Death of an Old Master lfp-3

by David Dickinson

  Captain Imperiali smiled a conspiratorial smile. Powerscourt noticed that his teeth were terrible. There were great gaps in his mouth, like the gaps in the mountains behind his office.

  ‘See how you come to the right place for your information, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said. ‘I take a look at these papers here.’ He waved at a mountain of apparently unsorted material on the table next to his desk. Outside a police seagull perched cheekily on the window sill. ‘Now then . . .’ Captain Imperiali began a hunt through his documents. ‘My colleagues in the French police, when they come here, always they talk to us about the filing systems, the order, the routines of the police work. But we Corsicans do not like the filing systems, the routine, the order of the police work. I do not even think my countrymen like the police work very much either. Here it is! This is what you need.’

  He pulled a large sheet of paper from the surrounding chaos. ‘When they come here to live, the foreigners, they have to register with the authorities. I think I have seen this family in Calvi sometimes. A mother and two daughters, one very pretty, perhaps you will like her, Lord Powerscourt. They are indeed called de Courcy. And they live in a big house called La Giocanda at the back of the main square in Aregno, the Aregno on the hill, not the one on the shore. Oh yes,’ Captain Imperiali leaned back in his chair and took another puff on his cheroot, ‘I think this young milady would certainly like me. Most of the foreign women fall for the charms of the Captain Imperiali!’

  A wolfish look crossed his face. Powerscourt wondered if his ancestors had been pirates, carrying protesting maidens away in their marauding expeditions across the Mediterranean.

  ‘I am most grateful, Captain,’ said Powerscourt, trying to remain charming. ‘And what of the forger? Or paintings sent abroad from here?’

  ‘I do not know about any forgers operating in the Balagne, our part of Corsica,’ said the Captain. ‘We do not have,’ he began to laugh at his own witticism, ‘we do not have the registration forms for the forgers, you understand! Registration forms for forgers, that would excite the policemen from France, I am sure!’

  Powerscourt laughed at the Captain’s little joke. He began thinking it was time to leave. Except for the canvases. Did the man know anything about the canvases?

  He did. ‘Paintings being sent away?’ Imperiali said, the gaps between his teeth clearly visible again. ‘There are always paintings being sent away. This English family, I think, they have been sending old canvases with old paintings to London for some time. But what of it? The people in London must have something to hang on their walls. No great artist has yet come forward with the scenes from the life of Jack the Ripper, I think. They would be very popular here in Corsica.’

  Two days later Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were trotting along the main road from Calvi to Ile Rousse. The turn-off, a track rather than a road, Powerscourt suspected, would be about half-way along. A card had been despatched to the de Courcy family in their hilltop mansion, saying that Lord and Lady Powerscourt were visiting the area and would like to consult Mrs de Courcy about the problems of living here as an expatriate. Their coachman, a short swarthy man who did not smile or speak, concentrated on steering his horses round the potholes in the road.

  The day before Powerscourt had taken Lady Lucy on a pilgrimage. A couple of miles to the south of Calvi a long thin rocky promontory stretched out into the waters of the Mediterranean. The land was rough, the sea crashing in on all sides, adventurous seagulls flying low beneath the cliffs. ‘They call this place La Revellata, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I want you to imagine you are a British sailor about a hundred years ago. Britain is at war with revolutionary France. Corsica is a place of supreme strategic importance in the Mediterranean. Whoever controls it can control the sea lanes, the traffic, not just of men of war and ships of the line, but the ordinary produce of the neighbouring areas. No olive oil, no timber for export. So, the British need to capture the rocky outpost. They need to control Calvi.’

  Powerscourt paused and waved at the vast expanse of grey sea stretching out to a distant horizon. ‘You are the captain of an English ship, Lucy. Your admiral tells you to make a landing on this patch of coast. And to bring some of the ships’ guns with you. Where would you bring them ashore?’

  ‘I don’t think I’d be very good as a sailor, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘My family have always suffered from seasickness. That’s why they all joined the army.’

  ‘Pretend you’re a good sailor, Lucy. Where would you land?’

  ‘There’s only one place where you could bring things ashore without being crushed to pieces on the rocks,’ Lady Lucy said sensibly, pointing to a tiny beach a hundred yards away. ‘There. On that little patch of sand.’

  ‘Very good, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, pulling her down towards the inlet. ‘So, maybe in the daytime, maybe in the dark when the Corsicans aren’t looking, you bring your men and your guns ashore. You haul the guns up this terrible slope – think how long that must have taken, the sailors pulling at the ropes, swearing viciously as they lost their foothold, sometimes perhaps the guns too heavy to move at all. You reach the top. You move them along the coast until they overlook the town of Calvi on that hill over there.’ Powerscourt pointed upwards to a rise in the ground which looked down at the citadel on the other side.

  ‘Come, Lucy,’ he said, a wave covering his boots as he stood on the tiny beach, ‘we must gain the rise over there. Maybe it was dark.’ Powerscourt was panting slightly now as he hastened up the track back the way they had come, holding firmly on to Lady Lucy’s hand, warm and soft to his touch. ‘Maybe the orders said the guns had to be in position by dawn. Somewhere over there,’ he pointed at a towering flotilla of mountains, staring imperturbably down on to their island, ‘somewhere behind the highest peak, you see streaks of faint green or blue. As the sun comes up the battery is in position, staring down at the unsuspecting inhabitants of Calvi, soon to huddle together inside their citadel. You fire two shots to tell the fleet out there in the bay,’ he pointed to an empty sea, ‘that you have arrived. The sailors build a tower so the signal midshipman can send his messages to the admiral. Then you start the bombardment.’

  ‘How long did it last?’ said Lady Lucy, suddenly deciding to sit down on a convenient lump of granite. Hot work pulling all those guns up the hill. Powerscourt was lying on the ground, inspecting the seagulls who whirled in the clouds above him.

  ‘It lasted four weeks. The English poured eleven thousand shot and three thousand shells down into the tiny town. But that’s not the important bit.’ He rose and pulled Lady Lucy to her feet.

  ‘You, as I said, are the captain in charge. One day you are bending to your work again, aligning the guns perhaps, or inspecting the mountings to see they haven’t fallen out of true. There is a terrible accident. You, the captain, are hit in the face by an explosion of stones. The surgeon, a man more used to sawing limbs off in the heat of battle than tending people’s faces, is summoned from the fleet. Grave doubts are expressed as to whether you will ever see again. You may be blind for life, that impossible person, a sightless sailor, doomed to eke out your days on half-pay in some forgotten village or begging for your daily bread on the streets of Portsmouth.’

  ‘So what happened, Francis?’ Lady Lucy looked concerned at the prospect of life as a blinded sea captain.

  ‘He only lost his right eye,’ said Powerscourt, smiling.

  ‘And who was this sea captain, Francis?’

  ‘I’ve always thought it remarkable that he was nearly put out of action here on the island of his greatest enemy,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Down there,’ he gestured vaguely to the south, ‘was Napoleon’s birthplace. Here Horatio Nelson, the man who stopped him invading England at Trafalgar, nearly lost his sight.’

  17

  The road from Calvi to Ile Rousse skirted the shore. Sometimes Powerscourt and Lady Lucy could look back on the bay of Calvi with its semicircular bay and its pines, sometimes all they could see was the unforgivin
g land, dotted with stones and the occasional sheep, olive trees bent into strange twisted shapes by the force of the Corsican wind. As they came down a hill they could see another perfect beach, half a mile or more of sand with a fortress at one end and rough rocks marking its limit at the other. The coachman pointed his whip upwards to the hills and the mountains. ‘Aregno up there,’ he said, flicking a fly from his face.

  Perched at the top of the hill, in a perfect circle on its crest, was the mountain village of San Antonino. It looked like a jewel in the weak afternoon sunlight. Only close up could the visitor have seen the crumbling masonry, the holes in the roofs, the vanished windows that bore witness to Corsican poverty. Aregno was half-way up the hill. They stopped briefly to let a flock of sheep go by, the shepherd staring at them angrily as if they had trespassed on his land. Powerscourt patted his pocket for reassurance. Lady Lucy held very tightly on to her bag.

  ‘What do you think we should say to the family, Francis? We can hardly ask them if they think their son killed Christopher Montague, can we?’ Lady Lucy had to speak quite loudly against the noise of the wheels as they struggled up the track.

  ‘We said we have friends who are thinking of coming to live here. And we could mention the Venetian exhibition – was that their son who had organized it? And,’ Powerscourt added darkly, ‘surely some of your relations must have known these people in England.’

  ‘Even here, Francis, half-way up a Corsican mountain,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘you can still manage to reproach me about my family. I can’t help it if there are so many, can I?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Powerscourt loyally. ‘Look, I think we’ve arrived.’

  The coach had stopped in front of a very handsome house behind the main square of Aregno, a quarter dominated by mangy dogs and a quartet of gnarled old men gossiping in a dingy cafe. A cracked bell in the tower of the church was trying to toll the hour of three.

  La Giocanda was a mansion on four floors, built in the finest style of the French eighteenth century. It would not have looked out of place on the mainland, on the outskirts of a provincial town perhaps, or nestling on a hilltop surrounded by its thousands of acres and rich fields. Powerscourt wondered how anybody could have had the money to build or maintain it in this island of rock and granite. A limping footman showed them to the drawing room on the first floor, with magnificent views ranging down to the coast and the distant blue of the Mediterranean.

  Mrs Alice de Courcy was surrounded by her two daughters, Julia and Sarah. Lady Lucy wondered how long it had been since they had entertained English visitors in this beautiful room. The girls’ clothes were impeccable, but in a style that had gone out of fashion in London three years before.

  ‘Good afternoon, Lord Powerscourt, Lady Powers-court, welcome to Aregno. May I introduce my daughters Julia and Sarah?’ Mrs de Courcy was behaving exactly as she would have done at home in Norfolk. ‘Some tea, perhaps,’ she went on, casting a meaningful glance at the servant, who hobbled off towards the lower floors, uneven noises coming from his boots as he limped down the stairs.

  ‘How very good of you to receive us at such short notice,’ said Powerscourt gallantly, noting how little furniture there was in the room, apart from a couple of sofas and some small tables.

  ‘Do you find Corsica a pleasant place to live, Mrs de Courcy?’ asked Lady Lucy, ‘I think we mentioned that we have some friends who are thinking of coming to live here.’

  Alice de Courcy smiled. ‘Well, it’s certainly cheap,’ she said, ‘much cheaper than the south of France.’

  The two girls looked shocked. Surely Mama should not have mentioned such a thing just a few minutes into their acquaintance. They had no idea of the trouble their mother took to save money, economizing on food, on clothes for herself, on furniture for the house, on travel. They could not have known how much of her day was spent thinking about money, or the lack of money. Only on the girls did she willingly spend it. She told her daughters after the visitors had gone that she had been thinking about the lack of money that morning, she had been thinking about the lack of money that afternoon, she had been thinking about the lack of money even as the visitors were shown into the room. It had, she said, just slipped out. She was so sorry if she had embarrassed them.

  Lady Lucy was quick to spot the blushes spreading up the girls’ cheeks, their looks away to hide their shame.

  ‘Why, Mrs de Courcy,’ she said brightly, ‘that is the single most useful thing you could have told us! Our friends, the ones we mentioned in our note, are indeed most concerned about money. They lost all their fortune in some imprudent investments. Now they are waiting for an inheritance but the rich uncle is in no hurry to die.’

  ‘And there must be other advantages,’ Powerscourt chipped in to join the rescue party. ‘The countryside is very beautiful.’

  Alice de Courcy smiled at them both. ‘I think the girls find the countryside more appealing than I do. They walk for miles up into the mountains and along the coast. I’m afraid that after a time I found the mountains oppressive. It’s as if they’re watching you, judging you all the time. Now I find myself longing for somewhere flat. When we get back to East Anglia I shall be able to breathe freely again.’

  ‘And is there much in the district in the way of society?’ said Lady Lucy, suddenly aware that she sounded like a new arrival in the flat lands of the Home Counties. ‘Are you able to mingle freely with the local people?’

  The two girls laughed bitterly. Outside the windows Powerscourt noticed two huge mountain birds, kites or buzzards he thought, circling slowly above the house. Three times he saw them pass, their wings scarcely moving at all, before they vanished from sight to scour the valley below.

  ‘Julia, Sarah,’ said their mother, ‘perhaps you’d better speak about that.’

  ‘Well,’ said Julia, ‘we’ve hardly got to know any Corsicans at all, apart from the servants and the shopkeepers in Calvi and Ile Rousse. There aren’t any gentry left here at all. Only poor people. And most of the Corsicans are very poor. I don’t think they like having strangers living with them at all.’

  ‘There are a few English people living round here,’ said Sarah, ‘but they’re either very old or very eccentric. One man has come to live here until he’s climbed every mountain in the island. A brave prospect, no doubt, but it makes for limited opportunities for conversation once you’ve heard of his latest conquest, the mountain I mean, and the high cost of hiring local guides.’

  The limping servant returned with a tray of tea. Mrs de Courcy did the honours.

  ‘I think we’ve been to two balls and three afternoon parties in the three years we’ve been here,’ said Julia bitterly. ‘Sometimes they have a dance when the French ships call into the port, that’s all. Once we went to a celebration of New Year where all the dishes were made with chestnuts, chestnut bread made with chestnut flour, chestnut puree, chestnut sorbets. It was terrible.’

  Lady Lucy felt it was time to move on from the social isolation of the girls, perched up here part-way into the mountains with the kites circling round them. Maybe they had eagles higher up. Or vultures.

  ‘Tell me, Mrs de Courcy,’ she said brightly, ‘is the Edmund de Courcy who runs the de Courcy and Piper Gallery in London any relation of yours by any chance?’

  Alice de Courcy suddenly came alive, thoughts of the lack of money banished by the mention of her son.

  ‘Edmund,’ she said proudly, ‘is my son. How is the gallery doing? Is it prospering?’

  ‘They have just had a most successful exhibition of Venetian paintings, Mrs de Courcy,’ said Powerscourt, his brain shifting suddenly into a different gear. ‘I believe there is talk of the firm opening in New York.’

  ‘New York?’ said the girls in unison, social isolation suddenly at an end in a glittering succession of soirees on Fifth Avenue and boxes at the Metropolitan Opera House.

  ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at their enthusiasm, ‘I don’t think it’s opened quite yet.�
� That did not diminish the eagerness of the girls. Lady Lucy saw them both sink into a kind of reverie, a dream of escape.

  ‘Does Edmund manage to find the time to visit you and the family here?’ asked Powerscourt in his most innocent voice.

  ‘He is very busy with his work, you understand, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Mrs de Courcy, pouring Lady Lucy another cup of tea, ‘but he has been to see us twice. He stayed for four days and a morning the first time, the second time he could only manage three nights and an afternoon before he had to go home.’ Powerscourt could imagine how every detail of the visit would have been discussed time after time by the three women after Edmund had left, a piece of treasure to last them into their lonely future.

  ‘We are able to help him in his work,’ said Sarah. ‘We collect old pictures and old picture frames for him and send them over to London.’

  Old pictures, old frames, thought Powerscourt. Did forgers need old frames, old canvases on which they could produce fresh works in the manner of the past?

  ‘But tell me, Lady Powerscourt,’ said Julia, ‘did you attend the exhibition yourself? Did you see Edmund? Was he with anybody special?’

  ‘And what about his great friend,’ said Sarah, ‘George Carrington, the one who was going to marry that Emily Morgan? Has he married her yet?’

  ‘And his other friend, the one Mama always liked,’ Julia carried on the interrogation, ‘Robert Packard, is he married yet?’

  ‘And,’ said Sarah, carried away on the flood, ‘our own dear friend Harriet Ward. Has she married that army officer of hers?’

  ‘Philip Massie?’ said Julia, blushing slightly. ‘Any news of him?’

  ‘Ladies, ladies,’ said Lady Lucy, banging her spoon against the side of her cup to plead for silence, ‘please, please. Let me try to answer your questions where I can. I did indeed see your brother at the Venetian exhibition, but he was talking to a huge man, well over six feet, who looked like a prize fighter.’ Roderick Johnston, thought Powerscourt, he of the National Gallery, the large house on the river in Mortlake, recent inheritor from the munificence of Mr Raphael. He suddenly wondered about Mr Raphael’s picture frame. ‘As to the rest of your queries,’ Lady Lucy went on, ‘I can only help you with one of them. George Carrington did marry Emily Morgan, last year I think. The daughter of one of my second cousins was a bridesmaid, I seem to recall. As for the rest I cannot help you now. But if you would like to give me a list of your questions I shall see what I can do and I shall write to you from London. I don’t suppose your brother is of much assistance in such matters. Men usually aren’t.’ She smiled ambiguously at her husband, who nodded sadly in agreement.