by A. D. Scott
“Where would a Leonardo drawing have come from?” Joanne still couldn’t take in the idea that Alice Ramsay had such a valuable work of art and kept it secret.
“After the war, ‘lost’ artworks were, still are, being bought and sold with no questions asked about how they were acquired.”
Joanne could hear the quotation marks around “lost.” “In that case, how can Mr. Forsythe sell it?”
“Finders keepers, he says.” Sandy sounded annoyed. After the last debacle and the letter from a furious Alice Ramsay that arrived only a few days before the news of her suicide, he had little time for the art critic. But the man stirred up debate, and that sold newspapers. “Talk it over with McAllister. Let me know if there’s anything to add from your end, a valedictory article perhaps. ‘The Mystery of Miss Alice Ramsay.’ She’s gone, so it won’t hurt.”
Joanne knew how newspapers worked, but she knew Alice would have hated any more publicity. Then again, maybe she could avenge Alice’s treatment by Forsythe; he had exposed her and used her, making himself out to be an arbiter of all things artistic. Now he would profit from her death. “Thanks, Sandy, for letting me know rather than . . .”
“Rather than having McAllister read over the breakfast table that he’s been bested by Forsythe?” He laughed. “I was tempted.”
Joanne put down the telephone and stared at the small oil painting they’d hung in the hallway. She loved it. A copy of a Pierre Bonnard painting of a vase of flowers, she’d decided, after finding his work in an art book.
She wandered into the sitting room. Leonardo da Vinci? Sandy Marshall’s revelation made her fear that the two small drawings she’d found amongst the papers in the writing box might also be genuine. Although taken with them, she hadn’t given them much thought. But what if they were genuine Leonardo works? She was too nervous to take them out and examine them. Even the thought of holding such ancient pieces of paper, of reading the notes, the thoughts of the great man, made her tremble.
The artworks hanging on the walls now seemed larger, brighter. I know they are copies, but what if even one of them is genuine? And how would I find out? She dismissed the idea. Mr. Fancy Wes’coat Forsythe would have bought them if they were.
She opened the portfolio of watercolors. These are real. She remembered glancing at a notebook on the kitchen table in Alice’s farmhouse, admiring a half-finished sketch of a vase of flowers.
She opened the writing box and brought out another folder. The drawings were small; their simple lines, the handwriting, and most of all their possible provenance imbued them with a spiritual value no anonymous artist could command. The paper had seemed dirty when she first looked at it. Now she knew the discoloration was age. The ink seemed to float on the surface as lightly as a thought. She held her breath; a puff of wind, a drop of moisture, and, she imagined, the writing and images would dissolve.
Who could tell me if they are genuine?
She closed the folder, closed the box. She turned the brass key in the brass lock. Her hands felt clammy.
She walked across to the painting of an unknown but definitely Continental countryside. The painting was set back in a gilt frame with elaborate gilt carved-wood curlicues, a fitting piece for a baroque theater. She brought over the footstool, kicked off her shoes. One foot on the tapestry cover, her knee began to tremble. She paused. Stepped up again. She dropped the key onto the top of the frame.
As she stepped down, she thought of her former mother-in-law’s expression, “a right palaver.” She shook her head. Stop being so suspicious. Forsythe was a man obsessed, certainly. A killer? Surely not.
She waited until that precious time, the time between the girls going to bed and McAllister putting on a record they would both enjoy. He would pour a whisky, although more and more lately it was wine, and they would talk. These shoes and ships and sealing-wax conversations she so loved.
Having hoarded the tale tight to her all afternoon and into the evening, the sentences burst out rapidly, breathlessly, and absolutely clearly.
“Sandy called. That drawing you bid against Forsythe for, the one I wanted, it’s a genuine Leonardo Da Vinci.”
“It’s a what?” He’d heard her, just needed to process the information.
She looked at him, shaking her head to one side, seeing in his face a reflection of her earlier shock. “I know. It’s incredible.”
“So does that mean . . . ?” He was gesturing around at the walls with a whisky glass in hand, but practiced Scotsman that he was, not a drop was spilt.
“I don’t think so.” Even after only a short few months together, they communicated in that verbal shorthand of most married couples. “But maybe.”
“Crivens.”
“Aye, crivens.”
Neither could have said who started laughing first. “Crivens,” McAllister repeated, shaking his head, bemused by the idea of a genuine old master, albeit a sketch, being discovered in an auction sale up a Highland glen. “Tell me exactly what Sandy said.”
She did.
“So Forsythe must have known,” he commented when she’d finished, “but how?”
Of all the thoughts Joanne had had, this was not one of them. “How? I don’t know.” She jerked up in her chair, spilling the art book she’d been examining. “Did he know her before she came to Sutherland? Or was he just an acknowledged art expert appearing for the defense at her trial?”
“Miss Ramsay’s solicitor might know. I’ll get Calum to find out.”
“Perhaps we should ask Mrs. Mackenzie. She’s bound to know how he came to be at the trial.” Seeing his expression whenever Mrs. Mackenzie was mentioned, she grinned. “Only kidding.” Her misgiving at voicing the question was overcome by a need for her husband’s opinion. “I was wondering . . .”
He could see it was more than wondering.
“Would someone . . . I mean, do you think a person would do something bad for that drawing?”
“Forsythe?” He didn’t use the word either. But the possibilities were between them: steal, kill, murder. “I don’t know. Some would. It’s not only the money, it’s the prestige of recognizing a wee drawing for what it really is.”
She knew to not say this proved Alice didn’t kill herself, for she knew that was illogical.
But McAllister guessed. “Concentrate on the manuscript. Then we’ll try to find a publisher. It’s the best we can do for Alice Ramsay.”
Alice’s work was taking most of Joanne’s time and concentration. Her own short stories—some no more than extended captions or chapter ideas—she allowed to float. When they were ripe, she would catch them, as though plucking some literary fruit from an ideas tree. Some days it was only a heading. “When Mrs. MacGillivary Dropped Her Wedding Ring Down the Well.” Some stories were a line or two, and two of them were a few paragraphs. The postman’s story was almost ready to be edited and retyped. The witch idea had yet to find a plot.
She started every story idea on a fresh sheet of paper and wrote by hand with a fountain pen in black ink. Blue ink was for correspondence with friends and family; black ink was serious.
Notes on Alice’s manuscript she typed. The artist’s system was logical, starting with the species’ names in alphabetical order, making it easy for an editor and a reader to follow. Usually, the flowers and brackens and trees were identified initially by their Latin names, then the common names, then the Scottish names if different from English. There was a note from Alice with a line crossed through it: “arrange by color?” That had made Joanne smile, as she liked the idea, but could see it would be hard to persuade a publisher to agree.
Today, though, was different: no work on the manuscript, no work on the stories. All Joanne could think of were the two small, faded drawings. Why hadn’t she shared her discovery with McAllister? And should she have the other artworks evaluated in light of the revelation? She had no answer to the first question and, for an answer to the second, didn’t know where to turn. Alice Ramsay, what secrets were y
ou hiding?
The telephone rang.
“Hello.”
“Hiya.”
“Rob. What’s up?”
“I hear the joker in the velvet waistcoat found a Leonardo.”
“The distinguished art expert, you mean.”
“Aye, him. McAllister said your paintings might be fakes, but—”
“Studies!” a voice she recognized as Hector’s shouted in the background.
“Shut up,” Rob said. “Sorry, not you, Joanne. The pest is really excited. It seems we have a distinguished art expert in the office—or so he tells me. And after hearing the news of a genuine Leonardo, he’s desperate to check out your pictures.”
“I know my stuff.” That was Hec again.
“Really? Truly?” Joanne was delighted.
“We’re coming over,” Rob told her, “so put the kettle on.”
“I can go on ma own,” she heard Hec complain.
“I wouldn’t wish that on my worst—” Someone cut off the conversation. She guessed it was Hector.
She was still in her pajamas and McAllister’s dressing gown. The kitchen was a mess. The sitting room needed Hoovering. She was debating whether to tidy or to dress first. Dress, she told herself. It’s only Rob and Hector, and they won’t notice if it’s untidy.
There was something in the way Hector would examine her that always made her straighten her shoulders, push back her hair. With people, Hec saw a subject, an object even, and when he took a shot, often sneakily, he could bring out that indefinable something that revealed the essence of the person.
She was leaning forwards, her head upside down, to brush her hair, when she heard the distant throb of Rob’s pride and joy, a red Triumph Bonneville motorbike.
Opening the door for them, she watched Hector hop off the bike. With a camera bag around his shoulder and a woolen balaclava hiding his marmalade-colored hair, he trotted up the path. Rob sauntered behind, his bike jacket and boots and airman’s goggles giving the impression he’d stepped off the page of a Biggles book.
“Paintings first or tea and gingerbread?” she asked.
Hector hopped from foot to foot. “Gingerbread, I can smell it.”
“But you can’t eat it, not with that thing on your head.” Rob yanked off the woolen helmet.
Hec yelled, “Ouch! You pulled ma hair out!”
Joanne smiled, envious of the easy, teasing camaraderie. She missed working, joking, thinking, sharing ideas, worries, front-page scoops, and coups in the cramped reporters’ room that smelled of men and cigarettes, the place where she met McAllister, the place where she grew up—finally, at the age of twenty-nine.
She made Hector sit at the kitchen table to eat his gingerbread; she had no energy to Hoover the carpets after his visit. Finished, he washed his hands thoroughly at the kitchen sink. He might be clumsy, but when it came to his professional persona, he was neat and knowledgeable.
Joanne and Rob followed Hector into the sitting room. He stood in the center of the washed-out Persian rug and slowly turned in a complete circle, eyeing the paintings and sketches at a distance, murmuring all the while, “Right. I see. Uh-huh. Och-och.” Then he stepped towards the paintings propped up on the mantelpiece. “Can I?” he asked.
She nodded. “Of course.”
He lifted what she considered one of her favorites, the still life with onions. He turned it around. “Aaah.” He made the sound softly, slowly, and then he put the picture back. The perhaps Picasso he was quicker with. “Mmmm.” He examined all the pictures plus the Bonnard look-alike in the hallway. Back in the sitting room, he said, “I’m pretty sure most of them are studies—really good ones, though.”
“Aye, they’d have to be copies, otherwise that fox Forsythe would have snapped them up at the auction,” Joanne agreed.
“They are not copies; they are studies.” Hec went into lecturing mode. “See, when you study art, you—”
“What about these?” Rob had been half-listening, more interested in nosing around Joanne’s manuscript and the books in the boxes McAllister had yet to finish unpacking.
“Don’t have enough bookshelves,” he’d replied when Joanne asked for the fourth time when he was going to unpack them.
“Rob!” she called out as he tried to open the writing box.
“It’s OK, I won’t read your private stuff—well, only a few paragraphs.” He leaned over a page still in the typewriter. “This is good. I like the opening.”
“These watercolors are really skillful,” Hec said. “The page composition an’ all.” He was holding the pages by their edges, laying them carefully on the tablecloth. “You need to put acid-free paper between the sheets. It costs a fortune, but I get it on Gazette expenses, so . . .” He winked at her. “Then you need to photograph them.” He reached for another illustration, this one of a clump of bog cotton. “I can do it for you if you like.”
“Would you?” She lifted a folder with a selection of Alice’s watercolors of the glens and the beach and the cathedral for Hector. The drawings locked in the writing box were what she really wanted to know about but daren’t ask. “I’d love to see Miss Ramsay’s manuscript published as a memento.” Of a life ended so horribly, she didn’t say.
“I’m your man.” He grinned at her, that half-boy half-man mad-troll grin, and seeing his enthusiasm, she was all the more determined to see the work published.
“I have to get going.” Rob had had enough of the pictures; fakes, studies, whatever they were they were not genuine, so he lost interest.
“See ya,” Hec said.
Rob shrugged. “Any chance of another slice of gingerbread?” he asked.
Joanne watched him lope down the garden path, bike key in one hand, and a fat slice of gingerbread in the other.
“Hector . . .”
He squinted up at her. He knew that tone; it was the same when his wee sister wanted something but was too shy to ask.
“Hector, there are two wee drawings I think might be important. No one knows about them. I locked them up and hid the key, and . . .”
They fetched the stepladder from the laundry. Key retrieved, she took out the folder and laid it on the table.
He opened the folder carefully. Touching only the top and bottom edges, he separated the drawings, and Joanne felt guilty she hadn’t thought to put tissue between the pages. He stared. For almost two minutes, he did nothing but stare, turning his gaze from left to right, from top to bottom. He peered down. He stood back. “Do you have a magnifying glass?”
“Somewhere,” she answered, knowing the only one they had was with Annie’s abandoned stamp-collecting project. “I think there is writing on the back.” She went to turn a drawing over.
“Don’t touch.” Hector was a man transformed, green eyes shining like a cornered wildcat’s, every freckle in his pale face sharp as stars in a clear midwinter midnight sky. “These are special.”
She stepped back. “Sorry.” She blew out a long, deep breath. “Sorry, Hector, it’s just I’m scared they might be . . . you know.”
“Real. I know.”
He bent over the drawings once more, examining them through the glass.
Much as a surgeon might examine the insides of a brain, Joanne thought.
Holding a page between thumb and forefinger, he held it up to the light. He put it down. Then sat down, staring not at the drawings but into another time. All he could eventually say was, “Crikey!”
All she could say was, “Fancy another cup of tea?”
“That’d be grand.”
She went to the kitchen. Filling the kettle, she could feel the excitement as a knot, a twist, in her stomach.
They didn’t speak until halfway through the first cup.
“I’m no certain. But if I am right . . . seeing yon . . . and . . .”
His eyes seemed wet, but she couldn’t be sure. She shared his feelings. “For me, it’s cathedrals. I stand in them and am completely overawed.”
“Does
anyone else know?”
“McAllister knows about the paintings. But not the drawings. I kept them hidden because . . .” She glanced up at the clock. Her husband would be home soon. “I don’t know why I hid them.” Not completely true; she wanted to keep them to herself for as long as possible—to enjoy, to marvel, to feel a pleasure as high and as clear and as uplifting as any visit to a cathedral—knowing that when she told someone, even her husband, she would have to give them up. To whom, she didn’t know.
Hector was also feeling covetous of the drawings. “Keep it that way for now. We’ll work out what to do later.”
She was flicking a pencil between her fingers, the frustration and the distress over Alice’s fate gnawing at her. All very well for my husband to tell me to let it go, but there had to be a reason for her to kill herself. If in fact she did. “Hector, why do you think Miss Ramsay killed herself?”
“I’ve never given it much thought.”
“She was really distressed by the gossip about her before and after the trial.”
“Aye, Rob told me. But what other people say and think is no reason to kill yourself.”
Joanne was startled by Hector’s conviction. Her own experience of malicious tongues was partly the reason she was so obsessed with the fate of Alice.
“I’m sure people say things about me, and I know for definite some call ma granny an old witch.”
Joanne smiled. Hec’s granny would be a star in a production of Macbeth.
“So why bother giving them harpies the satisfaction of gaining a hold over you?” he asked.
“Thank you for saying that, Hector.”
He stared at her. To him it was so obvious.
“I know, sticks and stones and all that. I’ve experienced how much malicious gossip hurts. Maybe that is why I am . . . why I am so sympathetic to Alice Ramsay.” Obsessed, she was about to say but didn’t. “Do you think the drawings and these paintings might be connected to her death?”
