David Dickinson: Death of an Old Master

There was one incongruous item in this haven of knowledge. On the wall directly opposite Piper’s desk was an enormous map of the United States of America with the railroad routes marked in a variety of different colours. Crawling across the continent went the Baltimore and Ohio, the Central Pacific Railroad, the Union Pacific, the Atcheson Topeka and Santa Fe. Casual visitors might have thought that Piper was a great devotee of railway travel, intent one day perhaps on traversing the length and breadth of the American continent. They would have been wrong. Piper disliked trains intensely. His favourite means of transport was the transatlantic liner, sailing in unimaginable luxury across the Atlantic.

For Piper the map symbolized American money, the vast American wealth that had been created by the railroads. Vanderbilt and Morgan, Stanford and Huntington had a daily income from the railroads greater than Piper had earned in his entire life. Piper’s ambition was to conquer the American art market. The new millionaires with their vast town houses in New York, their improbable chateaux in Newport, their yachts, their vulgar furnishings, were beginning to buy European pictures, usually of inferior quality. They had, after all, as Piper gleefully reminded himself from time to time, a great deal of wall space to fill. Once they had been tutored in the glories of the Old Masters Piper dreamt of Old Master prices, Old Master profits for himself, and a spurious second-hand immortality for their new owners. Already he had plans to infiltrate the beating heart of American money, New York’s Fifth Avenue.

As he opened his letters a smile, a rather wolfish smile, crossed his face. A note from his agent in New York told him that a certain William P. McCracken, master of all the railroads that radiated north, south and west of Boston, was coming to London shortly. He had made reservations at the Piccadilly Hotel. Piper too would visit the Piccadilly Hotel. Perhaps he would take the adjacent suite to this William P. McCracken. A meeting would be engineered with the sole purpose of introducing the millionaire to the joys of European painting. Perhaps he would be able to escort him round the National Gallery. Then he would receive a special invitation to the exhibition. Then, if Piper judged the time was right – he had observed that too many of his rivals rushed their fences and lost valuable business by excessive haste in selling – he would tempt the railroad king until he had to buy. Above all, he reminded himself, he had to make a friend of McCracken. He would become a friend for life. After all, McCracken’s money was going to last for life. And McCracken, unlike many of his fellow plutocrats, was still fairly young. What a collection William Alaric Piper could build for him! How much wealth could be quietly removed from the McCracken accounts in the banks of Wall Street into the coffers of William Alaric Piper!

A couple of miles to the west a military inspection was under way in Chelsea.

‘Stand at ease!’ said the tall Sergeant Major figure with the brown curly hair and the blue eyes.

‘Attention!’ The troops banged their feet on the floor, eyes staring rigidly ahead, fists pressed tightly to their sides.

‘Shoulder arms!’ shouted the Sergeant Major. A couple of shortened broom handles made their way slowly up into the correct position.

‘By the left, quick march!’ The little platoon moved off smartly towards the window.

‘Squad, halt!’ said the Sergeant Major, nearly tripping over a chair.

‘About turn!’ The figures shuffled awkwardly round to face the way they had come.

‘By the left, quick march! Left, left, left, left right left.’ The parade was rapidly approaching the double doors of the drawing room. The Sergeant Major, whose mind had temporarily wandered off somewhere else, recalled himself to his duty.

‘Squad, halt!’ He was only just in time. One more pace and the heads of the platoon would have crashed into the hard wood of the doors.

‘Squad, stand at ease!’ One of the figures refused to move.

‘You there, at the back, you miserable rapscallion, you! What did I just say? I said stand at ease! If you can’t obey orders in this battalion it’ll be bread and water for thirty days! Stand at ease!’

A foot banged into the floorboards. Two arms went behind the back. A face looked rather sad at the prospect of bread and water for thirty days.

‘Squad, dismiss!’

Two small figures turned round and leapt into their father’s arms. Lord Francis Powerscourt held his two children, the six-year-old Thomas and the five-year-old Olivia, very tightly and laughed.

‘You were nearly in trouble there,’ he said, ruffling Olivia’s hair. ‘Bread and water for thirty days. Don’t think you would have liked that, would you?’

‘Would you really have done that, Papa?’ asked the little girl, staring up into Powerscourt’s eyes.

‘You never know,’ said her father. ‘You never know what the Sergeant Major might have to do.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt had served in the army in India as an intelligence officer of the Crown. Since then he had become one of the foremost investigators in Britain, called in to solve murders and mysteries in England and abroad. A month before he had taken the children to visit his former Sergeant Major, recently installed in scarlet luxury as a Chelsea Pensioner. Sergeant Major Collins had always seemed a most formidable figure on the parade ground to Powerscourt but he had been wonderful with Thomas and Olivia. He had shown them the great hall where the Duke of Wellington’s body had lain in state before his funeral in 1852, the pensioners guarding the great warrior twenty-four hours a day. He had shown them his tiny room with the bed that folded into the wall. The children had been enchanted and immediately wanted to know why they didn’t have a similar arrangement at home. He had sat them down on the lawns that stretched down to the Thames and told them stories of strange Indian tribesmen with great beards, of campfires in the high mountains, of the terrible cold in the Crimea where he had lost a toe.

‘God bless them, sir,’ Sergeant Major Collins had said to Powerscourt as they left. ‘It makes you feel young just to be around them, so it does. I don’t have any grandchildren of my own, you see, so it brightens an old man’s week.’

‘Think of them as honorary grandchildren of your own, Sergeant Major,’ Powerscourt had said. ‘Make no mistake, we shall come again.’

‘I suppose you’ll want to look at the pictures,’ James Hammond-Burke said rather sadly to Edmund de Courcy that same afternoon. The Hammond-Burkes lived in a crumbling Elizabethan house called Truscott Park in Warwickshire, blessed with red deer and a river running through the grounds. The interior was not blessed. Decades of lack of money had left it in a sad condition.

Edmund had gained entrance by his usual ploy. He had a standard letter which stated that he was compiling a four-volume compendium on the artistic treasures held in Great Britain, to appear volume by volume over a period of ten years. A number of firms were described as being involved in the venture, foremost among them de Courcy and Piper of Old Bond Street, London. De Courcy explained to the houses he visited that the great advantage of his firm being involved was that any owners who wished to extend their collections could apply to de Courcy and Piper who would know where more Carpaccios or Caravaggios could be found and, possibly, purchased to extend existing collections. In the unlikely event of anybody wanting to sell – and how unlikely that must be, de Courcy would always exclaim with a charming smile at this point – then reluctantly, very reluctantly, the house of de Courcy and Piper would see what service they might offer.