David Dickinson - Death of an Old Master

The Beaufort had realized earlier than their competitors along Pall Mall that there was money to be made from the Americans. They had links with the top clubs in all the major cities in America. Financiers, importers, newspapermen, tourists came to the Beaufort and reported home that it was almost like being back in the States. There was American cooking, American whiskey, Cuban cigars. Most important of all there were other Americans to talk to. There was no need in the Beaufort to catch at the nuances of English irony or eat their terrible food. You wouldn’t have to talk about cricket. The Beaufort was a home from home, a slice of apple pie in the alien world of London. Many of the Americans felt homesick even going there.

And the Beaufort had the American newspapers and magazines, the New York Times , the Washington Post , the Chicago Sun Times, Harpers and Queen, Vanity Fair, The American. They kept the back copies of all these publications for a year. Sometimes Americans would arrive in London who had spent months in the even more alien climes of France or Italy, Egypt or St Petersburg, Russia, and would want to catch up on events at home.

Edmund de Courcy sat at a small table in the basement with a great pile of America’s most fashionable magazines. Within these pages the advertisements for houses started at enormous prices, and no jewellery was on display that cost less than fifty thousand dollars. Here rich America was on display, their mansions, their yachts, their possessions, their wealth flaunted before a jealous world.

Edmund de Courcy was looking for illustrations of two very rich families. Not the husband, or the husband and wife, but husband, wife and children. One such family was the McCrackens, whose husband was, of course, in London, doing business with Edmund’s own firm of de Courcy and Piper. The other was a man due to arrive in England in two weeks’ time. The Piper intelligence service in New York had given warning that a Lewis B. Black, based in Philadelphia, was on his way. Mr Black may have dwelt in the city of brotherly love but he was said to be the most ruthless steel magnate in all America. His personal fortune – the Piper intelligence service had checked the figures with three different sources – was in excess of one hundred million dollars. And, even more enticing, Mr Black was interested in art. Nobody knew what kind of art, but a man with that kind of fortune has to collect something.

De Courcy read about society balls in New York. He read of charity dinners in Boston. He read of Lucullan birthday parties in Chicago, and glittering evenings at the Metropolitan Opera. He saw illustrations of the American plutocracy on their yachts, at the weddings of their children and the Commemorative Masses for their dead.

He had gone through four whole months of The American before he struck gold. There, in the drawing room of a very grand house, he found an illustration of Mr and Mrs William P. McCracken of Concord, Massachusetts, and their two daughters, aged about eight and ten, a small dog standing alertly beside them. De Courcy tiptoed carefully over to the door to make sure no one was coming. Then he took a small pair of scissors from his pocket and cut the page out of the magazine. He put it inside a large red notebook he had brought with him. The book had slightly larger pages than the magazine. De Courcy didn’t want to have to fold it.

Two hours later he was on the verge of giving up. Various Americans had come down to the basement to look up old financial results in the New York Times or the football scores in the Boston Globe. They had greeted him cheerfully, wishing him a good day as he ploughed through the pile in front of him. But when he found it he was overjoyed. A large photograph showed Mr and Mrs Lewis B. Black, with their twin daughters, outside their new town house on Fifth Avenue. The girls looked about six years old. Mrs Black was wearing a hat composed largely of exotic feathers. Feathers, thought Edmund de Courcy. Hats made of fancy feathers in English portrait paintings. How many of the English Masters had painted such hats in their time? Lawrence, Hoppner, Romney. Gainsborough, Reynolds. What a treat! Out came the scissors. Mr Lewis B. Black and family joined Mr William P. McCracken and family in Edmund de Courcy’s special album.

Powerscourt was scribbling furiously at his writing desk. Jackson, the family footman who had served with his master in India, was waiting discreetly behind the chair. Powerscourt had decided not to call upon Jason Lockhart of Clarke’s the art dealers in person. He felt Lockhart might feel constrained in his working surroundings and, for some reason he couldn’t pin down, Powerscourt didn’t want to show himself yet in the rarefied air of Old Bond Street.

‘I am investigating the death of the late Christopher Montague,’ he wrote, ‘and I feel that you may be able to assist me.’ He said nothing of new magazines, of fakes and forgers, of mistresses in the heart of Chelsea. ‘If you could fix a time with my man here I should be delighted to see you in 25 Markham Square at your earliest convenience.’

Jackson promised to wait for the reply. Powerscourt found Lady Lucy inspecting the dining room with a worried air. ‘Francis,’ she said, ‘these dining chairs. We’ve had them for ever so long. But they’re beginning to look a bit shabby, don’t you think?’ Lady Lucy pushed hard at one of the seats. There was a slight wobble, implying that a very heavy person might find themselves sitting unexpectedly on the floor.

Powerscourt was used to these continuous campaigns of domestic improvement. Sometimes he would return home and find that all the furniture in the drawing room had been rearranged. Or that a pair of curtains, previously deemed perfectly satisfactory, had been transferred from his study to a spare bedroom. Once he found that his entire wardrobe had been removed from the bedroom and placed in a closet some yards away down the corridor.

‘I just didn’t like that wardrobe, Francis,’ Lady Lucy had said on that occasion, ‘it was so ugly.’ Privately Powerscourt wondered if he himself might not be the subject of one of these periodic fits of rearrangement, transferred for ever to the coal hole or the top floor of the stables, thereby guaranteeing the aesthetic perfection of the rest of the house. Sometimes he replied with flippancy, suggesting that the kitchens would work much better if they were transferred into the attics, and that the children should all sleep in the front hall. It would mean that they could get to school quicker. He was reproved for being a domestic Philistine, a non-believer in the search for domestic harmony. In vain did Powerscourt try to tell his wife that perfection was an ideal, like one of Plato’s Forms, something to aspire to, a beacon on a distant hill, a vision that could never be achieved, and that all her efforts were doomed to failure.

‘You’re being absurd, Francis,’ Lady Lucy would laugh at him. ‘All I’m trying to do is to make our home as nice as possible. You wouldn’t want the children growing up surrounded by ugliness, would you?’

Powerscourt decided that instant capitulation was the only solution to the case of the dining-room chairs. ‘That looks a bit dangerous, Lucy. I think you’d better replace them straight away.’

Lady Lucy was not accustomed to such rapid victories. Often there would be protests about furniture being able to last a few years longer, sometimes dire and apocalyptic male mutterings about money. She stared hard at her husband’s face. Perhaps, as so often, he was teasing her.

‘Are you serious?’ she said incredulously.

‘Yes, I am,’ replied her husband. Lady Lucy resolved to try to find the cause of this immediate acquiescence. If she could identify the reason, then she could time future campaigns to coincide.