Death of an Old Master (3 page)

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 involved 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.

‘1,’ he wrote: ‘Isabella, wife of Emperor Charles V of Spain. 2: Christ on the Cross.’ Then he wrote ‘titian’ without the capital T to remind himself that the
paintings were not genuine works by the master. He continued through a whole series devoted to ancestor worship which took him from Number 3 to Number 41 across four pages of his book. A cavalcade
of previous Hammond-Burkes, sometimes simply Hammond, at other times simply Burke, stared down at him. There were Thomases and Sarahs, Alices and Williams, Henrys and Constances. Most of them
looked pretty pleased with their lot, apart from one old woman, painted by an unknown hand, who was scowling at the painter as if she wished he would go away. The artists were various, a couple of
Knellers that looked genuine, a couple of Gainsboroughs that looked doubtful.

But it was a painting to the left of the fireplace in the dining room that took his fancy. It was listed in his black catalogue as Number 75.

The Holy Family with Lamb
, the inscription on the frame declared. Rafaello Sanzio, called Raphael. De Courcy peered at it carefully. In the top left-hand corner was one of those imaginary
Renaissance cities on the edge of a lake, two small figures trudging towards it along a dusty road. In the bottom left-hand corner was the lamb with the infant Christ sitting astride it. Holding on
to the child was a Madonna in deep blue with a red blouse. Above her stood an old man, leaning on a staff, peering with adoration at the sacrificial victims below. The painting was suffused with a
pastoral devotion. The Madonna, de Courcy decided, was not one of those Florentine beauties to be found in the Uffizi or the Pitti Palace. This one looked as though she might have tilled the fields
or milked the cows herself. But Raphael. Was it a Raphael? De Courcy stepped back to inspect the picture from a distance. He took a small eyeglass and looked closely at the brushwork. He
contemplated the composition of
The Holy Family with Lamb.
He looked out of the window at the river rushing past the terrace, the deer grazing peacefully in their pasture.

Two thoughts were uppermost in Edmund de Courcy’s mind as he completed his entry in the black book. The first was that Raphael commanded very high prices. For some reason he always had.
Murillos might drift in and out of fashion, Lawrences could come and go, but Raphael, along with Leonardo and Michelangelo, always sold for fabulous sums. Less than twenty years ago the Government
had purchased Raphael’s
Ansidei Madonna
for the National Gallery for seventy-thousand pounds from the Duke of Marlborough. The second thought was that this house merited three stars in
his private annotation of relative penury. The Hammond-Burkes were virtually bankrupt, if not worse.

He strolled back through the house to greet his host. Hammond-Burke was seated at a small table in a sitting room just off the Great Hall. Outside de Courcy could see the weeds bursting through
the gravel, the untrimmed lawns, the broken windows still unrepaired. He remembered the many damp patches on the walls of the dining room. Hammond-Burke was looking disconsolately at a pile of
papers in front of him. Reading one or two of them upside down de Courcy noticed that they were bills, probably unpaid, possibly final demands.

‘What a splendid collection of pictures you have here,’ he began with a flattering smile. ‘Easily one of the best I’ve seen.’

His host was not encouraged by the news. He continued staring at his bills.

‘Is there any chance,’ de Courcy went on brightly, ‘that you might want to add to your collection? Two Gainsboroughs are always an asset, four Gainsboroughs would be more than
twice as good!’

James Hammond-Burke laughed. He went on laughing. The laugh turned hysterical. He picked up a couple of his bills and threw them defiantly in the air. ‘Add to the collection, did you
say?’ His face had turned very red. ‘Add to it? That’s good. That’s very good.’ He paused and put his hand to his face. ‘That’s the best thing I’ve
heard this year, oh yes, easily the best.’

He stopped as if he had said too much. The normal look of melancholy pain returned to his features. De Courcy waited. This was the crucial moment. In the early days he and William Alaric Piper
had rehearsed the various ways these interviews about the compendium might develop. Piper had the ability to become an irascible if impoverished duke or a proud and haughty squire who would both be
quick to anger if the wrong proposition was put to them. Englishmen after all are always loath to part with their possessions, however trying the circumstances. De Courcy thought that the
Marlborough sale must have made it easier for them. If one of the foremost members of the aristocracy could sell the most valuable objects in his collection to pay his debts, then the smaller fish
in the pond might feel easier about doing likewise. On more than one occasion in these rehearsals the Piper figure had thrown de Courcy out of the imaginary house for impudence and discourtesy.