EIGHT

Herne Hill, 2009

“No shit, Sherlock,” said Julia.

“It is a painting,” said Andrew helpfully.

“Brilliantly spotted,” drawled Nicholas.

Julia gave him a look. “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess Pre-Raphaelite,” she said. “It’s got the right … feel to it.”

Maybe if she’d stuck with art history she’d have the technical terminology to elaborate on just what those details were that made her so sure. It was something about the colors, about the subject matter, the quality of the light. She hadn’t taken any classes on the Pre-Raphaelites back in college—they were considered vaguely déclassé by the art historical establishment at Yale when she was there—but they’d been standard dorm room decoration. In her own room she’d had Dicksee’s Belle Dame sans Merci, Millais’s Ophelia, and Waterhouse’s My Sweet Rose, all courtesy of the poster collection at the Yale Co-op.

But those had been prints. This was the real thing.

“You’re right,” said Nicholas, surprising her. “Is there a signature?”

Their heads narrowly escaped collision as they both leaned over the painting at the same time. Julia’s arm brushed Nicholas’s, damp with sweat in the un-air-conditioned room. Andrew had been wrong; there wasn’t any pong about Nicholas. He smelled of soap and laundry detergent and the slightly musty odor of old books.

“Well?” said Natalie impatiently from behind them.

Julia’s eyes met Nicholas’s. They were blue, but not a pedestrian, workaday sort of blue; his eyes were like stained glass limned in sunlight, the blue tinged a translucent green.

“PRB.” Julia’s voice was breathless. Three little letters, such a small thing to make the hair on her arms prickle like that, to send a chill down her spine. Julia used the edge of the bed to lever herself back up to a standing position. “You saw it, too, didn’t you? On the bottom right. The initials PRB.”

“Who’s PRB?” asked Natalie.

“Not who, what,” said Julia before Nicholas could. “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They were a group of painters in the mid-nineteenth century. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But they painted beautiful things.”

“Postcard art,” said Nicholas, rising to his feet. Standing, he was considerably taller than she was, placing her eyes somewhere on a level with the top button of his shirt.

Julia refused to be loomed over. “Tell that to the Met,” she retorted.

“Or the Tate,” said Nicholas blandly, and she realized he’d been deliberately winding her up. To Natalie he said, “The art community is always suspicious of anything that’s too popular with the masses.”

“Is there a name, or just those initials?” asked Natalie, placing a proprietary hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. Julia took a step back, feeling, strangely, chastened. “Do we know who painted it?”

“I’m not seeing a signature,” said Andrew, hunkering down by the painting. “Not that it means there isn’t one,” he added hastily.

“Even if there isn’t one,” Nick said slowly, “I think we can narrow it down. If I’m right.”

“How?” asked Julia.

His eyes met hers, the glint in them belying his reserved tone. “It was a small movement. It wasn’t just anyone who used the initials PRB. It was only members of the original brotherhood and only at the very beginning of the movement. They dropped the use of the initials—I don’t remember exactly when. Within the first few years. Early enough.”

That would be easy enough to find out; she could Google it once they were gone. Julia’s head swam with possibilities. The idea that this painting, sitting here on the bed, might be a genuine Pre-Raphaelite, that it might not have been seen since it was first painted … Someone, 150-odd years ago, had dipped his brush into paint and produced that.

The mind boggled.

“I wouldn’t get too excited,” Nicholas warned her. “There were a few of those early Pre-Raphaelites who were non-starters. They weren’t all Rossetti and Millais.”

Julia ignored that. “So you think it’s real,” she said. “I mean, a real Pre-Raphaelite, not just a copy or an imitation.”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know or don’t want to say?”

Natalie quickly stepped between them. “Really, there’s no need—”

Ignoring Natalie, Nicholas said abruptly, “Look. Would you let me take this into my shop? I know a person or two who might take a look at it, tell us what it is.”

Natalie clapped her hands together. “Didn’t I tell you? Just like Antiques Roadshow!” She linked an arm through Nicholas’s. “What would we have done without you here?”

“Taken it to a real expert?” Disentangling himself from Natalie, Nicholas turned to Julia. “What do you say?”

Julia found herself oddly reluctant to relinquish the painting. “Won’t some snapshots do just as well?” She scrounged for a plausible excuse. “Hauling it back and forth can’t be good for it.”

“It’s been sitting in the back of a wardrobe for the better part of a century,” Andrew pointed out. “Hardly archival preservation.”

“Do you have a digital camera?” Nicholas asked.

Julia looked at him in surprise. “Yes. Hang on. I’ll go grab it.”

She hurried out towards her own room, hoping that the camera was actually at the bottom of the second pocket of her suitcase, where she usually forgot it for months at a time.

Her own room was diagonally across the hall. As she bent over her suitcase, scrabbling for the camera case, she heard Natalie ask, “Why not take the painting with you? Wouldn’t that be simpler?”

“And risk losing it over lunch?” said Andrew laughingly. “Or getting egg mayonnaise on a lost masterpiece?”

“No one’s going near this with any kind of food.” Julia returned, breathless, with the camera. “Okay. Who wants to play photographer?”

Miraculously, there was actually still some battery life left in the camera. The three of them stood by while Nicholas photographed the canvas from every possible angle, with particular attention to those three entwined letters: PRB.

Julia couldn’t resist asking, “Whose do you think it is?”

“I don’t know enough to make an educated guess,” he said. “The subject matter is reminiscent of Millais, but the color palette looks more like Rossetti. My friend Anna will be able to tell you.”

“Anna?” said Natalie, arching an eyebrow.

Nicholas was oblivious. “A lecturer at Cambridge. This is her area. She’ll know.” He set the camera down on the desk, his eyes fixed on the painting, incongruously nestled among Julia’s mother’s old skirts and sweaters. “It might be a copy.”

“Of course,” murmured Julia. And she might be Genghis Khan.

“But if it were a copy,” said Andrew, “wouldn’t they have copied something more familiar?”

“Andrew,” said Julia, “I love you.”

Andrew jostled her arm affectionately with his elbow. “Anything for a cousin. Weren’t you meant to be going, Nick?”

Nicholas glanced at his watch and swore. “Bugger. I’m late for lunch.” Turning to Julia, he said, “You’ll remember to e-mail me those files?”

There was one slight problem with that plan. “I don’t have my camera cord with me. Just take the camera with you. There’s nothing else on it right now anyway.” She hoped. Not without malice, she added, “Natalie can always get it from you for me.”

“The gallery is on my way from work,” chimed in Natalie.

“That’s that sorted,” said Nicholas. He gave Julia an oblique look. “I’ll ring you by Monday and let you know what I’ve discovered. What’s your number?”

It was only after he’d gone that Julia realized that none of them had asked the real question: what in the hell was a Pre-Raphaelite painting—imitation or original—doing hidden in the back of her wardrobe?

London, 1849

As if through a fall of water, Imogen heard the whisper of skirts, the chatter of voices, the clatter of heels on the marble floor as the exhibition goers moved on their varied courses around her. Her hands felt damp in her kid-leather gloves.

There she was, on the wall, for the world to see.

No, not her. A model. A model with long, red hair. Painfully, Imogen forced herself to step back, to look at the painting critically, trying not to feel as though she’d just been stripped bare in the middle of the Academy.

So what if it was her sewing box, her Book of Hours? They were just objects, nothing to do with her. Anyone else looking at the painting would see only a scattering of items, part of a scene, a scene from a poem, depicting something very long ago and far away. No one would think to ask to whom the individual items might belong. They were simply props, like the pasteboard crown in a Shakespeare play.

She should, Imogen told herself firmly, admire the technical skill of the work. The colors were rich and glowing, making the composition stand out among the duller shades of the paintings hung above and beside it like a robin in a field of wrens. The window, in particular, shone as though light were streaming through the glass. It had the same pure, clear tones as the best sort of medieval-manuscript miniatures.

And her deepest, darkest feelings staring out at her from a stranger’s face.

“Mrs. Grantham!”

The sound of her own name started her out of her reverie. She turned, surprised, and her exhibition catalog fell, splayed open on the floor.

Mr. Rossetti gallantly scooped it up for her before it could be trampled. His disordered curls had been brushed for the occasion, but his cheeks still had the proper air of artistic pallor.

“I see you’re admiring Thorne’s work,” he said as Imogen received the catalog from him with a murmur of thanks.

“Mr. Rossetti.” Imogen forced herself to sociability. “Where is your work?”

Rossetti shrugged with feigned nonchalance. “Not here, I’m afraid. I exhibited at the Free Exhibition in Hyde Park this year instead. I didn’t want to risk my Girlhood of Mary Virgin being hung all the way up by the ceiling with the cobwebs! As you can see, Thorne got one of the good spots.”

“Yes,” murmured Imogen. “Yes, he did.” On the line, they called it. Hung conveniently at eye level for all to see.

Rossetti said easily, “But I’m sure you’ll be wanting to see Thorne to congratulate him.”

“No, really, there is no need—” began Imogen.

“There is every need,” said Rossetti. “Honest admiration is good for the artist’s battered soul. Particularly once the critics have been at one. There he is, with Millais. Thorne!”

Rossetti raised a hand to the other man, who was standing a little bit away, in a group that included another man, with a high forehead and fair, tousled hair, and the ubiquitous John Ruskin. Seeing them, Thorne murmured something to the others and started in their direction.

Imogen adjusted her sweat-sticky gloves and pasted a polite smile on her face.

“Mr. Thorne.” Her greeting was all that was politely condescending. “I have just been admiring your work.”

“Admiring” wasn’t at all the word she would have preferred to use.

“Mrs. Grantham.” His deep voice with its regional accent sounded particularly out of place against all the high-pitched chatter around them, something from a different, more rough-and-tumble sort of world, for all that his words were everything that was correct. “It is a pleasure to see you again.”

“You seem to have taken much from your visit to us,” Imogen said, trying to keep her voice light.

Thorne’s brows rose at the acid note in her voice. “Your husband was kind enough to allow us to sketch anything that caught our interest. I was given to understand it would not be an intrusion.”

Of course, Arthur would say that, thought Imogen bitterly. It wasn’t his soul being bared on canvas.

Her sewing box, that was. Not her soul. Mariana in her moated grange was nothing to do with her.

“I am surprised by your choice of subject,” she said, her voice just a little too loud. “Don’t you find Mariana a rather dull character?”

“You’ve read the poem, then?”

Read it and chafed at it. She had despised weak, whiny Mariana—and despised herself even more for the sense of kinship that came to her through those lyrical, despairing words. Perhaps that was why the poem had annoyed her so much, annoyed her enough that she had flung the slim volume aside and sought solace in her garden, in the honest work of digging and planting and tearing out weeds. She knew how it felt to be caught in a cage, waiting, constantly waiting.

And for what? She had learned long ago that there were no such things as knights in shining armor. And if such a being did come to bear one away, it was inevitably to one’s doom, or so the stories would have it.

“The mirror crack’d from side to side.… Singing in her song she died.”

But that was another poem, also by Mr. Tennyson, beautiful and disturbing and with a heroine just as ill-fated.

“Mr. Tennyson,” Imogen said tightly, “has a wonderful way with words but a rather dreary choice of subject.”

“You find Mariana dreary?”

“She calls herself dreary.” Imogen’s voice was sharper than she would have liked. In exaggerated tones, she quoted, “‘Then said she, “I am very dreary, / He will not come,” she said; / She wept, “I am aweary, aweary, / O God, that I were dead!”’ There you have her, condemned from her own lips. One cannot have it on better authority than that.”

“Would you say that we are the best judges of our own characters?” He was looking at her far too intently. “We delude ourselves as much as we do others.”

“Save for the eagle eye of the artist?” Imogen said acidly.

“I’d hardly say that.” To her surprise, he laughed, a low, rough laugh, his eyes crinkling around the corners. “We painters, we’re—there’s a French term for it. Knowing idiots? We wield the brush, but we only see the half of what we convey.”

“The wise fool.” She knew better than to be fooled by a show of false modesty. Imogen countered, “But isn’t it true that a fool who knows himself is no fool?”

Mr. Thorne held up his hands in surrender. “You’re too sharp for me by half, Mrs. Grantham.”

She couldn’t tell whether it was meant as a compliment or an insult.

“Yes, she is that, isn’t she?” said Arthur, coming up beside her and taking her arm. “I had wondered where you had got to, my dear. Mr. Thorne. I see you’ve put our little collection to good use.”

“I cannot thank you enough for your generosity.” They were speaking man-to-man now and Imogen had faded back into the background, just another ornament, as insignificant as Mariana in her moated grange. “It’s the details that make the difference. Having a proper model, even for the smallest things—it brings a scene to life.”

Arthur regarded the painting thoughtfully. “Yes. Yes, I do see what you mean. There is a clarity to it, an immediacy. No more blurry backgrounds for you, eh?”

Mr. Thorne’s face was set and stubborn. “If there’s a daffodil, I want to paint a real daffodil, not just a generic imitation of one; if there’s sky, it will be the sky as I saw it, myself, with my own eyes. I won’t pay my viewers in false coin.”

“Honesty in art…” Arthur turned the idea around, prodding it gently. “It’s an interesting idea, although some would say it’s a contradiction in terms.”

“There’s truth in fiction, sometimes, sir,” said Mr. Thorne, “and I mean to keep my fictions as true as they can be.”

“A little too true.” Imogen hadn’t meant to speak the words aloud. As both men looked at her, she laughed awkwardly and gestured at the painting. “So much emotion—it’s almost uncomfortable to see.”

Her husband regarded her thoughtfully. “Do you know, Thorne, I might have a proposition to put to you.” Turning to Imogen, he said, “We had spoken of having your portrait painted.”

Yes, they had spoken of it—a portrait to match the portrait of Arthur that hung in the drawing room—but it was one of those projects that were always delayed to some indefinite time in the future. As for herself, Imogen was largely indifferent. It didn’t particularly matter to her whether she hung on the wall of Herne Hill for posterity. What difference would it make to her, once she was gone? Like Arthur’s poor first wife, forever immured in a miniature in a back bedroom, laughing at a world she had never lived to see.

But of one thing Imogen was quite sure: she didn’t want to be painted by Gavin Thorne. If Arthur must have her painted, let it be by someone safe and stodgy, someone who would translate her features to canvas and leave her emotions alone.

“There’s really no need,” she said quickly. “Besides, I shouldn’t wish to take Mr. Thorne away from his other compositions. There are all those individual daffodils to be painted, after all.”

“Nonsense,” said Arthur genially. “It’s a rare artist who isn’t in want of a commission. Don’t tell me I’m wrong.”

“We mustn’t presume—” Imogen began quickly, but Arthur cut her off with a quick gesture of his hand.

“You’re right, sir,” Mr. Thorne said to Arthur. “I would be glad of the work. And, of course,” he added, “grateful for the chance to paint someone so lovely as Mrs. Grantham.”

The gallantry sat ill on his lips. Imogen pressed her own lips tightly together, saying nothing. What could she say? She would only sound churlish if she were to protest.

“Good man,” said Arthur genially. “We shall expect you at Herne Hill—shall we say next Monday?”

The question wasn’t directed at Imogen. And why should it be? There was no activity in which she might engage that Arthur couldn’t rearrange for his own convenience.

“Yes,” said Mr. Thorne, and he looked again at Imogen. Imogen felt the color rise in her cheeks for no reason. She wondered if this was how a butterfly felt, pinned to the table of a naturalist, splayed, defenseless. “Next Monday should do very well.”