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Synopsis
In May 1901 the Salisbury Galleries announce the biggest exhibition of the Old Master Paintings ever seen in Europe. Excitement is intense. But before it opens, one of Britain's leading art experts, Christopher Montague, is found murdered in his study. When Lord Francis Powerscourt is called in to investigate he finds every book, notepad and scrap of paper has been removed from the scene of the crime. Montague had been working on something that would have rocked the art world. Did his article that claimed a number of the Old Masters had been painted recently by a single hand have anything to do with his death? Powerscourt embarks on an odyssey through a treacherous world of art dealers and picture restorers in pursuit of a master forger. He travels to Sicily where the trail goes cold, but, after the thrills and danger of that wild, lawless isalnd, in a remopte corer of England, the truth is finally revealed.
Release date: September 1, 2011
Publisher: C & R Crime
Print pages: 288
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Death of an Old Master
David Dickinson
Winter 1896
The old man walked slowly across the fields. A fine rain was falling on his bare head. He let himself into the little church and walked to the position he knew so well after
forty-five years as the bell ringer of St Peter’s Church. He slipped through the faded red curtain and unhooked the rope from its place on the wall. High above him in the tower the bell still
carried the inscription from its maker. ‘Thomas Wilson made mee, 1714.’ The old man began to pull, his arms rising regularly above his shoulders like the swell on the sea.
The bell tolled for a funeral, the funeral of one who would have been the lord of the manor had he still lived there before his God called him home. Charles Edward Windham Fitzmaurice de Courcy
was in the church already, his coffin resting beneath the inscriptions to earlier de Courcys on the walls. It was a quarter past ten in the morning, the service scheduled for eleven
o’clock.
Two hundred and fifty yards away through the morning mist that swirled across the fields the great Jacobean mansion of de Courcy Hall continued to resist the elements as it had for the past two
hundred and seventy years. Inside in the Great Hall a melancholy party was preparing to set off for the church. Alice de Courcy, wife of the dead man, wondered about her future. Edmund de Courcy,
the eldest son, wondered about the size of his inheritance. Julia and Sarah, his younger sisters, wondered if they would be able to go and live in London all the year round. None of them had seen
the dead man, husband and father, for the past fourteen years.
‘Do you think it’s time to go, Edmund?’ Mother touched her son softly on the arm. ‘We don’t want to be late.’ It was half-past ten.
‘Not yet, Mother, there’s still time.’
In 1882 Charles de Courcy had abandoned his fields and his family to live with another woman in the south of France. There, so the family believed, he had fathered another two children. There,
the family were convinced, he had squandered most of the family inheritance on his mistress. And she, the mistress, had announced her intention of attending the last rites this melancholy morning,
though whether she would bring the children no one knew.
‘Did Smithson say that woman would come to the house first or go direct to the church?’ Alice de Courcy asked for the hundredth time. Alice shook every time she thought about this
meeting if meeting there had to be. Smithson was the family lawyer, based in Fakenham, who had been the unhappy conduit of many messages between the two households over the preceding decade and a
half. The family knew there had been great arguments about a will, with lawyers coming up from Norwich and even London to thrash out the rights of an estate owner to dispose of his property as he
wished in the dusty offices of a Norfolk town. Every conversation in de Courcy Hall since they heard of the death had revolved round this single point. Would the Frenchwoman come to the Hall or
would she go direct to the church?
‘You know Smithson didn’t say, Mama.’ Edmund was as gentle as he knew how. ‘But I don’t think there is time for her and her party to come here and then go to the
church. I think we’d better set off.’ It was twenty to eleven.
And so the de Courcy family set off across their fields for the last rites of a man they would never see again. In their different ways they prepared to meet another family they had never seen
before, half-brothers, half-sisters perhaps. The girls thought it was rather dramatic and exciting, their cheeks turning red as the wind lashed through the trees. Alice was not sure she could bear
it. Edmund, aware of his new responsibilities at the age of twenty-five, was uncharacteristically worried about his mother.
To the north, past the sodden cows that huddled for shelter beneath the twisted trees, the North Sea marked the outer limits of the estate. Generations of de Courcys had planted trees in
ever-growing numbers as a protection against the storms that whistled in from the angry coastline. To the south the estate stretched for many miles in the direction of Norwich.
Sometimes the bell was very loud, as if it was right in front of them, sometimes it drifted off to the west with the wind.
A bedraggled vicar greeted them at the door. There were tiny holes in his cassock. His boots were leaking. Payments from the de Courcy family had become increasingly irregular over the
years.
‘Good morning, Mrs de Courcy, Edmund, Julia, Sarah.’ The vicar smiled a feeble smile, his eyes flickering down the long drive that led to de Courcy Hall. It was ten minutes to
eleven.
Edmund led his family to their pew at the front of the church, his mother huddling up against the wall as if she didn’t want to be seen. The bell was still tolling. The organ was playing a
Bach fugue very softly. The women fell to their knees to pray. Servants and neighbours were filling up the pews behind them.
On the floor to Edmund’s left, two of his ancestors stared up at the ceiling and the next life from their brass memorial on the floor. ‘Richard de Courcy lies here, God have mercy on
his soul. Lady Elizabeth who was the wife of Richard de Courcy lies here, to whose soul may God be merciful. This in the year of our Lord 1380.’ Grave and inscrutable, serious and humble, the
ancient faces slept on. It was five to eleven.
In the pew opposite, Mr Smithson, the lawyer from Fakenham, was kneeling in prayer. Beside him a rather smartly dressed young man was staring at the memorial tablets on the walls. As the bell
stopped a slow drip began to fall loudly on to the floor just behind the pulpit. It seemed to have caught the rhythm of the bell, the plops on the stone floor sounding at the same interval as the
creation of the bellwright Thomas Wilson far above in its tower. Edmund noticed a small trail of green slime making a determined advance on the wall beside the altar.
Edmund stole a quick glance behind him. All the pews were full now, except for the one opposite his own. The organ began to build towards a crescendo. The vicar was busying himself by the altar,
water dripping from his boots and forming little puddles on the floor.
At two minutes to eleven Edmund sensed there were new arrivals. You didn’t have to look round. There was a low murmur of excitement from the pews behind. There was a firm click as the door
was closed by the newcomers. Julia and Sarah began to turn their heads to look until Edmund nudged them both firmly in the ribs. Alice de Courcy huddled ever closer to the wall and sank to her
knees again to pray for deliverance.
A handsome woman of about forty years of age, escorted by a boy of ten and a girl of seven or eight, sat down in the pew opposite. Edmund realized with a shock that the little boy looked
remarkably like he had done at the same age. All three stared directly in front of them.
The vicar coughed firmly. Resolutely looking at the back of the church he began the service.
‘I am the Resurrection and the life.’ The vicar’s voice was thick as if he had a heavy cold. ‘He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and
whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’
The Frenchwoman in her pew was having difficulty finding her place in the unfamiliar prayer book of the Anglican Church. The smartly dressed young man sitting beside lawyer Smithson leant
forward and gave her his own, opened at the correct page. She smiled slightly in acknowledgement.
Edmund’s memories of his father were remote. Sometimes he had to admit that he found it hard to remember what his father looked like and he had to go and stare at the portrait in the Long
Gallery of de Courcy Hall where an unbroken line of nine of his male ancestors adorned the walls. He dimly recalled his father teaching him to play cricket in the walled garden at the side of the
house. He thought his father had been away a lot, in London or Norwich, always apparently on business. He recalled all too well the shouting matches that often accompanied his return, his mother
left weeping softly in a corner of the drawing room. This new half-brother and half-sister must have very different, fresher memories but he had no idea what they were. He wondered if the little
boy had been taught to play cricket in some hot French garden, with French servants bringing glasses of lemonade to drink under the trees.
‘We brought nothing into this world,’ the vicar sounded hoarser now, ‘and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the
name of the Lord.’
Edmund thought bitterly that his father, contrary to the words of the book of Job, had brought a great deal into this world. But had he left anything behind? Edward gazed sadly at the drip
continuing its monotonous journey from ceiling to floor. He thought of the estate steward shaking his head as he pored over the account books. What would be left? How much would be left? How would
it be divided?
Roger Bilton, the de Courcys’ closest neighbour, had risen to read the second lesson. He was a tall, stooping man, reputed never to have travelled any further from his home than the city
of Norwich. He spoke the words in a high querulous tone, as if he didn’t believe them.
‘Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even
so in Christ shall all be made alive.’
Another memorial on the floor echoed the words of St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians. Thomas de Courcy was portrayed on his brass in full armour, holding a very long sword, as if about
to go into battle. Edmund remembered the full description of the armour with its archaic vocabulary of gorgets and vambraces, tassets and epaulieres, jambarts and rerebraces, genouillaires and
sabbatons.
Livest Thou Thomas? Yeas. Where? With God on Highe.
Art thou not dead? Yeas. And here I lye.
I that with men on earth did live to die
Died to live with Christ eternallie.
The vicar was praying now, the prayers interrupted by his hacking cough, praying that the dead man’s sins might be forgiven so he could be received into God’s gracious mercy and
protection.
Three of his father’s transgressions were sitting but three feet away from him, Edmund thought to himself, casting a quick glance at the alternative family in its pew. The mother was
impassive, the boy and girl taking their cue from their mother and staring resolutely straight ahead. Julia and Sarah had managed to stand right at the front of their box pew so they could look
sideways without being noticed. Alice, their mother, was still huddled against the wall.
The prayers were punctuated by the regular drip on to the floor, sounding another note of desolation and decay, as if not only the body of the dead man but the very fabric of the buildings on
his estate was beginning to rot away.
There was no sermon from the vicar. He found it impossible to know what to say in such circumstances.
At last, at twenty minutes past eleven, it was all over.
‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen.’
Scarcely had the word ‘Amen’ died away when the smartly dressed young man sitting beside lawyer Smithson unlatched his door, opened the door of the pew in front of him and escorted
the French party out of the church as fast as decency allowed. Just once Edmund met the eyes of his father’s mistress. Julia and Sarah had one quick glimpse of the half-brother and sister
they had never seen before. Almost before the congregation realized what was happening the French party had fled the field.
The bell began to toll again. Smithson had a brief word with Edmund and his mother as they stood at the gate of the church, staring out at what had been their fields, but might be their fields
no longer.
‘They’re not going to come to the house,’ he said, trying to reassure the widow, ‘they’re going back to their hotel.’
Smithson paused. He suspected that the ordeal of having to listen to the dead man’s will being read out, surrounded by his mistress and the bastard offspring, might prove too much for
Alice de Courcy.
‘The young man who took them away is called McKenna, Richard McKenna. He works for Finch’s Bank. McKenna’s going to tell them the details of the will there before they go back
to France.’
How long did it take, Edmund wondered, to travel from the south of France to a remote house in Norfolk for a service that had lasted less than half an hour? Perhaps it was the will, an unknown
financial future, not family piety that had brought them on their long journey into the rain and the wind that surrounded St Peter’s Church. Just visible on the long drive that led to the
main road, the French carriage was making good speed as if they wanted to escape as fast as they could.
‘I thought,’ Smithson went on apologetically, ‘that a rest would be a good idea before the reading of the last will and testament. Mr McKenna and I propose to call on you at
three o’clock this afternoon. Would the library be suitable, do you think?’
‘Of course,’ said Edmund and steered his mother back across the fields to de Courcy Hall. The congregation drifted off. The vicar wondered yet again if he could afford another pair
of boots. The great bell rang out across the countryside and almost reached the sea. This afternoon, it would be decided. This afternoon, they would know their fate and their future.
‘“I, Charles Edward Windham Fitzmaurice de Courcy, formerly of de Courcy Hall in the county of Norfolk, currently resident at the Chateau de Fontcaude, Grasse,
Alpes Maritimes, France, do hereby cancel, revoke and annul all previous wills and testaments.”’
Mr Smithson, the lawyer from Fakenham, had put on his glasses. The library was on the first floor of de Courcy Hall, great oak bookcases rising almost to the ceiling. Many of the books had been
purchased in Rome or Geneva, Naples or Venice, by earlier de Courcys on the Grand Tour, shorter visits to Europe than the dead man who had stayed there fifteen years. There was a large mahogany
table in the middle of the room. Mr Smithson and his banker companion sat at the head, with the family below them. Outside the rain was still falling. The wind was battering against the windows.
Even with a fire the room was cold.
Julia started at the mention of the word ‘Chateau’. She had visions of some enormous palace filled with tapestries and exciting histories of romance and elopement. Edmund was
wondering how much a chateau would cost to run, even a little one.
There was a lot more legal preamble. Smithson read this as fast as he could. Then he paused. Richard McKenna was looking at what appeared to be a first edition of Dr Johnson’s dictionary,
the dust sitting thickly on the top as if nobody had checked the meaning of a word for over a hundred and forty years.
‘“I come now to my testimonary dispositions.”’ Smithson glanced at the dead man’s family, Alice looking pale, the girls interested, Edmund apprehensive. ‘“De Courcy Hall, its contents, furniture, pictures, ornaments and everything else pertaining unto it, I leave to my son Edmund George Windham de Courcy.”’
The girls looked relieved. They had never lived anywhere else. They would be safe. Smithson coughed. He looked slightly embarrassed as he read on.
‘“My estates, farms, woods, horses, cattle and sheep and all other farm animals”’ – there followed a precise geographical description of all these properties
– ‘“I leave absolutely to Madame Yvette de Castelnau of Grasse for her sole use and that of her children, François and Marie-Claire.”’
Charles de Courcy had done the unthinkable. He had failed to keep one of the oldest rules of the English gentry in disposing of their property. He had broken it up. In his wish to accommodate
his two families he had separated the house from the lands which supported it. None of the women seemed to understand what had happened. Perhaps they had been hypnotized by the legal prose, the
dead language of lawyers come to impose its will on the living.
Edmund did. He did not know just how terrible the news was, but he knew it meant catastrophe for himself, his mother and his sisters.
‘“Signed in the presence of witnesses, Albert Clement, notaire of Grasse and Jean Jacques Rives, banker of Nice, on the twentieth day of October 1895.”’
Smithson wiped his brow. He coughed apologetically. The women looked dumb. Edmund was staring at the leather volumes opposite him, wondering how much they were worth.
‘I am afraid there is more that you must know,’ Smithson said, glancing briefly at his companion. ‘Mr McKenna here comes from Finch’s Bank which handles the family
financial affairs. I fear you should hear from him.’
Great God, thought Alice de Courcy, is there worse to come on this terrible day? That woman and her children coming to the funeral was bad. Breaking up the house and the estate, she suspected,
was worse.
Richard McKenna drew some papers from his bag and placed them on the table. He spoke very gently. ‘The financial position is not good,’ he began. ‘Let me deal with the house
first. There are two mortgages outstanding on the property in which we sit this afternoon. They are for a total of forty thousand pounds, secured on de Courcy Hall itself. The current interest on
those mortgages comes to approximately fifteen hundred pounds a year.’ The figures dropped into the room like the drops of rain from the leak in the church at the service that morning, cold,
regular, unstoppable.
‘The estates are also mortgaged,’ McKenna went on. Edmund thought he sounded like a doctor telling his patient that they had an incurable disease. Perhaps they had. Financial cancer
had spread to Norfolk, a plague of debt and impossible obligations.
‘They are mortgaged to the value of sixty thousand pounds. The interest on those loans from Finch’s Bank comes to the total of two thousand, two hundred and fifty pounds a
year.’
McKenna paused. Now came the hammer blow. ‘The rent rolls from the estates have been falling lately. The properties are not perhaps in such good repair as they once were.’ His eyes
glanced up at the cracks in the ceiling, the broken window panes, the worn patches in the carpet. ‘At present the income amounts to just four thousand pounds a year, barely enough to cover
the interest payments.’
He looked around at the remaining members of the de Courcy family. Alice had turned even paler and was staring at the floor. Julia and Sarah were gazing in horror at this messenger of despair.
Edmund had his head in his hands. ‘I fully appreciate,’ McKenna purred on, as if he was performing this melancholy rite for the ninth or the tenth time – which he was –
‘that this must have come as rather a shock. A terrible shock. At the bank we have considerable experience of dealing with these problems. We shall continue to extend our credit for the
foreseeable future, but a rescue plan must be devised which can extricate you all from this temporary financial impasse.’
Edmund escorted his mother and sisters to the door. He took McKenna to walk up and down the Long Gallery on the other side of the house from the library. Their footsteps echoed up and down the
hundred and forty feet of the great room. Long thin windows looked out over a bedraggled garden, weeds and brambles laying siege to the lawns, the unpruned roses running wild across the flower
beds.
‘I fear I can be more frank with you here than with your mother and your sisters,’ said McKenna. ‘Nothing need happen for three months. After that I would suggest you send your
mother and your sisters abroad. Life is cheaper there. You would be surprised how many of our fellow countrymen live happy and inexpensive lives in southern France.’
‘I do not think,’ said Edmund, looking sadly at his companion, ‘that my mother will be happy going to the south of France.’
‘Forgive me,’ said the banker. ‘It need not be there. There are many other places round the Mediterranean where they could be happy.’
‘But how can they be brought back? How will I find the money?’
‘We can improve the management of the estates,’ said McKenna. Experience had taught him that hope was the most important commodity in these circumstances. ‘We can bring in a
new steward, that old one seems to have been incompetent. The rent rolls could be doubled in three or four years.’
‘I can’t leave them abroad for that long. It will break my mother’s heart.’ Edmund stopped at one of the windows. The last of the afternoon light was going now, a couple
of stray dogs patrolling the lawns that led towards the lake. ‘I must make some money. But I have no training. What can I do, Mr McKenna? Please help me.’
McKenna looked at the long line of de Courcys on one section of the walls, painted by Lawrence and Reynolds, Hoppner and Gainsborough. He looked further away where some early Italian paintings
were becoming invisible in the gathering gloom.
‘Paintings,’ he said suddenly. ‘I hadn’t thought of it before. You could sell some of these paintings. Or you could use them as a way into the art world. We have a valued
client in London who might be willing to train you up, and to draw on your knowledge of the works of art in the great houses of England.’
Edmund felt the first faint stirrings of hope. ‘But is there any money to be made in dealing in paintings and things?’ he asked. ‘Surely nobody is going to pay hundreds of
pounds for some old works of art?’
Richard McKenna laughed. ‘The art market is changing, it’s changing every day, every month, every year, young man. Rich Americans, rich beyond imagination, richer than the world has
ever seen before, are just beginning to buy European paintings. If the trends continue, just three or four paintings, maybe even some of the ones you have on the walls here, would fetch enough to
clear all the debts and all the mortgages of de Courcy Hall.’
Autumn 1899
William Alaric Piper walked happily through his art gallery in London’s Old Bond Street. Every morning he went on a tour of inspection of the pictures, checking they were
all straight, that no dust remained on the floor from the previous day’s visitors. Piper was a small, rather tubby man in his early thirties. He was immaculately turned out, as ever, with a
fresh flower in his buttonhole and perfectly polished boots. The de Courcy and Piper Gallery, for such was to be the name of the new venture, was the boldest move yet on to the London art market of
the firm of de Courcy and Piper, art dealers.
In the main gallery, lit in the most dramatic way that London designers could provide, were Titians and Tintorettos, on the opposite wall Bellinis and
Giorgiones. In the smaller room next door the lesser gods of the Venetian pantheon were on display, the Bassanos and Carpaccios, the Bordones and the Vivarinis. Venetian Paintings had been
acclaimed as the most dramatic exhibition that year in London. The paintings had come on loan from Paris and the great houses of England to dazzle and bewitch the citizens of London with their
colour and their enigmatic beauty. Today, Piper reminded himself, the exhibition had been open for exactly one month.
As he reached his office William Alaric Piper took out a large cigar and opened his correspondence. His office was filled with files, for William Alaric Piper believed that knowledge was the key
to success. Quite simply he was determined to discover the location of all the valuable paintings in Britain. Then he would move on to France and Italy. Neatly arranged in alphabetical order were
the counties of the kingdom, some thicker than others, detailing the collections of Petworth and Knebworth and Chatsworth, Knole and Kingston Lacy and Kedleston Hall. Sometimes individual entries
were marked with a strange system of asterisks. These told the initiated how severe were the financial problems of the owners of the paintings. One asterisk meant major trouble, might be persuaded
to sell. Two asterisks meant technically insolvent, desperate to raise money. And three asterisks meant that financial Armageddon was imminent and might only be averted by the judicious sale of
some of the family heirlooms. This intelligence system was run by Piper’s partner Edmund de Courcy Since his father’s death de Courcy had been employed first as an apprentice and then
as a junior partner in the business – his speciality to maintain an accurate index of the fluctuating fortunes of the English rich so the firm of de Courcy and Piper could make an offer at
precisely the right time.
There was one incongruous item in this haven of knowledge. On the wall directly opposite Piper’s desk was an enormous map of the United States of America with the railroad routes marked in
a variety of different colours. Crawling across the continent went the Baltimore and Ohio, the Central Pacific Railroad, the Union Pacific, the Atcheson Topeka and Santa Fe. Casual visitors might
have thought that Piper was a great devotee of railway travel, intent one day perhaps on traversing the length and breadth of the American continent. They would have been wrong. Piper disliked
trains intensely. His favourite means of transport was the transatlantic liner, sailing in unimaginable luxury across the Atlantic.
For Piper the map symbolized American money, the vast American wealth that had been created by the railroads. Vanderbilt and Morgan, Stanford and Huntington had a daily income from the railroads
greater than Piper had earned in his entire life. Piper’s ambition was to conquer the American art market. The new millionaires with their vast town houses in New York, their improbable
chateaux in Newport, their yachts, their vulgar furnishings, were beginning to buy European pictures, usually of inferior quality. They had, after all, as Piper gleefully reminded himself from time
to time, a great deal of wall space to fill. Once they had been tutored in the glories of the Old Masters Piper dreamt of Old Master prices, Old Master profits for himself, and a spurious
second-hand immortality for their new owners. Already he had plans to infiltrate the beating heart of American money, New York’s Fifth Avenue.
As he opened his letters a smile, a rather wolfish smile, crossed his face. A note from his agent in New York told him that a certain William P. McCracken, master of all the railroads that
radiated north, south and west of Boston, was coming to London shortly. He had made reservations at the Piccadilly Hotel. Piper too would visit the Piccadilly Hotel. Perhaps he would take the
adjacent suite to this William P. McCracken. A meeting would be engineered with the sole purpose of introducing the millionaire to the joys of European painting. Perhaps he would be able to escort
him round the National Gallery. Then he would receive a special invitation to the exhibition. Then, if Piper judged the time was right – he had observed that too many of his rivals rushed
their fences and lost valuable business by excessive haste in selling – he would tempt the railroad king until he had to buy. Above all, he reminded himself, he had to make a friend of
McCracken. He would become a friend for life. After all, McCracken’s money was going to last for life. And McCracken, unlike many of his fellow plutocrats, was still fairly young. What a
collection William Alaric Piper could build for him! How much wealth could be quietly removed from the McCracken accounts in the banks of Wall Street into the coffers of William Alaric Piper!
A couple of miles to the west a military inspection was under way in Chelsea.
‘Stand at ease!’ said the tall Sergeant Major figure with the brown curly hair and the blue eyes.
‘Attention!’ The troops banged their feet on the floor, eyes staring rigidly ahead, fists pressed tightly to their sides.
‘Shoulder arms!’ shouted the Sergeant Major. A couple of shortened broom handles made their way slowly up into the correct position.
‘By the left, quick march!’ The little platoon moved off smartly towards the window.
‘Squad, halt!’ said the Sergeant Major, nearly tripping over a chair.
‘About turn!’ The figures shuffled awkwardly round to face the way they had come.
‘By the left, quick march! Left, left, left, left right left.’ The parade was rapidly approaching the double doors of the drawing room. The Sergeant Major, whose mind had temporarily
wandered off somewhere else, recalled himself to his duty.
‘Squad, halt!’ He was only just in time. One more pace and the heads of the platoon would have crashed into the hard wood of the doors.
‘Squad, stand at ease!’ One of the figures refused to move.
‘You there, at the back, you miserable rapscallion, you! What did I just say? I said stand at ease! If you can’t obey orders in this battalion it’ll be bread and water for
thirty days! Stand at ease!’
A foot banged into the floorboards. Two arms went behind the back. A face looked rather sad at the prospect of bread and water for thirty days.
‘Squad, dismiss!’
Two small figures turned round and leapt into their father’s arms. L
The old man walked slowly across the fields. A fine rain was falling on his bare head. He let himself into the little church and walked to the position he knew so well after
forty-five years as the bell ringer of St Peter’s Church. He slipped through the faded red curtain and unhooked the rope from its place on the wall. High above him in the tower the bell still
carried the inscription from its maker. ‘Thomas Wilson made mee, 1714.’ The old man began to pull, his arms rising regularly above his shoulders like the swell on the sea.
The bell tolled for a funeral, the funeral of one who would have been the lord of the manor had he still lived there before his God called him home. Charles Edward Windham Fitzmaurice de Courcy
was in the church already, his coffin resting beneath the inscriptions to earlier de Courcys on the walls. It was a quarter past ten in the morning, the service scheduled for eleven
o’clock.
Two hundred and fifty yards away through the morning mist that swirled across the fields the great Jacobean mansion of de Courcy Hall continued to resist the elements as it had for the past two
hundred and seventy years. Inside in the Great Hall a melancholy party was preparing to set off for the church. Alice de Courcy, wife of the dead man, wondered about her future. Edmund de Courcy,
the eldest son, wondered about the size of his inheritance. Julia and Sarah, his younger sisters, wondered if they would be able to go and live in London all the year round. None of them had seen
the dead man, husband and father, for the past fourteen years.
‘Do you think it’s time to go, Edmund?’ Mother touched her son softly on the arm. ‘We don’t want to be late.’ It was half-past ten.
‘Not yet, Mother, there’s still time.’
In 1882 Charles de Courcy had abandoned his fields and his family to live with another woman in the south of France. There, so the family believed, he had fathered another two children. There,
the family were convinced, he had squandered most of the family inheritance on his mistress. And she, the mistress, had announced her intention of attending the last rites this melancholy morning,
though whether she would bring the children no one knew.
‘Did Smithson say that woman would come to the house first or go direct to the church?’ Alice de Courcy asked for the hundredth time. Alice shook every time she thought about this
meeting if meeting there had to be. Smithson was the family lawyer, based in Fakenham, who had been the unhappy conduit of many messages between the two households over the preceding decade and a
half. The family knew there had been great arguments about a will, with lawyers coming up from Norwich and even London to thrash out the rights of an estate owner to dispose of his property as he
wished in the dusty offices of a Norfolk town. Every conversation in de Courcy Hall since they heard of the death had revolved round this single point. Would the Frenchwoman come to the Hall or
would she go direct to the church?
‘You know Smithson didn’t say, Mama.’ Edmund was as gentle as he knew how. ‘But I don’t think there is time for her and her party to come here and then go to the
church. I think we’d better set off.’ It was twenty to eleven.
And so the de Courcy family set off across their fields for the last rites of a man they would never see again. In their different ways they prepared to meet another family they had never seen
before, half-brothers, half-sisters perhaps. The girls thought it was rather dramatic and exciting, their cheeks turning red as the wind lashed through the trees. Alice was not sure she could bear
it. Edmund, aware of his new responsibilities at the age of twenty-five, was uncharacteristically worried about his mother.
To the north, past the sodden cows that huddled for shelter beneath the twisted trees, the North Sea marked the outer limits of the estate. Generations of de Courcys had planted trees in
ever-growing numbers as a protection against the storms that whistled in from the angry coastline. To the south the estate stretched for many miles in the direction of Norwich.
Sometimes the bell was very loud, as if it was right in front of them, sometimes it drifted off to the west with the wind.
A bedraggled vicar greeted them at the door. There were tiny holes in his cassock. His boots were leaking. Payments from the de Courcy family had become increasingly irregular over the
years.
‘Good morning, Mrs de Courcy, Edmund, Julia, Sarah.’ The vicar smiled a feeble smile, his eyes flickering down the long drive that led to de Courcy Hall. It was ten minutes to
eleven.
Edmund led his family to their pew at the front of the church, his mother huddling up against the wall as if she didn’t want to be seen. The bell was still tolling. The organ was playing a
Bach fugue very softly. The women fell to their knees to pray. Servants and neighbours were filling up the pews behind them.
On the floor to Edmund’s left, two of his ancestors stared up at the ceiling and the next life from their brass memorial on the floor. ‘Richard de Courcy lies here, God have mercy on
his soul. Lady Elizabeth who was the wife of Richard de Courcy lies here, to whose soul may God be merciful. This in the year of our Lord 1380.’ Grave and inscrutable, serious and humble, the
ancient faces slept on. It was five to eleven.
In the pew opposite, Mr Smithson, the lawyer from Fakenham, was kneeling in prayer. Beside him a rather smartly dressed young man was staring at the memorial tablets on the walls. As the bell
stopped a slow drip began to fall loudly on to the floor just behind the pulpit. It seemed to have caught the rhythm of the bell, the plops on the stone floor sounding at the same interval as the
creation of the bellwright Thomas Wilson far above in its tower. Edmund noticed a small trail of green slime making a determined advance on the wall beside the altar.
Edmund stole a quick glance behind him. All the pews were full now, except for the one opposite his own. The organ began to build towards a crescendo. The vicar was busying himself by the altar,
water dripping from his boots and forming little puddles on the floor.
At two minutes to eleven Edmund sensed there were new arrivals. You didn’t have to look round. There was a low murmur of excitement from the pews behind. There was a firm click as the door
was closed by the newcomers. Julia and Sarah began to turn their heads to look until Edmund nudged them both firmly in the ribs. Alice de Courcy huddled ever closer to the wall and sank to her
knees again to pray for deliverance.
A handsome woman of about forty years of age, escorted by a boy of ten and a girl of seven or eight, sat down in the pew opposite. Edmund realized with a shock that the little boy looked
remarkably like he had done at the same age. All three stared directly in front of them.
The vicar coughed firmly. Resolutely looking at the back of the church he began the service.
‘I am the Resurrection and the life.’ The vicar’s voice was thick as if he had a heavy cold. ‘He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and
whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’
The Frenchwoman in her pew was having difficulty finding her place in the unfamiliar prayer book of the Anglican Church. The smartly dressed young man sitting beside lawyer Smithson leant
forward and gave her his own, opened at the correct page. She smiled slightly in acknowledgement.
Edmund’s memories of his father were remote. Sometimes he had to admit that he found it hard to remember what his father looked like and he had to go and stare at the portrait in the Long
Gallery of de Courcy Hall where an unbroken line of nine of his male ancestors adorned the walls. He dimly recalled his father teaching him to play cricket in the walled garden at the side of the
house. He thought his father had been away a lot, in London or Norwich, always apparently on business. He recalled all too well the shouting matches that often accompanied his return, his mother
left weeping softly in a corner of the drawing room. This new half-brother and half-sister must have very different, fresher memories but he had no idea what they were. He wondered if the little
boy had been taught to play cricket in some hot French garden, with French servants bringing glasses of lemonade to drink under the trees.
‘We brought nothing into this world,’ the vicar sounded hoarser now, ‘and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the
name of the Lord.’
Edmund thought bitterly that his father, contrary to the words of the book of Job, had brought a great deal into this world. But had he left anything behind? Edward gazed sadly at the drip
continuing its monotonous journey from ceiling to floor. He thought of the estate steward shaking his head as he pored over the account books. What would be left? How much would be left? How would
it be divided?
Roger Bilton, the de Courcys’ closest neighbour, had risen to read the second lesson. He was a tall, stooping man, reputed never to have travelled any further from his home than the city
of Norwich. He spoke the words in a high querulous tone, as if he didn’t believe them.
‘Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even
so in Christ shall all be made alive.’
Another memorial on the floor echoed the words of St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians. Thomas de Courcy was portrayed on his brass in full armour, holding a very long sword, as if about
to go into battle. Edmund remembered the full description of the armour with its archaic vocabulary of gorgets and vambraces, tassets and epaulieres, jambarts and rerebraces, genouillaires and
sabbatons.
Livest Thou Thomas? Yeas. Where? With God on Highe.
Art thou not dead? Yeas. And here I lye.
I that with men on earth did live to die
Died to live with Christ eternallie.
The vicar was praying now, the prayers interrupted by his hacking cough, praying that the dead man’s sins might be forgiven so he could be received into God’s gracious mercy and
protection.
Three of his father’s transgressions were sitting but three feet away from him, Edmund thought to himself, casting a quick glance at the alternative family in its pew. The mother was
impassive, the boy and girl taking their cue from their mother and staring resolutely straight ahead. Julia and Sarah had managed to stand right at the front of their box pew so they could look
sideways without being noticed. Alice, their mother, was still huddled against the wall.
The prayers were punctuated by the regular drip on to the floor, sounding another note of desolation and decay, as if not only the body of the dead man but the very fabric of the buildings on
his estate was beginning to rot away.
There was no sermon from the vicar. He found it impossible to know what to say in such circumstances.
At last, at twenty minutes past eleven, it was all over.
‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen.’
Scarcely had the word ‘Amen’ died away when the smartly dressed young man sitting beside lawyer Smithson unlatched his door, opened the door of the pew in front of him and escorted
the French party out of the church as fast as decency allowed. Just once Edmund met the eyes of his father’s mistress. Julia and Sarah had one quick glimpse of the half-brother and sister
they had never seen before. Almost before the congregation realized what was happening the French party had fled the field.
The bell began to toll again. Smithson had a brief word with Edmund and his mother as they stood at the gate of the church, staring out at what had been their fields, but might be their fields
no longer.
‘They’re not going to come to the house,’ he said, trying to reassure the widow, ‘they’re going back to their hotel.’
Smithson paused. He suspected that the ordeal of having to listen to the dead man’s will being read out, surrounded by his mistress and the bastard offspring, might prove too much for
Alice de Courcy.
‘The young man who took them away is called McKenna, Richard McKenna. He works for Finch’s Bank. McKenna’s going to tell them the details of the will there before they go back
to France.’
How long did it take, Edmund wondered, to travel from the south of France to a remote house in Norfolk for a service that had lasted less than half an hour? Perhaps it was the will, an unknown
financial future, not family piety that had brought them on their long journey into the rain and the wind that surrounded St Peter’s Church. Just visible on the long drive that led to the
main road, the French carriage was making good speed as if they wanted to escape as fast as they could.
‘I thought,’ Smithson went on apologetically, ‘that a rest would be a good idea before the reading of the last will and testament. Mr McKenna and I propose to call on you at
three o’clock this afternoon. Would the library be suitable, do you think?’
‘Of course,’ said Edmund and steered his mother back across the fields to de Courcy Hall. The congregation drifted off. The vicar wondered yet again if he could afford another pair
of boots. The great bell rang out across the countryside and almost reached the sea. This afternoon, it would be decided. This afternoon, they would know their fate and their future.
‘“I, Charles Edward Windham Fitzmaurice de Courcy, formerly of de Courcy Hall in the county of Norfolk, currently resident at the Chateau de Fontcaude, Grasse,
Alpes Maritimes, France, do hereby cancel, revoke and annul all previous wills and testaments.”’
Mr Smithson, the lawyer from Fakenham, had put on his glasses. The library was on the first floor of de Courcy Hall, great oak bookcases rising almost to the ceiling. Many of the books had been
purchased in Rome or Geneva, Naples or Venice, by earlier de Courcys on the Grand Tour, shorter visits to Europe than the dead man who had stayed there fifteen years. There was a large mahogany
table in the middle of the room. Mr Smithson and his banker companion sat at the head, with the family below them. Outside the rain was still falling. The wind was battering against the windows.
Even with a fire the room was cold.
Julia started at the mention of the word ‘Chateau’. She had visions of some enormous palace filled with tapestries and exciting histories of romance and elopement. Edmund was
wondering how much a chateau would cost to run, even a little one.
There was a lot more legal preamble. Smithson read this as fast as he could. Then he paused. Richard McKenna was looking at what appeared to be a first edition of Dr Johnson’s dictionary,
the dust sitting thickly on the top as if nobody had checked the meaning of a word for over a hundred and forty years.
‘“I come now to my testimonary dispositions.”’ Smithson glanced at the dead man’s family, Alice looking pale, the girls interested, Edmund apprehensive. ‘“De Courcy Hall, its contents, furniture, pictures, ornaments and everything else pertaining unto it, I leave to my son Edmund George Windham de Courcy.”’
The girls looked relieved. They had never lived anywhere else. They would be safe. Smithson coughed. He looked slightly embarrassed as he read on.
‘“My estates, farms, woods, horses, cattle and sheep and all other farm animals”’ – there followed a precise geographical description of all these properties
– ‘“I leave absolutely to Madame Yvette de Castelnau of Grasse for her sole use and that of her children, François and Marie-Claire.”’
Charles de Courcy had done the unthinkable. He had failed to keep one of the oldest rules of the English gentry in disposing of their property. He had broken it up. In his wish to accommodate
his two families he had separated the house from the lands which supported it. None of the women seemed to understand what had happened. Perhaps they had been hypnotized by the legal prose, the
dead language of lawyers come to impose its will on the living.
Edmund did. He did not know just how terrible the news was, but he knew it meant catastrophe for himself, his mother and his sisters.
‘“Signed in the presence of witnesses, Albert Clement, notaire of Grasse and Jean Jacques Rives, banker of Nice, on the twentieth day of October 1895.”’
Smithson wiped his brow. He coughed apologetically. The women looked dumb. Edmund was staring at the leather volumes opposite him, wondering how much they were worth.
‘I am afraid there is more that you must know,’ Smithson said, glancing briefly at his companion. ‘Mr McKenna here comes from Finch’s Bank which handles the family
financial affairs. I fear you should hear from him.’
Great God, thought Alice de Courcy, is there worse to come on this terrible day? That woman and her children coming to the funeral was bad. Breaking up the house and the estate, she suspected,
was worse.
Richard McKenna drew some papers from his bag and placed them on the table. He spoke very gently. ‘The financial position is not good,’ he began. ‘Let me deal with the house
first. There are two mortgages outstanding on the property in which we sit this afternoon. They are for a total of forty thousand pounds, secured on de Courcy Hall itself. The current interest on
those mortgages comes to approximately fifteen hundred pounds a year.’ The figures dropped into the room like the drops of rain from the leak in the church at the service that morning, cold,
regular, unstoppable.
‘The estates are also mortgaged,’ McKenna went on. Edmund thought he sounded like a doctor telling his patient that they had an incurable disease. Perhaps they had. Financial cancer
had spread to Norfolk, a plague of debt and impossible obligations.
‘They are mortgaged to the value of sixty thousand pounds. The interest on those loans from Finch’s Bank comes to the total of two thousand, two hundred and fifty pounds a
year.’
McKenna paused. Now came the hammer blow. ‘The rent rolls from the estates have been falling lately. The properties are not perhaps in such good repair as they once were.’ His eyes
glanced up at the cracks in the ceiling, the broken window panes, the worn patches in the carpet. ‘At present the income amounts to just four thousand pounds a year, barely enough to cover
the interest payments.’
He looked around at the remaining members of the de Courcy family. Alice had turned even paler and was staring at the floor. Julia and Sarah were gazing in horror at this messenger of despair.
Edmund had his head in his hands. ‘I fully appreciate,’ McKenna purred on, as if he was performing this melancholy rite for the ninth or the tenth time – which he was –
‘that this must have come as rather a shock. A terrible shock. At the bank we have considerable experience of dealing with these problems. We shall continue to extend our credit for the
foreseeable future, but a rescue plan must be devised which can extricate you all from this temporary financial impasse.’
Edmund escorted his mother and sisters to the door. He took McKenna to walk up and down the Long Gallery on the other side of the house from the library. Their footsteps echoed up and down the
hundred and forty feet of the great room. Long thin windows looked out over a bedraggled garden, weeds and brambles laying siege to the lawns, the unpruned roses running wild across the flower
beds.
‘I fear I can be more frank with you here than with your mother and your sisters,’ said McKenna. ‘Nothing need happen for three months. After that I would suggest you send your
mother and your sisters abroad. Life is cheaper there. You would be surprised how many of our fellow countrymen live happy and inexpensive lives in southern France.’
‘I do not think,’ said Edmund, looking sadly at his companion, ‘that my mother will be happy going to the south of France.’
‘Forgive me,’ said the banker. ‘It need not be there. There are many other places round the Mediterranean where they could be happy.’
‘But how can they be brought back? How will I find the money?’
‘We can improve the management of the estates,’ said McKenna. Experience had taught him that hope was the most important commodity in these circumstances. ‘We can bring in a
new steward, that old one seems to have been incompetent. The rent rolls could be doubled in three or four years.’
‘I can’t leave them abroad for that long. It will break my mother’s heart.’ Edmund stopped at one of the windows. The last of the afternoon light was going now, a couple
of stray dogs patrolling the lawns that led towards the lake. ‘I must make some money. But I have no training. What can I do, Mr McKenna? Please help me.’
McKenna looked at the long line of de Courcys on one section of the walls, painted by Lawrence and Reynolds, Hoppner and Gainsborough. He looked further away where some early Italian paintings
were becoming invisible in the gathering gloom.
‘Paintings,’ he said suddenly. ‘I hadn’t thought of it before. You could sell some of these paintings. Or you could use them as a way into the art world. We have a valued
client in London who might be willing to train you up, and to draw on your knowledge of the works of art in the great houses of England.’
Edmund felt the first faint stirrings of hope. ‘But is there any money to be made in dealing in paintings and things?’ he asked. ‘Surely nobody is going to pay hundreds of
pounds for some old works of art?’
Richard McKenna laughed. ‘The art market is changing, it’s changing every day, every month, every year, young man. Rich Americans, rich beyond imagination, richer than the world has
ever seen before, are just beginning to buy European paintings. If the trends continue, just three or four paintings, maybe even some of the ones you have on the walls here, would fetch enough to
clear all the debts and all the mortgages of de Courcy Hall.’
Autumn 1899
William Alaric Piper walked happily through his art gallery in London’s Old Bond Street. Every morning he went on a tour of inspection of the pictures, checking they were
all straight, that no dust remained on the floor from the previous day’s visitors. Piper was a small, rather tubby man in his early thirties. He was immaculately turned out, as ever, with a
fresh flower in his buttonhole and perfectly polished boots. The de Courcy and Piper Gallery, for such was to be the name of the new venture, was the boldest move yet on to the London art market of
the firm of de Courcy and Piper, art dealers.
In the main gallery, lit in the most dramatic way that London designers could provide, were Titians and Tintorettos, on the opposite wall Bellinis and
Giorgiones. In the smaller room next door the lesser gods of the Venetian pantheon were on display, the Bassanos and Carpaccios, the Bordones and the Vivarinis. Venetian Paintings had been
acclaimed as the most dramatic exhibition that year in London. The paintings had come on loan from Paris and the great houses of England to dazzle and bewitch the citizens of London with their
colour and their enigmatic beauty. Today, Piper reminded himself, the exhibition had been open for exactly one month.
As he reached his office William Alaric Piper took out a large cigar and opened his correspondence. His office was filled with files, for William Alaric Piper believed that knowledge was the key
to success. Quite simply he was determined to discover the location of all the valuable paintings in Britain. Then he would move on to France and Italy. Neatly arranged in alphabetical order were
the counties of the kingdom, some thicker than others, detailing the collections of Petworth and Knebworth and Chatsworth, Knole and Kingston Lacy and Kedleston Hall. Sometimes individual entries
were marked with a strange system of asterisks. These told the initiated how severe were the financial problems of the owners of the paintings. One asterisk meant major trouble, might be persuaded
to sell. Two asterisks meant technically insolvent, desperate to raise money. And three asterisks meant that financial Armageddon was imminent and might only be averted by the judicious sale of
some of the family heirlooms. This intelligence system was run by Piper’s partner Edmund de Courcy Since his father’s death de Courcy had been employed first as an apprentice and then
as a junior partner in the business – his speciality to maintain an accurate index of the fluctuating fortunes of the English rich so the firm of de Courcy and Piper could make an offer at
precisely the right time.
There was one incongruous item in this haven of knowledge. On the wall directly opposite Piper’s desk was an enormous map of the United States of America with the railroad routes marked in
a variety of different colours. Crawling across the continent went the Baltimore and Ohio, the Central Pacific Railroad, the Union Pacific, the Atcheson Topeka and Santa Fe. Casual visitors might
have thought that Piper was a great devotee of railway travel, intent one day perhaps on traversing the length and breadth of the American continent. They would have been wrong. Piper disliked
trains intensely. His favourite means of transport was the transatlantic liner, sailing in unimaginable luxury across the Atlantic.
For Piper the map symbolized American money, the vast American wealth that had been created by the railroads. Vanderbilt and Morgan, Stanford and Huntington had a daily income from the railroads
greater than Piper had earned in his entire life. Piper’s ambition was to conquer the American art market. The new millionaires with their vast town houses in New York, their improbable
chateaux in Newport, their yachts, their vulgar furnishings, were beginning to buy European pictures, usually of inferior quality. They had, after all, as Piper gleefully reminded himself from time
to time, a great deal of wall space to fill. Once they had been tutored in the glories of the Old Masters Piper dreamt of Old Master prices, Old Master profits for himself, and a spurious
second-hand immortality for their new owners. Already he had plans to infiltrate the beating heart of American money, New York’s Fifth Avenue.
As he opened his letters a smile, a rather wolfish smile, crossed his face. A note from his agent in New York told him that a certain William P. McCracken, master of all the railroads that
radiated north, south and west of Boston, was coming to London shortly. He had made reservations at the Piccadilly Hotel. Piper too would visit the Piccadilly Hotel. Perhaps he would take the
adjacent suite to this William P. McCracken. A meeting would be engineered with the sole purpose of introducing the millionaire to the joys of European painting. Perhaps he would be able to escort
him round the National Gallery. Then he would receive a special invitation to the exhibition. Then, if Piper judged the time was right – he had observed that too many of his rivals rushed
their fences and lost valuable business by excessive haste in selling – he would tempt the railroad king until he had to buy. Above all, he reminded himself, he had to make a friend of
McCracken. He would become a friend for life. After all, McCracken’s money was going to last for life. And McCracken, unlike many of his fellow plutocrats, was still fairly young. What a
collection William Alaric Piper could build for him! How much wealth could be quietly removed from the McCracken accounts in the banks of Wall Street into the coffers of William Alaric Piper!
A couple of miles to the west a military inspection was under way in Chelsea.
‘Stand at ease!’ said the tall Sergeant Major figure with the brown curly hair and the blue eyes.
‘Attention!’ The troops banged their feet on the floor, eyes staring rigidly ahead, fists pressed tightly to their sides.
‘Shoulder arms!’ shouted the Sergeant Major. A couple of shortened broom handles made their way slowly up into the correct position.
‘By the left, quick march!’ The little platoon moved off smartly towards the window.
‘Squad, halt!’ said the Sergeant Major, nearly tripping over a chair.
‘About turn!’ The figures shuffled awkwardly round to face the way they had come.
‘By the left, quick march! Left, left, left, left right left.’ The parade was rapidly approaching the double doors of the drawing room. The Sergeant Major, whose mind had temporarily
wandered off somewhere else, recalled himself to his duty.
‘Squad, halt!’ He was only just in time. One more pace and the heads of the platoon would have crashed into the hard wood of the doors.
‘Squad, stand at ease!’ One of the figures refused to move.
‘You there, at the back, you miserable rapscallion, you! What did I just say? I said stand at ease! If you can’t obey orders in this battalion it’ll be bread and water for
thirty days! Stand at ease!’
A foot banged into the floorboards. Two arms went behind the back. A face looked rather sad at the prospect of bread and water for thirty days.
‘Squad, dismiss!’
Two small figures turned round and leapt into their father’s arms. L
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Death of an Old Master
David Dickinson
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