David Dickinson: Death of an Old Master

Edmund did. He did not know just how terrible the news was, but he knew it meant catastrophe for himself, his mother and his sisters.

‘“Signed in the presence of witnesses, Albert Clement, notaire of Grasse and Jean Jacques Rives, banker of Nice, on the twentieth day of October 1895.”’

Smithson wiped his brow. He coughed apologetically. The women looked dumb. Edmund was staring at the leather volumes opposite him, wondering how much they were worth.

‘I am afraid there is more that you must know,’ Smithson said, glancing briefly at his companion. ‘Mr McKenna here comes from Finch’s Bank which handles the family financial affairs. I fear you should hear from him.’

Great God, thought Alice de Courcy, is there worse to come on this terrible day? That woman and her children coming to the funeral was bad. Breaking up the house and the estate, she suspected, was worse.

Richard McKenna drew some papers from his bag and placed them on the table. He spoke very gently. ‘The financial position is not good,’ he began. ‘Let me deal with the house first. There are two mortgages outstanding on the property in which we sit this afternoon. They are for a total of forty thousand pounds, secured on de Courcy Hall itself. The current interest on those mortgages comes to approximately fifteen hundred pounds a year.’ The figures dropped into the room like the drops of rain from the leak in the church at the service that morning, cold, regular, unstoppable.

‘The estates are also mortgaged,’ McKenna went on. Edmund thought he sounded like a doctor telling his patient that they had an incurable disease. Perhaps they had. Financial cancer had spread to Norfolk, a plague of debt and impossible obligations.

‘They are mortgaged to the value of sixty thousand pounds. The interest on those loans from Finch’s Bank comes to the total of two thousand, two hundred and fifty pounds a year.’

McKenna paused. Now came the hammer blow. ‘The rent rolls from the estates have been falling lately. The properties are not perhaps in such good repair as they once were.’ His eyes glanced up at the cracks in the ceiling, the broken window panes, the worn patches in the carpet. ‘At present the income amounts to just four thousand pounds a year, barely enough to cover the interest payments.’

He looked around at the remaining members of the de Courcy family. Alice had turned even paler and was staring at the floor. Julia and Sarah were gazing in horror at this messenger of despair. Edmund had his head in his hands. ‘I fully appreciate,’ McKenna purred on, as if he was performing this melancholy rite for the ninth or the tenth time – which he was – ‘that this must have come as rather a shock. A terrible shock. At the bank we have considerable experience of dealing with these problems. We shall continue to extend our credit for the foreseeable future, but a rescue plan must be devised which can extricate you all from this temporary financial impasse.’

Edmund escorted his mother and sisters to the door. He took McKenna to walk up and down the Long Gallery on the other side of the house from the library. Their footsteps echoed up and down the hundred and forty feet of the great room. Long thin windows looked out over a bedraggled garden, weeds and brambles laying siege to the lawns, the unpruned roses running wild across the flower beds.

‘I fear I can be more frank with you here than with your mother and your sisters,’ said McKenna. ‘Nothing need happen for three months. After that I would suggest you send your mother and your sisters abroad. Life is cheaper there. You would be surprised how many of our fellow countrymen live happy and inexpensive lives in southern France.’

‘I do not think,’ said Edmund, looking sadly at his companion, ‘that my mother will be happy going to the south of France.’

‘Forgive me,’ said the banker. ‘It need not be there. There are many other places round the Mediterranean where they could be happy.’

‘But how can they be brought back? How will I find the money?’

‘We can improve the management of the estates,’ said McKenna. Experience had taught him that hope was the most important commodity in these circumstances. ‘We can bring in a new steward, that old one seems to have been incompetent. The rent rolls could be doubled in three or four years.’

‘I can’t leave them abroad for that long. It will break my mother’s heart.’ Edmund stopped at one of the windows. The last of the afternoon light was going now, a couple of stray dogs patrolling the lawns that led towards the lake. ‘I must make some money. But I have no training. What can I do, Mr McKenna? Please help me.’

McKenna looked at the long line of de Courcys on one section of the walls, painted by Lawrence and Reynolds, Hoppner and Gainsborough. He looked further away where some early Italian paintings were becoming invisible in the gathering gloom.

‘Paintings,’ he said suddenly. ‘I hadn’t thought of it before. You could sell some of these paintings. Or you could use them as a way into the art world. We have a valued client in London who might be willing to train you up, and to draw on your knowledge of the works of art in the great houses of England.’

Edmund felt the first faint stirrings of hope. ‘But is there any money to be made in dealing in paintings and things?’ he asked. ‘Surely nobody is going to pay hundreds of pounds for some old works of art?’

Richard McKenna laughed. ‘The art market is changing, it’s changing every day, every month, every year, young man. Rich Americans, rich beyond imagination, richer than the world has ever seen before, are just beginning to buy European paintings. If the trends continue, just three or four paintings, maybe even some of the ones you have on the walls here, would fetch enough to clear all the debts and all the mortgages of de Courcy Hall.’

Autumn 1899

William Alaric Piper walked happily through his art gallery in London’s Old Bond Street. Every morning he went on a tour of inspection of the pictures, checking they were all straight, that no dust remained on the floor from the previous day’s visitors. Piper was a small, rather tubby man in his early thirties. He was immaculately turned out, as ever, with a fresh flower in his buttonhole and perfectly polished boots. The de Courcy and Piper Gallery, for such was to be the name of the new venture, was the boldest move yet on to the London art market of the firm of de Courcy and Piper, art dealers.

In the main gallery, lit in the most dramatic way that London designers could provide, were Titians and Tintorettos, on the opposite wall Bellinis and Giorgiones. In the smaller room next door the lesser gods of the Venetian pantheon were on display, the Bassanos and Carpaccios, the Bordones and the Vivarinis. Venetian Paintings had been acclaimed as the most dramatic exhibition that year in London. The paintings had come on loan from Paris and the great houses of England to dazzle and bewitch the citizens of London with their colour and their enigmatic beauty. Today, Piper reminded himself, the exhibition had been open for exactly one month.

As he reached his office William Alaric Piper took out a large cigar and opened his correspondence. His office was filled with files, for William Alaric Piper believed that knowledge was the key to success. Quite simply he was determined to discover the location of all the valuable paintings in Britain. Then he would move on to France and Italy. Neatly arranged in alphabetical order were the counties of the kingdom, some thicker than others, detailing the collections of Petworth and Knebworth and Chatsworth, Knole and Kingston Lacy and Kedleston Hall. Sometimes individual entries were marked with a strange system of asterisks. These told the initiated how severe were the financial problems of the owners of the paintings. One asterisk meant major trouble, might be persuaded to sell. Two asterisks meant technically insolvent, desperate to raise money. And three asterisks meant that financial Armageddon was imminent and might only be averted by the judicious sale of some of the family heirlooms. This intelligence system was run by Piper’s partner Edmund de Courcy Since his father’s death de Courcy had been employed first as an apprentice and then as a junior partner in the business – his speciality to maintain an accurate index of the fluctuating fortunes of the English rich so the firm of de Courcy and Piper could make an offer at precisely the right time.