David Dickinson - Death of an Old Master

He thought of his own beauty, cast into a different sort of bonfire, a bonfire of a marriage to a man she did not love. Orlando suddenly remembered the night he had fallen in love with Imogen, three weeks after he met her. He let the memories wash over him as he walked back to one of the great windows and stared out at the rain falling on the ruined gardens. It had been at a ball, a ball in one of the most romantic houses in England. The house itself was quite small, surrounded by a moat, and boasting three priest’s holes inside where the persecuted Jesuits were said to have hidden from the agents of the Elizabethan state. Imogen had been very excited by those, climbing into one and demanding that Orlando close the secret door for at least ten minutes so she could understand what it must have been like.

It had been early summer, Orlando recalled. There was a great marquee round two sides of the house, open to the water. Imogen and he had danced for most of the night. They dined on lobsters, washed down with pink champagne, and strawberries, sitting at the very edge of the marquee, their feet almost touching the green water of the moat. Orlando remembered that a drop or two of strawberry juice had fallen on to his sleeve. When it dried it looked like blood on his cuff.

As the dawn came Orlando and Imogen were so passionately in love with each other that the other dancers moved away to make room for them. It was as if they were in the centre of an enchanted circle, a circle of love so bright that it dazzled their neighbours on the wooden floor. Orlando remembered it as a feeling of ekstasis , ecstasy, standing almost outside yourself to worship the grace and the beauty of the girl you held in your arms. He looked again at his quotation. Perhaps the flames of their love had been too bright. Perhaps the two of them had been consumed like the vanities in Savonarola’s bonfire.

When the music stopped they had gone for a walk in the soft morning light. The birds had been up for hours to welcome another dawn. Dew glistened off the fields. He told Imogen he loved her under a great sycamore tree that had stood for hundreds of years. Maybe the tree had sheltered other lovers in the past.

In the days that followed – why were his memories always of bright sunshine, Orlando wondered, had it never rained? – they would meet for walks across Hyde Park, past the gleaming horses on Rotten Row, past Prince Albert’s statue to look at a different circle, the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Once he had taken Imogen to Windsor and he had rowed her up the Thames in a boat. She had a broad-brimmed hat to keep the sun off and she leaned back on her cushions in the stern of the boat, her face in shadow, her hand trailing in the water, her eyes fixed on her boatman. As they went upriver the noise of the town died away. The mighty castle, grey and forbidding even in the sunlight, seemed to shrink in size. The only noise was the singing of the birds and the soft plops of Orlando’s oars.

‘“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”’ Orlando whispered.

‘“Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”’

Imogen had laughed. ‘Two people can play Shakespeare sonnets, you know,’ she said, ‘the nuns were very keen on Shakespeare sonnets. Well, most of them.

‘“Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”’

They pulled the boat into the side of the river and tied it up under a pair of weeping willows, the water dark and cool in the shade. They set out for a short walk across the empty fields.

Imogen had her arm wrapped round Orlando’s waist. She stopped suddenly and looked straight into his blue eyes. ‘We’re not doomed, are we, Orlando?’ she said. ‘We’re not going to the edge?’

Imogen had met him off the train when he came back from Monte Carlo. She laughed that reckless laugh of hers when he told her about his failure, that there was no fortune to secure their future.

‘It’s fate,’ she said. Orlando often wondered if the fate of doomed love had some secret appeal for Imogen. ‘Fate is now calling me to a different future,’ she said, nestling closely to him as the crowds streamed down the platform. She took him for tea in the great hotel at the side of the station. There, amidst the potted palms and the trays of sandwiches and the distant music of the orchestra, she told him the terrible tidings.

‘In three weeks’ time, at St James’s Piccadilly, I am to be married. I do not love him. I will never love him. I will not bear his children. But my father insists.’ She paused while the waiter brought the tea. He smiled at them. The circle of love was still wrapped around the pair in spite of the terrible news.

‘I shall not give you up, Orlando,’ she said defiantly. ‘I shall never give you up. Whatever happens.’

That was when he had started drinking again, Orlando remembered. When he was with Imogen he didn’t need to drink at all. It was intoxicating enough just to be with her. His new captors from the tables of Monte Carlo had installed him in a sad little flat near Victoria station until they worked out where to send him. Orlando didn’t remember much about that time. He remembered starting one marathon drinking session three days before the wedding was due to take place. He started with wine, then brandy, then armagnac. Armagnac could make you forget, he decided. He did remember falling asleep on the steps outside St James’s, Piccadilly the night before Imogen’s wedding, an armagnac bottle half full inside his coat. A policeman had escorted him away. Orlando thought he had been sick through the railings of Green Park as he staggered back to his sordid quarters. Two days later, his captors had come for him – he was still drunk – and taken him away.

Ever since the start of his incarceration he had pleaded with his captors to let him write to Imogen. He could send a letter to her father’s house for forwarding to the new address. For weeks they had refused. And then, three days before, his chief captor, known to Orlando as the Sergeant Major, a great pirate of a man with an enormous brown beard, had brought him the news.

‘My masters,’ he always referred to them as ‘my masters’, ‘have agreed that you may write to the lady. They are pleased with you. And you may have drink this week-end. Only on Friday or Saturday, mind you. No more after that.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was in a train, returning to Oxford. The note that summoned him had been cryptic. It asked him to meet Chief Inspector Wilson at an address on the Banbury Road in that city at twelve noon. Nothing more. Powerscourt wondered if this was the same Wilson he had met in an earlier investigation, a death by fire at Blackwater House. He smiled as he remembered the young fire investigator Joseph Hardy who had played such a prominent role in rescuing Lady Lucy from a Brighton hotel near the end of the inquiry.

Then he started thinking seriously about forgers. He hadn’t given the forger much consideration before. As his train pulled out of Didcot station, Powerscourt was joined by a very old lady, who refused all offers of assistance and eventually settled herself down in a corner of his compartment. The old lady took out a copy of An Outcast of the Islands and began to read, muttering to herself sometimes as if she was reading aloud. Conrad’s characters are a long way from Didcot, even from cosmopolitan Oxford, Powerscourt thought, returning to his forger. He realized suddenly, as he stared blankly at the passing countryside, that it would be easier, much easier, to find the needle in the proverbial haystack. Where was the forger? Was he in London? Was he somewhere in Europe, only coming to England to deposit his counterfeit goods? Was he attached to some great house with a history of paintings, increasing their holdings of Old Masters with forged art and forged terms of reference? Was he in the employ of one of the dealers, forging, as it were, to order? Was he forging purely for money, to become as rich as some of his subjects? Was he a frustrated contemporary artist, who turned to fakery as revenge on a hostile art market? Whoever he was, wherever he was, he realized as the train pulled into Oxford station, the man must have been trained somewhere. And that probably meant, if he were a home-grown forger, the Royal Academy. He would write to Sir Frederick immediately he returned to London.