The Temptation of Gracie

by Santa Montefiore

  Since acquiring his beloved painting Tancredi seemed more in love with Gracie than ever. The pleasure she had derived from pleasing him was dizzying. She couldn’t wait to complete the forgery so that he could take the real one home. In the meantime, they regularly made love in the tower, indulging in fantasies where there was no place for doubts and obstacles barring their future happiness. Petronella did not exist in their cosy hideaway, only the two of them and the imaginary world they had created. The Castello was deserted for the winter months with only Bagwis in residence as caretaker, but he was discreet and knew not to bother them, save to make sure there was always food in the fridge in the castle kitchen. The countess would not be back until spring.

  At the end of December Uncle Hans took Gracie to London for Christmas. He had business to attend to there and he knew Gracie wanted to see her mother. Rutger travelled to Holland and La Colomba, like the Castello, was locked up and left swathed in snow.

  England was enduring the worst winter in years. Gracie left a snow-covered landscape only to arrive in yet another, one decidedly less appealing. Smog choked the London air as coal fires burned constantly. The roads were icy, the trees crippled with cold, the winds bitter, blowing into the country all the way from Russia. Gracie’s feelings about her home were always conflicted. She loved seeing her mother and brother yet the reality of being a guest in the house that had once been her home made her feel sad. She felt Oma’s absence keenly and hated the change that had come over the place. It looked the same and smelt the same and yet it wasn’t the same, because she had grown up and moved on and no longer felt the same attachment to it. As a child she hadn’t noticed how shabby it was. She hadn’t noticed the peeling paint and the odd corner of the room that was stained with damp. She hadn’t seen the tired old furniture and the threadbare rugs because she hadn’t had anything with which to compare them. Now she had experienced the grandeur of the Castello and La Colomba her mother’s house had become intolerably worn-out. She didn’t understand why her uncle, with all his money and fine things, didn’t help his sister more. Gracie sent her mother money whenever Uncle Hans paid her for her forgeries, and yet the state her mother lived in was still dire. How was it that she didn’t have the means to paint the house, fix the damp, buy the odd new piece of furniture? It wasn’t until Christmas Day, when she, her mother and Uncle Hans went to Joseph’s new house, situated in a more elegant part of town, that she realised where the money was going.

  Joseph had married the local girl he had been seeing when Gracie had last been in London. She was a sweet, mousy young woman with a snub nose and big brown eyes and Gracie could see why he liked her. She didn’t challenge him like Gracie had, but looked up to him and admired him and agreed with everything he said. She kept the house immaculate to the point of obsession. There was not an ornament out of place, or a rug laid crookedly on the floor. The cushions were plump, the surfaces shiny, the walls painted and papered, there was even a television in the front room. Joseph was keen to show off his new life to his uncle and sister. He sat smoking in a leather armchair beside the hearty fire while his wife basted the turkey, cooking to perfection in the new Belling oven he had bought for her, and boasted about his job in a local advertising firm where he was sure he was soon to be promoted to account manager. While Gracie was pleased for him, she felt guilty, for like her he was enjoying a standard of living their mother could only dream of. Yet Greet was almost bursting with pride. It was she who showed Gracie around the house, pointing out the small luxuries Gracie now took for granted.

  ‘Why don’t you keep more of the money we send you for yourself?’ she asked as her mother showed her the baby-blue bathroom suite.

  ‘I don’t need much,’ Greet replied, running her fingers along the smooth rim of the sink. ‘Isn’t this fine, Gracie? Your father would be so proud to see what Joseph has become. I used to despair of him when he worked at the hardware shop, but then Hans managed to secure him a job at the advertising agency, and a very good job it is too. There is opportunity to climb there. Who knows where he might be in ten years. He will be able to give his children a better life than I was able to give you.’

  ‘So, he earns well. There’s no need for you to subsidise his wages.’

  Greet lowered her voice. ‘Oh, he is full of big talk, but the truth is he doesn’t earn much at all. Of course he will, eventually. But Susan is pregnant – no, don’t say I told you. It is a secret. She only found out last week and it is early days. But they are going to have a family. I am going to be a grandmother.’ Her smile was so full of joy that something gave in Gracie’s heart. She put her arms around her.

  ‘Mother, I am so happy,’ she said.

  Her mother held her at arm’s length. ‘And what about you, Gracie? You are not getting any younger. It is time you found a nice man and settled down. You wrote about Donato but now you don’t mention him at all.’ She frowned. ‘Is there no one? Are you getting out enough? Is Hans working you too hard? You have to get out and meet people. I will tell Hans. It is his responsibility. You must marry before you get too old, then no one will want you.’

  Gracie longed to tell her about Tancredi, but she couldn’t. It would break her to know that her daughter was having an affair with a married man. She looked at her mother’s concerned face and wanted to assuage her anxiety. ‘There is a man, Mother, but I have only just met him. Don’t tell Uncle Hans.’

  Greet’s eyes brightened and her anxiety was swiftly alleviated. ‘Is he handsome like your father was? Is he honest? Does he earn a good living? Can he look after you?’

  Gracie laughed. ‘He is all of those things.’

  ‘I knew it!’ Greet’s delight made Gracie feel guilty. ‘You are not beautiful but you are intelligent and good. If I were a man I’d be suspicious of a beautiful woman. She might run off with a younger man in years to come. But you can be relied on, Gracie. Any man would be lucky to be married to you.’

  Gracie was happy to return to Italy and into the arms of the man who believed her beautiful.

  It wasn’t long after Christmas that Uncle Hans went away again. Gracie set to work on the forgery at once, painting in the evenings when Rutger had retired to his cottage, and toiling away well into the early hours of the morning. She enjoyed those still, silent evenings. There was something familiar and reassuring about them. Alone in the studio she lost herself in her work and time became irrelevant, until tiredness alerted her to the lateness of the hour and the need for sleep.

  Forging a seventeenth-century painting was a highly complicated process. Unlike fifteenth-century painters who used egg tempera, which was easy to emulate, Golden Age artists like Vermeer, Rembrandt and Frans Hals painted in oils, which hardened over the centuries to a consistency the forger was unable to achieve due to lack of time. It only took a dab of alcohol to expose the modern forger’s brush. Hans had originally used a medium of gelatin-glue, which was unaffected by alcohol but did go soft in water, which rendered it inadequate. Then he learned from another master forger who was an expert in the chemistry of paint to use Bakelite. Bakelite was an early plastic used during the 1920s and 1930s to make brightly coloured costume jewellery, kitchenware and toys. When dry this product was impervious to anything. For Hans Hollingsworth, the discovery of this medium was a turning point in his career. He ground period-appropriate pigments into liquid Bakelite then painted it onto recycled seventeenth-century canvases. When the film hardened it mimicked to perfection an oil-paint surface hundreds of years old. In this way, he was able to forge Golden Age Dutch masters with great success. However, Bakelite was incredibly hard to use in painting and Gracie had not yet got to grips with it. She did not think it mattered. Piero Bartoloni’s The Temptation of Eve was simply going to hang on a wall in Bruno and Livia Montefosco’s house in Rome, so a good copy in oils would suffice, and it would be easy to find a matching frame, Uncle Hans’s studio was full of old frames in every size. An expert would most certainly notice the difference, but Bruno and L
ivia were not experts.

  Gracie took more pleasure from copying the voluptuous Eve and the serpent than she had taken with any previous work. The way Eve’s expression conveyed a mixture of desire and fear fascinated her, the way the soft light drew her out of the murky forest and caught the head of the wicked snake, luring her into temptation. Eve’s body was curvaceous, fecund, ripe, like the rosy apple on the branch above the serpent, crying out to be picked. Her lips were parted, one white hand on her breast, the other reaching out with graceful fingers, the folds of the gown that barely covered her falling away, like her innocence.

  It wasn’t just the painting that enthralled Gracie but the knowledge of who she was painting it for. Her love for Tancredi propelled every stroke and into her work she poured her heart. A solitary month it might have been as Tancredi was in Rome and she was busy restoring during the day and copying during the night. And yet she was content. The Temptation of Eve linked her to Tancredi and the tranquillity fed her soul.

  The painting took Gracie five weeks to complete. Uncle Hans returned in the middle with more mysterious canvases wrapped in brown paper and her nightly activity had to be put on hold, but then he went away again, this time to Antwerp, and she was able to resume. When Tancredi returned to the Castello at the end of February he telephoned Gracie and discovered, to his excitement, that the painting was finished.

  Gracie didn’t have to hide her affair from Rutger, but she did have to hide the painting. As Tancredi was coming to pick her up in his car she didn’t want to be seen leaving the villa with a suspicious package, so she sneaked down to the bottom of the garden and hid it beneath a bush, close to where the drive passed a little further down the slope. When Tancredi turned up she was able to greet him with nothing but a small leather handbag. She didn’t imagine Rutger was watching – the studio was at the back of the villa and he wasn’t the kind of man to pry into other people’s affairs – but she felt so guilty for deceiving him that she wanted him to see her, just to ease her own conscience.

  Once out of sight of the villa she told Tancredi to stop the car. She jumped out and scampered up the snowy bank. She reached out and withdrew the canvas from beneath the bush. ‘You are devious!’ Tancredi said, watching her climb back into the car with the painting, her coat dusted with white. Her face was flushed with both excitement and guilt, burning through the cold. ‘You’re not betraying your uncle Hans or Rutger, you know,’ he said softly. ‘You’re cheating my uncle because I’ve asked you to. Let me be the one to carry a guilty conscience.’ He leaned across the gear stick and kissed her. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘You haven’t seen it yet.’

  ‘I know it will be exactly like the original.’

  ‘I’m flattered that you have so much faith in me.’

  He laughed. ‘I can read you, Gracie. If it wasn’t good, you wouldn’t be looking so happy.’

  They drove to the castle. It was a grey, cloudy afternoon. Snow still clung to the valley in pools of indigo while, on the crests of the hills, the wind had blown it away in patches. The streets of Colladoro were quiet, but had they been seen together it wouldn’t have raised so much as an eyebrow for it was common knowledge that Gracie was teaching Tancredi to paint – and besides, no one would have imagined a girl like Gracie had what it took to catch the eye of the count.

  Once in the tower Tancredi unwrapped the canvas. Piero Bartoloni’s The Temptation of Eve was revealed with all the character and charm of the original. Tancredi was so surprised by the exactness of the copy that he was suddenly fearful that she hadn’t copied it at all but given him the real one. She saw the look on his face and blanched. ‘You don’t like it?’ she asked.

  ‘Are you sure this is the copy?’

  ‘Of course, I’m sure.’

  ‘But I can’t tell the difference.’

  Gracie smiled with relief. ‘You’re not meant to see the difference.’

  ‘I know, but I didn’t think it would be so exact, so perfect.’

  ‘If it is so exact and perfect, why don’t you keep the copy and leave them with the original.’ Gracie didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of that before. If he kept the copy she’d have done nothing untoward. It wouldn’t even be considered a forgery.

  ‘Because I want my uncle to have a fake. Just knowing that he has a fake in his collection will give me pleasure.’ Tancredi turned to Gracie, eyes shining. ‘My grandfather promised me that painting, Gracie, and I will have it, come what may.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said, heart sinking at the thought of slipping a fake into Bruno and Livia’s collection right under her uncle’s nose. ‘I will swap them.’

  The challenge of swapping the paintings was not a physical one, for that part was easy and anyone with an ounce of guile could do it, but an emotional one. Gracie did not feel happy about keeping such a secret from Uncle Hans and Rutger even though the truth would probably never come to light. The forgery would remain undiscovered in the Montefosco palace in Rome and no one would ever know of it. The only person to derive any pleasure from knowing was Tancredi, but to Gracie he was the only person who mattered. However, in the weeks that followed, while she worked with Rutger on the cleaning and restoring of the other paintings in the Montefosco collection, her guilt fed on itself and grew. And in the shadow of it she was able to see her uncle and Rutger not only with her eyes but with her heart, and she realised how much she loved them both.

  Spring brought warm days and chilly nights and the countryside was transformed once again into the bright greens, reds and yellows that Gracie was so fond of. Tancredi hid his painting in the tower, nailed to the back of a wardrobe behind jackets and shirts and coats. When she watched him open the doors, part the clothes and gaze in wonder on his beloved painting, those were the only times her guilt lifted. In those moments, she was at peace with herself and what she had done.

  She was relieved, when, at the end of June, the paintings were ready to be returned to Rome. With Gaia’s help she and Rutger wrapped and crated them and sent them off in a van. Gracie was happy to see them go, knowing that her forgery was among them and no longer in the house, waiting to betray her. Livia Montefosco telephoned Uncle Hans. They spoke for a long while. When at last he hung up he reported that she was delighted with their work and had invited him to come to Rome at the earliest to discuss how to enhance her already prestigious collection. This time Gracie was not included. She was relieved. As far as she was concerned the Montefosco matter was closed.

  It was not long after Hans returned from Rome that he suggested Gracie join him for a drink in the garden. It was a balmy, golden evening. The sweet scents of the lavender and honeysuckle lingered in the still, humid air and only the twittering of roosting birds gave a sense of movement to an otherwise tranquil scene. They sat on the terrace, she on the wicker sofa, he in the armchair, one leg crossed over the other to reveal a red spotted sock. The smoke from his cigarette filled the space around them and kept the midges away. Gracie had grown to like the smell of it for it was familiar and it was Hans. ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said, picking up his wine glass and taking a sip. The gold signet ring on his little finger glinted in the last rays of sun.

  ‘What do you want to talk to me about?’ she asked, her guilty conscience rising into her chest to poison the happiness there.

  ‘My will,’ he replied.

  ‘Oh.’ The relief was palpable.

  ‘Now, it’s been nine years since you came to La Colomba. During that time, you have worked hard. I could not have asked you to work harder. I could not have asked you to be more pleasant or more helpful.’ He settled his intense blue eyes on her and smiled with tenderness. ‘Had you been my daughter I could not have asked for a more delightful one. So, I feel it is only fair to fill you in on a few truths.’ He took another sip. Gracie took one too. She liked the taste of chilled white wine and it relaxed her. She couldn’t imagine the truths he was about to divulge, for surely, she knew them already. ‘Now, you and I have
many secrets.’ At that the image of Guido Vanni on his knees in front of Uncle Hans floated distastefully into her mind. She blinked it away as Uncle Hans went on. ‘But I feel you are ready to know a few more. Long before I came to La Colomba I worked as an art dealer in Amsterdam. During the war we were occupied by the Germans. I did not sympathise with them, but’ – he shrugged – ‘a man must do what he can to survive. I sold paintings to them in the same way that I sold paintings to my fellow countrymen. The trouble was that during that time the Germans were the only ones with the means to buy. I was already in the business of forgery. But it was not because of that that I had to leave Holland after the war, but because I had been seen to be collaborating with the enemy. I came here to Italy with Rutger and started afresh. Now, there are many forgers out there – you can wander into a grocer’s or a second-hand shop and find a crude van Ostade tavern scene or a Jan Fyt game-and-fowl still life, but they are very quickly revealed as fakes – you see, few aim as high as me and have the skill to carry it off. So, I began to make money, serious money, but what is a man to do with all that money? It cannot just be left to accumulate. I needed to put it into things. The most obvious thing to put it into is property. So, I began to buy properties abroad. As well as La Colomba, I have a villa in the South of France, a house in Spain, an apartment in Paris, a chalet in the Swiss mountains and a beach house in Norway. You may wonder why I am telling you this. Well, I have no children of my own. You and Joseph are the closest to children I am ever going to get. I have made a will and left all my property to you and your brother.’