The Rainaldi Quartet

by Paul Adam

  ‘We don’t want to offend her. It’s only for one night.’

  The cats were back in their places on the sofa in the sitting room. We made a half-hearted attempt to evict them again, but they just twitched their whiskers disdainfully and went back to sleep. We left them alone and wandered off to explore the house. We found Mrs Colquhoun in the kitchen, a large, stone-flagged room with an enormous oak table and a blackened cooking range which emitted a welcome warmth. The house was distinctly chilly but there didn’t appear to be any heating in the other rooms.

  ‘Ah, you’re just in time,’ Mrs Colquhoun said. ‘I’ve made you some fine traditional English cuisine.’

  I caught the momentary look of horror on Guastafeste’s face. If anything is guaranteed to make even the most robust Italian quake, it is the juxtaposition of the words ‘cuisine’ and ‘English’. But the smell from the large casserole dish Mrs Colquhoun was removing from the oven was rich and inviting. Even more reassuringly, there were three bottles of red wine on the table. This was a good sign.

  We ate in the kitchen, which was a relief. Guastafeste and I had found what appeared to be the dining room earlier and, leaving aside its glacial temperature, the smell of damp and cat pee from the rows of litter trays it contained would have been more than enough to put anyone off their food.

  ‘The letters in the chest,’ I said as we ate our hotpot and dumplings. ‘Where did they come from?’

  ‘My husband’s family,’ Mrs Colquhoun replied. ‘They were up there when we moved into the house. We had a look at them once but didn’t get very far. Edward was always intending to sort through them but somehow never got round to it. You know how things are. How is your hotpot?’

  ‘Very good, thank you. We think there may be letters in the chest from a firm of cloth merchants in Italy. Why would your husband’s family have correspondence with an Italian cloth merchant?’

  ‘That was the family business. They were mill owners in Manchester. The wool trade at first, then later cotton. Edward’s great-great-great – I forget how many greats grandfather, Thomas Colquhoun, started the firm back in the eighteenth century. Made a fortune. He became very grand, built this house as his country retreat, to escape from the noise and grime of his factories.’

  ‘Here?’ I said. ‘But it’s so cold and bleak.’

  ‘Thomas was something of a romantic, I believe. He liked the wildness of the moors.’

  ‘And he did business with Italy?’

  ‘With everywhere, I think. He was a very successful businessman. He filled his house with fine paintings and furniture, gave weekend parties, courted the aristocracy with his money. He was the epitome of the self-made English country gentleman.’

  ‘The business still exists?’

  ‘Alas, no.’ Mrs Colquhoun waved an apologetic hand around the kitchen. ‘If it did, would I live like this? Unable to heat the place, to repair the leaking roof. No, the fortune disappeared long ago. Squandered by successive generations of idle young men. My husband made his own way in the world and when his father died inherited nothing but debts and this liability of a house.’

  ‘Have you considered selling it?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t sell it. It was Edward’s family house. He would have wanted it to go to our son. Besides, who would buy a house as dilapidated as this?’

  ‘You have a son?’

  ‘In America. He rarely comes home.’

  She took the lid off the casserole in the centre of the table. I sensed it was a distraction, a way of closing off a topic of conversation she did not wish to discuss. ‘More hotpot, Signor Castiglione?’

  ‘Thank you, but no.’

  ‘And your friend?’

  Guastafeste looked up from his plate.

  ‘Would you like more?’ I asked him in Italian.

  ‘Well, if it’s going…’

  We stayed up late, listening to Mrs Colquhoun’s reminiscences and drinking rather more of her wine than was good for us. Then she showed us to our room.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve put you in together. This is the only guest bedroom that’s really habitable.’

  I lay awake for a long time, listening out for the ghosts. But the only strange noises I heard were Guastafeste snoring.

  10

  We spent the next morning back upstairs in the attic, sifting methodically through the chest of papers. It was a strange, eclectic collection of documents. Some were business correspondence relating to the firm of Thomas Colquhoun and Sons, others were more personal family letters. Glancing at the contents of the papers, it was difficult to see why they’d been kept. They seemed very ordinary, mostly downright dull records of commercial transactions or mundane household matters. Perhaps this was all that remained of a larger, more interesting archive of documents that over the years had been misplaced or disposed of. What we didn’t find, however, were any letters from Italy.

  ‘They’re not here, are they?’ Guastafeste said despondently as he examined yet another dusty piece of paper.

  ‘Don’t give up hope,’ I replied. ‘There are plenty more to look at.’

  At one o’clock Mrs Colquhoun came up to inform us that lunch was ready. We followed her back down the attic stairs and along the landing. It was then that I noticed the painting on the wall. I don’t know how I’d missed it before. Something about its location maybe, something about the light on the landing that tended to obscure it. But I saw it now, a canvas about a metre square in a gilt rococo frame.

  ‘That’s one of my favourites,’ Mrs Colquhoun said, seeing me pause to look up at the painting.

  The canvas was old, its cracked surface badly in need of a clean and restoration. But despite its poor condition, the quality of the artist seemed to shine through the layers of accumulated dirt. It depicted a young man in a music room – from the man’s dress and the furniture I put the date as somewhere around the beginning of the eighteenth century. There was an elaborately decorated virginal occupying one side of the painting, but the eye was drawn irresistibly towards the young man, who was standing before a music stand with a violin cradled in his arms. The neck of the instrument was gripped in his left hand, his right forearm curled comfortably around the lower bouts, a bow dangling loosely from his fingers. The attention to detail was striking. I could see the grain of the wood in the violin’s belly, beneath the sheen of the varnish. There were flecks of rosin between the fingerboard and tailpiece, a trace of a gouge mark on the scroll. The whole thing was so perfect I felt as if I could have reached up with my hand and plucked the violin from the canvas.

  ‘Who painted this?’ I asked, trying to make out the illegible signature in the bottom left-hand corner.

  ‘Cesare Garofalo,’ Mrs Colquhoun replied.

  I didn’t recognise the name, but the painting was unmistakably Italian rather than English. The man’s features, the colour of his skin were Mediterranean and through the window at one side of the music room was a view of cypress trees and a red-brick church that could only have been Italian.

  ‘Do you know who the man in the picture is?’ I said.

  Mrs Colquhoun shook her head. ‘I’m afraid not. Apart from the artist, I know almost nothing about it. It’s always been on the wall here. Edward was very fond of it. He wasn’t musical himself, but his ancestors all played.’

  ‘The violin?’

  ‘I believe so. Even Thomas Colquhoun, the founder of the family firm, made time to play chamber music. He was said to have been a rather fine violinist.’

  ‘Do you still have his instrument?’

  ‘No, his violins – he had several – were sold off long ago. Well before we inherited this house. It’s very lifelike, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very.’

  Guastafeste came up to my shoulder and peered curiously at the painting.

  ‘You recognise the violin?’ he said.

  ‘The maker, you mean?’ I said. ‘Yes, it’s a Guarneri “del Gesù”.’

  * * *

&
nbsp; ‘How is your research coming along?’ Mrs Colquhoun enquired over lunch.

  We were in the kitchen eating sausages with hot English mustard and a potato salad sprinkled with chives from the Hall’s herb garden.

  ‘Slowly,’ I said. ‘Do you know why the papers are up there? Why they were kept?’

  ‘Why do families keep anything?’ Mrs Colquhoun said with a shrug. ‘Sentimental attachment sometimes, but more often than not it’s out of laziness or inertia. The Colquhouns have always been notorious for never throwing anything away.’

  ‘But there must have been more at one time. The family business must have accrued thousands of documents over the years. Why does only one chest remain?’

  ‘Pure accident, I would say. Most of the business correspondence was never kept here anyway, it was filed at the firm’s offices in Manchester. A lot of that was destroyed in a fire back in the mid-nineteenth century. The chest upstairs wasn’t retained for any particular reason that I know of.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of an Italian firm named Anselmi di Briata?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘We have reason to believe that letters from the firm were in that chest. We think it was those letters that Signor Rainaldi photocopied. Yet we can’t find them.’

  Mrs Colquhoun gave a start of surprise. ‘Well, they should be there. I told you, I saw him put them back.’

  ‘Are you sure they were the same letters?’

  ‘What else would they have been? They were very old. He handled them very carefully. I can picture them now, all yellow and curling. Yes, he definitely put them back.’

  We returned to the attic after lunch and resumed our examination of the papers in the chest.

  ‘Maybe Mrs Colquhoun’s mistaken and Tomaso didn’t put the letters back,’ Guastafeste said.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘If he had, they’d have been at the top, surely?’

  ‘Who knows? This whole chest is a complete mess.’

  We were down to the last layer of documents now, the ones at the very bottom of the chest. Guastafeste lifted out a pile and placed it on the floor between us. I picked up a bundle of papers tied together with red ribbon. There was a pale line across the outer document where the paper had been protected from discolouration by the ribbon. But the ribbon was no longer directly over that line.

  ‘This bundle has been untied, and then fastened together again,’ I said. ‘And fairly recently too.’

  I undid the knot in the ribbon and carefully separated the documents. There were four of them, as fragile as dried leaves. I saw the signature at the bottom of the first letter and felt a tingling sensation creep up my spine.

  ‘Found them,’ I said softly.

  ‘Really?’ Guastafeste leaned across and glanced at the letters. ‘They’re in English. You’ll have to translate them for me.’

  ‘If I can read them.’

  I picked the letters up and carried them nearer the window where the light was better. Three of the letters were written in the same hand, the fourth in a different one. I peered more closely at them, trying to decipher the dates at the top. One looked like February 16, 1803. Another seemed to read July, 1803, though the exact day was unclear, and a third was dated September, 1803. The fourth letter – written in the different hand – was harder to read. The handwriting was spidery and untidy and in places the ink was badly smudged, making the words illegible. It appeared to have been written in 1804. All four letters were addressed to Thomas Colquhoun in Manchester and had Giovanni Michele Anselmi di Briata’s address at the top and his florid signature at the bottom.

  I started with the earliest of the letters, translating it into Italian as I went along.

  ‘“Distinguished Sir,”’ I read, ‘“Please accept my most profound apologies for the delay in replying to your letter of December last. Events here, as you can imagine, have not been conducive to the proper arrangement of our business affairs. The state of uncertainty may continue for some months, so I would beg you to be patient…”’

  ‘What events is he talking about?’ Guastafeste asked.

  ‘The war between the French and the Austrians for control of northern Italy, I imagine. It would have disrupted most of the commerce of the time.’

  The next few paragraphs of the letter dealt with mundane business matters – the ordering and transportation of bales of wool and cloth from England to Italy, banker’s arrangements and so on – which had no relevance to our enquiries.

  ‘Ah, this looks more interesting,’ I said, and read aloud the next section.

  ‘“As to the delicate matter you addressed in your letter, I am instructed by His Excellency to express his regret that the situation has not yet been satisfactorily resolved, and to crave your indulgence in allowing him a little more time to set matters right. I have been instructed to write to Signor Carli, which I shall do with the greatest expedition, and I hope that in due course I shall have a more substantial reply for you. I remain, Sir, your most faithful servant, Gio Michele Anselmi di Briata.”’

  I put the letter down on the top of one of the cardboard boxes that were under the attic window.

  ‘What was interesting about that?’ Guastafeste said. ‘There wasn’t a mention of any violin.’

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘But look at the names. “His Excellency” and “Signor Carli”.’

  ‘And who were they?’

  ‘“His Excellency” can only be one person – Count Cozio di Salabue.’

  ‘And Signor Carli?’

  ‘Carlo Carli, the count’s Milanese banker, and incidentally a fine amateur violinist, good enough to play quartets with Paganini. When the Austrians and the French were fighting over Piedmont, Count Cozio had his violin collection removed for safekeeping from his country seat at Salabue, near Casale Monferrato, to Carlo Carli’s home in Milan.’

  I turned to read out the next letter. This was more specific. After the usual salutations and some discussion relating to the cloth trade, Michele Anselmi had written: ‘“I must now address myself to the question of His Excellency’s debts. I have been in communication with Signor Carli and regret to have to inform you that circumstances are but little changed since I last wrote to you. If anything, the situation has worsened. The confiscation of certain properties by the French military command has caused His Excellency much embarrassment…”’

  I paused. The next few words were difficult to read. I peered at the text. ‘I’m not sure what comes next. Regret. It looks like regret. I regret … something. I regret something, something, unable to repay. No, the rest is too smudged.’

  ‘Leave it for the time being and go on,’ Guastafeste suggested.

  I moved on to the next paragraph. ‘“However, His Excellency, knowing your great interest in music, asks if you would be willing to accept an item from his collection in lieu of payment.”’

  I stopped reading. The rest of the letter was just a blur of ink. The paper was stained as if water had been spilt on it. But it didn’t matter. We both knew that we’d just heard the most important bit.

  ‘An item from his collection?’ Guastafeste said excitedly. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. What’s next?’

  It was the third letter that contained the real meat.

  ‘“I have made all the necessary arrangements to despatch the violin within the week,”’ I read out Michele Anselmi’s words. ‘“My son, Paolo, who is undertaking business on my behalf in France, will take the violin as far as Paris where he will arrange for a courier to transport the instrument to England. His Excellency asks me to express his gratitude for your understanding and patience in this matter, and feels assured that you will not find anything lacking in the instrument. It is one of the finest in his collection – indeed one of the finest the Master ever made – and has barely been touched since the day it left the workshop in Cremona. His Excellency is sorry to part with it, but he wishes you great joy in the playing of it.”’

  ‘That’s it,’
Guastafeste said. ‘That’s the violin we’re looking for. It was sent to England, to Thomas Colquhoun. Does it not say who the maker was? If it was one of the finest in Cozio’s collection, it must have been a Stradivari surely. What do you think?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t mention the maker, just the words “the Master”, which may mean Stradivari.’

  ‘So Thomas Colquhoun had the violin. What if it’s still here at Highfield Hall? I know Mrs Colquhoun said all his instruments were sold off long ago, but what if she’s wrong? This house is full of junk. It could be hidden away somewhere in the attics.’

  I shook my head doubtfully. It was a nice thought, that classic cliché of treasure-seeking lore – the dusty attic. But I knew it wouldn’t be that easy.

  ‘Why not?’ Guastafeste said. ‘Let’s go and look now. Search the whole house. What do we have to lose?’

  ‘Let’s see what the last letter says.’

  The handwriting of the fourth letter was the sloppiest and most difficult to read of them all. Either Anselmi had changed secretaries by this point – in which case he could surely have employed one with a rather more obvious talent for calligraphy – or he had written the letter himself. I was inclined to think it was most likely the latter.

  Deciphering and translating the text was slow work. It began with a rambling exposition in which Anselmi enquired at length about Colquhoun’s health. Then it moved on to more important matters.

  ‘“I am continuing to make enquiries into the disappearance of the violin. My agent in Paris is endeavouring to trace the courier who was engaged by my son but has, so far, met with little success. It is impossible, at the moment, to be certain whether the instrument ever left Paris or if it did, at what point in the journey to England it was stolen. As the months go by, I begin to fear that the violin will never be recovered and the thief will take the secret of its whereabouts to the grave with him.”’

  I looked up from the letter. Guastafeste, so animated only a few moments ago, now had an expression of bleak disappointment on his face. I turned back to the text.