Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman (17 page)

“Can I drop you somewhere now? I could take you to the bus stop, if you’re going home?”

“Thanks a lot, it’s awfully kind of you, but I’ve got my bike here. I put it in the stand near the gate.”

All the same, he came right to the car with her, opened the door with a flourish and closed it upon her carefully when she had settled herself on the driving-seat; and he didn’t move away until she had fished her black kid gloves out of the dashboard compartment, pulled them on and started the car. Then he stepped back to give her room to turn, and lifted a hand to her with a self-conscious smile as she drove away.

When she was gone he awoke suddenly to the chill of the wind and ran like a greyhound for his bike. He rode back into the centre of the town as fast as he could go. Some of the shops were already closing, and the dapple of reflected lights in the wet surface of the pavements blurred into a long, hazy ribbon of orange-yellow, the colour of autumn.

IT WAS ON Thursday evening that Professor Brandon Lucas, on his way to a week-end art school which did not particularly interest him but at which he had rashly consented to put in an appearance, made a sudden detour in his most capricious manner and called on Jean and Leslie Armiger. The visit could have been regarded as planned, since he had with him the notes and sketches relating to the sign of The Joyful Woman, but he had not admitted his intention even to himself until the miles between him and his boredom were shortening alarmingly, and his reluctance to arrive had become too marked to be ignored. Why get there in time for dinner? His previous experiences at Ellanswood College had led him to write off the food as both dull and insufficient, whereas there was a very decent little hotel in Comerbourne; and if the slight ground mist didn’t provide a plausible excuse for lateness his errand to the Armigers could be pleaded as important, and even turned into a topic of conversation which might save him the trouble of listening to fatuities about art from others.

Being too short-sighted without his glasses to read the lettering on Leslie’s bell, and too self-confident in any case to bother about such details, he startled the silent evening street with a tattoo on Mrs. Harkness’s knocker, and brought out the lady herself; but he was equal even to Mrs. Harkness, and made so profound an impression upon her that Leslie’s status with her went up several notches on the strength of the call.

The professor climbed the stairs unannounced, to find Leslie in his shirt-sleeves washing up at the little landing sink, and the smell of coffee bubbling merrily from the hot plate, and demonstrated his finesse by exclaiming in delight that he’d come just in time, that the cooking at The Flying Horse was splendid, but their coffee hadn’t come up to the rest. And having thus intimated that they need not attempt to feed him, he sat down comfortably and reassured them with equal dexterity that they were not expected to try to entertain him.

“I’m on my way to a week-end course, as a mater of fact. I mustn’t stay long, but I thought I’d look in on you with a progress report. That’s a very interesting job you’ve found me, my boy, very interesting indeed.”

Leslie came in rolling down his sleeves, and produced liqueur glasses and the carefully nursed end of the half-bottle of cognac Barney Wilson had brought back from his summer holiday in France. Jean had conjured up a glass dish he hadn’t known they possessed, and filled it with extravagant chocolate biscuits which Leslie felt certain would be the wrong thing to offer this unexpectedly Corinthian old buck of a professor, until he saw how deftly and frequently they were being palmed. She had also shed her old blue smock and appeared in a honey-yellow blouse that made her hair look blue-black and her skin as clear and cool as dew. Half an hour ago they had been talking to each other with the cautious forbearance of strangers in order not to quarrel, but whenever events demanded from her a gesture in support of her husband Jean would be there, ready and invincible.

“Is it going to turn out to be anything? I was afraid to touch it myself, but I could hardly keep my hands off it, all the same.”

“You had definite ideas about it?”

“Well, rather indefinite, but very suggestive. Such as its possible date, and the genre it belongs to.”

“Have you shown it to anyone else?”

“A dealer in the town here. He put forward some theory that it was originally a portrait by some local eighteenth-century painter called Cotsworth.”

“Preposterous!” croaked Lucas with a bark of laughter, pointing his imperial at the ceiling like a dart.

“Well, not so much preposterous as crafty, actually, I think. Because he’s offered as high as six hundred for it since.”

“Has he, now! And you turned him down. Good boy! So you must have had an idea you were on to something much more important than a dauber like Cotsworth. As indeed I’m pretty sure you are. Mind you, the actual market value may not be very great, I’m not sure how much commercial interest such a discovery might arouse just at this moment. Ultimately it’s likely to be considerable, when the full implications are realised.”

Leslie was startled to discover that his hands were trembling with pure excitement. He didn’t want to look at Jean, she would only think he was underlining the professor’s vindication of his judgment; she would expect him not to miss an opportunity like that, not out of any meanness of spirit but out of his fundamental insecurity. And yet he was longing to exchange glances with her, and see if she was quivering as he was. There ought to be a spark still ready to pass between them, when they were on the verge of promised discoveries fabulous enough to excite this Olympian old man.

“Its possible date,” said Lucas, harking back. “What did you conceive its possible date to be?”

If he wasn’t actually teasing them he was doing something very like it, offering them marvels and then making them play guessing games for the prize. Well, thought Leslie, if he had to be tested he’d better put a good face on it, and say what he had to say with authority.

“Before fourteen hundred.”

It sounded appallingly presumptuous when he’d said it, he would almost have liked to snatch it back, but now it was too late. He stuck out his chin and elaborated the audacity, refusing to hedge. “It seemed to me that the pose couldn’t be later, or the hands—that want of articulation, the long curved fingers without joints. And then the backward-braced shoulders and head, and even something about the way the blocks of colour are filled in to make the dress. If we get all those layers of repainting off successfully I shall expect to see a kind of folded drapery you don’t get as late as the fifteenth century.”

“And the
genre
! You said you had ideas about that, too.”

Leslie drew breath hard and risked a glance at Jean. Her eyes, wide and wondering, were on him; he didn’t know whether she was with him or only marvelling at his cheek and expecting to see him shot down the next moment.

“I think she’s local work,” he said in a small voice, “because I think she’s been kicking about here for centuries, never moving very far from where she was first put in position. And that wasn’t on any pub. The only thing out of tradition is the laugh—”

“Yes,” said Lucas, his eyes brightly thoughtful upon the young man’s face, “the laugh. Don’t let that worry you. The laugh is one of those things that happen to any tradition from time to time, the stroke of highly individual genius nobody had foreshadowed and nobody ventures to copy afterwards. And extraordinary experiences they can be, those inspired aberrations. Go on. Out of what traditions? You haven’t reached the point yet.”

Going softly for awe of his own imaginings, Leslie said: “That oval inset that looks like a brooch, that’s what first made me think of it. In its original form it was that odd convention, a sort of X-ray plate into the metaphysical world. Wasn’t it?”

“You tell me.”

“It was then. It was an image of the child she’s carrying. She’s a Madonna of the Annunciation or the Visitation—something before the birth, anyhow—”

“Of the Magnificat, as it happens. You seem to have done very well without an adviser at all, my boy.”

“I haven’t dared even to think seriously about it before,” owned Leslie with a shaky laugh. “You as good as hinted that I could go ahead with my wildest guesses and they wouldn’t be too fantastic, or I wouldn’t have ventured even now. Do you really mean that a piece of work like that has been lying about in attics and swinging in the wind in front of a pub ever since the fourteenth century?”

“More likely since about the latter half of the sixteenth. No doubt you know that the house from which the panel came was at one time a grange of Charnock Priory? And that the last prior retired there after the Dissolution?”

“Well, a friend of mine did dig out something of the kind from the archives, but until then I’m afraid I didn’t know a thing about it.”

“You didn’t? You cheer me. Neither did I, but it seems it was so. What struck me about this panel of yours was its likeness in proportion and kind to one of the fragments in Charnock parish church. I don’t know if you know the rector? A scholarly old fellow, quite knowledgeable about medieval art. Glass is his main line, but he knows the local illuminators and panel painters well, too, and he’s spent a good many years of his life hunting for bits of the works of art that were disseminated from Charnock at the Dissolution. What’s now the parish church is the truncated remains of the old priory church, of course, and such relics as he’s been able to trace he’s restored to their old places. This head of an angel with a scroll is all he has of what seems to have been a larger altar-piece, probably from the Lady Chapel.”

“And you think we’ve found the lady?” asked Leslie, not meaning to be flippant, simply too excited to bear the tension of being entirely serious. An elevated eyebrow signalled momentary disapproval, but the knowing eye beneath it saw through him, and there was no reproof.

“I think it is a strong possibility. I went to see the rector. He has records which indicate that parts of the furnishings must have gone into retirement with the last prior, and some very interesting sketches and notes of his own, collected from many scattered sources. He holds that the angel with the scroll is the angel of the Magnificat, he has contemporary and later references to the painting which enable one to form a fairly detailed picture, and I’m bound to say there’s every reason to feel hopeful that your panel is the Virgin from the same altar-piece. The master who painted it is not known by name, but various examples of his work have been identified, including some illuminations. One of them has an initial strongly resembling your Madonna.”

“Including the laugh?” asked Jean in a low voice.

“Including the laugh. Altogether the evidence is so strong that I don’t anticipate much difficulty in establishing the authenticity of your fragment. The rector has seen it. If I am cautiously prepared to pronounce it genuine, he is absolutely convinced. He had made a careful reconstruction from the various references of what the lost Madonna should be. It bore an unmistakable resemblance to your panel. He has since made another sketch from the panel in its present form and from his previous sources, to show what we should uncover.”

He slapped his brief-case open on the table, and drew out a wad of documents and papers, spreading them out before him with a satisfied smile.

“I’ve brought you his notes and drawings to examine over the week-end, if you’d like to. And here is his latest sketch. There she is. As she was, and as she will be.”

It was quite small, smaller than a quarto sheet of paper; they drew close together to look at it. The Joyful Woman had put off her muslin fichu and corkscrew curls and the Toby frills from round her wrists, and stood in all her early English simplicity and subtlety, draped in a blue mantle over a saffron robe, all her hair drawn back austerely under a white veil. She leaned back to balance the burden she carried, clasping her body with those hands feeble as lilies, and the symbolic image of the unborn son stood upright in her crossed palms. She looked up and laughed for joy. There was no one else in the picture with her, there was no one else in the world; she was complete and alone, herself a world.

Leslie felt Jean’s stillness as acutely as if she had never before been still. He moistened his lips, and asked what would inevitably sound the wrong question at this moment; but he had to know the answer. He had to know what he was doing, or there was no virtue in it.

“Have you any idea how much she’s likely to fetch if I sell her? Always supposing we’re right about her?”

“It’s a matter of chance. But the master’s work is known and respected, and there are few examples, possibly none to be compared with this. And there’s a local antiquarian interest to be reckoned with. I think, putting it at the lowest, even if you sell quickly, you should still realise probably between seven and eight thousand pounds.”

Desperately quiet now, their sleeves just touching, Jean and Leslie stood looking at the promise of fortune.

“And the rector—would he be in the market? He must want it terribly, if he’s so sure—”

“He’d give his eyes for it, of course. You’ve stopped him sleeping or eating since he’s seen this. But he’s already appealing for twenty thousand to keep his poor old rotting church together, there’s no possibility whatever of earmarking any funds for buying Madonnas.”

“Not even to bring them home,” said Leslie. He moved a little away from Jean because he wanted to see her face, but she kept it averted, looking at the little drawing. He wondered if she knew that she’d folded her own hands under her breasts upon the immemorial wonder, in the same ceremonially possessive gesture.

“Not even to bring them home. But there’ll be other bidders. If you wait and collect enough publicity before you sell you may get double what I’ve suggested.” Professor Lucas closed his brief-case and pushed back his chair. The boy was obviously in need of money, small blame to him for relishing it in advance.

“I can’t afford to pay for all the work that will have to be done on the panel,” said Leslie, his voice slightly shaky with the intensity of his resolution. “Would your laboratory be prepared to stand that, if I give the thing back to Charnock?”

Lucas straightened up to look at him intently, and came to his feet slowly. “My dear boy, you realise what you’re saying?”

Yes, he realised, and he had to say it quickly and firmly and finally, so that there should be no possibility of withdrawing. Panic surged into his throat, trying to choke the words into incoherence. He was afraid to look at Jean now, he knew he’d done something she could never understand or forgive, but he’d had to do it, he couldn’t have lived with himself if he’d let the moment go by.

“It isn’t mine,” he said, “only by the last of a long series of ugly accidents, and I don’t like that. It ought to go back where it belongs. And it isn’t because it’s the church, either,” he said almost angrily, in case he should be misconstrued. “I should feel the same if it was a secular thing and as fine as that. It was made for a certain place and purpose, and I’d rather it went back. Only it would be a bit rough if I gave it back to the rector and then he couldn’t get the necessary work done on it for want of money.”