by Karen Odden
“Lord Sibley,” she said impatiently. “He was besotted with her! And with him maybe having a son, he wouldn’t inherit anything—”
Mary’s pronouns were presenting a challenge, but the message was clear enough, along with its implications.
“You mean that if Lord Sibley married Mademoiselle Heloise, and she had a child, Mr. Pagett would be cut out of any inheritance.”
Her eyes were round and serious. “And the paintings, miss. He’d already lost the Boucher, seeing as Lord Sibley planned to sell it back to the LeMarcs. But if they married, he’d lose them all. I’d say they mattered more to him than the money.” She paused. “I’ve caught him myself, standing in front of ’em, whispering to ’em like—like they was alive.”
And there it was. A fear of being displaced and disinherited. The nugget of Mr. Pagett’s resentment, as simple as that.
My thoughts whirled, and I struggled with what to ask next. “The LeMarc family—did they return to France?”
“Yes, miss. First week in January. Lord Sibley went with ’em.”
“But they didn’t take the Boucher?”
“No, just their trunks and boxes. They’d have it shipped later, along with some other special things that needed crates and such.”
So perhaps that was why Stephen Jesper had it. He’d been entrusted to ship it to France.
“That must have made Mr. Pagett angry—to lose that painting.”
“Oh, he was furious. He said—well—” Suddenly her face went crimson. “Oh, I ain’t going to repeat it, but he and his father had a row we could hear all the way down in the kitchen . . .” Her voice faded and she shivered, as if even the memory of the words jabbed at her.
“And then Lord Sibley returned from France?”
“He came back in March, but that’s when he got sick.” A church bell chimed nearby and she started. “Miss, I can’t keep talkin’ to you. I took my half day yesterday instead of today, and I have to stop at the bakery, and pick up something at the milliner, and get back before tea. I’ll catch it if I’m late.”
“Of course. Thank you, Mary.” I reached out my hand and squeezed hers. “You’ve been so helpful.”
She scurried off, and I turned to survey the street. There were dozens of people walking along the pavement, and no one seemed to be taking particular notice of Mary or me. But I had the unsettling feeling that had I turned a moment earlier to look, I might have seen someone who was.
Chapter 21
My thoughts occupied with all that Mary had told me, my feet instinctively headed back to Matthew’s house in Mayfair. Halfway there, however, I realized I wanted to see someone first.
At Felix’s rooms there was no answer to my knock. But I could see a faint light coming under the door, so I knocked again.
I expected to hear his voice or his footsteps, but still there was nothing. Finally I tried the handle and pushed at the door. To my surprise, it was latched but not locked, and I went inside.
By the daylight coming through the open window, I could see into all the corners of the room. I hadn’t been to his flat in over a year, but the disarray shocked me. Felix had never been fastidious; he liked his papers and books piled about him, close at hand, and he didn’t discard anything, out of fear it might someday be useful. But I’d never seen clothing or newspapers thrown around like this. I couldn’t even see the two chairs for everything strewn over them.
And then I saw something that stopped me cold: his father’s gold pocket watch, glinting from the floor. I knew the timepiece was one of Felix’s most prized possessions, and one of the few items his father had bequeathed him before he died. I bent over, picked it up, and searched for the walnut watch stand upon which it always hung. That, too, was on the floor. I picked it up, found a flat space on a table for the stand, and hung the watch on its hook. With a feeling of misgiving, I started toward the bedchamber.
“Felix?” I called softly. I went to the door and pushed it open, dreading what I might find. This room was also untidy, but I could tell at a glance that he wasn’t in it, and I gave a sigh of relief.
I stood between the two rooms and scanned the living area. Was this squalor because Felix was unhappy and disheartened? Or was it because the room had been searched? I couldn’t tell. But if it was searched, why wouldn’t the person have taken the watch? Any pawnshop would accept it.
Well, there were no answers here. The best I could do was leave him a message to come to Matthew’s as soon as he could, for I had important news to share. I went to the desk to search for an empty piece of paper. As I shifted a stack of circulars, I nearly knocked his precious meerschaum onto the floor, but I snatched at it in time. I cleared a small space on the desk to write a few lines—
And there, caught on the edge of the blotter, was something that made my breath catch.
An envelope, addressed in Edwin’s handwriting. But the name scrawled in Edwin’s heavy slanted hand across the pale rectangle wasn’t Felix’s. It was mine, in care of the Slade—although he’d written the address so poorly that it might well have been misdirected.
Slowly, I took it up. As I turned it over to peel off the sealing wax, I felt a stinging sense of dismay and betrayal. It didn’t seem to have been opened, but Felix had kept this from me, for goodness knows how long.
Still, there was part of me that leapt to his defense. Perhaps Felix had done it out of kindness. Perhaps he feared that Edwin’s letter contained something he thought I shouldn’t read. Something cruel or accusing. I could understand Felix keeping that from me, perhaps giving it to me later, when Edwin’s death wasn’t so recent.
I held the missive in the palm of my hand, feeling the near-weightlessness of it, in such contrast with the heft of what it might reveal, and my fingers trembled as they unfolded it.
The letter was only a few lines, scrawled on a single page that, given its thickness and texture, was probably torn from a sketchbook. It was dated two Saturdays previous, only a few days before his death.
Bel—
I found something important today, and it’s made me uneasy. Would it be possible for you to come see me tomorrow? If not, I’ll see you on Tuesday as usual, but—just in case—I want you to know about it. Remember our Caesar.
E
I read it several times over, bewildered not only by his use of my childhood nickname, which he hadn’t called me in years, but also by what “it” could be. And his entreaty to “remember our Caesar” made no sense to me at all. Edwin had read Caesar’s Gallic Wars under the instruction of his Latin tutor, and some days I’d been present incidentally, sitting in the same room, but I’d been only seven or eight, and I certainly didn’t learn much of it. Although, to be fair, I’d taken in a good deal of Edwin’s early maths and history that way, so perhaps he thought that I’d absorbed Latin that way as well. I groped desperately for what I remembered about Julius Caesar and why his works, or the man himself, would have been on Edwin’s mind at the moment of writing this letter. What emerged from my memory first were some phrases from Shakespeare’s tragedy, rather than anything I recalled from Edwin’s lessons—phrases I’d loved for their sound as much as their sense. But Edwin wouldn’t know the phrases that I’d committed to memory, and so far as I could remember we’d never discussed the play.
More to the point, what had he discovered that disturbed him so?
I reread the letter again. Did Edwin intend that I connect Caesar with a place where the important thing might be hidden? Or perhaps with a painting of Caesar or of a place connected with him? But I couldn’t recall any painting in Edwin’s room that featured Rome or Pompey.
Or—my heart stopped—in referencing Caesar, was Edwin thinking of himself as Caesar? Wretchedly, I took a seat in the desk chair. Caesar was killed by conspirators who were close to him, including members of his family. Is that how he saw me? Someone who betrayed him? Did the “something important” mean something that he had hidden from himself, in his mind or heart, that he wanted me to dis
cover? But “uneasy” seemed too faint a feeling for that.
I read the letter yet again.
No, I decided. That wasn’t Edwin’s tone at all. Those first lines conveyed a sense of tamped urgency; they were scribbled hastily, but didn’t have the unevenness of ink that would accompany bitterness or anger. And Edwin wasn’t prone to elaborate conceits. He was practical and spoke directly, and in these written words, I could almost hear the tone in his voice.
I closed my eyes, trying to feel my way into my brother’s thoughts. What did Caesar mean to Edwin? He didn’t even like classical Latin. In fact he’d hated studying it and found it a waste of his time, as he couldn’t see how it would help in his painting—
My eyes flew open, and my breath caught in the back of my throat.
Of course.
Caesar was Edwin’s dog. A sweet reddish-brown spaniel. The whole reason he was named Caesar in the first place was because my father insisted that Edwin learn to love his Caesar. When my uncle brought the dog for Christmas, Edwin named him Caesar. That sort of sly ruse was exactly the way Edwin managed my father. He would acquiesce to the letter of his commands but skewer the spirit of them.
The spaniel wasn’t a puppy, I remembered; he had belonged to a friend of my uncle’s who couldn’t keep him, and Caesar only lived with us a few years. Indeed, I scarcely remembered him. But Edwin had often taken him as a subject for his paintings back then.
As I drew on my coat, my mind raced, recalling the day Edwin had died, when Matthew and I had searched his room. I didn’t remember seeing a painting of Caesar among his others, but there might have been.
My coat still unbuttoned, I penned a hasty note to Felix, shoved Edwin’s letter into my pocket, and hurried down the stairs. Dusk was beginning to fall, and as I started toward my brother’s flat the church bells rang half past the hour.
Time had slipped away when I wasn’t watching.
AT EDWIN’S, I opened the door with my key. The room was shadowy and cold, with no residual warmth, and the air was stale.
I lit three lamps and two candles to dispel the gloom and went straight to the stack of Edwin’s original paintings, where I thought I’d be likely to find one of Caesar. There was nothing there, nor was there one in the second stack, but at last I found one in the third, toward the back. It was still unframed and with the background unfinished, as if having finished Caesar, Edwin had lost interest. I pulled it out, laid it upside down on the table, and began to search for a note or something tucked underneath or around the stretcher bars, or for a sign of Edwin having hidden a message somewhere. There were no stray pencil marks, no scratches in the paint, no sign that the staples had ever been removed from the stretcher bars and replaced. Nothing.
I turned the painting over and inspected it for any indication that Edwin had recently tampered with the original paint but found none. My heart sank. I’d been so sure. Was there another painting of Caesar? My eyes cast over the room, across the different piles of canvases—
Swiftly, I went to the stack closest to the bedroom. The portrait I’d done of Edwin at his easel was still turned with the unpainted verso toward the room, just as Matthew had placed it.
I took up the painting and turned it over to be sure I had the correct one. Yes, Caesar was there, underneath the easel, but just a suggestive russet blur. No doubt I intended to finish the dog later and never did. Still, this painting was more “our Caesar” than the other because it was by my hand, and I examined it with care. But again, I found nothing, either on the painted canvas or on the verso.
“Oh, Edwin,” I whispered in frustration as I stared at Edwin’s animated face, his boyish grace in front of his easel. “What were you thinking?”
And then, it came to my mind, clicking in a sequence. Edwin good-naturedly chiding Caesar for dashing around the three wooden legs of the easel; Edwin with his brush raised, threatening to paint stripes on Caesar’s tail; Edwin throwing his head back and laughing—and I?
I had been giggling myself, so hard that my stomach hurt, because Caesar looked so silly—
And Caesar had knocked the easel over, bringing it crashing to the ground. Our father had found us some minutes later, shrieking with laughter, as Edwin was wiping blue paint off of Caesar’s paws and his tail. Following the incident, Edwin had taken some pains to teach Caesar to be mindful of his easel. Eventually Caesar learned to curl himself into a ball between the three legs and remain quiet. And when he was close to the end of his life, that space became Caesar’s lair. He spent hours there, sleeping and serving as Edwin’s sole companion while he worked.
Edwin’s easel stood in the corner.
I circled it, looking for signs of writing or anything out of the ordinary. This wasn’t Edwin’s childhood easel; he probably acquired it after he was released from prison. The legs were a bit wider perhaps and the bolts sturdier than his old one, but it wasn’t heavy, and I rapped on one of the legs and heard a hollow twang. Carefully, I tipped the easel on its side, bringing it gently to the ground so that I could inspect the bottoms of the legs, which were capped with a felted fabric. I ran my fingers around the cloth, but I felt no gaps. Nevertheless, I peeled the felt away from the first leg and slid my fingers inside. There was nothing. Nor was there anything in the second. But the third piece of felt was more difficult to remove, as if it had recently been glued tightly back in place. I went to Edwin’s table where I found a knife he employed to cut canvas and used the blade to pry the felt away. I reached inside the hollow space, and my fingertips brushed against something that felt like paper, coiled tightly into itself.
My heart pounding, I teased it out from its hiding place. Still sitting on the floor, I unrolled it to find two pieces of paper. The first was a notarized receipt, of a sale of the Boucher painting, for one pound sterling, from Lord Sibley to Mme. Heloise LeMarc, on December 21, 1873. The second was a bill of lading authorizing the Jesper Shipping Company to handle the painting. The space for the date was left blank, but the stamp on the lower left corner indicated the shipping fees had been paid for carriage all the way to Paris.
I sat there on the floor, the papers in my skirt for a long minute. The price paid suggested that Lord Sibley intended the painting as an engagement present, but this receipt proved beyond a doubt that it belonged to her. And Edwin? Where had he found these papers? Moreover, where had they been that Felix wouldn’t have found them?
I crawled over to the wall, where someone—perhaps Matthew—had stacked the pieces of the broken frames. I found the two sections of the heavy gilt one that had likely held the Boucher. A wide molding overlaid with gilt, it had broken on the diagonal, at the upper left and lower right joints. I fit them properly back together, in their usual shape, on the floor. By the light from the lamp, I saw that this frame was a piece of art in itself. I found one of Edwin’s magnifying glasses and peered through it. The gesso had been applied to the wood in very thin layers and with care, and the recutting, prior to the application of bole and the gold leaf, had been performed with exquisite attention to the delicate details of the leaf stems and the crosshatch of the diaper pattern. I flipped the frame so I could examine the back, and began to run my fingers very slowly over the unpainted wood, feeling for any anomaly in the fine workmanship.
It was on the second pass that my right forefinger felt a crack, no wider than an embroidery needle. Through the glass, I could see what I missed at first: a small door inside the rabbet, the section of frame a quarter inch wide and, on this frame, nearly two inches deep that created space for the canvas behind the molding. I’d never seen something like this in a frame before. It made me think of the hidden compartments in the headboards that Mr. Radermacher had described to Matthew.
Still, I couldn’t find a way to open it. I picked up one of Edwin’s knives and tried to slide the blade in, thinking to wedge it open. But even that slender blade was too thick, and there was no nick or scrape to suggest Edwin had used that method. I began to press on it, gently—toward t
he top, toward the bottom—
And then, silently, it swung open on its hinge.
The door was perhaps an inch wide and eight inches long, concealing a compartment an inch deep. The mechanism was simple—only three metal pieces: a tiny metal hinge so precisely attached inside a groove as to make it invisible from the outside and two pieces of a latching mechanism that held the door closed.
This wasn’t a Régence frame like those in the Sibleys’ parlor, but a Salvator Rosa, which meant that it was probably original to the work. Did the LeMarc family know about this hidden pocket?
I sat back on my heels, staring at the neat little mechanism, my thoughts scrambling for a logical version of events. I could see why Edwin found the compartment. Once he’d removed the canvas, he’d no doubt have examined the frame for wear and damage. But why would Lord Sibley have hidden these papers here? Why wouldn’t they be with the other papers that showed the provenance?
The only reason I could surmise was that he was afraid his son might destroy them.
But why wouldn’t Edwin show the papers to Felix? Why had he removed them and hidden them?
My heart sank as I reached what seemed to be the only possible conclusion: Edwin wasn’t sure what Felix would do with them. Perhaps he was afraid that Felix would destroy them, out of affection and loyalty to Celia Jesper. Or—a more disturbing possibility—Felix would know that the painting wouldn’t be sellable at the Bettridge auction. The jewel of the sale, gone, because of these two pieces of paper, which revealed the true reason it had been in the Jespers’ house.
The room had gone very cold, and I found myself shivering. I wished to see Celia, and suddenly I very much wanted to hand all this over to Matthew. I stood, folded the pieces of paper without creasing them, and slipped them into my bodice. I would take no chances with these. I extinguished the lamps, locked the door behind me, and then—even as I turned away—replaced the key in the lock and went back in. I selected a stretcher bar from Edwin’s box. It wasn’t much, but I felt better with that solid piece of wood in my hand as I made my way to Celia’s.