“You make a lot of fuss about your damned book.”

“My damned book will be on the shelves when all of us are dust, and I want it to be the best book I can leave behind me. And I ask you, Arthur, as a friend, to think of that. Because I am going to write it, and write it my way, whatever you choose to do, and if it costs me your friendship, that will be part of the price of authorship.”

“Simon, don’t be pompous. Maria and I value your friendship highly, but we could live without it if we had to.”

“Oh shut up, both of you!” said Maria. “Why can’t men ever disagree without all this high-stomached huffing and puffing? No friendships are going to be broken, and if you and Simon part brass rags, Arthur, I’ll leave you and live in sin with him. So shut up! Have another drink, Simon.”

“Thank you, no. I have to be going. But do you mind telling me what that stuff is you are drinking? It looks delicious.”

“It is delicious. It’s milk with a good slug of rum in it. My doctor recommends it at bedtime. I haven’t been sleeping well, and he says this is better than sleeping-pills, even if the milk is a bit fattening for a lady in an interesting condition.”

“Marvellous! Do you think I could have a small one of those? After all, I am great with book, and I need all the little comforts of one who is about to give birth.”

“Will you get it for him, Arthur? Or are you too much on your dignity to help poor Simon in his delicate state? I was drinking this last night when Al and Sweetness were here, and Sweetness was shocked.”

“Shocked by rum and milk?—Oh, thanks, Arthur.—What shocked her?”

“She gave me a long, confused talk about what she called the foetal alcohol syndrome; booze in pregnancy can lead to pixie-faced, pin-headed, mentally retarded children. I knew something about that; you have to drink rather a lot to be in danger. But Sweetness is a zealot, and she’s deep into the squalor of pregnancy, poor wretch. I heard all about her agonizing little balls of gas, which won’t come up or go down; and how she can’t do a thing with her hair—not even wash it, I thought, looking at her; and she has to be dashing off every half-hour to what she delicately calls the tinkle-pantry, because her bladder capacity is now minimal. She is paying the full price nasty old Mother Nature can exact for Al’s baby. I just hope it’s a nice baby.”

“Did she say why they don’t get married, if they are so devoted?”

“Indeed she did. Sweetness has a cliché for everything. They do not admit that their union would be hallowed more than it is, if some parson mumbled a few words over them.”

“I wonder why people like that always talk about parsons mumbling a few words. I’ve married lots of people and I never mumble. I would scorn to mumble.”

“You have no proper respect for cliché. Performing your ignominious, outdated office, you ought to mumble for very shame.”

“I see. I’ll remember that. Am I to mumble at the christening, by the way? I’d very much like to.”

“Of course, Simon dear. Mumble, mumble, mumble.”

“Have you chosen any names, yet? Always wise to be ready with names.”

“Arthur and I haven’t made up our minds, but Geraint keeps putting forward Welsh names that are crammed with ancient chivalry and bardic evocation, but are rather demanding for the Canadian thick tongue.”

Darcourt had finished his rum and milk, and took his leave. Maria was loving and kind, and Arthur was friendly, with a hint of reserve. On the whole, Darcourt thought he had achieved about as much as he expected.

As he walked home he thought about pixie-faced, pin-headed, mentally retarded children. That was what Francis the First had been. But had Francis the First’s mother been a heavy drinker? Nothing he had found in his investigations suggested it. But a biographical researcher must reconcile himself to the fact that there are many things he will never know.

“It certainly seems as though le beau ténébreux had been much more shadowy than any of us suspected,” said Princess Amalie.

“Frankly, I am astounded! Astounded!” said Prince Max, who liked to multiply his verbal effects. “I remember Cornish well. Charming, reserved fellow; spoke little but was a splendid listener; handsome, but didn’t seem aware of it. I thought Tancred Saraceni lucky to have found such a gifted assistant; his picture of the Fugger dwarf was a little gem. I wish I had it now. And certainly the Fugger dwarf looked very much like the dwarf in The Marriage.”

“I remember that curious man Aylwin Ross saying precisely that when the Allied Commission on Art had a chance to look at both pictures. Ross was no fool, though he came to grief in a rather foolish way.”

The speaker was Addison Thresher. He is the man to watch and the man to convince, thought Darcourt. The Prince and Princess Amalie know a lot about pictures, and a very great deal about business, but this man knows the art world, and his Yes or No is decisive. Until now he has given no hint that he had known The Marriage at Cana in Europe. Watch your step, Darcourt.

“Did you know Francis Cornish well?” he asked.

“I did. That’s to say, I met him in The Hague when he made that astonishing judgement on a fake Van Eyck. He played with his cards very close to his vest. But I had a few chats with him later in Munich, during the meetings of the Art Commission. He told me something then that clicks with your surprising explanation of this picture, that we have all loved for so many years. Do you know how he learned to draw?”

“I have seen the beautiful copies of Old Master drawings he made when he was at Oxford,” said Darcourt. He saw no reason to say more.

“Yes, but before that? It was one of the most extraordinary confessions I ever heard from an artist. As a boy he learned a lot about technique from a book written by a nineteenth-century caricaturist and illustrator called Harry Furniss. Cornish told me he used to do drawings of corpses in an undertaking parlour. The embalmer was his grandfather’s coachman. Furniss was an extraordinary parodist of other men’s styles; he once showed a gigantic hoax exhibition in which he parodied all the great painters of the late Victorian era. Of course they hated him for it, but I wish I knew where those pictures are now. Drawing lies at the root of great painting, of course—but imagine a child learning to draw like that from a book! An eccentric genius. Not that all genius isn’t eccentric.”

“Do you really think our picture was the work of le beau ténébreux?” said the Princess.

“When I look at these photographs Professor Darcourt has been showing us, I don’t see how I can think anything else.”

“Then that smashes the favourite in our collection. Smashes it to smithereens,” said Prince Max.

“Perhaps,” said Thresher.

“Why perhaps? Isn’t it shown to be a fake?”

“Please—not a fake,” said Darcourt. “That is what I am anxious to prove. It was never intended to deceive. There is not a scrap of evidence that Francis Cornish ever attempted to sell it, or show it, or gain any sort of worldly advantage from it. It was a picture of wholly personal importance, in which he was setting down and balancing off the most significant elements in his own life, and doing it in the only way he knew, which was by painting. By organizing what he wanted to look at in the form and style that was most personal to him. That is not faking.”

“Try telling that to the art world,” said the Prince.

“That is precisely what I shall try to do in my life of Francis. And I hope I’m not immodest in saying that I shall do it. Not to unveil a fake, or smash your picture, but to show what an astonishing man Francis Cornish was.”

“Yes, but my dear professor, you can’t do one without the other. We shall suffer. We shall be made to look like fools, or collaborators in a deception. Think of that article in Apollo that Aylwin Ross wrote, explaining the sixteenth-century importance of this picture. It’s well known in the world of art history. A very clever piece of detective work. People will think we kept our mouths shut to save our picture, or else that we were victims of Francis Cornish’s little joke. No—his big joke. His Harry Furniss joke, as Addison has told us.”