Death of an Old Master
Page 21
‘Tell me, Mrs de Courcy,’ she said brightly, ‘is the Edmund de Courcy who runs the de Courcy and Piper Gallery in London any relation of yours by any chance?’
Alice de Courcy suddenly came alive, thoughts of the lack of money banished by the mention of her son.
‘Edmund,’ she said proudly, ‘is my son. How is the gallery doing? Is it prospering?’
‘They have just had a most successful exhibition of Venetian paintings, Mrs de Courcy,’ said Powerscourt, his brain shifting suddenly into a different gear. ‘I believe there is talk of the firm opening in New York.’
‘New York?’ said the girls in unison, social isolation suddenly at an end in a glittering succession of soirées on Fifth Avenue and boxes at the Metropolitan Opera House.
‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at their enthusiasm, ‘I don’t think it’s opened quite yet.’ That did not diminish the eagerness of the girls. Lady Lucy saw them both sink into a kind of reverie, a dream of escape.
‘Does Edmund manage to find the time to visit you and the family here?’ asked Powerscourt in his most innocent voice.
‘He is very busy with his work, you understand, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Mrs de Courcy, pouring Lady Lucy another cup of tea, ‘but he has been to see us twice. He stayed for four days and a morning the first time, the second time he could only manage three nights and an afternoon before he had to go home.’ Powerscourt could imagine how every detail of the visit would have been discussed time after time by the three women after Edmund had left, a piece of treasure to last them into their lonely future.
‘We are able to help him in his work,’ said Sarah. ‘We collect old pictures and old picture frames for him and send them over to London.’
Old pictures, old frames, thought Powerscourt. Did forgers need old frames, old canvases on which they could produce fresh works in the manner of the past?
‘But tell me, Lady Powerscourt,’ said Julia, ‘did you attend the exhibition yourself? Did you see Edmund? Was he with anybody special?’
‘And what about his great friend,’ said Sarah, ‘George Carrington, the one who was going to marry that Emily Morgan? Has he married her yet?’
‘And his other friend, the one Mama always liked,’ Julia carried on the interrogation, ‘Robert Packard, is he married yet?’
‘And,’ said Sarah, carried away on the flood, ‘our own dear friend Harriet Ward. Has she married that army officer of hers?’
‘Philip Massie?’ said Julia, blushing slightly. ‘Any news of him?’
‘Ladies, ladies,’ said Lady Lucy, banging her spoon against the side of her cup to plead for silence, ‘please, please. Let me try to answer your questions where I can. I did indeed see your brother at the Venetian exhibition, but he was talking to a huge man, well over six feet, who looked like a prize fighter.’ Roderick Johnston, thought Powerscourt, he of the National Gallery, the large house on the river in Mortlake, recent inheritor from the munificence of Mr Raphael. He suddenly wondered about Mr Raphael’s picture frame. ‘As to the rest of your queries,’ Lady Lucy went on, ‘I can only help you with one of them. George Carrington did marry Emily Morgan, last year I think. The daughter of one of my second cousins was a bridesmaid, I seem to recall. As for the rest I cannot help you now. But if you would like to give me a list of your questions I shall see what I can do and I shall write to you from London. I don’t suppose your brother is of much assistance in such matters. Men usually aren’t.’ She smiled ambiguously at her husband, who nodded sadly in agreement.
‘May we go and write our list, Mama?’ said Julia, as she and Sarah prepared to depart.
‘Of course,’ said Mrs de Courcy, ‘how very kind of Lady Powerscourt to take the trouble to assist you.’
Powerscourt had walked over to the window. Below him in the untidy yard was a miscellaneous collection of old cartwheels, bits of broken furniture, dead sofas whose springs were hanging out in the afternoon sun. He raised his eyes.
‘The view is magnificent, Mrs de Courcy. Mountains and sea, the perfect romantic cocktail. Do you tire of it?’
Alice de Courcy winced. ‘You may call me unromantic, if you wish, Lord Powerscourt, but I tired of it very quickly. It leaves me cold now. I think the girls like it, however.’
‘And are there any plans,’ Powerscourt turned to face his hostess, ‘forgive me if this sounds a rude question, but do you have any plans to come back to England?’
‘I’m sure the girls could come and stay with us during the season, if they would like that,’ said Lady Lucy, offering support and the prospect of unlimited supplies of young men to aid her consort.
‘You have both been very kind,’ said Alice de Courcy. ‘I will tell you, but I would ask you not to pass it on to anybody else.’ The surest way, in normal circumstances, thought Powerscourt, for a piece of news to be disseminated as widely as possible inside a week. But he and Lady Lucy would be true.
‘Edmund has always said,’ the pride in her son rang through Alice de Courcy’s words, ‘that when he has made enough money from the gallery to repair our house in Norfolk and for us all to live comfortably, then he would bring us back. He thought it would be two years from now. But he wrote last week to say that things had gone better than expected with the gallery.’ She paused. They could hear a pair of horses’ hooves fading away down the hill.
‘We could be home for Christmas,’ she said. Lady Lucy could see tears of happiness forming in her eyes. ‘But please don’t tell the girls. I want it to be a surprise.’
Powerscourt was wondering how much money it would take to repair a house near the Norfolk coast left empty for three or four years as they set out down the stairs of the eighteenth-century house in Aregno. Maybe the estate needed improvement as well. Thirty thousand? Forty thousand? He thought of the eighty-five thousand paid for the Raphael. Suppose it was a forgery. Suppose a number of other forgeries had been sold by the outwardly respectable firm of de Courcy and Piper, art dealers of Old Bond Street. Suppose de Courcy took half the proceeds. Surely he could bring his family home now? And suppose some of the forgeries might have been exposed by the late Christopher Montague? Much better to have him out of the way.
His thoughts were interrupted at the front door.
‘Wake up, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘The carriage has gone. It’s simply disappeared.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs de Courcy anxiously, ‘that does happen sometimes with the local coachmen. They forget they’re meant to wait, or they have to be somewhere else. One of ours ran off one day because he had to go to his cousins’ hunting party on the other side of the island.’
‘Damn,’ said Powerscourt, striding to the front of the little drive to see if the coachman had joined the drinkers in the café in what passed for Aregno’s main square. He hadn’t.
‘How long would it take to walk down the hill?’ he asked the girls.
‘Much better to be going down the hill than up it,’ said Sarah, handing over their letter to a better world. ‘We’ve done it in just over half an hour. You should be able to catch the train back to Calvi in Algajola down at the bottom. There’s one in about an hour and a half.’
They set off down the slope, a pealing campanile at the edge of Aregno’s main square observing their passage down the hill. Ahead of them, sometimes hidden by the folds in the track, lay the pale sands of Aregno beach. To their right the scrub stretched out across the valley to another campanile in the village of Corbara, staring out towards the red rocks of Ile Rousse. Calvi was, for the moment, invisible. Behind them the mountains, cast in deep shadow, watched over their island.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Powerscourt, slipping slightly on a hairpin bend. ‘Why should that fellow have gone off like that? We paid him well enough, heaven knows.’
‘Had you given him the money for the whole day Francis?’ said Lady Lucy practically.
‘Well, I had, as a matter of fact,’ replied Powerscourt. ‘I thought it was the decent thing to do.’
Powerscourt muttered inaudibly to himself. All Lady Lucy could catch was the word savages, repeated several times.
They had gone about a third of the way, walking in the shade where they could, when it started. From somewhere higher up on the hill, a shot rang out. Powerscourt’s instant reaction was that it was Corsicans hunting, a chase for wild boar or the wild goats that sometimes came down from the mountains. Then there was another shot. Powerscourt pulled Lady Lucy to the ground at the side of the path. The bullet had ricocheted off a rock in front of them and shot off down the valley. It had been only feet away.
‘Christ, Lucy, this is getting dangerous. These people are firing at us, for God’s sake.’
‘Should we run for it? Maybe they think we’re a couple of wild boar.’
‘We’ll run for it in a moment,’ said Powerscourt, pulling something from his pocket. ‘When we do, keep to the right side of the track. Below those rocks, they may not be able to see us clearly. After I’ve taken a shot at them, we’ll go.’
Powerscourt climbed very gingerly up the rocks and peered out over a boulder. He fired one shot up the hill and then they fled down the mountainside. The path was never straight. Sometimes there were more hairpins, then they would climb for a hundred yards or so before the track dropped down again towards the sea. Powerscourt was thinking desperately about everything they had done since they arrived in Corsica. What had placed their lives in danger? Why hadn’t he left Lady Lucy behind? Why hadn’t he brought Johnny Fitzgerald instead? Johnny was a much better shot than he was. And what had he said to place them in such peril? Lady Lucy was panting slightly now. They paused just in front of a stretch of open ground. There were no rocks here to give them cover. Only an ancient olive tree guarded the route for the next hundred yards. Powerscourt grabbed a stout stick lying at the side of the road. He took off his jacket and placed it carefully at the end of his makeshift pole. He shoved it forwards at the height he would have been had he been taking the next part of the route at a running crouch. He waited for about five seconds. Somewhere over to the right, another shot rang out. A bullet went neatly through the left-hand shoulder.
‘Christ,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I think we may have to crawl this bit. Do you think you’re up to crawling along this filthy road, Lucy?’
Lady Lucy grinned at him. ‘I always used to beat Thomas and Olivia in the crawling races when they were little, Francis,’ she said. ‘I think I beat you once in a race across the drawing-room floor.’
Powerscourt remembered the game of hide and seek just a few days before, Olivia giggling behind the curtains.
‘All right, Lucy. One shot at them. Then we’ll go.’
Powerscourt fired again across the slopes. Then he set off, crawling as fast as he could go. When he had gone a few paces, he heard another shot, fired up the hill not ten feet away from him. He looked back briefly to see Lady Lucy putting his other pistol back into her bag. Then she too shot off at full speed on all fours, the rocks bumping into her arms.
There was no answering fire from the hills. Lucy and Powerscourt were reunited under a clump of trees.
‘Christ, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I didn’t know you had my other gun. I didn’t know you could shoot like that. Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. I’ll tell you all about it later,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘we still need to get out of here. Should we abandon this path and run for it across the open country?’
‘I thought of that,’ said her husband, ‘but there’s no cover at all over there. We’d be sitting ducks, visible for miles around. I think we need to run as fast as we can. It’s always harder to hit a moving target. If we sit still in any one place, we’re for it. Have you enough strength for a long run, a couple of hundred yards, Lucy? You’re not too tired? God, I wish I hadn’t brought you here.’
‘I’m fine, Francis, I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. I’d rather not die in Corsica, though, if that’s all right with you.’
Powerscourt took her hand. There were faint trickles of blood near her left wrist where she had collided with a rock. Somehow that made Powerscourt angrier than ever.
They set off at a trot that turned into a gallop and then back into a trot. It was easier on this rocky terrain to run at medium pace rather than at full speed. Powerscourt wondered if anything they had said at the de Courcy house in Aregno could have led to this declaration of war. No, it could not, he decided. And even if they had become suspicious, it was unlikely that the de Courcy family could have organized a shooting party in this amount of time. Hold on a minute, he said to himself, they knew we were coming. They had known at least a day before with the delivery of the card. But somehow he still couldn’t see Alice de Courcy or her daughters hiring a couple of Corsican bandits. The coach driver? He was in the shade of some very large boulders now, the kites, scenting possible human prey perhaps, circling ominously overhead. Lady Lucy was looking pale, but she kept up a good pace. Powerscourt motioned to stop. Ahead was the longest straight stretch of track they had encountered so far. A couple of derelict farmhouses stood on their right, the glass long gone from the windows, a battered door swinging from one hinge.
As if to greet them, a couple of shots pinged off the rocks twenty yards ahead. This little bit here, Powerscourt felt, this could be what their enemies had decided on as the killing field. Well, he bloody well wasn’t going to let them. The trick with the jacket was unlikely to work again. He wondered about Lucy’s hat. He tried to remember what the army instructors in India had told them about ambushes in broken country.
‘Are you all right, Lucy? You’ve done magnificently so far. There’s only one thing for it now. Whatever we do, we can’t stay in the same place. I want you to run for those trees at the end of this straight bit. Run in a zigzag. Vary your pace if you can. While you’re on your way I’m going to take a shot at these characters. They must come out into the open if they’re to get a decent aim. When you’ve got to the far side, do the same for me. See if you can hit one of these bastards. Don’t fire from the same place, dodge about as much as you can.’
Powerscourt didn’t say the chances of hitting somebody armed with a rifle with a pistol at a couple of hundred yards distance were extremely remote. He kissed Lady Lucy briefly on the cheek.
‘Run, my love, run! Run like hell!’
Lady Lucy took two deep breaths and shot out from beneath the trees. She gathered pace. Powerscourt was half-way up a tree, scouring the landscape for the hidden rifles. Lady Lucy was back in her childhood, following the hunting of the stags in her native Scotland with her grandfather. Only this afternoon she was the stag. She made a dramatic stop three-quarters of the way across. Still no shots. With a final burst of speed she disappeared into the shadows. She was panting deeply. She was through. She had made it. Still no shots.
Powerscourt came down from his tree. Maybe they didn’t want the woman. Maybe they had no quarrel with her. Maybe they wanted the man. A faint reminder of the smell from Captain Antonio Imperiali’s cheroot came back to him as he took several deep breaths. Something was nagging at his brain. Now was not the time to think of it. Lady Lucy had found an overturned cart at the side of the road. She climbed half-way up. There was a good view of the mountainside behind Francis through the broken wood.
Powerscourt set off at a gentle pace. Lady Lucy peered through her makeshift stockade. What had her grandfather told about shooting pistols? She saw a shape coming out from behind a clump of trees two hundred yards up the hill. Powerscourt had suddenly accelerated. He was running very fast now. The man on the mountain drew his rifle up to his shoulder. Just before he settled it, Lady Lucy fired. She thought the bullet went into the trees to his left. The man ducked down. Powerscourt was three-quarters of the way across. The man rose again a couple of yards to the right from where he had been before. He must have been crawling on
all fours. Lady Lucy fired again. She didn’t see where the bullet went. She only knew that her husband was pulling her off the cart and behind a clump of trees.
‘They’ll think we’re going to take a rest now. Run, my love, let’s keep going.’
Their strength was beginning to run out. Sometimes Lady Lucy stumbled. Powerscourt stopped briefly several times to hold on to his side. ‘Stitch,’ he said ruefully to Lady Lucy. Powerscourt was wondering again about the police chief. He had mentioned that he was looking for the de Courcy family. He had mentioned that he was looking for a forger. He had, he thought, implied that the two might be linked in some way. Surely that must be the cause of this Corsican violence. But had the policeman himself ordered it? Was he part of the conspiracy with the forger? Had the policeman told somebody else? Had the policeman telegraphed to brother Edmund in London, keeper perhaps of the forger and his secrets? Was that what caused the assassination attempt, here on the slopes beneath Aregno with the impossible blues of the Corsican sea washing away at the beach? Somebody could have killed Christopher Montague in his flat behind the Brompton Oratory because he was about to reveal the existence of the forger. Were Powerscourt and Lady Lucy to be further victims? Nobody, absolutely nobody, Powerscourt felt certain, would investigate closely the deaths of two strangers on this island. Shooting accident. Very regrettable. The man must have had the sun in his eyes. Very regrettable. Soon forgotten. Maybe the de Courcy women would put flowers on their graves.
Lady Lucy was praying for her children. Then they could see salvation. A couple of hundred yards ahead, on the far side of a group of comforting trees, was the railway line, the beach and, on their left, the little town of Algajola with its train station. Powerscourt outlined the final plan of campaign under the trees.
‘We’ll do it as we did before,’ he said. ‘You go first. Lie low in those bamboos on the far side of the railway line. I’ll keep you covered. Then you do the same for me.’