world, was also the god of thieves and crooks and hoaxers. The division between art and deviousness and—yes, it had to be admitted—crime was sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper. Beset by conscience on the one hand, he enjoyed a deep, chuckling satisfaction on the other. He was no Letztpfennig, to be brought down to ruin by a monkey: his picture, though anonymously, was to be given wide exposure and an interesting ambience by a rising young expert in the Mercurial world of connoisseurship. Francis decided to keep mum.