David Dickinson - Death of an Old Master

‘What happens to them, Orlando? Is there something very wicked going on here?’

‘That was your third question, my love,’ said Orlando, giving her three rapid kisses. ‘It’ll be my turn in a minute. I can only guess what happens to them, but I think it must go something like this. Somebody goes to an exhibition where this Titian is for sale. A price is agreed, quite a steep price, I should think. The dealer tells the purchaser he must clean the picture and make sure the frame is in good condition. The picture comes up here. I make a copy. Both go back to London. The purchaser takes away, not the real thing, but my copy. The dealer hides the real one away for a couple of years. Then he brings it on to the market.

‘As for the Gainsboroughs, I think that is rather cunning. The reason for sending me the illustrations from the American magazines must be that the father, with or without his family, is coming to London. The dealer shows him my Gainsborough. The American is astonished by the likeness to his wife or daughter, all dressed out in eighteenth-century finery. So he buys it.’

The storm was getting up outside. Orlando took Imogen over to the middle window of the five. The tops of the trees were bending in a hideous nocturnal ballet. Here and there in the remains of the garden branches had been wrenched away from their trees and were being blown towards the broken fountain in the centre.

‘You see that first window, Imogen?’ Orlando pointed down towards the door she had come in by. ‘That is where I think about the day’s work, the right brushes, mixing the right paint in the right fashion. The second window is where I think how to finish the paintings, the glazes, the varnish, the final touches. This window,’ he drew her to him very closely, ‘this is where I think about you.’

The rain was lashing against the window. Orlando noticed that two further cracks had appeared in the upper pane. He closed all the shutters except the middle one, Imogen’s window, Imogen who was now right beside him in his prison.

‘My turn to ask the questions now,’ he said, leading her back to the sofa. ‘What’s been happening to you, my love?’

Imogen told him about the terrible wedding, the reception where she had refused to smile, the honeymoon where she had first locked her door. She told him about her life in the country, the boring neighbours, the incessant talk of hunting, the lack of civilized conversation, the endless letters from her mother and her sisters exhorting her to be a good wife. She told him about how she felt cold inside all the time, down there in Dorset surrounded by the deer and the lake, how she knew her life was not meant to be like this, about how time and boredom numbed the senses until she felt she was only half alive. Maybe everybody else felt like that all the time, she didn’t know.

‘I feel more alive here with you, Orlando, than I have felt for months and months.’

Orlando took her in his arms again.

‘Where do you sleep, Orlando? Surely not in here? If your bedroom is as grand as this Long Gallery, you should have a four poster bed at least.’

Orlando pulled Imogen to her feet and led her towards the door at the far end.

‘Four poster bed?’ he laughed, putting his arm around her waist. ‘That’s precisely what I do have.’

‘Francis, Francis, I think I’ve found her.’

Lady Lucy had rushed into the drawing room at Markham Square, not stopping to leave her hat and gloves in the hall down below. Her husband was sprawled full length on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling.

‘Found who, Lucy?’ He rose to his feet and gave his wife a quick kiss on the cheek. Lady Lucy’s face and eyes were very bright from walking through the cold London afternoon.

‘You should be very pleased with me,’ she said, drawing off her gloves. ‘You said it might be very important.’

‘I’m sure I’ll be very pleased, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but only if I knew who it was you have found.’

‘You even made disparaging remarks about my relations at the time, Francis.’ Powerscourt groaned inwardly, checking outside in the hall that none of the army of relations had come to invade the house. ‘Well, without them, we might never have found her. For heaven’s sake, Francis, where have you gone to, lying on that sofa over there? Have you forgotten this investigation completely and gone to fight the Boers or something like that?’

‘I was thinking about Horace Aloysius Buckley, the man who went to Evensong. Shouldn’t think there’s much in the way of Evensong where he is now. But please, tell me, who have you found?’

Lady Lucy completed the business with her gloves and laid her hat down on a side table. She stared at her husband with some exasperation.

‘Honestly Francis,’ she said, ‘I thought you would have known by now.’

Powerscourt had known for some time. ‘Let me hazard a guess, Lucy. You have found Alice Bridge, the young woman who went to the Venetian exhibition with Christopher Montague. I suspect the reports from your intelligence operatives, also known as your relations, may have told you that she has been rather under the weather recently.’

‘It is,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘I mean it is Alice Bridge. And people do say that she has not been herself recently. How do you know that?’

‘It was a guess. Now then, do you know where she lives, what manner of person she is?’

‘Her father is a successful financier in the City of London. They live about a mile away from here in Upper Grosvenor Street, Number 16. She’s twenty-two years old and, my third cousin tells me, remarkably pretty.’

‘And why,’ said Powerscourt, moving slowly towards a writing table in the corner of the room, ‘does the third cousin say she has not been herself?’

Lady Lucy watched as Powerscourt began writing his letter, those long thin fingers wrapped round his pen. ‘The official story, Francis, you know what families are like for putting out information that may or may not be accurate to cover over some family problem, is that she was upset because her sister has left London and gone to live in the country.’

Powerscourt was writing furiously now. Alice Bridge was unhappy. Could her unhappiness have anything to do with the death of Christopher Montague, strangled by the neck until he was dead?

‘I think we have to be as good as gold, Orlando,’ said Imogen Foxe. The pair were sitting in the Long Gallery after breakfast. Normally Orlando ate with his jailers in the kitchen, but they had turned the room where Imogen took off her bandages the night before into a small dining room and let the young lovers eat alone.

‘If we look as if butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths they may lose interest,’ she went on. ‘And I intend to flirt outrageously with the two younger men down there. That redhead can’t be more than twenty-four or twenty-five.’

Orlando Blane winced at the thought of the flirting.

‘It’s no good looking like that, Orlando, it’s got to be done if we’re going to get you out of here.’

‘Not too much flirting, please.’

Imogen was not to be put off. ‘The one thing that must not happen, Orlando,’ she seemed to have taken charge of the situation, ‘is that you get behind with your work. So I’m going to sit up at the other end there and keep out of your way.’

Orlando smiled. ‘You don’t suppose, that you might find it necessary to say something from time to time, just a few words now and then to let me know what the weather’s like at the far end of the room, that sort of thing?’

Imogen laughed. She said she would take a walk for a while to ensure Orlando was left in peace. ‘What are you forging now?’ she asked as she set off. ‘I’d like to know.’