Death of an Old Master Read online

  The girls looked relieved. They had never lived anywhere else. They would be safe. Smithson coughed. He looked slightly embarrassed as he read on.

  ‘“My estates, farms, woods, horses, cattle and sheep and all other farm animals”’ – there followed a precise geographical description of all these properties – ‘“I leave absolutely to Madame Yvette de Castelnau of Grasse for her sole use and that of her children, François and Marie-Claire.”’

  Charles de Courcy had done the unthinkable. He had failed to keep one of the oldest rules of the English gentry in disposing of their property. He had broken it up. In his wish to accommodate his two families he had separated the house from the lands which supported it. None of the women seemed to understand what had happened. Perhaps they had been hypnotized by the legal prose, the dead language of lawyers come to impose its will on the living.

  Edmund did. He did not know just how terrible the news was, but he knew it meant catastrophe for himself, his mother and his sisters.

  ‘“Signed in the presence of witnesses, Albert Clement, notaire of Grasse and Jean Jacques Rives, banker of Nice, on the twentieth day of October 1895.”’

  Smithson wiped his brow. He coughed apologetically. The women looked dumb. Edmund was staring at the leather volumes opposite him, wondering how much they were worth.

  ‘I am afraid there is more that you must know,’ Smithson said, glancing briefly at his companion. ‘Mr McKenna here comes from Finch’s Bank which handles the family financial affairs. I fear you should hear from him.’

  Great God, thought Alice de Courcy, is there worse to come on this terrible day? That woman and her children coming to the funeral was bad. Breaking up the house and the estate, she suspected, was worse.

  Richard McKenna drew some papers from his bag and placed them on the table. He spoke very gently. ‘The financial position is not good,’ he began. ‘Let me deal with the house first. There are two mortgages outstanding on the property in which we sit this afternoon. They are for a total of forty thousand pounds, secured on de Courcy Hall itself. The current interest on those mortgages comes to approximately fifteen hundred pounds a year.’ The figures dropped into the room like the drops of rain from the leak in the church at the service that morning, cold, regular, unstoppable.

  ‘The estates are also mortgaged,’ McKenna went on. Edmund thought he sounded like a doctor telling his patient that they had an incurable disease. Perhaps they had. Financial cancer had spread to Norfolk, a plague of debt and impossible obligations.

  ‘They are mortgaged to the value of sixty thousand pounds. The interest on those loans from Finch’s Bank comes to the total of two thousand, two hundred and fifty pounds a year.’

  McKenna paused. Now came the hammer blow. ‘The rent rolls from the estates have been falling lately. The properties are not perhaps in such good repair as they once were.’ His eyes glanced up at the cracks in the ceiling, the broken window panes, the worn patches in the carpet. ‘At present the income amounts to just four thousand pounds a year, barely enough to cover the interest payments.’

  He looked around at the remaining members of the de Courcy family. Alice had turned even paler and was staring at the floor. Julia and Sarah were gazing in horror at this messenger of despair. Edmund had his head in his hands. ‘I fully appreciate,’ McKenna purred on, as if he was performing this melancholy rite for the ninth or the tenth time – which he was – ‘that this must have come as rather a shock. A terrible shock. At the bank we have considerable experience of dealing with these problems. We shall continue to extend our credit for the foreseeable future, but a rescue plan must be devised which can extricate you all from this temporary financial impasse.’

  Edmund escorted his mother and sisters to the door. He took McKenna to walk up and down the Long Gallery on the other side of the house from the library. Their footsteps echoed up and down the hundred and forty feet of the great room. Long thin windows looked out over a bedraggled garden, weeds and brambles laying siege to the lawns, the unpruned roses running wild across the flower beds.

  ‘I fear I can be more frank with you here than with your mother and your sisters,’ said McKenna. ‘Nothing need happen for three months. After that I would suggest you send your mother and your sisters abroad. Life is cheaper there. You would be surprised how many of our fellow countrymen live happy and inexpensive lives in southern France.’

  ‘I do not think,’ said Edmund, looking sadly at his companion, ‘that my mother will be happy going to the south of France.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said the banker. ‘It need not be there. There are many other places round the Mediterranean where they could be happy.’

  ‘But how can they be brought back? How will I find the money?’

  ‘We can improve the management of the estates,’ said McKenna. Experience had taught him that hope was the most important commodity in these circumstances. ‘We can bring in a new steward, that old one seems to have been incompetent. The rent rolls could be doubled in three or four years.’

  ‘I can’t leave them abroad for that long. It will break my mother’s heart.’ Edmund stopped at one of the windows. The last of the afternoon light was going now, a couple of stray dogs patrolling the lawns that led towards the lake. ‘I must make some money. But I have no training. What can I do, Mr McKenna? Please help me.’

  McKenna looked at the long line of de Courcys on one section of the walls, painted by Lawrence and Reynolds, Hoppner and Gainsborough. He looked further away where some early Italian paintings were becoming invisible in the gathering gloom.

  ‘Paintings,’ he said suddenly. ‘I hadn’t thought of it before. You could sell some of these paintings. Or you could use them as a way into the art world. We have a valued client in London who might be willing to train you up, and to draw on your knowledge of the works of art in the great houses of England.’

  Edmund felt the first faint stirrings of hope. ‘But is there any money to be made in dealing in paintings and things?’ he asked. ‘Surely nobody is going to pay hundreds of pounds for some old works of art?’

  Richard McKenna laughed. ‘The art market is changing, it’s changing every day, every month, every year, young man. Rich Americans, rich beyond imagination, richer than the world has ever seen before, are just beginning to buy European paintings. If the trends continue, just three or four paintings, maybe even some of the ones you have on the walls here, would fetch enough to clear all the debts and all the mortgages of de Courcy Hall.’

  Part One

  Raphael

  1

  Autumn 1899

  William Alaric Piper walked happily through his art gallery in London’s Old Bond Street. Every morning he went on a tour of inspection of the pictures, checking they were all straight, that no dust remained on the floor from the previous day’s visitors. Piper was a small, rather tubby man in his early thirties. He was immaculately turned out, as ever, with a fresh flower in his buttonhole and perfectly polished boots. The de Courcy and Piper Gallery, for such was to be the name of the new venture, was the boldest move yet on to the London art market of the firm of de Courcy and Piper, art dealers.

  In the main gallery, lit in the most dramatic way that London designers could provide, were Titians and Tintorettos, on the opposite wall Bellinis and Giorgiones. In the smaller room next door the lesser gods of the Venetian pantheon were on display, the Bassanos and Carpaccios, the Bordones and the Vivarinis. Venetian Paintings had been acclaimed as the most dramatic exhibition that year in London. The paintings had come on loan from Paris and the great houses of England to dazzle and bewitch the citizens of London with their colour and their enigmatic beauty. Today, Piper reminded himself, the exhibition had been open for exactly one month.

  As he reached his office William Alaric Piper took out a large cigar and opened his correspondence. His office was filled with files, for William Alaric Piper believed that knowledge was the key to success. Quite simply he was determined to discover the location
of all the valuable paintings in Britain. Then he would move on to France and Italy. Neatly arranged in alphabetical order were the counties of the kingdom, some thicker than others, detailing the collections of Petworth and Knebworth and Chatsworth, Knole and Kingston Lacy and Kedleston Hall. Sometimes individual entries were marked with a strange system of asterisks. These told the initiated how severe were the financial problems of the owners of the paintings. One asterisk meant major trouble, might be persuaded to sell. Two asterisks meant technically insolvent, desperate to raise money. And three asterisks meant that financial Armageddon was imminent and might only be averted by the judicious sale of some of the family heirlooms. This intelligence system was run by Piper’s partner Edmund de Courcy Since his father’s death de Courcy had been employed first as an apprentice and then as a junior partner in the business – his speciality to maintain an accurate index of the fluctuating fortunes of the English rich so the firm of de Courcy and Piper could make an offer at precisely the right time.

  There was one incongruous item in this haven of knowledge. On the wall directly opposite Piper’s desk was an enormous map of the United States of America with the railroad routes marked in a variety of different colours. Crawling across the continent went the Baltimore and Ohio, the Central Pacific Railroad, the Union Pacific, the Atcheson Topeka and Santa Fe. Casual visitors might have thought that Piper was a great devotee of railway travel, intent one day perhaps on traversing the length and breadth of the American continent. They would have been wrong. Piper disliked trains intensely. His favourite means of transport was the transatlantic liner, sailing in unimaginable luxury across the Atlantic.

  For Piper the map symbolized American money, the vast American wealth that had been created by the railroads. Vanderbilt and Morgan, Stanford and Huntington had a daily income from the railroads greater than Piper had earned in his entire life. Piper’s ambition was to conquer the American art market. The new millionaires with their vast town houses in New York, their improbable chateaux in Newport, their yachts, their vulgar furnishings, were beginning to buy European pictures, usually of inferior quality. They had, after all, as Piper gleefully reminded himself from time to time, a great deal of wall space to fill. Once they had been tutored in the glories of the Old Masters Piper dreamt of Old Master prices, Old Master profits for himself, and a spurious second-hand immortality for their new owners. Already he had plans to infiltrate the beating heart of American money, New York’s Fifth Avenue.

  As he opened his letters a smile, a rather wolfish smile, crossed his face. A note from his agent in New York told him that a certain William P. McCracken, master of all the railroads that radiated north, south and west of Boston, was coming to London shortly. He had made reservations at the Piccadilly Hotel. Piper too would visit the Piccadilly Hotel. Perhaps he would take the adjacent suite to this William P. McCracken. A meeting would be engineered with the sole purpose of introducing the millionaire to the joys of European painting. Perhaps he would be able to escort him round the National Gallery. Then he would receive a special invitation to the exhibition. Then, if Piper judged the time was right – he had observed that too many of his rivals rushed their fences and lost valuable business by excessive haste in selling – he would tempt the railroad king until he had to buy. Above all, he reminded himself, he had to make a friend of McCracken. He would become a friend for life. After all, McCracken’s money was going to last for life. And McCracken, unlike many of his fellow plutocrats, was still fairly young. What a collection William Alaric Piper could build for him! How much wealth could be quietly removed from the McCracken accounts in the banks of Wall Street into the coffers of William Alaric Piper!

  A couple of miles to the west a military inspection was under way in Chelsea.

  ‘Stand at ease!’ said the tall Sergeant Major figure with the brown curly hair and the blue eyes.

  ‘Attention!’ The troops banged their feet on the floor, eyes staring rigidly ahead, fists pressed tightly to their sides.

  ‘Shoulder arms!’ shouted the Sergeant Major. A couple of shortened broom handles made their way slowly up into the correct position.

  ‘By the left, quick march!’ The little platoon moved off smartly towards the window.

  ‘Squad, halt!’ said the Sergeant Major, nearly tripping over a chair.

  ‘About turn!’ The figures shuffled awkwardly round to face the way they had come.

  ‘By the left, quick march! Left, left, left, left right left.’ The parade was rapidly approaching the double doors of the drawing room. The Sergeant Major, whose mind had temporarily wandered off somewhere else, recalled himself to his duty.

  ‘Squad, halt!’ He was only just in time. One more pace and the heads of the platoon would have crashed into the hard wood of the doors.

  ‘Squad, stand at ease!’ One of the figures refused to move.

  ‘You there, at the back, you miserable rapscallion, you! What did I just say? I said stand at ease! If you can’t obey orders in this battalion it’ll be bread and water for thirty days! Stand at ease!’

  A foot banged into the floorboards. Two arms went behind the back. A face looked rather sad at the prospect of bread and water for thirty days.

  ‘Squad, dismiss!’

  Two small figures turned round and leapt into their father’s arms. Lord Francis Powerscourt held his two children, the six-year-old Thomas and the five-year-old Olivia, very tightly and laughed.

  ‘You were nearly in trouble there,’ he said, ruffling Olivia’s hair. ‘Bread and water for thirty days. Don’t think you would have liked that, would you?’

  ‘Would you really have done that, Papa?’ asked the little girl, staring up into Powerscourt’s eyes.

  ‘You never know,’ said her father. ‘You never know what the Sergeant Major might have to do.’

  Lord Francis Powerscourt had served in the army in India as an intelligence officer of the Crown. Since then he had become one of the foremost investigators in Britain, called in to solve murders and mysteries in England and abroad. A month before he had taken the children to visit his former Sergeant Major, recently installed in scarlet luxury as a Chelsea Pensioner. Sergeant Major Collins had always seemed a most formidable figure on the parade ground to Powerscourt but he had been wonderful with Thomas and Olivia. He had shown them the great hall where the Duke of Wellington’s body had lain in state before his funeral in 1852, the pensioners guarding the great warrior twenty-four hours a day. He had shown them his tiny room with the bed that folded into the wall. The children had been enchanted and immediately wanted to know why they didn’t have a similar arrangement at home. He had sat them down on the lawns that stretched down to the Thames and told them stories of strange Indian tribesmen with great beards, of campfires in the high mountains, of the terrible cold in the Crimea where he had lost a toe.

  ‘God bless them, sir,’ Sergeant Major Collins had said to Powerscourt as they left. ‘It makes you feel young just to be around them, so it does. I don’t have any grandchildren of my own, you see, so it brightens an old man’s week.’

  ‘Think of them as honorary grandchildren of your own, Sergeant Major,’ Powerscourt had said. ‘Make no mistake, we shall come again.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll want to look at the pictures,’ James Hammond-Burke said rather sadly to Edmund de Courcy that same afternoon. The Hammond-Burkes lived in a crumbling Elizabethan house called Truscott Park in Warwickshire, blessed with red deer and a river running through the grounds. The interior was not blessed. Decades of lack of money had left it in a sad condition.

  Edmund had gained entrance by his usual ploy. He had a standard letter which stated that he was compiling a four-volume compendium on the artistic treasures held in Great Britain, to appear volume by volume over a period of ten years. A number of firms were described as being involved in the venture, foremost among them de Courcy and Piper of Old Bond Street, London. De Courcy explained to the houses he visited that the great advantage of his firm being in
volved was that any owners who wished to extend their collections could apply to de Courcy and Piper who would know where more Carpaccios or Caravaggios could be found and, possibly, purchased to extend existing collections. In the unlikely event of anybody wanting to sell – and how unlikely that must be, de Courcy would always exclaim with a charming smile at this point – then reluctantly, very reluctantly, the house of de Courcy and Piper would see what service they might offer.

  It so happened that most of the houses de Courcy visited were in need of repair. New roofs, fresh plumbing, the urgent need for modern kitchens were all crying out for money that was not there.

  Most of the Hammond-Burke pictures were in the Great Hall and the dining room. ‘I think it might be easier if you left me for a while,’ de Courcy said to his host. ‘I need to make notes.’ He pointed to a forbidding large black notebook in his left hand. Everywhere he went de Courcy made copious notes of all the paintings and sculpture in the houses. This was the cover story. He knew that he could quite soon produce, if he had to, the first volume of the proposed compendium. The real purpose of his visit was to see what might sell, what might fetch the highest prices.

  He sat down at a small writing table and set to work. There were few houses he visited which did not lay claim to Titians and Van Dycks. Sure enough, there they were, on either side of the great fireplace. De Courcy inspected them carefully and shook his head. ‘Here we go again,’ he said to himself. By this stage of his new career Edmund de Courcy had acquired a very considerable knowledge of the works of the Old Masters. He had once boasted to William Alaric Piper that he could spot a fake Titian at fifty paces. Here were some more. Generations of English tourists on the Grand Tour had been fleeced by their hosts. The devious Venetians, the even more devious Romans had been quick to discover which Old Masters particularly appealed to their visitors. A few days or a few weeks later, copies or forgeries would mysteriously appear to be carried home in triumph to the broad fields of Hampshire and Surrey.