Death of an Old Master

by David Dickinson

  ‘You may find the light difficult at first,’ he said. ‘I suggest you wait here for about five minutes. It should seem easier then.’

  Orlando Blane was peering out of one of the windows of the Long Gallery. A full moon had come out from behind the clouds. The wind was rustling through the trees, blowing the leaves across the unkempt lawns. To his left the surface of the lake was uneven, small waves driven in towards the shore.

  Imogen winced as the man opened the door and shafts of light fell across the room. It was, she saw, a small sitting room with pictures lining the walls and a great globe standing inscrutably by the window. Gradually her eyes became accustomed to the light. She stepped into the hall, a huge high chamber with a great staircase leading to the upper floors.

  ‘May I go to him now?’ she asked meekly. Great humility, she had decided, must be her watchword at the beginning with these guards, the keepers of Orlando. When she knew them better, other policies might prove more fruitful.

  ‘Up the stairs and turn left,’ the man said, ‘keep going to the end of the corridor. Then it’s the door in front of you.’

  Orlando was wondering how he could escape from his prison. His recent letters requesting release, pointing out how much money he must have earned from his captors, had gone unanswered. He wished he knew where he was – after a couple of weeks he had been so absorbed in his work that he hadn’t bothered to notice anything else.

  Imogen passed a couple of stags’ heads, dust lying across the antlers, at the top of the stairs. She checked the doors on her way down the corridor. They were all locked. She could see a little beam of light coming under the door at the end.

  Orlando moved away from his window and began walking the hundred and forty feet towards the far end of the Long Gallery. His footsteps echoed off the floorboards, small pieces of plaster still lying on the ground. He didn’t hear the first knock. The second was louder.

  ‘Come in,’ said Orlando, not bothering to turn round. He presumed it was one of the guards making sure he was still here. They usually checked every hour.

  The footsteps kept coming, very quiet footsteps now as if their owner was crossing the floor on tiptoes. Should she speak? Imogen saw that Orlando would reach the end and turn about in less than a minute. She stopped by the fireplace half-way up the Long Gallery. She was breathing very fast. Now, surely he must turn now. But he didn’t. Orlando stopped at the far window, gazing out at the bent trees around the lake, the dark water glistening in the moonlight.

  Imogen could bear it no longer. ‘Orlando,’ she called out very quietly. ‘Orlando.’

  Orlando Blane turned. He couldn’t believe what he saw, an Imogen in dark grey travelling clothes, an Imogen with red eyes, a weary Imogen after her long journey, but Imogen. His Imogen.

  ‘Imogen, is this really you?’ He walked very slowly down the room to take her in his arms, fearful that the wraith by the fireside might suddenly disappear into the night.

  ‘It is, my love,’ she said. ‘Oh yes, it is.’ She broke the spell. She ran as fast as she could and fell into his arms. They remained wrapped around each other for over a minute, neither daring to speak. Then it came in a great rush.

  ‘Imogen, did they wrap your eyes up . . .’

  ‘Orlando, what are you doing here . . .’

  ‘You must be tired after your journey . . .’

  ‘Are you a prisoner here . . .’

  Orlando laughed and clapped his hands together. ‘Stop, stop,’ he said, trailing his fingers through Imogen’s left hand. ‘Let’s do it like this. You can ask me three questions. Then I can ask you three questions. All right?’

  Imogen nodded. She wondered briefly what she should ask first. Then it came to her.

  ‘Orlando, do you still love me?’

  Orlando Blane laughed again. ‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘You didn’t need to ask that one. You know it already.’ He kissed her very gently on the lips.

  ‘Second question then,’ said Imogen, drawing Orlando over to a small sofa by the fireplace. They heard a sudden scurrying across the ceiling.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Orlando, pointing above his head, ‘that’s only the rats taking their evening exercise. They usually run about at this time of day. They’re quite harmless.’

  ‘Second question, then,’ said Imogen. ‘What are you doing here? Are you a prisoner or something like that?’

  ‘That’s two questions.’

  ‘No it’s not.’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘No it’s not.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Orlando, ‘I’ll let you off just this once. One question. What am I doing here? I’ll show you.’

  He walked down the gallery and pulled a selection of canvases from the wall. ‘Portrait of a Man by Titian,’ he said. He pulled another one into the light. ‘Portrait of a Man by Titian. You don’t have to be the director of the National Gallery to see that they’re the same. Which one is the real one, Imogen?’

  Imogen looked at them carefully. The same Venetian nobleman, his body at right angles to the artist, the same blue doublet, the same dark blue cloak thrown across the shoulders.

  ‘That one is the real one, Orlando,’ Imogen said, pointing at the one furthest away.

  ‘Wrong,’ said Orlando triumphantly. ‘That one is a Blane. This one is a Titian. This is what I do. I’m a prisoner here. One Sergeant Major and three of his men guard me round the clock. If I go for a walk one of them comes with me. I don’t know where I am – they brought me here with my eyes wrapped up so I was as blind as a bat. It all has to do with that ten thousand pounds I lost in Monte Carlo. When I’ve paid that back, I will be set free on certain conditions. I don’t know what they are. But I am certain they have made much more than ten thousand pounds out of me by now.’

  Orlando paused and pointed his hand up and down the Long Gallery. ‘This is my prison cell. It must be the finest cell in the whole of Europe – maybe they imported the rats to remind me that it is only a prison cell after all. This is where I do my work. I fake to order. I forge what others tell me. I do not know where the instructions come from, somewhere in London, I suppose. Sometimes they send paintings up here for me to copy. Recently they have been sending me illustrations of various American families. I have to turn them into Gainsboroughs or Reynoldses, people like that. I mean, I take the modern face and drop it into my version of a Gainsborough.’

  ‘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.’

  Orlando explained that he was working on a lost Giovanni Bellini. It had adorned the walls of a church in Venice until the building was ravaged by fire about twenty-five years before. Everybody assumed the painting of Christ with a couple of saints had been destroyed. But the canvas was about to be rediscovered, having left Venice with the family who rescued it. First, the lost masterpiece had to be born. In Orlando Blane’s Long Gallery.

  ‘These people know their business,’ said Orlando. ‘A picture known to have existed is much more likely to be believed in than one that turns up out of the blue. It has a history already.’

  The wind had dropped from the night before as Imogen stepped out of the front door, the redhead a respectable few paces behind her. Rain was falling steadily across the countryside. A tattered group of crows was flying across the fields. She walked away from the house to a path that led on to the main drive. She wondered how far down the drive she would be allowed to go. To her right the fields stretched out for a couple of miles before they stopped at a wood. Ahead, set back from the path, was a little church. Even at a hundred yards Imogen could see the holes in the roof, tiles blown away by the wind. To her left a red-brick stable block where she presumed there must be horses. Horses. She wondered if she and Orlando could creep down in the night and ride away. Steady, she said to herself, steady. We don’t even know where we are yet. The great Jacobean house, the derelict fields, she could be anywhere. She set off down the drive, remembering that she must have come this way the day before. Ten paces behind her, like a faithful guard dog, the redhead maintained his vigil. She was passing a pond and another group of abandoned buildings. Perhaps this had been the home farm in better days. As the path rose up a little hill Imogen wondered if it was time to talk to the redhead. What was his name? Where did he come from? Did he like it here? She rehearsed the opening moves in her mind and decided against it. Too soon.

  Six hundred yards away a man was fiddling with the aperture on his binoculars. It was as though he couldn’t believe what he was seein
g. The man was lying in a circle of trees to the right of the drive and was virtually invisible from all directions. Yes, it was. It was definitely a woman, young and very attractive if these German glasses were to be believed.

  Johnny Fitzgerald had seen the redhead before. He had seen all the guards. He had heard the carriage coming to the house the previous evening but he could see nothing at all. This girl must have been inside, Johnny decided. Was she a prisoner? Was the redhead a warder? Or a nurse in some form of mental asylum? Were these people guarding some dangerous lunatic in there? Was the girl the lunatic? Was the girl deranged?

  Johnny Fitzgerald had based himself in one of the few hotels left open on the sea front of Cromer. The main rooms looked out over the grey sea, occasional fishermen venturing out for crab or lobsters. The waiters were bored, serving bored food in a bored dining room where only one other couple came to dine. They were so bored that they scarcely spoke to each other. Even Johnny’s bottle of Beaune, a cheerful draught in happier places, seemed bored. It tasted flat as if it had had enough of Cromer and its beach.

  He watched as the little drama continued on the drive. When the girl was about three hundred yards away from Johnny’s hiding place, the redhead came up to her. They spoke a few words. The girl turned round. Johnny could not hear what was said. He watched as the slim figure walked slowly back to the house, possibly deep in thought, or lunacy. This afternoon, Fitzgerald said to himself, I’m going to work my way round to the other side of the house. I’ll go to those woods at the back and see how close I can get.

  Imogen thought later that she could so easily have missed it. A grey stone blended into a grey wall between the house and the stable block. The stone made her heart beat faster and the blood rush to her face. It was a milestone, aged and worn now but with the legend still faintly legible through the green lichen. She pretended to retie her boot as she bent down and tried to read the words. The redhead was about twenty paces behind her, approaching fast. She peered desperately at the milestone. One arrow pointed in a southerly direction. Norwich, twenty miles, it said. Another arrow pointed north over the woods. Cromer, three miles.