by Katie Khan
‘I’ve been looking.’ Isaac sucks in a breath, about to speak, when Thea continues.
‘Have you considered that maybe this lady’s my great-great-grandmother?’ Thea says bluntly, gesturing at the painting. ‘Or my great-great-grandmother’s sister? Or, perhaps, somebody in my family saw this painting once and thought it might be fun to make me wear my rings in the same triangle formation? I’ve done it for years. Years, Isaac.’
Isaac is silent.
‘Three rings is scant proof.’ Thea sticks her hand in her pocket, not wanting to admit she’s finding them unnerving. ‘What else have you got?’
‘It’s not just the rings. It’s the likeness … and we’ll get the painting’s history …’
‘Because Rosy—’
‘Thea,’ Isaac says, and for once she stops speaking at the firmness of his tone. ‘When it comes to Rosy, there are no leads.’ His eyes meet hers. ‘Not a single one. Urvisha’s found nothing. Ayo’s found nothing. And I’ve searched everywhere I can think of; every database, archive, social media site, family history, lists of births, deaths, wills – everywhere. There’s no sign of a Rosalind de Glanville anywhere else in history but now.’
Thea lets that sink in.
‘But you,’ he says, ‘you’ve run the experiment multiple times – you just admitted as much. You’ve experimented with time travel on numerous occasions and now here you are, on the wall of the National Portrait Gallery.’
She blinks, but when she speaks, her voice is softer, calmer. ‘What am I supposed to have done, Isa? Gone back in time, sat for a portrait and then come home?’ she says. ‘When?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s too much of a coincidence to ignore. We have to piece it together because, right now, this is the only clue we have.’
They step aside as a group of tourists enter the gallery, snapping photos on oversized cameras.
‘Oh,’ she says finally, dismayed.
‘You see?’ he says.
‘I see. No leads.’
‘This is a lead,’ he corrects.
‘No proof.’ Thea eyes the tourists’ cameras longingly, wishing for the clean capture of a photograph, rather than a muted oil painting hanging on the wall of a Tudor gallery.
‘Shall we get out of here?’ Isaac suggests.
‘Yes, please.’
‘Where do you want to go?’
Thea looks up. ‘Somewhere with wine.’
They find a spot in the bar on the top floor of the gallery, taking a seat by the window with far-reaching views across a vaulted glass roof to Nelson’s Column and beyond. It’s an incredible panorama, a slice of rooftop London filled with icons and landmarks.
But they’re not admiring the view.
In his hand Isaac holds a postcard of NPG 1488 bought from the gift shop downstairs, which he turns over and over between his fingers as he orders a flat white from the waiter.
‘I’ll have a glass of rosé, please,’ Thea says. ‘Large.’
When the waiter moves away, Isaac leans towards her over the black leather menu. ‘You really don’t remember when you might have jumped?’ he says, his voice no more than a whisper in the busy restaurant and bar.
‘Not a thing.’
‘When did you—?’
The barman arrives quickly with their order and Thea takes the wineglass gratefully from his hands, downing a large gulp. ‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘I really needed that.’
‘You know, I’ve never heard you say that.’
Her eyes flick up to the right as she thinks. ‘You’re right. I’ve not felt like I’ve ever needed a drink, before.’ She glances at the postcard on the table between them. ‘But it’s not every day you’re told you time travelled back to a past century and ended up in an oil painting hanging in the National Portrait Gallery.’
He flashes a grin, then begins typing on his phone.
‘What are you doing?’ Thea murmurs.
‘I’m tweeting a curator,’ Isaac says.
‘Huh?’
‘If you use the hashtag #AskACurator, someone from the gallery will answer. I’ve left my tweet pretty vague, but I thought we could use the help.’ Thea would usually boggle at him expressing something so personal, sharing their search online with strangers, but she says nothing. They’ve argued before about the validity of social media and, while she doesn’t see the value in many of the platforms, she can at least appreciate the idea of connecting with experts.
‘Okay,’ she says, and he looks surprised that she hasn’t kicked up more of a fuss.
‘Okay,’ he repeats, smiling, then returns to looking serious. ‘When did you run the experiment alone?’
‘When I first got to the farmhouse,’ she says honestly. ‘And a couple of times since. Nothing happened, though. I woke on the floor of the barn – it was a failure. A double failure, if you consider that I must have knocked myself out. Do you remember anything?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Was there a power cut?’
This time he does look out over the rooftops of London, the spire of the Houses of Parliament just visible behind the pillar of Nelson’s Column. ‘No, I don’t think so. The first time, you triggered a blackout in Oxford – while I was in New York. Then on Rosy’s leap, I got held up at Heathrow Airport after I landed because the power had cut out nationwide overnight. So if you really did leap back far enough to appear in a nineteenth-century painting, by rights you should have taken out the power for the whole damn continent of Europe.’
‘It wouldn’t work like that.’
Isaac looks surprised. ‘I was speaking in hyperbole. But it wouldn’t?’
‘Urvisha showed me how the National Grid works.’ She pauses, catching sight of Isaac’s eyes glazing over as she warms to her theme of the logistical challenge of distributing high-voltage electricity. ‘There’s a power flow running from the north of the country to the south,’ she says more simply. ‘In fact, I should talk to Visha about that. Because of the north-south power loss, we’d actually have better luck running the experiment on the south coast – better generation capacity.’
The waiter bustles back, arranging crockery in front of them. The restaurant is much too fancy; they should have gone outside to a cafe where they’d be left alone, but they’re committed now.
‘I can’t believe you’re still looking for ways to improve it,’ Isaac says as he takes a sip of coffee. ‘You really are incorrigible.’
Thea’s eyes have softened from the wine, and she watches him from above the rim as she finishes the rosé from the oversized glass. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t mean to get sidetracked by the theory again.’
‘Don’t you remember anything?’ he says.
‘You really want to talk about the experiment?’ she asks.
‘It would seem pressing.’
She looks at him, her face speculative. ‘I didn’t tell you I was working on it alone, because you’d have told me not to.’
Isaac leans forward. ‘When do I ever tell you what you should do? When would you ever listen?’
‘That’s true,’ she says, putting down the glass. ‘You never tell me I shouldn’t do something. You just disappear instead.’
He watches her, not rising to meet the fight.
‘Sometimes I wish I’d had somebody – anybody – to tell me no. “You can’t do that, Thea,”’ she says, her voice slurring a fraction. ‘“Do your homework, Thea. Go to bed, Thea.”’
‘You always did your homework and went to bed.’ He speaks quietly.
‘Maybe that’s why – I was my own parent. Maybe I’m my own grandmother, too. Could that work? If I went back in time and I …’ She pauses, and he waits for her to finish, allowing the rant to play out. In all their years at university together, she’d only once mentioned her family.
The splash of cutlery is loud in the restaurant, the rain tapping against the windowpane like an inquisitive stranger.
‘I never talk about my family,’ she sa
ys eventually, her voice almost lost beneath the scrape of plates. ‘Mainly because they died when I was a child.’
‘You told me that, once.’ Isaac’s face is sympathetic.
Maudlin, Thea scowls at the wineglass as though it’s an enemy, feeling the bottoming-out of emotion alcohol can so often bring. She reaches instead for the water Isaac has poured, sitting quietly for a moment with her thoughts.
Isaac’s phone chirrups. ‘Would you look at that,’ he murmurs, audibly impressed. ‘A curator’s replied. Isn’t technology great?’
‘What do they say?’
He pushes back his chair. ‘The curator can tell us the history of the painting,’ he says. ‘Which sounds like a great place to start.’
‘No, Isaac.’
‘No?’
‘We need to be searching for Rosy. I’m here, I’m fine. She’s not.’
Isaac is adamant. ‘It’s all related; if we can trace you back in time, then we can trace Rosalind de Glanville. I’m sure of it. Right now, this is the only lead we’ve got. Don’t you want to discount it, at least?’
Thea gets to her feet as Isaac indicates to the waiter that they want to pay the bill. She reaches over and downs the rest of Isaac’s cooling mug of coffee, with the hope the caffeine will knock the after-effects of her rosé on the head. ‘But I came back, Isaac. Why hasn’t Rosy?’
Isaac leads the way out of the gallery restaurant, away from the rooftops, back down into the darkened womb of the Tudor gallery. ‘That’s what I’m hoping to find out.’
Together they make their way through the mauve-walled rooms, past the floor-to-ceiling gold frames, back to the modestly sized oil painting. ‘Hello again,’ Thea says aloud, as though greeting an old friend, and Isaac hides a smile. He paces in front of NPG 1488, looking at one side of the gilt frame, then the other.
‘Portrait of an Unknown Woman, formerly known as Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby,’ Thea reads once again, paying more attention this time to the smaller, italicized text at the bottom of the description plaque.
‘Hi there,’ says a voice, and Thea looks round in surprise.
Isaac shakes the hand of a woman in a smart bottle-green suit holding an iPad, who then stretches out her hand towards Thea.
‘This is Helen Claassen,’ Isaac says. ‘She’s a curator here.’ At Thea’s confusion: ‘From the tweet.’
‘Oh,’ Thea says, ‘I see.’
Helen smiles, her mouth set in a professional line. ‘You had some questions about this painting, in particular? It’s not often we get tweets from people inside the building, so I thought I’d come down and see you.’
‘Thank you,’ Isaac says smoothly. ‘I wondered if you could tell us about its – er – history?’
‘Its provenance?’ she says, raising her voice as a particularly loud guided tour makes its way past. ‘Of course. It’s oil on panel, probably wood, and measures –’ Helen Claassen takes out a small tape measure from her suit pocket – ‘445 millimetres by 318. As you can see, it was painted in the nineteenth century, and at the time was identified as a portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby. Do you know much about her?’
Isaac shakes his head, taking his rucksack from his back and pulling out a notepad.
‘“Lady Margaret Beaufort, later Countess of Richmond and Derby”,’ Thea says unexpectedly, reading from the phone screen in her hand in an attempt to hurry up the proceedings. ‘“Born 1443, died 1509. A key figure in the Wars of the Roses and an influential matriarch in the House of Tudor, she is credited with the establishment of two prominent Cambridge colleges.”’ Thea looks up. ‘So if we’d gone to Cambridge—’
‘We’d have known the name instantly,’ Isaac finishes. ‘Bloody Oxford.’
Helen Claassen looks bemused. ‘We know quite a few details about Lady Margaret Beaufort – she was a renowned figure. Margaret was only twelve when she married the twenty-four-year-old Edmund Tudor at the beginning of the Wars of the Roses. Her husband was taken prisoner and died in captivity from plague, leaving Margaret a widow at thirteen, seven months pregnant with their child.’
‘That’s grim,’ Isaac says. ‘She was a child herself.’
‘Lady Margaret gave birth in 1457 to her only child –’ Helen Claassen indulges them with a smile – ‘Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII of England.’
Isaac drops his rucksack loudly on the floor. ‘King Henry VII?’
Thea blinks.
‘Indeed. Lady Margaret was determined her son Henry would become king. She was quite the formidable woman. In fact, King Henry VII built the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey in her honour. She’s buried there.’
‘Why –’ Isaac speaks slowly – ‘was this particular painting – NPG 1488, an Unknown Woman – originally thought to be Lady Margaret Beaufort?’
Helen Claassen lifts her gallery iPad and quickly taps out the name, pulling up the archive of Lady Margaret Beaufort. She moves to sit down on the studded leather bench in the middle of the room. ‘Here, take a seat. This is every portrait of her we have in our collection. They vary from seventeenth-century hand-coloured stipples to the earliest line etchings.’ The curator taps the screen, stopping on a pencil drawing. ‘In many portraits of Lady Margaret Beaufort you’ll see symbols in the background marking the House of Tudor. Then there’s the distinctive ring pattern on her fingers, the unusual positioning. There’s the covered hair – stylistically, Lady Margaret is almost always represented in the same devoutly religious pose.’ She flips from image to image, making her point.
‘That’s an impressive archive system,’ Isaac says, in his element now that they’re no longer in laboratories and barns full of scientific equipment. ‘Can I have a quick look?’
‘Of course.’ Helen hands him the iPad, watching as he flicks through the images, magnifying certain details.
Thea remains standing, itching to continue the search for Rosy. But she remembers what Isaac said about this being their strongest lead, so she stays quiet as he sits beside the curator, looking through portraits of the mother of a king.
‘You mentioned three rings …’ Isaac says.
‘Yes.’ Helen Claassen shows them five different portraits, pointing at the Lady’s hand. ‘They’re unusual.’
Thea leans over, looking at the rings on an ancient stipple engraving. ‘They could be folds in the paper,’ Thea says cynically, ‘or cracks in the canvas.’
‘The pattern is too frequent to be a flaw, or coincidence,’ Helen says, then gestures back up to the portrait on the wall. ‘Like many others, this painting bears those symbols. What’s likely, in this case, is that the painter – the artist is unknown – styled the sitter in such a way to look like Lady Margaret. Royal homage of this nature was incredibly popular in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Profitable, too. It would have made the picture much more valuable. Perhaps the artist needed to earn as much money as possible from the sale of this painting. Conjecture, of course.’ She smiles.
‘Wonderful,’ Isaac says admiringly. ‘You’ve been so helpful. You really know your stuff.’
She doesn’t blush – this is her job. ‘The painting was purchased by the gallery in 1908, and relabelled as Portrait of an Unknown Woman in the middle of the twentieth century.’
‘Would you have,’ Isaac says, ‘any record of the 1908 sale? A receipt, for example?’
Helen Claassen nods. ‘We should do – so long as it wasn’t bestowed on the condition the seller remain anonymous. Would you like me to get that information for you?’
‘That would be great,’ Isaac says, visibly relieved, and as Helen turns back to face the painting he winks at Thea, who shrugs at him.
‘It may take some time. Perhaps if you came back next week—’
‘I’m only in London for the day,’ Thea says, and Isaac blanches.
‘I’m so sorry, Helen – may I call you Helen? – but we’re only down for a short time. Is there any chance … I suppos
e it would be too hard to get the information today?’ Isaac says.
‘Well …’
‘Or perhaps it would be too hard for most people to get the information today.’
‘I’m sure I could find it for you.’
Thea watches with amazement as curator Helen Claassen melts like warm butter folding around a knife, falling for Isaac’s charm.
‘We’re open late on Thursdays,’ she says, ‘so perhaps I could make an exception today.’ She looks solely at Isaac, ignoring Thea. ‘Just this once.’
‘That would be so very kind,’ Isaac says, smiling broadly. ‘I’d be so grateful.’
‘Why don’t you leave me your number,’ she suggests, ‘and I can let you know when I have that information for you?’
‘Oh, lovely. Thanks ever so much.’ Isaac types his number into Helen’s iPad.
But Helen isn’t looking at Isaac any more. She’s looking at Thea, a frown on her face. ‘You know, your sister really does bear a striking similarity to this painting,’ Helen says.
‘I’m not—’
‘Doesn’t she?’ Isaac says lightly. ‘That’s why we’re so keen to learn about the painting’s provenance.’
‘Of course.’ Helen straightens her green jacket. ‘We often help families piece together their ancestry. I’ll see you later,’ she says as they walk back towards the stairs, ‘when I have the documentation.’
‘I can’t thank you enough.’ Isaac kicks Thea.
‘Yes, he can’t thank you enough.’
‘You really are a piece of work,’ Thea says, as they make their way down the two-storey escalator back to the entrance. ‘You’re a terrible flirt.’
Isaac blinks. ‘You think that was flirting?’
Thea smirks. ‘Of course.’
‘I complimented her at her job.’ Isaac turns to face her on the escalator, so he’s travelling backwards. ‘I challenged her to find what we needed, by saying most people wouldn’t be able to. That isn’t flirting –’ he shrugs – ‘that’s efficient.’
‘Fair enough,’ Thea says, wrapping her scarf around her neck.
‘We’re well on our way,’ Isaac says, nodding to himself. ‘The search is on.’
