The Prince laughed. “The heart was as useful to him as his skill with the brush,” he said.

“And I am sure the dicky heart was as real as the skill.”

“Of course. But we know what those reports to his doctor were, don’t we?”

“You knew,” said the Princess. “But I did not know, not then. You knew a lot of things I did not know.”

“You are going to explain, I hope?” said Darcourt. “Bad heart. I knew something of that. Of course it was the heart that killed him at last. But was it something else?”

“I knew about the bad heart at the other end—the London end,” said the Prince. “Francis sent accounts of his heart to his doctor, who passed them on at once to the right people at the Ministry of Information, because they were a code. Francis was watching the trains that passed by Düsterstein two or three times a week, carrying poor souls to a nearby internment camp—a labour camp or something of the sort. Anyhow, one of those infamous camps from which very few people escaped alive.”

“Are you telling me Francis was a spy?”

“Of course he was a spy,” said the Prince. “Didn’t you know? His father was a well-known spy, and I suppose he introduced the boy to the family trade.”

“But le beau ténébreux wasn’t a very good spy,” said the Princess. “Lots of spies aren’t, you know. I don’t suppose he was a very important spy. He came to Düsterstein as an assistant to that old rogue Tancred Saraceni, who was restoring the family pictures, and if Saraceni wasn’t a spy he was certainly one of the great busybodies of his time. He was on to Francis at once. And so was my grandmother.”

“Nobody put anything over on the old Grafm,” said the Prince. “She was up to every dodge.”

“Sorry,” said Darcourt. “You’ve lost me completely. What was Düsterstein, and who was the old Grafm, and what is all this spy business? I’m completely in the dark.”

“Then we shall be able to pay for those drawings in full,” said the Prince.

“You have the key to the missing years in Francis’s life. I knew he had been in Europe for some time as a student of painting, and that he had worked with the great Saraceni, but nothing beyond that.”

“Düsterstein was Amalie’s family home. She lived there with her grandmother, who was the old Gräfin.”

“I was an orphan,” said the Princess. “Not a pitiable orphan, or a Dickensian orphan, but just an orphan, and I was brought up at Düsterstein by my grandmother, and a governess. It was as dull as could be, till old Saraceni came to work on the family collection of pictures, and not long afterward le beau turned up to help him. Exciting, under the circumstances.

“And he was a spy?”

“Certainly he was a spy. So was my governess, Ruth Nibsmith. Germany was full of spies during the years of the Reich. With so many spies everywhere it is astonishing that Britain made such a goat of herself as the war approached.”

“He was spying on a nearby internment camp?”

“He never went near it. Nobody could do that, and certainly not a Canadian in a little sports car. No; he just counted the number of freight cars in each train that chugged along the track not far from our house. I used to watch him. It was funny, really. There I was, in my window in a tower—sounds romantic, doesn’t it—watching Francis count—you could almost hear him—as he stood at his window, invisible, as he thought, in the darkness of night. And there in the garden below, behind some bushes, was my governess, spying on Francis. I used to watch them both, almost helpless with laughter. And I suspect that my grandmother was watching too, from a room next to her business office. She was a very big farmer, you know.”

“The thing about spies,” said the Prince, “is that unless they are of the small number of very good ones, you can almost smell them. They have balloons coming out of their heads, like people in the comic strips, with ‘I’m a snoop’ written in them. One doesn’t pay too much attention to them, because most of them are harmless. But if a strange, handsome young man turns up in your castle, to help a crook like Saraceni, with every credential including a bad heart, who sends regular letters to a Harley Street address—he’s probably a spy.”

“But Francis was a genuine assistant to Saraceni?” said Darcourt. “There was no deception about that.”

“Saraceni was the soul of deception. Not, mind you, that I think he was dishonest in a trivial or purely self-seeking way. He had an artistic passion for illusion, far beyond fakery. He thought of it as playing tricks with Time. He was a very great restorer; you know that. And when he was working on a painting of value, like the pieces in the Düsterstein collection, he worked faithfully in the spirit and the mode of the artist who had made the picture. He turned back the clock. But he could take a piece of very indifferent painting, and skilfully make something fifth-rate look second-rate. That is art of a very special kind—knowing just how far to go.”

“One of the best things of that kind to come from Saraceni’s studio was, in fact, the work of Francis Cornish,” said the Princess. “Drollig Hansel–you remember it, Max?”

“No, no; that was no patched-up thing. That was an original. The queerest little panel you ever saw, of a dwarf jester. Extraordinary little face; you felt it saw everything.”

“It frightened me,” said the Princess. “Of course I should not have seen it at all. But you know what children are. Saraceni used to lock up his studio every evening, and probably thought that all his secrets were safe. But I used to take my grandmother’s key from her desk every now and then, and have a look. That dwarf seemed to me to speak of all the tragedy of human life—imprisonment in an ugly body, deformity that put him beyond the understanding of other people, the yearning for vengeance and the yearning for love. So much of the horrible pathos of life, on a panel eight inches by ten.”

“Where is that picture now?” said Darcourt.

“I have no idea,” said the Prince. “I believe it was in Hermann Goering’s collection for a time, but I have heard nothing of it since. Unless it was destroyed—and I can’t imagine anybody destroying it—it will certainly turn up some day.”

“You speak as if Francis had really been a great painter,” said Darcourt.

“Yes,” said the Prince. “Shall we have coffee now?”

For coffee the three went into a large drawing-room. Darcourt had not been there before; his earlier talks with the Princess had been in a room she used for business, but it was so elegant that only a coarse soul would have thought of questioning any proposal of a business nature that was made there. Haggling, one presumed, was done elsewhere. But haggling there must have been, for Max and Amalie plainly conducted their businesses on a large and highly competitive level. The drawing-room seemed to occupy the whole of one side of the splendid penthouse in which they dwelt.

Darcourt was beginning to be an expert on rich people’s penthouses. The Cornishes’ penthouse in Toronto was wonderful because it was very modern, and some of its walls were composed entirely of glass, commanding a sweeping view over much of the city, and beyond it so that—enthusiasts insisted—on a fine day it was possible to see the mist rising from Niagara Falls in the farthest distance. But its modernity paradoxically gave it a somewhat timeless air, for it had no obtrusive architectural features, and took its character from the furnishings, many of which were in the seventeenth-century manner that appealed to Arthur and which Maria did not challenge. But Max and Amalie had chosen to give their dwelling a strong eighteenth-century character. That was why the picture that dominated the room was so surprising.

It was a triptych that hung against the damask covering of the south wall. Its subject was not immediately apparent, for it was filled—filled but not crowded—with figures dressed in the manner of the earliest sixteenth century; figures in ceremonial dress, figures in ceremonial armour, and some figures in the robes that artists have for so long used to clothe characters from biblical history. But a rather longer inspection told Darcourt that he was looking at a representation—a most unusual representation—of The Marriage at Cana. It was not until the Princess spoke that he became aware that he was gaping at it.