“Do we look for pictures of Virginia?” she asked.
“I don’t think there are many, really—she hated sitting for her portrait.” Peter smoothed his blond hair away from his spectacles. “Shall we just start with the first room and go on to the second? Something is bound to strike you.”
“Okay,” she said uncertainly.
BUT AS SHE HAD EXPECTED, NOTHING REALLY DID. EXCEPT the obvious thing that struck everyone who walked through Charleston’s front door—how extraordinary the house, in every detail, actually was.
The rooms were a jumble of the rare and the mundane, of walls stained with damp, of curtains and fabrics faded by the sun. There were fantastic objects—carnival masks, seashells, ceramic zebras—and ordinary ones, like fraying rugs. Some of the ceilings were low, and the light dim. Floorboards creaked underfoot. A faint tang of mold laced the air, and the scent of flowers, and possibly charcoal. It was a house that did not feel like a museum; but it felt, Jo thought, like the house of old people who were dying or dead. That saddened her. It must have been a vivid place when Vanessa lived there—because almost every wall was flamboyantly painted, with rounded nudes, or enormous flowers, or the figure of a dog. Tables and lamps and mantelpieces were painted, screens were positioned as trompe l’oeil doors.
She turned in place, her eyes sweeping the canvases that lined many of the walls, wondering how on earth they would find what Jock intended her to find—could they lift the paintings from their hooks, and feel with hopeless fingers for notebook pages stashed behind them? Or had Jock meant something was hidden in the vibrant images swirling all over the furniture? Peter was chatting in his correct English way to the guide who took their entrance fee and pressed a brochure upon them; he was asking whether she’d noticed his friend earlier that morning—a tallish woman, long dark hair? She had not. The guide was moon-faced; she wore a wool skirt and sweater against the chill of the house. She was obviously going to hover at their elbows as they walked through the rooms. Lifting a picture frame would be an impossible violation.
They drifted from Clive Bell’s green and yellow study—books on teetering, makeshift shelves; an odd sort of stone hearth like piled slates, jutting from the fireplace—to the black and silver dining room, where the inky wallpaper was stenciled by Bloomsbury hands. More paintings here: still lifes, a man fingering a piano, a painted fire screen, but none of them could be Jock’s hidden clue. They seemed a world apart from the White Garden, from the fevered words of the Lady’s notebook so briefly in Jo’s hands; and doubt scrabbled at her mind. Vanessa Bell may have been the center of Bloomsbury, but what could she possibly have to do with the death of an elderly man in Delaware? Jo began to feel impatient. Peter had dragged them both on a wild-goose chase. It was something to see the tubes of paint and the stacked canvases in Duncan Grant’s burlap-colored studio, to hear Peter discussing with the guide certain elements of Post-Impressionist paintings, the influence of Picasso, the legacy of Cézanne; but she longed suddenly to be outside in the open air, with dirt beneath her fingers, where things made sense.
They were mounting the stairs. A series of bedrooms. Clive’s, with its painted bed and riotous textiles. The green bathroom, with a sprawling Duncan Grant nude on the tub enclosure. More paintings on the walls—none of Virginia. Duncan’s room. Portraits of Vanessa: As a young woman. As a middle-aged woman, in a batlike gray cloak, hunched at her easel. Then regal as a queen on a throne, her hair gray and her eyes forbidding.
Abruptly, they came to the spare bedroom. Or what looked like a spare bedroom.
“This is Maynard Keynes’s Room,” the guide announced, in what was obviously a memorized spiel. “John Maynard Keynes, the brilliant architect of the economic theory that bears his name, Keynesian Economics, was a great friend of Vanessa and Clive Bell. He was often at Charleston, and the family set aside this room for his use, although other family members certainly slept here. Baron Keynes later purchased Tilton House, not far from here.”
It was a low-ceilinged room, with a single narrow bed covered in what looked like Indian cottons. There was a bookcase and several paintings, one of which Jo found vaguely troubling—two male nudes, sprawled on a brown bank, toweling their ribs after swimming. It might have been painted by Seurat; it reminded her somehow of crucifixion.
“The Bathers,” Peter observed. “That’s one of Grant’s? He was quite close to Keynes, I believe?”
“Yes,” the guide said primly, and closed her lips.
“Grant was gay,” Peter explained for Jo’s benefit, “regardless of his relationship with Vanessa. Most of male Bloomsbury slept with him. Including Keynes.”
“I see,” Jo managed. It was clear the guide had no intention of adding to Bloomsbury gossip, and would have liked them to move on; but still Jo lingered by the doorway. The room was somehow restful. It was so white. It murmured of sleep…
White. The walls were completely white.
“Peter,” she said suddenly. “Don’t you think it’s weird? How unpainted this room is?”
He turned back and stood for an instant in the doorway, staring at the pristine walls. “Yes. Very weird. In a house where everything is daubed, a white wall screams for notice. I wonder…”
A cord across the doorway barred entrance. Birdlike, Peter peered over it, his gaze fixed on the whitewashed walls.
“It wasn’t always plain,” the guide said. These four words were the first unscripted ones she’d managed. She looked almost appalled.
Peter turned slightly, one shoulder propped against the doorframe. He did not quite look at her; but something about his silence must have been encouraging.
“There was a mural,” the guide added. “Of a religious nature. Quite out of the common way, for Charleston. They weren’t religious people.”
“No,” Peter agreed.
Jo felt her heartbeat quicken. She was waiting, with a sense of suspense, for the important thing she knew was coming.
The guide folded her arms protectively beneath her breasts. “Mrs. Bell whitewashed the walls the year Maynard Keynes died.”
“When was that?” Peter asked easily.
“Nineteen forty-six.”
“Ah. So it was. Just after the war. Keynes saves the economies of the Western World with the notion of deficit spending, and goes home to Tilton to die.” He nodded casually at the sterile walls. “Sad, that so much valuable art should be lost.”
“She was always painting over things. We’ve found pictures inside of pictures. Canvases reused. Nobody knows how much there might have been.”
Pictures inside of pictures. Jo almost said: Were any of them of Virginia? But something about Peter’s face—a careful, listening quality—stopped her.
“There’s a photograph on file,” the guide offered. “Of the mural, I mean. If you’d like to see it.”
“How enchanting,” Peter enthused. “We’d love to.”
CITIES MADE IMOGEN CANTWELL UNCOMFORTABLE—the excessive traffic, the narrowness of certain streets, the confusing directional signs. A bare fifteen minutes into the heart of London she was cursing foully at the windscreen, which was spattered with the first drops of rain. The fact that she had forgotten to prepay the central London congestion charge, and would now owe a late fee in addition to the usual eight-pound toll, infuriated her further; she ought to have taken the train in from Kent. It was idiotic that she had chosen to drive. The miscalculation betrayed her country manners, her lack of sophistication, her general backwardness. It also further eroded her faltering self-confidence.
So that by Tuesday afternoon as she stood in front of Cissy, doorkeeper of Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts department, Imogen was flushed with self-loathing. Broad-hipped, in khaki trousers and a cotton jumper, her grizzled hair lank with rain, she seethed before the reception desk, while Cissy made a show of studying her computer screen.
“Have you an appointment?”
“No. I have not.”
“Then I’m afraid you must s
chedule, madam. The Experts are all booked—”
Cissy’s languid drawl; her Sloane Ranger hair, carefully blonded every three weeks; her suggestion of being merely on loan to Sotheby’s in the odd interval between modeling gigs—all infuriated Imogen. She leaned heavily over the reception desk, her breath coming in rapid snorts through her nose. “I’m here on a matter of some urgency, love. You people have nicked something that doesn’t belong to you. And I want it back. You can turn me away now if you like—but it’ll be a police matter before long.”
A faint crease appeared between Cissy’s perfect brows. She stared coldly at Imogen, then extended one polished talon to her phone. “If you’ll sit down, madam, I’ll inquire.”
“Right,” Imogen boomed. “Inquire away, love. And tell them it’s about the Woolf notebook you’re sitting on, the lot of you.” She cast a defiant look around the paneled waiting area, the row of comfortable seats dotted with well-heeled clients. None of them was sodden with rain. None looked ill at ease. One actually rose, as though to offer her a chair: a dark-haired man of middle height and wordless authority.
“Did you say Woolf notebook? As in, Virginia Woolf?” he asked.
“That’s right.” Imogen eyed him dubiously. “Could be priceless. And I’ve reason to believe it’s here.”
“Or perhaps in Oxford.”
“Oxford?”
The man smiled at her disarmingly; she realized, with sharp misgiving, that like Jo Bellamy he was American. He turned to the blonde at Reception. “It’s all right, Cissy. I’ll just bring Miss…?”
“Cantwell.”
“… in with me.”
“Very well.” Cissy dimpled at him, and cradled her phone. “Marcus would be delighted to see you now, Mr. Westlake.”
THE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE MURAL PAINTED ON THE WALLS of Maynard Keynes’s bedroom was obviously quite old.
The Charleston House guide—who informed them that her name was Glenna, that she lived nearby in Firle and had taken the job half-time during the winter months, now that her youngest was at school—led them to a small office area crammed with heavy oak furniture that might once have belonged to the Bell family.
“We’re a private trust,” she explained, “sustained by publications, charity, and various Bell grandchildren. So we make do. Most of the funds go towards repairs, of course, and the maintenance of the garden, or recovery of paintings by artists associated with the house. So many canvases were sold—once English Post-Impressionism fell out of fashion, Vanessa and Duncan were rather hard up. They had to work to live.”
“Don’t we all,” Peter muttered. And Jo realized, with a small jolt of awareness, that she was unlike the rest of the world in this—she lived to work. She loved nothing so much as planning, digging, and establishing a garden—even if, in the end, it was handed over to clients.
She stood next to Peter in the office doorway. There was only one available chair, and both of them were too conscious of the other to take it. Glenna pulled open file cabinet drawers and flipped through manila folders, edging photographs into the light just long enough to determine they were not the one she sought. Then she slammed the drawer with a decisive click and handed an eight-by-eleven print to Peter.
“Here it is. Not in the best condition, unfortunately, but it gives you an idea.”
Together, they bent their heads over it.
A black-and-white image, slightly grainy as old photographs often are. The print was cracked and stained with age; one corner was dog-eared and another was missing entirely. A few words were scrawled in the white margin at the base; Jo could not make them out.
“What is the title?” Peter asked.
“Virgin and Apostle,” Glenna replied. “As I say—a religious subject, really quite unusual for Mrs. Bell, but then again it’s hardly an ordinary depiction, is it?”
Surreal would be a better word, Jo decided—complete with Magritte’s bowler hat. One was lying in the foreground, as though it had just rolled off the head of the dark-haired man who was crouched at the base of a statue. He was seen in profile: brown-eyed, middle-aged, with a mustache and a pleading expression reminiscent of a bloodhound’s. A rectangular briefcase stood at his left knee. Papers were scattered in the grass.
“Maynard Keynes?” Peter suggested.
“Possibly,” said the guide. “Or possibly not. The quality of the photograph makes it difficult to say.”
The man in the suit was venerating—or pleading with—a fluid feminine shape, all draperies and delicate ankles. Her arms were joined over the breast in what might have been prayer. Her head was unveiled, and suggested a Greek goddess; her hair was drawn back in a classical knot at the nape; her face was an ovoid blank.
“Virgin, Virginia.” Jo said it for Peter, but it was Glenna who answered her.
“I doubt very much this is a portrait of Mrs. Woolf, if that’s what you’re suggesting. One of the grandchildren would surely have identified her.”
“Although she hated sitting for her portrait,” Jo murmured. “When was this painted, I wonder?”
Peter turned the print over and glanced at the back side. “No date.”
“We’ve talked of doing a bit of research,” Glenna offered, “but with funds so short, and the mural not a priority—”
“What did Vanessa mean by calling Keynes the Apostle?” Jo asked. “Was he particularly devout?”
Peter frowned. “There’s no mystery about that, surely. Keynes was an Apostle. A Cambridge Apostle. He practically reformed the Society in his own image, I believe, during his days there.”
“But we can’t be sure this is a portrait of Keynes,” Glenna interjected.
There were times, Jo thought, with a surge of irritation, when she understood too well the force of Winston Churchill’s adage—that the English and Americans were one people divided by a common language. What in hell were the Cambridge Apostles? Peter referred to them as though they were as familiar as Christ’s. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Maynard… But the repetition of that single word—Apostle—had reminded her of the Lady’s notebook, at least.
“Apostles Screed,” Jo exclaimed. “It was written in the back of the notebook, right where the pages were torn out. Does that have to do with Cambridge, too?”
Peter’s gaze was still fixed on the print of the mural, but he wasn’t really looking at it anymore. He was chasing a rapid succession of thoughts Jo could track in the expressions that crossed his face.
“Screed. Screed—that could mean one of several things. Conversazione. The Ark, perhaps, or the Memoir Club,” he muttered.
Jo snorted and rolled her eyes.
“No wonder Margaux’s not here,” he persisted. “We’ve gone in completely the wrong direction, haven’t we?”
“Are you saying we should be in Cambridge?”
But at that moment, Peter’s cell phone rang.
MARCUS SYMONDS-JONES HAD SPENT THE FEW hours between Gray Westlake’s unexpected call and the man’s appearance in Sotheby’s book department conducting what he called due diligence. This meant an all-out assault on available information: online searches of biographic and financial data, reviews of past auction purchases, quick interrogations of Marcus’s opposite numbers in Wine Sales and European Antiques. By the time Cissy tapped her fingernail against the paneled mahogany door and slid into the room, Marcus had a rough understanding of Gray Westlake’s tastes. He knew that the man was worth somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. He knew Gray was fifty-four years old. He knew that he bought rare cars and speculated in oil futures. He knew that Gray’s first wife liked English antiques, his second American country, and his third, Mid-Century Modern. He knew that Gray drank Bordeaux and California Cabernets, that he was a member of golf clubs all over the world, and that his five homes were scattered, at the moment, on three continents.
About Imogen Cantwell, Marcus Symonds-Jones knew absolutely nothing.
At first, he thought the woman might be Westlake’s bag carrie
r, but that notion was dismissed as soon as he caught a good look at her. He was surprised and slightly unnerved as he bared his teeth and extended his hand to grasp Gray’s own; if the man had brought a manuscripts expert to his first meeting—and Imogen was just frumpy enough to pass for one—then the American was in deadly earnest.
“Do tell me how I can be of help,” Marcus boomed, as Gray stood before his desk. He would have liked to have sat down himself, but the other man wasn’t bending, and Marcus saw that he was waiting for Imogen Cantwell to take a seat first. She seemed oblivious of this, her gaze fixed malevolently on Marcus; he recoiled as she thrust out a work-hardened finger.
“Was it you that woman talked to? When she brought her stolen goods to market?”
“Sorry?”
“A book expert, she said. At Sotheby’s. Was it you?”
Marcus blinked, his eyes shifting to Gray Westlake’s.
The American smiled. “Let’s sit down, shall we? Miss Cantwell? Have a seat?”
Grudgingly, Imogen lowered her bulk into one of Marcus’s beloved Bauhaus chairs—white leather and steel, he’d saved for months to buy them before they’d even gone on preview. Everything in his office was deliberately chosen to offset the fusty image of Rare Books and Manuscripts, to scream in the broadest visual accent: HEDGE FUND OPERATORS TAKE NOTE: WORDS ARE HIP, TOO!
He wanted to ask what the fuck these two were talking about, but as they obviously assumed he knew, he sank instead into his chair and made a pretense of stabbing his keyboard. “Right. It’s a pleasure to have you at Sotheby’s again, Mr. Westlake—and to welcome you to Rare Books! I understand you’d like Miss…”
“Cantwell,” Imogen supplied.
“… to sit in on our meeting?”
“I thought her information could be helpful.” There was a hint of amusement in Gray’s eyes that Marcus immediately resented.
“You said something about a Woolf manuscript, is that right? You think you’ve found one, or that perhaps we have one—am I correct? What sort of manuscript, exactly?”
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