by Adam Roberts
‘Da Vinci? Of course.’
‘Leonardo is world famous, of course. But there is one thing that is little known about him – that in fact is only now being unearthed by scholars – that he was not an only child. In fact his mother had twins: the boy Leonardo, and a girl called Eda. They grew up together, and were very close, and yet whilst everybody has heard of Leonardo only a very few specialists have heard of the sister, Eda.’
‘But why?’
‘In part that’s just a reflection of the age in which she lived, a world ruled by men, in which women – even brilliant women – never got the chance to achieve their potential. Like Shakespeare’s sister – you’ve heard of Shakespeare’s sister?’
Robert paused before replying, ‘The pop group?’
Sophie ignored this. ‘Renaissance Italy was a patriarchal culture. It valued men, and thought of women only as chattel. Women were for marriage, for childbirth and for domestic chores. It’s hardly surprising that Eda, though a brilliant artist in her own right, never got the chance to work professionally.’
After a short pause Sophie continued, her words freighted with some buried emotional significance. ‘People think of Leonardo as an outsider,’ she said, ‘as somebody ignored and unrecognised by his own age; but that description fits Eda much better. Leonardo was one of the most successful artists of his day; he was apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio’s studio, which Eda never was. He was given commissions by the Florentine authorities; he worked for Lorenzo de Medici, the most powerful man of his age; and for Lodovico Sforza, another very powerful figure. He knew the Pope personally. Eda had none of these advantages. Indeed, it seems that she couldn’t even afford to buy the most basic artists’ materials, and had to beg offcuts of canvas and bits and pieces from her brother when she wanted to paint.’
‘So she was a painter too?’
‘A great painter. A better painter, arguably, even than Leonardo. It’s a lamentably common occurrence in European history that a brilliant artist or poet owes his fame to his gender, and that an even more brilliant female is ignored by posterity. Do you know about Dorothy Wordsworth?’
Robert decided this was a trick question. ‘Do I know what about Dorothy Wordsworth? I mean, which of the many interesting things that I know about Dorothy Wordsworth are you interested in . . . ?’
‘William Wordsworth remains perhaps the most famous English Romantic poet. He wrote a great many poems in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Perhaps you’ve heard his poem “Daffodils”? “I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vale and hill?”
‘Yes!’ said Robert, delighted finally to recognise something.
‘Well Dorothy wrote that.’
‘But you just said William Wordsworth wrote it . . .’
‘That’s right. William published the poem under his own name and took all the credit. But he stole it from Dorothy. She kept a journal, and wrote down all her observations about the natural world. William read it, took out the most striking images and thoughts and published them as his own.’
‘Brothers!’ tutted Robert. ‘That’s so typical. I remember once when my little sister was only six, she had this Cindy doll, and I . . .’
‘The case of Wordsworth,’ said Sophie firmly, ‘is quite well known amongst academics and students. What is not so well known is that many of Leonardo’s most famous images are reworkings of original art produced, first of all, by Eda – by his sister.’
‘I see.’
‘The official explanation for the neglect of Eda’s work,’ Sophie continued, ‘is similar to the explanation for Dorothy Wordsworth’s relative neglect: the ingrained sexism of European culture, a society only interested in great men not great women. But I have long suspected that this is not the real reason. Eda’s work has been much more comprehensively suppressed than Dorothy Wordsworth’s. Nobody burned Dorothy’s journals, for instance.’
‘Did they burn Eda’s pictures, then?’
‘That was what was thought, for a long time. Certainly almost all the records of Eda’s very existence have been expunged from official Florentine and Milanese records of the period. It seemed an impossible dream to recover any of her artwork. But I believe that is what Jacques Sauna-Lurker managed to do . . . and perhaps this is why he was murdered!’
‘To preserve the reputation of Leonardo?’ boggled Robert. ‘That hardly sounds a likely motive for murder! ’
‘There’s more to it than that,’ said Sophie. ‘I believe that Eda’s art contained certain . . . clues . . . certain elements that Leonardo omitted when he copied his sister’s paintings in order to sell them on to wealthy patrons.’
‘How do you mean, clues?’
‘Well that’s the six million euro question. If we knew that, then perhaps we’d be able to get to the bottom of this whole mystery. My hypothesis is that Eda belonged to the Conspiratus Opi Dei herself. She may have placed certain clues as to the core mysteries of that organisation – the great secret, one so devastating that, if it were to get out, it would devastate the world—’
‘—you said “devastate” already—’ Robert put in.
‘. . . would destroy the world’s certainties,’ Sophie said, ‘upset Faith, erode social conventions.’
‘All this from a picture?’
‘Pictures can be very influential. They can have global reach. They can influence people in a hundred subtle ways. Think of the Mona Lisa . . . Leonardo’s most famous image.’
‘Ah yes. The original smiley,’ said Robert, nodding. ‘Only not so yellow. Or so circular.’
‘What’s interesting is that scholars are not certain who the image is supposed to represent. The name “Mona Lisa” is, for instance, a guess . . . Mona is short for “Madonna”, and “Lisa” is supposed to refer to “Lisa Gioconda”, the wife of a businessman. But there’s no proof that explanation is correct. That information comes from Vasari, perhaps the least reliable historian in the history of history. Vasari was eight years old when Leonardo died, in 1519. He had no first-hand experience of the great painter. Most of what he wrote was hearsay – or, perhaps, deliberate misinformation. Do you know what the Encyclopaedia Britannica says about Vasari?’
Robert considered this. ‘Is that a rhetorical question? ’ he replied, eventually. ‘I mean, is it likely that I am going to know what the Encyclopaedia Britannica says about Vasari?’
‘There’s no need to be like that,’ snapped Sophie. ‘I was only going to cite your eminent national Encyclopaedia to support my assertion that Vasari is an untrustworthy source. They say “when facts were scarce, however, he did not hesitate to fill in the gaps with information of questionable veracity”.’
‘Right,’ said Robert. ‘Now I know what the Encyclopaedia Britannica says about Vasari. Which is, I’m sure, a good thing.’
‘The point is that we cannot trust Vasari. We have no actual evidence that the so-called Mona Lisa represents a woman called Lisa.’
‘Then why is it called the Mona Lisa?’
‘My personal theory,’ said Sophie, ‘is that the title is a rude pun by Leonardo. We know he loved word games, puns, plays on words. We also know that he was a homosexual - he narrowly avoided prosecution for it on several occasions. I think the title “Mona Lisa” is a play on the Latin word mōnaulēs, which means “a player on the single flute”.’
Robert thought about this. He pictured James Galway. ‘Well if that’s a joke,’ he said eventually, ‘it’s not a very funny one.’
‘But don’t you see? He was implying something quite suggestive. Most Roman pipes were cluster-pipes, like pan-pipes, lots of tubes together, called aulus. But the mono-aulus was an unusual pipe, just a single shaft. And by calling his painting a name that sounded like mona-lees, which is to say mōnaulēs, he was suggesting that the sitter . . . you know . . . “played” upon the single shaft of the “flute”.’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Robert. ‘So she plays the flute. So what?’
‘No
t the flute,’ said Sophie ‘The “flute”.’ She made little quotation-marks gestures with her forefingers.
Robert thought about this until realisation dawned. ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Ah! I get it! That is quite rude. So is that why she’s smiling in that mysterious way?’
‘Well,’ said Sophie. ‘Possibly.’
‘But,’ said Robert, ‘if the Mona Lisa is not a painting of some woman called Lisa, then who is it of?’
‘It’s not certain. But many scholars have noted a distinct resemblance between the so-called Mona Lisa and Leonardo’s own self-portrait.’
‘Not the beard, though.’
‘No, not the beard,’ Sophie conceded. ‘But the strong, rather long nose; the knowing look in the eyes. The brow. Compare Leonardo’s self-portrait and this painting, and you can’t fail to be struck by how similar they are.’
‘Are you saying that the Mona Lisa is actually a self-portrait of Leonardo?’
‘Some people say so, a self-portrait in drag. But I don’t think so. There are differences as well as similarities: the lower face and the mouth are quite different, for instance. But I’m saying that there is enough of a similarity to suggest a family resemblance . . .’
Realisation belatedly dawned for Robert. ‘The Mona Lisa is a picture of Leonardo’s sister . . . ?’
‘Exactly. Once you look at it from that point of view, everything suddenly falls into place. Now, it was painted in 1500, when Leonardo was nearly fifty years of age; so clearly his sister was younger than he was.’
‘Unless it was a deliberately idealised portrait . . . you know, flattering the sitter and so on.’
‘Exactly! It was on this subject that I was corresponding with Professor Sauna-Lurker. To begin with he was a little standish-off . . .’
‘Stand-offish?’
‘Yes, that. Of course I understood why. There are many cranks and idiots in this line of enquiry, and man in his position cannot afford to waste time on . . . um, on timewasters . . . who would only, um, waste his . . . his time . . . but recently I felt he was beginning to trust me a little. He had got as far as suggesting that he and I should meet up. Indeed, he told me he had something very important to show me.’
‘What? What did he want to show you?’
‘I don’t know. That meeting never happened. And now it never will. But if I had to guess, I’d say it was something relating to the so-called Mona Lisa, perhaps an alternate version of the image.’
‘Alternate?’
‘Yes. There are several copies and versions of the painting in existence today; that’s well known. Some of those are later copies by students of Leonardo’s. But there may be earlier versions of the image in Leonardo’s own hand, or even – perhaps – a prior version of the image pained by Eda herself.’
‘This is most exciting,’ said Robert, jiggling up and down on his seat. ‘I really feel like we’re getting closer and closer to solving a really very exciting and mysterious mystery.’
‘Here we are,’ announced Sir Teabag. ‘The National Gallery.’ He pulled the car to a halt in front of the austere building.
15
There was still a police presence outside the gallery; a police cruiser parked across the pavement, yellow tape and two uniformed ‘Bobbies’. As it happens, neither of them was called Bobby, but that’s by-the-bye.
‘We’ve got to find a way into that building,’ urged Sophie. ‘To get past those policemen and back to Jacques office. We need at least the chance of discovering whether the Mona Eda is still inside the Gallery.’
‘Don’t worry about the police,’ said Teabag, with alarming panache. He pronounced the word “police” as if he wished to distinguish the ‘Po’ lease from some other variety of lease. ‘I’ll distract them. When they’re distracted, run up the steps and break into the building. ’
‘Break in - how?’
‘Just break a window why don’t you?’ said Teabag, ‘warble wibble wobble. I assume, what with all the police wandering to and fro after hours, that they turned off the burglar alarm. Why should they need a burglar alarm anyway, when they’ve got a personal police guard outside the main steps?’
‘Good point,’ said Robert.
‘Did you,’ said Sophie, in a slightly troubled voice, ‘say “warble wibble wobble” in the middle of that sentence?’
‘Just getting into character.’ said the Baronet. ‘Distracting character. Police-distracting character.’ He unzipped his tweed trousers and extracted his spaghetti-thin and spaghetti-coloured legs like a man defusing a nuclear warhead by removing the uranium core and ensuring it did not at any point touch the outer casing. Finally he stood there in the streetlight, unclothed from his boxers to his socks ‘I’ll dance past those policemen,’ he said. ‘When they give chase, it’ll give you a chance to dash to that window there. Break the glass with a brick. Or anything. Get inside - that’s the important thing. I’ll try to give them the slip and join you later.’
Without further prevarication Teabag was off, frolicking and cavorting along the northside of Trafalgar Square, singing a song to the tune of Una Paloma Blanca, although with words of his own invention, the precise meaning of which Robert found quite hard to parse.
Sophie and Robert crouched at the foot of the Gallery’s broad entrance staircase, peering round the stone balustrade at proceedings.
‘That Sir Teabag,’ observed Robert. ‘He’s quite eccentric. ’
‘He’s more than eccentric,’ said Sophie. ‘He’s XXX-entric. He’s an adult-only oddball.’
Robert looked at her. ‘That was another of your jokes.’
‘It was,’ agreed Sophie.
‘It is rare for a non-native speaker to have sufficient fluency in English to be able, successfully, to make amusing jokes.’
Sophie looked pleased. ‘You’re flattering me!’
‘Well, no,’ said Robert. ‘I’m not.’
‘Oh,’ said Sophie. ‘I see.’
There was a difficult pause.
‘But well done for trying,’ said Robert, trying to be encouraging.
‘Shush,’ said Sophie. Sir Teabag had reached the police.
He did a little pirouette in front of the two impassive officers of the law. He continued singing. He pranced and danced away. The two policemen watched him, their expressions unchanging, as he frolicked away into the distance. But they did not move from their appointed posts.
‘Tiens!’ hissed Sophie. ‘They are not going for it!’
‘I guess,’ said Robert, ‘that drunkards or otherwise brain-disordered pedestrians are not all that unusual in this neck of the woods in the small hours of the morning. Teabag’d need to do something more shocking to get them to actually leave their posts.’
Teabag was coming back down the pavement, past the policemen. This time the song he was singing put new and frankly upsetting words to Robbie Williams’ popular hit Let Me Entertain You. Once again the police were unmoved.
Rather breathless, and with his legs a colder colour than they had been when he started, Teabag joined them behind the balustrade. ‘Nothing doin’,’ he announced. ‘They wouldn’t take the bait. I baited them, but it was bateless.’
‘What shall we do now?’ hissed Sophie.
‘It’s your turn to run up and down without any pants,’ said Teabag, in a petulant tone. Slowly, and with excessive care, he re-inserted his legs into his tweed britches. ‘At any rate. It’s set a chill in my lower limbs and no mistake.’
‘I wouldn’t run up and down there without my trousers,’ said Sophie, demonstrating her impressive command of English-language popular idiom, ‘on the end of a barge pole.’
‘Wait!’ said Robert. ‘Listen!’
The police car radio was fizzing and crackling. One of the two coppers hopped over, opened the driver’s door, and leant in. In a moment he pulled his head out. ‘They’ve gorrim,’ he called to his partner.
‘What does the word mean, the gorrim?’ queried a whispering Sophie.
&n
bsp; ‘The “t” mutates to an “r”,’ explained Teabag, ‘under certain circumstances and in certain idiolects . . .’
‘Sh,’ said Robert. ‘I’m trying to eavesdrop.’
‘They sure?’ said Policeman Number 2, still standing on the bottom step.
‘Yep. Some guy called the Exterminator.’
‘Exterminator!’ said the second Policeman, impressed.
‘That’s right. With a moniker like that, he’s bound to be in the frame for a job like this. They apprehended him in the Church of Our Lady of the Silver Scales in Blackfriars. They’ve video evidence that he was in the Gallery earlier, around the time of the murder.’
‘Really?’
‘Yep.’
‘So what about that other feller, the professor chap? Him with the fingerprints all over the fish?’
‘Sarge says there’s still an All Cars out on him. He may be an accomplice. But he doesn’t have the form for a murder like this. He’s a penpusher. This other geezer, this “The Exterminator”, Sarge says killing is his profession. He’s the much more likely candidate.’
‘Right,’ said PC2 ‘So do they need us here any more?’
‘Nah,’ said PCI with loud satisfaction. ‘Why don’t we pop down to that all night caff on the Chelsea Bridge Road and grab a cuppa?’
‘Good idea!’ replied his companion, equally loudly. They both clambered into their squad car and drove away.
Robert, Sophie and Teabag looked after them, hardly able to believe their luck.
‘Did you hear that?’ said Robert. ‘They’ve arrested some chap called the Exterminator! I told you I hadn’t handled that fish!’
‘More important than that,’ said Sophie. ‘They have left the Gallery unguarded. Quick! Up the steps before they return! We must break in and search Jacques’ office for clues!’
16
The Exterminator had indeed been apprehended. As he stepped from the Church, a bank of headlights dazzled him, and three uniformed policemen tackled him to the ground. ‘Game’s up, Exterminator!’ called Inspector Charles ‘Curvy’ Tash of the C.I.D., striding over to where he lay, struggling, on the path.