“You don’t care, I suppose,” said Francis to Ruth, on one of their afternoon walks. “You’re not really a governess—not in the nineteenth-century Bronte sense—and surely you want to do something else.”
“So I shall,” said Ruth, “but I shall stay here as long as there is work for me to do. Like you.”
“Ah, welclass="underline" I’m learning my craft, you see.”
“And practising your other craft. Like me.”
“Meaning?”
“Come on, Frank. You’re in the profession, aren’t you?”
“I’m a professional painter, if that’s what you mean.”
“Go on with you! You’re a snoop, and so am I. The profession.”
“You’ve left me behind.”
“Frank, nobody at Düsterstein is thick. The Countess has rumbled you, and so has Saraceni, and I rumbled you the first night I noticed you looking out of your open window, counting the cars on the Bummelzug. I was on the ground below, doing the same thing, just for the fun of it. A fine snoop you are! Standing in a window with a light behind you!”
“All right, officer. It’s a fair cop. I’ll come quietly. So you’re in the profession, too?”
“Born to it. My father was in it until he died on the job. Killed, very likely, though nobody really knows.”
“And what are you doing here?”
“That’s not a question one pro asks another pro. I’m just looking about. Keeping an eye on what you and the Meister are doing, and what the Countess and Prince Max do with that.”
“But you’ve never been in the shell-grotto.”
“Don’t need to go. I write the Countess’s letters, and I know what happens, however much she pretends it’s something else.”
“Doesn’t the Countess rumble you?”
“I hope not. It would be awful to think there were two snoops in one’s house, wouldn’t it? And I’m not very high-powered, you know. Just write the occasional letter home to my mum, who is a pro’s widow, and knows how to read them and what to pass on to the big chaps.”
“I know it’s nosy to ask, but do you get paid?”
“Ha ha; the profession relies to what might be considered a dangerous degree on unpaid help. The old English notion that nobody who is anybody really works for money. No, I work for nothing, on the understanding that if I shape up well I will be in line for a paid job some day. Women don’t get on very fast in the profession, unless they are elegant love-goddesses, and then they don’t last long. But I don’t grumble. I’m acquiring a useful command of Bavarian rural dialect and a peerless knowledge of the borderland between the Reich and Austria.”
“Not casting any horoscopes?”
“Plenty, but chiefly of people long dead. Why?”
“It was hinted to me that Prince Max would like to know what you think of his.”
“Oh, I know that. But I won’t bite. Anyhow, it would be bad for his character. Max is going to be rather famous.”
“How?”
“Even if I were sure I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Aha, I see in you the iconological figure of Prudence.”
“Meaning what?”
“The Meister has me hard at it studying all that sort of thing. So that I can read old pictures. All those symbolic women—Truth with her mirror, Charity suckling her child, Justice with her sword and balances, Temperance with her cup and ewer—scores of them; they are the sign language of a particular kind of art.”
“Well, why not? Have you anything better to do?”
“I have a block about that sort of thing. This Renaissance and pre-Renaissance stuff, where you make out the figures of Time, and his daughter Truth, and Luxury, and Fraud, and all those creatures, seems to me to pull a fine painting down to the level of moral teaching, if not actual anecdote. Could a great painter like Bronzino really have been so much of a moralist?”
“I don’t see why not. It’s just romantic nonsense to suppose that painters have always been rowdies and wenchers. Most of them were daubing away like billy-o in order to get the means to live the bourgeois life.”
“Oh well—it’s very dull learning iconology and I am beginning to wish something interesting would happen.”
“It will, and soon. Just hang on a bit. Some day you will be really famous, Francis.”
“Are you being psychic?”
“Me? What put that into your head?”
“Saraceni did. He says you are very much a psychic.”
“Saraceni is a mischief-making old nuisance.”
“Rather more than that. Sometimes when I listen to him going on about the picture exporting and importing business that he and the Countess are up to, I feel like Faust listening to Mephistopheles.”
“Lucky you. Would anybody ever have heard of Faust if it hadn’t been for Mephistopheles?”
“All right. But he has in a high degree the trick of making the worse seem the better cause. And he says it’s because conventional morality takes no heed of art.”
“I thought he said art was the higher morality.”
“Now you are beginning to sound like him. Listen, Ruth, aren’t we ever going to get together in bed again?”
“Not a hope, unless the Countess goes away on one of her jaunts and takes Amalie with her. In the Countess’s house and under her eye I play by the Countess’s rules, and I can’t be having it off with you when I am supposed to be gently watching over the precious virginity of her granddaughter. Fair’s fair, and that’s a little too much in the line of eighteenth-century castle intrigue for my taste.”
“Okay—I just thought I’d ask. ‘Hereafter, in a better world than this—’ “
“ ‘I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.’ I’ll hold you to that.”
“And I’ll hold you to that.”
“Corniche! I want you to go to the Netherlands and kill a man.”
“At your service, Meister. Shall I take my dagger or rely on the poisoned chalice?”
“You will rely on the poisoned word. Only that will do the job.”
“Then I suppose I’d better know his name.”
“His name, unfortunately for him, is Jean-Paul Letztpfennig. I am a great believer in the influence of names on destiny, and Letztpfennig is not a lucky name. Nor is he a lucky man. He wanted a career as a painter, but his stuff was dull and derivative. A failure, indeed, but just at the moment he is attracting a lot of attention.”
“Not from me. Never heard of him.”
“His notoriety is not mentioned in the German papers, but he is of great interest to Germany. The glassy eye of Reichsmarschall Göring is on him. He wants to sell the Reichsmarschall a ridiculous fake painting.”
“If it’s ridiculous how did the Reichsmarschall ever cast his glassy eye on it?”
“Because Letztpfennig, who is probably the most left-handed schlemiel in the art world at present, is hawking his fake around, and if it were real it would be the great find of the century. Nothing less than a major work by Hubertus van Eyck.”
“Not Jan van Eyck?”
“No; Hubertus, Jan’s brother who died in 1426, quite young. But Hubertus was a very great painter. It was he who designed and painted quite a bit of the magnificent Adoration of the Lamb, which is at Ghent. Jan finished it. There aren’t many pictures by Hubertus, and the appearance of one now is bound to create a sensation. But it is a fake.”
“How do you know?”
“I know because I feel it in my bones. It is my ability to feel things in my bones that lifts me above the general run of art experts. We all have sensitive bones, of course. But I am a painter myself, and I know more about how the great painters of the past worked than even Berenson, because Berenson is not a painter, and his bones keep changing their mind; he has attributed some very remarkable pictures to as many as three painters over a period of twenty years, to the dismay of their owners. When I know a thing I know it forever. And Letztpfennig’s van Eyck is a fake.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“I don’t have to see it. If Letztpfennig vouches for it, it’s a fake. He has made a tiny reputation among gullible people, but I know him through and through. He is the worst kind of scoundrel—an unlucky, muddling scoundrel. And he must be destroyed.”