The Temptation of Gracie

by Santa Montefiore

  Gracie caught her breath. The tower seemed to loom out of the past like a relic. It stole her breath. She felt a lump lodge itself in her throat. ‘I’m feeling a little tired, suddenly. I think I’ll go and lie down,’ she said to Rex as he began to walk towards it.

  He looked disappointed. ‘Are you sure? You really should take a look. It’s a jewel,’ he said, trying to convince her to stay.

  ‘I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course not, Gracie. You go and put your feet up. There is always tomorrow.’ He raised his hat. ‘The food has made me sleepy too, but I’m old. I don’t want to waste a moment.’ He chuckled, gave an apologetic smile, and replaced his hat. ‘One only realises how precious every moment is in the autumn of one’s life.’ Gracie wanted to agree with him, but she could no longer speak.

  Just then Rex raised his eyes and looked beyond her and he shouted, ‘Well, good afternoon!’ Gracie turned round to see who he was talking to. But the sudden cramp in her stomach told her it was him, their host, Count Tancredi Bassanelli. She stared at him up there on the balcony and he looked down at them and raised his hand in greeting.

  As Rex took off his hat again, Gracie froze. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak. She was paralysed with anxiety and longing. Tancredi was an old man now and yet, to her, he was still the same Tancredi. His hair was no longer dark brown but peppered with grey, and wavy, swept off his wide forehead and curling behind his ears and at his neck like it always had. He wore an open-neck blue shirt with a matching scarf tied loosely at his throat, and Gracie remembered how stylish he had always been. Yes, she remembered in a deluge of memory the smell of him, the feel of him, the sound of him, but he seemed not to know her at all. He gazed down, his smile polite but impersonal, and there was not even a flicker of recognition. She was not too far for him to see her and yet she felt invisible.

  The moment felt as if it lasted minutes and his failure to recognise her cut her deeply. At length, Tancredi withdrew inside and Rex said something about how charming he was to wave, but Gracie didn’t hear. The blood throbbed in her temples, drowning out everything but her sorrow. She knew she had to hide, like a dog seeking a bush beneath which to lick its wounds; she needed to be alone.

  She knew her way round the castle already. She entered through the back door and climbed the stairs to her floor with legs that felt like lead. She staggered along the dark corridors to her room, suppressing the sobs that were rapidly building in her chest, and closed the door behind her. Then she lay on the bed, shut her eyes and allowed her grief to pass through her like a tornado. How could a man who had loved her so deeply not know her? She now asked herself whether he had really loved her at all. Perhaps what had been the most significant love of her life had been only one of many to him. She looked back now, searching the past for evidence to prove that she hadn’t been wrong in believing.

  He had loved her, surely he had loved her. If not, she had spent the last forty-odd years hankering after a dream.

  Chapter 7

  Italy, 1955

  If Gracie had thought she would be living a glamorous life in Italy she was proved wrong. There was nothing glamorous about studying with Rutger, and he worked her very hard. She had much to learn and in the beginning most of it was studying the history of art, all the way back to the Greeks. Rutger gave her books and she sat at a desk in the corner of the studio and read, after which he would test her. He was a hard task master. Gracie realised very quickly that the man with the kind and twinkly eyes was in fact a man of high standards and expectations, a man who did not tolerate anything short of excellence.

  In London Gracie had found school uninspiring and she hadn’t felt particularly clever. Here, however, she realised she was much cleverer than she realised. She absorbed the art history with surprising ease and with her gradual learning grew her curiosity and interest. She had always enjoyed painting but the tools she had had at home were far inferior to the ones at her disposal in Uncle Hans’s studios. In the warm room with its bright electric lights and the sound of doves cooing on the roof, she would copy paintings while Rutger restored his. She enjoyed the sense of industry, the peace and quiet, and the satisfaction of pleasing her tutor.

  Uncle Hans kept a sharp eye on her progress. When he spoke to Rutger he often spoke in Dutch, but even if Gracie hadn’t been able to understand she could tell by the look on his face when he was pleased. He would smile a very special kind of smile which lifted her heart as nothing else could. He studied her work closely, holding her paintings to the light, scrutinising her brushstrokes through his magnifying lenses, and she sensed there was something else propelling his interest, as if he saw some sort of potential beyond her imaginings and was keen to realise it for his own ends. Gracie strived hard for his approval. She wanted to be as good a restorer as Rutger. She didn’t want her uncle to regret having brought her to Italy. So, she worked conscientiously and her reward was his praise.

  When Uncle Hans wasn’t in his studio – and he could be there for weeks on end, emerging only to eat and sleep – he was away travelling. When he returned he brought new paintings to be restored, or to be sold. Gracie loved looking at the works of art he had found and they always came with an interesting story. An elderly widow here who didn’t realise she had been sitting on a masterpiece; a young man there who had hit hard times and had to sell a family heirloom to keep the wolf from the door; a painting of little value found in a small country sale that Rutger restored to reveal the work of a great master. Uncle Hans always told wonderfully elaborate stories and Gracie loved listening to them. Rutger would shake his head and declare Hans Hollingsworth a man with the Midas touch.

  When Gracie had first arrived at La Colomba, for that was the name of the house, she had enjoyed exploring the gardens and surrounding countryside. She learned that Rutger lived in a picturesque cottage just outside the walls of Uncle Hans’s property, nestled among bushes of pink oleander. There were undulating fields of farmland, crops that would turn to gold in August, vines that would produce grapes in September, olive groves that gave up their fruit in November. For Gracie, who had never been to the countryside, Tuscany was like heaven. The freedom she experienced was intoxicating, the beauty mesmerising. She missed her mother and grandmother and was surprised that she occasionally missed Joseph too, but she knew she was fortunate and believed that giving in to homesickness was insulting to Uncle Hans, who had given her such an exotic and privileged life.

  She wrote to her family every week, describing her life in minute detail, knowing that her mother would read her letters out loud at the dinner table just like she read Uncle Hans’s. Gracie knew the pleasure those letters would give her mother and grandmother, and how envious Joseph would be, which gave her a wicked thrill. Uncle Hans bought her pretty dresses from Rome and Paris and spoiled her like the daughter he’d never had. She wondered why he hadn’t ever married, for she was sure he would make a loving husband and father, but that wasn’t a subject she could raise with him. She respected him too much to ask such personal questions.

  As the months went by Gracie grew more confident. She walked the mile and a half to the town, which was a cluster of Tuscan stone houses built on a hillside beneath a magnificent castle. The streets were paved, the ancient houses shuttered and adorned with pots of red geraniums, the occasional wall embellished with extravagant bushes of bougainvillea and oleander. There were a few shops where one could buy the essentials, a butcher’s, a bakery, a fruit and vegetable shop where they also sold pasta and biscuits, a few cafés and the church of Maria Maddalena where the entire population would congregate regularly for mass. There were also a couple of simple restaurants and an inn. The first time Gracie had visited, the locals had stared at her as if she were some strange creature from outer space. She had felt so self-conscious that it had been a few weeks before she had dared go again, and this time with Rutger for company. The Dutchman had explained that their community was a small one and that any new face
aroused curiosity. Especially a child on her own, dropped into their midst as if by magic. But soon she was able to go without fear and, as the summer days shortened and autumn ripened the grapes on the vines, her Italian improved and she began to talk to people. It wasn’t long before they knew her by name and considered her much like the stray dogs and cats that wandered the streets, only not as thin and uncared for.

  Uncle Hans and Rutger were both fluent in Italian but neither bothered to teach her. It was Gaia who taught her, the sultry-eyed young woman with shiny brown hair which reached her waist in a thick plait, who worked around the house and cooked. Gracie enjoyed the long evenings when Uncle Hans was away, when the two of them sat outside beneath the pagoda, in the balmy, fragrant air, chatting about their lives, Gracie faltering in Italian, Gaia gently correcting her, a woman and a child forging an unlikely friendship. Had it not been for Gaia Gracie might have been lonely.

  Gaia’s family lived a mile down a track. Her father was a farmer and her mother raised their other six children, but Gaia lived in a small bedroom at the top of the villa and had done so for five years. Gracie was surprised to discover that she had started working for Uncle Hans when she was the same age as her.

  When Gracie turned sixteen she began to go to town in the evenings with Gaia. They cycled along the track that wound its way up the hillside and Gaia introduced her to her friends. Gradually Gracie became part of a large and boisterous group of young people who spent their evenings in the piazza, flirting and sharing gossip. It was there that she first heard of Count Tancredi Bassanelli.

  Castello Montefosco dominated the town not only because it was positioned on top of the hill, but because many of the locals worked there. Gracie learned that the countess, who was a widow, was a flamboyant, creative woman who lived in Rome during the winter months and spent the summers at the castle, which had been a wedding present from her wealthy father, Count Gaetano Montefosco. She loved to entertain lavishly and, according to Donato Fabbri who worked in the gardens with his father, she took lovers without so much as a blush. Every year there was a different man but they were all very much of a type. They were rich, arriving in shiny motor cars and swaggering about the terraces in expensive clothes with gold watches glinting on their wrists. Donato told Gracie that the countess thought nothing of kissing these men in front of her employees and that he had seen her, on various occasions, in a passionate embrace in the pavilion next to the tennis court.

  The more Gracie heard about the headstrong countess, the more her curiosity grew. The woman sounded so glamorous and carefree and Gracie admired the independent way she lived her life. In Gracie’s experience a woman was nothing without a husband, her mother was an example of that, but the countess was a sovereign power who seemed to please no one but herself and, according to gossip, had no intention of marrying again. Damiana Conti, who was a maid in the castle and a close friend of Gaia’s, told Gracie that the countess’s father was an avid art collector and was so rich he bled gold. The countess’s son, Tancredi, was fast going through his inheritance, however. Damiana’s face lit up when she talked about him. Dashing and handsome, he had a bad reputation for womanising and partying. He roared up the street in his sports car and turned every head in town. According to Damiana, girls wanted to bed him, men wanted to be him. Gracie longed to see this swashbuckling count for herself.

  Gracie was aware that she wasn’t a beauty like Gaia and Damiana. She did not assume that men would be interested in her, even Italian men who loved to flirt. At sixteen she was now a woman, but she did not exude sex appeal like Italian women did. She did not walk with a swinging gait, nor smile with promise. She did not believe she was attractive so she did not draw attention to herself. She was shy, self-contained and watchful. She applied to life the same attention to detail that she applied to her work, and this made her acutely perceptive. She noticed everything going on around her, from Donato’s foot toying with Gaia’s beneath the table, to the teasing glances he was simultaneously throwing at Damiana. She sensed romance before it blossomed and she intuited the bitter end as it withered. She knew that the young men who flirted with her were not in love, but full of lust, and she was not going to be fooled by them. She did not know how she knew this. She was young and inexperienced, but somehow she saw through them. Perhaps they were clumsy. Perhaps their intention was poorly concealed in their lascivious eyes, perhaps she just knew that, when they told her she was beautiful, they were lying because she knew she wasn’t. She longed to be, but nature had not blessed her with beauty. Nature had, however, endowed her with a beguiling mystery, but Gracie did not know that. Uncle Hans did. He had recognised that quality in her when she was a small child, for she’d inherited it from him. Mystery was one of the key ingredients required for the very specialised job he had in mind for her.

  Three years passed before Rutger allowed her to start restoring paintings herself. She had learned how to study the work, to ascertain the date and place of conception, to read what should be there but was lost due to damage, age or intervention. She was accomplished now at removing the discoloured varnish, repairing tears, restoring a painting to an interpretation of its original state using the specific materials and techniques available to the artist at the time. She had learned to be a detective as Rutger had said she would, although she had nothing like the knowledge the Dutchman had – only experience could give her that. So when the bookshelves were deficient in the information she needed to correctly analyse a painting she had to rely on Rutger to advise her. But generally he allowed her freedom to work independently. ‘It is only with freedom that you will grow,’ he told her and left her to work it out for herself.

  After five years Uncle Hans was pleased with her progress and her genuine interest in the skill of restoration. ‘You have shown patience, intelligence and skill,’ he said one afternoon after he had just returned from Paris with a crateload of paintings, old frames and canvases. He was standing behind her as she toiled at her easel, watching her intently. ‘I think it is time,’ he said.

  Rutger tossed another cotton swab into the bin and stood up. ‘I have been waiting for you to say that, Hans. I believe she is ready too.’

  Gracie took off her magnifying lenses and looked at the two men with curiosity. ‘Ready for what, Uncle Hans?’ she asked.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said. He put his hand in his pocket and took out the key to his studio. Gracie’s heart began to race. She had longed to know what was behind the door ever since Rutger had told her she was not allowed inside.

  Uncle Hans put the key in the lock and turned it to the right. He opened the door and stepped into the room. ‘Come,’ he said to Gracie, who hovered nervously on the threshold. ‘I am now going to bring you into a secret.’

  Gracie looked around expecting to see something special. What she saw was a typical artist’s studio. However, that in itself was a surprise because she had learned how different a restorer’s studio was to an artist’s, and this was definitely an artist’s place of work. There were paintings stacked against the walls, canvases rolled up and placed on specially designed shelving, bookcases full of books and ledges lined with pigments in small glass jars, brushes and paints. Easels stood ready to be of use and everywhere was evidence of Hans’s toil. Paint splattered the wooden floorboards and furniture. The air smelt of oil paint, linseed, turpentine and wood – all the things a studio would normally smell of. Uncle Hans was not restoring works of art in here; he was painting them.

  Uncle Hans closed the door behind Rutger and locked it. For the first time in her life Gracie felt fear. What was so secret that it required the door to be locked when all three of them were in the room? She looked at her uncle and he must have noticed her panic, because he was swift to reassure her. ‘Do not be afraid, my dear,’ he said. ‘You are about to join a very exclusive club. I know I can trust you. You are like a daughter to me. My own flesh and blood. So, you must never speak of what you are going to do to anyone. Do you understand?’ Graci
e nodded, wondering frantically what it was that she was going to do.

  ‘Come,’ he said. He directed her to a large canvas leaning against the wall in an old gilt frame. ‘What do you make of this?’ he asked. Gracie studied the painting. It was quite obviously a Matisse. She was excited to see such a famous painting up close. ‘Well? If you know your art you should know this,’ said Uncle Hans.

  ‘It is a Matisse,’ Gracie replied with a shrug. Even a child would know that, she thought. ‘However, I cannot pretend that I have seen this particular work before.’

  Her uncle laughed, delighted with her reply. ‘It is not by Matisse,’ he said and there was a triumphant inflection in the way he said the artist’s name. ‘It is by Hans Hollingsworth.’

  ‘You are a genius, Hans,’ said Rutger, who had evidently never seen the work either.

  ‘It is a brilliant copy,’ said Gracie, impressed and much relieved. If her uncle wanted her to copy paintings there was nothing to worry about. She was very good at copying. She always had been.

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ said Uncle Hans. ‘It is indeed a brilliant copy. But it is more than that, Gracie. It is a brilliant forgery.’

  Gracie felt the air still around her. Her stomach clenched again with panic. Now she knew why he had locked the door, why he didn’t want anyone to come in, why this room was out of bounds for everybody. Uncle Hans was painting forgeries and selling them. And this is what he now wanted Gracie to do. She stared at him in horror. ‘But you could go to prison for this, Uncle,’ she said, aghast.