23

They had got back to Bridle Lodge at midday. John had got out of the car, unlocked the front door, and walked straight to the alarm panel outside the drawing room. He had turned and looked at Catherine, and held out his hand.

“Come here,” he said. “I want to show you.”

He’d keyed the alarm; they went in and closed the door behind them.

John went to the desk on the far side near the windows. He opened a drawer and brought out a sheaf of papers.

“These are all the invoices I could find,” he said. “I went through it all when I got back from you the other night. They go back about ten years.” He looked around himself. “Other things I can guess where I bought them, the time,” he said. “But some of them … the little bits, some of the Bow porcelain I don’t know …”

She’d walked over to him. “Let’s take it to London,” she said. “If you really want to sell, you may as well get the best price you can. And it wouldn’t feel quite ethical to put it through Pearsons.”

He’d taken her hand in his, lifted it to his face, and pressed his mouth to it.

“Or you can think about it some other time,” she said. “If you really want to sell, if it’s what you really want to do, there’s no hurry …”

“Yes, there is,” he had replied. “I want all this to go.”

She paused a beat. “It’s such a lot, John. You’ll want to keep some of it.”

He’d dropped her hand slowly. “Helen wasn’t talking about this when she talked to you about secrets,” he told her. “She was talking about something else.”

He took her to the window seat and positioned her there, facing into the room. He watched her for a second over his shoulder, then walked back to the center and lifted aside the gateleg table, moving its contents to one of the sideboards. Then, getting down on his hands and knees, he rolled back the edge of the rug. The floor looked smooth; oak floorboards with an almost black patina.

“This took me a hell of a long time,” he was saying to her as he got onto his hands and knees. “I almost gave the game away the first day I saw you, talking about lifting floorboards.” He began to run his hand over the floor. “I wanted it really invisible,” he murmured. “I took up the board and cut it. It was January. Those weeks when it never stopped raining. When I’d eventually made the compartment, the board had expanded. I had to wait until it dried. I put it in the kitchen near the stove …”

She was staring at him, mystified.

“Here,” he said. He tried prying the board with his fingertips. It wouldn’t budge. He got up, cursing softly, went back to the Jacobean chest, and took a small screwdriver from it. Catherine leaned forward, her elbows on her knees.

A few moments later he had removed two boards; from out of the cavity underneath them, he took a metal box. It was about two by three feet and shallow, an architect’s steel drawer from a plan chest that had been fitted with a steel lid. It took some maneuvering to get it out and, when he had done so, he laid it flat on the floor in front of her.

“It used to be in the bank.”

“What is it?” she asked.

He looked at her and said nothing.

The drawer was divided into two compartments: one small, one large.

He opened the smaller one of the two, and one by one, put plastic file covers on the ground. They were an ordinary letter-size. Inside each folder was a brown paper envelope.

“I’ve wrapped them in a couple of layers of acid-free,” he said.

He stood up and brought the folders to her. There were about twenty, she estimated. Next, from the same drawer, he brought her a pair of cotton gloves. She put them on, her eyes fixed on his.

“Open them,” he said.

She laid the pile next to her on the window seat and took out the first. It had words and a date on the left-hand corner, Night and Day, 1864. She gave a sharp intake of breath, and looked back at him.

“Open it,” he repeated.

She took out the acid-free paper, and the drawing wrapped inside it.

A penciled sketch lay in her lap. The half-circle, looking like the template for a stone carving or plinth, was inscribed on the bottom right-hand corner: Richard Dadd, 1864.

“But this is in the Ashmolean,” she said softly. “They bought it just before the war.”

“This is a copy,” he told her. “Dadd made a copy.”

She stared at it for some seconds in astonishment, then looked at the pile of folders next to her. He held out his hand to take the first; wordlessly, she picked up the next one and opened it.

“Port Stragglin,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

She had written a seminar paper once on this watercolor. It had been painted in 1861. On the original, Dadd had written a poignant inscription, General View of Part of Port Stragglin—The Rock and Castle of Seclusion / and the Blinker Lighthouse in the Distance / not sketched from Nature.

She turned the envelope over again and looked at the date on the outside, 1865. “He redrew them?” she murmured.

“Everything he had to leave behind in Bedlam,” John said. “Or gave to anyone else.”

She looked again at the drawing. “Not sketched from Nature,” she murmured. “He used to draw such beautiful things, his flowers and trees, like pre-Raphaelite paintings, or Surrealist … and that phrase, ‘not sketched from Nature,’ because he was out of sight of a garden …” She shook her head.

She held up the drawing. “I always thought this was perfect,” she said. “The rock and the town, the ships in the harbor, everything perfectly done. The chimneys on the houses, the rigging on the ships. The towers that follow the road up the rock. When you first look at it, it’s impossible. Nowhere on earth is made like that. To get a whole world like that on a little piece of paper just seven inches by … I don’t remember, seven by four inches?”

“Five,” John said.

She shook her head. “So this is exact,” she said.

“Exactly the same size.”

She sat back. “My hands are shaking,” she said. She closed her eyes for a second. “This is what you were talking about, this is what Helen wants.”

“No,” he said. “She hates them. She wants to sell them. She wants the money.”

“And she thinks I want to sell them, too,” Catherine murmured. She frowned suddenly. “You’re not going to?”

He was watching her. “What do you think?”

“Well, this alone …” she hesitated. “What would they make, if you sold them? I don’t know … it’s impossible to say. Ten thousand? Twenty, thirty? They never come on the market. I think the British Museum has the original of this. There are some private owners,” she continued, thinking aloud. “In America. There’s one in Connecticut … the Tate has some, and the Victoria and Albert Museum …” She looked back at the drawing, and again at John. “But mostly,” she said, “when you see a catalogue, it just says, ‘Whereabouts unknown.’

There might be a picture, a copy, or a photograph taken years ago, but no one …” She took a breath. “No one knows where they are now,” she said. “They vanished.”

John had replaced the first drawing in its envelope.

She gazed at him. “John, how many have you got?”

Not answering, he inclined his head toward the next folder. She opened it.

It was Mother and Child. “Oh, God,” she whispered.

“It’s the clothes,” John said. “The incredible folds. Just too much material, and too much shadow.”

“And the bird in the background,” she said, smiling hesitantly now. “Such a strange, strange bird, with its puffed-out feathers.” She turned her head to one side, looking carefully at it. “It’s peculiar to see it so small,” she said.

“He almost miniaturized this one.”

“It’s quite a big painting,” she said. “Oil on canvas. It came up for sale in the 1950s.”

“The 1960s,” he said.

She glanced from one to the other. “How could he remember them all?” she wondered. “Everything’s the same. Every single thing in them. It’s as if they’ve been photocopied.”

She sat in silence for a while.

He took Mother and Child and gave her the next.

Within ten minutes, she had picked them up, taken them to the empty table, and spread them out on the top. John said nothing else, waiting. Only after some time did she turn and look at the metal container.

“There’s nothing else?” she asked.

“I have eighteen paintings,” he said. “And fourteen miniatures on enamel.”

She said nothing. She didn’t move.

“The Child’s Problem,” he said “Bacchanalian Scene, Cupid and Psyche, The Pilot Boat, The Flight of Medea …”

“Oh, shit,” she said. “John.”

He stopped, then burst out laughing. “That’s not an academic response, Mrs. Sergeant.”

“Oh, yes it is,” she retorted. “You’ve got a copy of Bacchanalian Scene, in miniature?”

“Yes.”

“On enamel …”

“He tried out all sorts of things in Broadmoor,” John said. “He painted a drop-curtain for the theater, and scenery for their plays, and lanterns, and he engraved glass …”

Catherine had gone back to the window. She stood with a hand over her mouth for a long time, gazing at the garden. Then she turned back to him.

“Eighteen paintings,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Copies?”

He smiled at her. “You’re doing a great job of keeping calm,” he said.

“Copies or not?” she repeated.

He went to the metal container and opened the larger compartment. He took out a canvas bag.

“These were always rolled,” he said. “My father said they were never framed. So …” He paused while he pulled the drawstring of the canvas. “Some have cracks. They all need attention. They need restoring and frames and …”

He pulled a painting from the bag and held it out to her.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Unroll it.”

The first thing she noticed, in all the other faces, was the magician.

Dominating the center of the picture, he sat with his arms outstretched.

Catherine gasped, then leaned forward. She looked hard at the magician’s face, and then back at John.

“He’s different,” she said. “Look at this … look at him.”

She got up from the seat, tilting the painting so that it caught the light. Her eye ran over the whole. It was like Songe de la Fantasie, in that some of the flowers were in bloom where they had only been in bud, or were invisible altogether, in the original painting. The grassheads that trailed across the picture now were in seed, their minute petals open.

“They’re all different,” she murmured. “Every one of them.”

The Fairy Queen of The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke was standing directly above the magician, and now looked out of the picture, instead of turning her profile to her partner. The dragonfly trumpeter now was walking straight for the viewer, wings outspread. Every face in the picture was looking straight out, some with the fixed stares of Bacchanalia, others merely curious.

Catherine’s fingertip brushed the two girls at the magician’s side.

John had come to her side.

She dropped the painting slightly and stared at him. “It’s you,” she whispered. “The magician is you.”

He glanced at the portrait. Even the colors were changed; the grays of the original had become powder blue, the ground under the Feller’s feet was bright yellow. The people in the picture were flourishing, growing, moving. There was light in their eyes; it was as if the artist had caught them in the act of dancing, running; the skirts of the girl with the mirror floated outward, her feet were lifted. She was flying, for a moment, on the wings that extended from her shoulder blades.

“Look in the mirror,” John said.

It was her. It was Catherine’s face. Someone else was leaping out of the reflection, close enough in coloring and dress to be the girl who held the glass, but not close enough. She was someone else. She was someone transcending the mirror, passing through it.

Catherine didn’t take her eyes off the painting. “This is what you meant,” she said. “When you told me to look at the girl in the mirror, you meant that you had seen this. You had seen who was in the mirror.”

“You,” he said. “That’s what I couldn’t get over when I first saw you. You’re in the mirror. He saw you in the mirror and painted you.”

She looked at him. “You’re serious.”

“Of course I’m serious,” he said. “Why not? He saw other worlds, vast enough to be Port Stragglin, and so small that even today you’d have to find them with a magnifying lens.”

“But it’s impossible,” Catherine replied.

John stepped so that he was behind the painting she held, looking straight at her. “Of course it is,” he said. “But then again, is anything truly impossible? Where are the boundaries?”

“You cannot seriously believe that he saw me,” she said.

He paused. “No, I can’t say that I believe it,” he answered. “But I believe he saw a version of the world, something that runs alongside us. Another reality.” He nodded at the painting. “They used to call them fairy pictures,” he said. “As if they showed something that wasn’t actually there, wasn’t alive. But”—he shrugged—“there were people all over the world saying that they saw these images, just as he did. A whole industry grew up on the back of paintings like this. It was the fashion for years.”

“But they didn’t really exist,” Catherine said.

“Maybe not,” John told her. “And you can look at a picture like this, and say that nothing that Richard Dadd painted really existed. After all, what was he? A madman. A man locked up for most of his adult life. A man who could take a knife to his father’s throat and think for the rest of his life that he had done the right thing. A man who heard voices …”

“But you think it existed?” Catherine said.

John smiled. “If you’re asking if I believe in fairies …”

She smiled back. “You do.”

“No,” John said. “But I believe that someone like Dadd knew a world we couldn’t begin to imagine. What’s to say what’s living in that world? Right next door to us. Right inside us, the things we never acknowledge, or we learn to ignore.”

“Otherness,” Catherine murmured.

He looked up. “What?”

“The otherness of things,” she said. “I’ve heard it described that way.”

He looked down again at the painting. “What else do you see?” he asked.

She was shaking her head rapidly, though slightly, from side to side. “I see your face in the magician,” she told him.

“Ah,” he told her. “But that’s not magic at all.”

“Why not?”

“Because this painting was made for my great-grandfather, Edward Brigham.”

Her mouth dropped, then a light dawned in her face.

“He was Dadd’s attendant in Bedlam,” John said. “He looked after Dadd for nine years. And in those nine years, Dadd painted The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.”

“Which he gave to the senior steward at Bedlam, Mr. Haydon, who liked Oberon and Titania so much that he asked for something similar.”

“And when Dadd got to Broadmoor,” John said, “he painted this copy, a copy that isn’t a copy, because it’s better.”

“And put Brigham’s face into the picture.”

“And yours,” John said.

She laughed a little, too amazed to do anything but still stand clutching the painting.

“Don’t you think it’s a better picture?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t really string a coherent thought, John.”

“I think it’s better,” he said. “It’s more optimistic.”

“I can’t think,” she murmured. “Take it off me.”

He did so; she sat down again abruptly. “This isn’t happening,” she murmured. She looked around at the table, and at John. “You’ve got the eighteen watercolors,” she said, “And the miniatures, and this, and …”

“Eleven others.”

“Eleven other oil paintings, in there?”

“Yes.”

“Copies of ones I’d know?”

“Five copies. Six originals.”

She put a hand to her forehead. “You have six Dadd originals?” she said. “Oils?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“What?”

“How do you know that they’re originals? You mean they’ve never appeared in any catalogues, any references?”

“They’re mentioned in his journals of Syria,” John replied. “They’re all paintings of Egypt, Syria, Greece.”

She said nothing at all. She watched as John carefully, slowly, replaced the painting in its weatherproofed canvas.

“They have to be kept better than this,” she murmured.

“I know.” He stood by the container. “Do you want to see the rest?” he asked.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Can we look at them all tomorrow?”

“OK.” He replaced the container, put back the floorboard, replaced the rug and the table. He eyed her warily. “Are you all right?” he asked. “You don’t look so good.”

“Are you surprised?” she said. “I can’t believe you’ve got them under your floorboards,” she said. “Under the bloody floorboards.”

He came and sat next to her and took her hand.

They walked up to Derry Woods that night, starting across the fields from the weirs on the river when the dusk was so deep that it was almost dark.

The paths were dry underfoot, with chalk showing through as the path rose. It was warm, humid, the heat of the day still hanging in the air. Under the beeches, the gloom deepened as they followed the route, Frith gone far ahead of them, thrashing a way through the undergrowth, until they could only hear him, and lost sight of him altogether.

They had last walked here three weeks before. It had been the first week of May then, and the new leaves on the trees had been a high, bright color, dazzling, and closer to yellow than green. The beeches, strung out in a long line down the hill, formed one unbroken green tunnel; below them, just above the water, under a haphazard mixture of hawthorn and scrub, wild garlic had been completely covering the ground, its waxy leaves open in a peeled-back display, giving a powerful, almost rancid, wash of scent.

They looked back now the way that they had come, over the tops of the trees now, to the hills beyond, now just a line of darker shadows on the far side of the valley. Bridle Lodge had vanished from view; they could only guess at the line of the river. All was silence in the upper reaches of the valley. Only in the land below, probably somewhere in the Lodge’s own garden, blackbirds were in competition in the twilight.

They stood in silence, his arm on her shoulder.

It was fully dark now.

And yet there was still a kind of light in Derry; they sat on the dry, warm ground, and waited for Frith to come back. In a few minutes he appeared, running full pelt through the trees, catching scent of them as he was almost upon them.

“Where have you been?” John asked him, as the dog lay down beside them and rolled luxuriously on his back.

Catherine looked up at the sky, empty of cloud. She had the same sensation she’d had when a child, of rushing upward. Falling upward through the stars.

She reached for John’s hand.

“I want to give Helen something,” he murmured. “She needs money.”

“Why don’t you sell them all,” Catherine replied. “You would make a lot of money, John. Perhaps a million pounds. Perhaps more. Helen could have half of that.”

“Is that what you would do?” he asked.

“They aren’t mine,” she said. “It isn’t my choice.”

“But is that what you would do?” he asked.

“If I were desperate for money I’d have to.”

“But imagine that you weren’t. What then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Keep them?”

“I really don’t know,” she said.

“Pass them on to your children.”

“If that was what had happened before, then … yes.”

“But I haven’t got any children,” he pointed out. And he was silent for a while. Then he said, “My father kept them all his life. He never told us about them. He left them in his will. It wasn’t as if he didn’t need money in his lifetime. But there was an instruction not to sell them in the bequest. Dadd gave them to Edward Brigham on the understanding that they would never be sold.”

“But you said the other week about selling everything,” she said.

“I meant all the porcelain,” he told her. “I suppose, then, that I meant the Dadds, too. But now …”

“Now what?” she asked.

“It doesn’t seem right,” he said. He sat forward, knees drawn up, arms crossed over his knees, letting go of her hand. She could just about make out his profile and the frown on his face. “I have to think of these things,” he said. “Helen, and the paintings. I can’t just leave them. They have to be sorted out. I’ve been living with my head in the sand, trying not to think about it, for too long. I have to decide.”

“Not just yet, though,” she said.

He only squeezed her hand by way of reply. She had a sudden crushing longing to stay in the dark. To never go back to the house. Things were not the same in the light. They were clearer, more cruel. In the dark, you could pretend you were invulnerable. That the world would stay away from you.

“Helen’s never with anyone for long,” John was saying. “She’s had a lot of relationships, all ending badly.”

“I’m sorry,” Catherine murmured.

“Nothing lasts for long with Helen,” John said. “She has a lot to hide.”

Catherine shifted forward, too, so that she could see his face a little better. “What do you mean?”

“She has bipolar disorder.” John turned to look back at her. “Dadd would have known it as mania,” he said. “A few years back they would have called it manic depression.”

Catherine looked at him in the shadows. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, I see …”

“She hides it,” John said. “Even hides her medication. When I lived with her for a while in London after Claire died, she had an accident. She took time off work. The firm’s medical officer came to see her. It transpired that she had never told them about the bipolar. She was asked to resign.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” Catherine commented.

“People aren’t always fair when it comes to psychiatric illness,” John said. “But she hadn’t disclosed it. They called it a breach of trust.”

“What did she do then?”

“Got a job abroad for a while. Moved around. Then came back to London after a few years. But I don’t think that she ever really got over being fired,” he said. “She bore a grudge about it.” He looked down at their joined hands. “She does bear grudges,” he said quietly. “You may have noticed.”

They were both silent.

Somewhere down the hill, they heard a noise. Next to them, Frith sat up, ears pricked.

“Don’t you dare,” John warned him, hand on his collar.

“What is it?” Catherine asked.

“Deer, I should think.”

She waited a moment; a breeze had picked up, carrying the sound of more than one animal moving slowly through the land below them. They listened to the steady progress, moving from west to east.

Catherine closed her eyes now. The noise of the deer was receding slowly. The scent of the woodland rushed up toward them on the heavy night air.

“Isn’t that strange,” she murmured. “I can smell something citrus. Oranges.”

“It’s Douglas fir,” John replied. “There’s a little copse of them about a mile away, up on the top toward Bere Regis. Their needles smell of oranges and lemons.”

“It must remind you of Spain.”

“It does,” he said.

“Why don’t you go back?” she asked. “Put the paintings back in the bank, go to Alora. Lie in the sun.”

“Would you come with me?” he asked.

“Of course.”

He smiled, though she couldn’t quite see it. He had turned his face slightly away from her again. “I can’t ask you to do that,” he told her. “And I can’t put the paintings back in the bank.”

“But why not?”

“Because Helen is co-trustee,” he said.

“What difference does that make?”

“Why do you think I took them out in the first place?” he asked. “I was afraid she would just take them out and sell them one day.”

“But she can’t do that!”

“I did it. I took them out, anyway. I considered selling them.”

“Does she know?”

“No,” he said. “And she’s not going to.”

“But what if she went to the bank and found they were gone?”

“She won’t,” he said. “At least, I hope she won’t. She’s never been there in all the time we had them. I only took them out in January, when I spoke to her after leaving Spain. She sounded very hyper and destructive.” He paused. “I think she must have been having problems with the man she was seeing.”

“If she finds out now,” Catherine said slowly, “she’ll kill you.”

They stopped, Frith was whining pitifully, desperate to plunge after the deer. John clipped on the dog’s lead. He stood up and held out his hand to Catherine.

“You still haven’t answered the question for me,” he said.

“Which question?”

“What would you do with the paintings, if you didn’t have children?”

She paused, feeling the whole texture of his hand in hers, the precious warmth of his skin, the pressure of his fingers. “If Helen had children,” she said, “they would have to pass to them, to your nieces or nephews.”

“They would never get that far,” he told her. “They would be sold before her children were ever born.”

“You can’t be sure of that,” she said.

“I’m certain of it.”

She looked back down the hill.

“Then donate them to someone,” she decided. “That’s all you can do.”

“To lie in storage for the next hundred years?” he asked.

“No,” she told him. “To be loved. To be seen, to be loved.”