Lots of conversations like that. Powell was right. Penny was jealous, mad as a wet hen because Gunilla had taken on Schnak as—what? As a pupil, of course, but also as a—what do you call it? When it’s a man there are plenty of words. A minion, a pathic, a catamite, a bardash, a bumchum—but, when it was a woman? Darcourt knew no word for it. Petite amie might do. Did Penny want Schnak for herself? No, that wasn’t Penny’s style at all. In so far as she was anything of a sexual nature, Penny was a lesbian, but of the smothery-mothery variety, brooding possessively over the successes of her little darlings. Sexually a dog-in-the-manger, who would not eat herself, or suffer others to eat. Penny resented the buccaneering success of Dr. Gunilla, the easy command, the scorn of Kater Murr.

But every day, and all day, and sometimes in dreams, the biography of Francis Cornish nagged. Was it really fated to be such a worthy, dull, unremarkable book? The spy stuff was not bad but he wanted something bigger.

It was that picture. The Marriage at Cana. Where had he seen those faces? Not among the mass of drawings and rough sketches he had sent to the National Gallery. The picture was surely the lock that secured the real life of Francis Cornish, but where was the key? Nothing to do but search, and search, and search again. But where?

It was lucky that he was so very much persona grata at the University Library, where all the left-overs from Francis Cornish’s crowded apartments were locked away, awaiting the attention of cataloguers. Certainly that material would not receive such attention quickly, because those packages were precisely what he had called them when he first transferred them to the Library. They were left-overs. Francis Cornish’s splendid pictures, his enviable collection of modern art, Canadian modern art, Old Master drawings, rare books, and expensive art books, his musical manuscript accumulation (it was not sufficiently coherent to be thought of as a collection), and everything else of any value had gone to the galleries and library where they would be, in the glacier-like progress of cataloguing, put in order. But there was still the mass of left-overs, the stuff which had been glanced at, but under the pressure of time not thoroughly examined by him in his capacity as an executor with a job to do quickly.

Without any great hope in his heart, Darcourt decided that he must rummage through the left-overs. He told his friend at the Library what he wanted to do, and was promised every help. But help was exactly what he did not want. He wanted to snoop, and seek, and see if anything would crop up that would give him a hint about that astonishing picture.

The picture itself was known to the art world, though few people had seen it. But there was, of course, the definitive article that had been written about it by Aylwin Ross, and which had appeared in Apollo a few years ago. Before Francis Cornish died, so he must have been acquainted with it. Must surely have approved it, or at least kept quiet about it. The article was well illustrated, and when Darcourt dug it out of the Library’s files of Apollo it troubled him with new urgency. He read and reread Ross’s elaborate, elegantly written explanation of the picture, its historical implications (something about the Augsburg Interim and the attempt to reconcile the Church of Rome with the Protestants of the Reformation), and Ross had concluded that the picture was the work of an unknown painter, but a master of fine attainment, whom he chose to identify simply as The Alchemical Master, because of some alchemical elements he identified in the triptych.

But those faces? Faces that seemed in some way familiar, when he saw the picture itself, in New York. They were not so compelling in the reproductions in Apollo, careful and excellent as those were. But there is a quality in an original canvas that no reproduction, however skilled, fully conveys. The people in the picture were alive in a way the people in the pages of Apollo were not. Those faces? He had seen at least some of them somewhere, and Darcourt was good at remembering faces. But where?

Nothing to do but go painstakingly through every scrap of unconsidered material that had been cleared out of Francis Cornish’s Old Curiosity Shop of a dwelling when he, and Clement Hollier, and the late unlamented Professor Urquhart McVarish had worked as executors of the dead man’s possessions. Could Urky McVarish have pinched anything vital? Probable enough, for Urky was a fine example of that rare but not unknown creature, the academic crook. (With a pang Darcourt recognized that he was already far advanced in that category himself, but, of course, being himself, it was rather different.) But it would not do to assume that there was no clue to the great picture until he had sifted every possible portfolio and parcel, and the best thing would be to start at the bottom.

So, clad in slacks and a sweat-shirt in preparation for dirty work, Darcourt went to the Library, and with Archie’s warm assent, began at the bottom.

The bottom was surely some stuff that neither he, nor Hollier, nor McVarish, had touched, because it did not seem to be directly related either to Cornish’s collections or to Cornish himself. A secretary, who had been lent to the executors by Arthur Cornish, had been asked to do the dirty work—as secretaries usually are—and bundle up all this junk and—what? Oh, put it with the stuff for the Library. They can throw it out when they get to it, which may not be for years. We are in a hurry, hustled on to complete a heavy task by the impatient Arthur Cornish.

There it was, quite a heap of it, neatly bundled and wrapped, a proper secretarial job. Many hours of tedious search in those bundles. Darcourt had been an active parson for almost twenty years before he contrived to get himself appointed a professor of Greek, and left work he had come to dislike. But the parson years had made their mark, and as he tackled the mass, he found himself humming.

Hums can be important. Hums can tell of a state of mind of which the topmost layer of consciousness is unaware. Darcourt was humming an old favourite of his own:

A great prayer, and because it came from the depths, and not from the busy, fussing top of the mind, it was answered. Oh, surely not answered? Are prayers ever answered? Can the thoroughly modern mind admit such nonsense?

The secretary had labelled every bundle in a neat, impersonal hand. There were no letters, and anyhow Darcourt had been all through whatever correspondence Francis Cornish had preserved. But there were bundles of newspapers, containing reports of artistic matters, all jumbled together but many of them about artistic forgeries, either suspected or detected. Francis had the horrible habit of keeping the whole newspaper, in which the relevant item was marked with a blue pencil, instead of cutting out what he wanted and filing it, as a man with any regard for his heirs would have done. There were several parcels of yellowing newspapers. Darcourt felt a biographer’s guilt; he should have sifted this stuff, and he would do so, but not yet. Some of the marked articles were about the affairs, or the deaths, of people of whom Darcourt knew nothing. People suspected in Francis Cornish’s Secret Service days? It could be. It was clear that as a spy Francis was sloppy and unmethodical. But here, right at the bottom, were six big packages, marked Photographs Not Personal. Surely nothing there? Darcourt had already ferreted out photographs of all the people that he needed to illustrate his book. Photographers keep very tidy files, and that had not been difficult; merely tedious. But he had determined to look at everything, and he untied the bundles, and found that they were old-fashioned family albums.