“What love and skill must have gone into the making of this,” said Francis.

“No doubt, but the less must give way to the greater, and now it is my workroom,” said Saraceni. “This was a costly, ingenious toy, and those who played in it are dust. Ours is the greater task.”

What was the task? Francis was never told directly; he made his discoveries by deduction, with growing incredulity. From after breakfast until four o’clock in the afternoon, when the light changed too much for Saraceni’s needs, with a short interval for sandwiches and a glass of good Munich beer, he toiled at a variety of jobs from early September until mid-December. He learned to grind minerals to powder in a mortar, and mix them with various oils; the mixing was a tedious process. He learned to use and prepare mineral colours and gums—cinnabar, manganese dioxide, calcined umber, and sticky, messy gamboge. He learned to chip bits from the least visible parts of the splendid lapis pilasters, and grind his chippings fine with mortar and pestle before uniting the powder with lilac oil, to make a splendid ultramarine. It gave him particular pleasure to make the acquaintance of woad, the isatis tinctoria, from the juice of which a dark blue could be extracted. At the laboratory bench he learned to make up a compound of carbolic acid and formaldehyde (the whiff of which reminded him poignantly of nights with Zadok in Devmney’s embalming parlour) and bottle it firmly against evaporation.

“I don’t suppose you ever thought painting involved so much chemistry and cooking,” said Saraceni. “You are making the true colours used by the Old Masters, Corniche. These are the splendid shades that do not fade with age. Nowadays you can buy colours somewhat like them in shops, but they are not the same at all. They are labour-saving and they save time. But you and I have precisely the same amount of time as the Old Masters—twenty-four hours in every day. There is no more, and never any less. For the true work of restoration on an old panel or canvas you must use the colours the original master employed. The honesty of your craft demands it. It is also undetectable.

“Oh, I suppose some very clever investigator with rays and chemicals might be able to say what parts of a picture had been restored—though I prefer to say revived—but our task is to do a job of revival that will not provoke foolishly inquisitive persons to resort to rays and chemicals. It is not the purpose of a picture to arouse unworthy suspicions, but to give pleasure—delight, or awe, or religious intimations, or simply a fine sense of the past, and of the boundless depth and variety of life.”

This had a fine ring of morality and aesthetic probity about it. Saraceni making the past live again. But there were elements in what was really happening that Francis did not understand.

If the past was to be recovered, why not the best of the past? There were pictures hanging in Schloss Düsterstein that plainly needed the attention of a restorer, pictures by distinguished masters—a Mengs, a van Bylert, even a Van Dyck that wanted cleaning—but these did not come to the shell-pavilion. Instead there were several pictures, usually painted on panels, some of which were in bad repair and all of which were dirty. One of Francis’s jobs was to wipe these as clean as possible with soft, damp cloths and then—but why?—wash these cloths in as little water as possible and dry out the pan until the dust from the picture was dust again, and could be sucked up with a syringe and put in a numbered small bottle.

Most of the little pictures were portraits of Nobody in Particular, in all his and her dull variety; just noblemen and merchants, burgomasters and scholars, and their pie-faced wives. But Saraceni would place one of these competent, uninteresting daubs on his easel, and study it with care for hours before removing certain portions with a solvent so that the painting beneath was blurred, or else the undercoating of the panel was revealed. Then he would repaint the face, so that it was the same as before but with a greater distinction—a keenness of aristocratic eye, a new look of bürgerlich astuteness, a fuller beard; women, if they had hands, were given rings, modest but costly, and better complexions. Sometimes he placed, in the upper left-hand corner of the panel, some little heraldic device, which might indicate the status of the sitter, and on one picture, rather larger than the rest, he introduced an ornamental chain, the collar and emblem of the Saint-Esprit. He is tarting up these four-hundred-year-old dullards, thought Francis, but why, and for whom?

Saraceni’s method of painting was wholly new to Francis. On his palette he laid out his colours—the colours that Francis had so laboriously prepared—in small, almost parsimonious dibbets; but elsewhere on the palette was some of the phenol and formaldehyde mixture mingled with a little oil, and before he took paint on his brush he dipped it first in this resinous gum, which served him as a medium. A strange way to paint, surely? Late in November Francis decided that the time had come to ask a question.

“You shall see why I do that,” said the Meister. “Indeed, you cannot help but see. Overpainting on a restored—or revived—picture is easily detected with the naked eye. As a picture ages, and the paint dries out—it takes about fifty years—it cracks in a certain pattern. What we call the craquelure. The cracks are mere hair-lines; only a poor picture develops a hide like a crocodile. But those hair-lines penetrate right through all the coatings of paint, as deep as to the ground you have used to prepare your canvas—or panel—like these I have been working on. So—how do I produce a craquelure in the new work I have done that blends undetectably with the old work? Well, as you see I am using a fast-drying paint—or rather, that phenol mixture that I use as my medium. Tomorrow I shall show you how I produce the craquelure.”

So this was what the electric furnace was for! Francis had assumed it might be to heat the cold, damp grotto-room, but such heat as there was came from a brazier—not much more than a pan of burning charcoal set on a tripod, which gave out about as much heat as a dying baby’s last breath, in Francis’s opinion. On the day following their talk about craquelure Saraceni turned on the electricity in the furnace, and in time, with much rumbling and moaning, it achieved a heat by no means great, but which taxed the primitive electrical system of the castle, where electric light was scant and dim, and did not proceed above the ground floor.

When Saraceni declared the heat to be sufficient he and Francis carefully inserted the painted panels and after about fifty minutes of slow baking they emerged with, sure enough, tiny hairlines that satisfied the Meister. While they were still warm he surprised Francis yet again.

“Before these cool, you must take a sable brush and put back as much as you can of the dust that was originally on these pictures, taking special pains to get it into the tiny cracks over the new work. Don’t be too eager; but be sure to cover the whole picture and especially whatever is new. Of course, you will use the dust from the bottle that bears the number of the picture. We must not insult Burgermeister A with dirt that the hand of time has sown on the portrait of the wife of Burgermeister B. And hurry up. The dust must adhere. Now—on with your work, you understudy of Father Time.”

The next day Saraceni was in high excitement. “Everything now will have to wait until I return from Rome. I must visit my apartment before Christmas; I cannot be separated forever from my darlings, my pictures, my furniture—not even from my bed-curtains, which once belonged to the Empress Josephine. Antaeus had to touch his foot to the earth to gain strength, and I must touch and see my beauties if I am to have the resolution I need for this work.—You are looking at me oddly, Corniche? Does my passion for my collection really surprise you so much?”