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Copyright © Margery Allingham 1934

Margery Allingham has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann in 1934

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099593539

To

H.J. Allingham

this book is respectfully dedicated by his industrious apprentice

www.vintage-books.co.uk

This story, the characters in it, and the district immediately round Little Venice, are products of the author’s imagination and have no reference to any incident, living people, or topographical fact.

NOTE ON MR ALBERT CAMPION

THIS young man is an adventurer in the prettiest sense of the word, and his activities, which I have chronicled for some years, seem to fall into two distinct classes. There are those which have been frankly picaresque, as in the affair at Mystery Mile, the business at Pontisbright, published under the title of Sweet Danger, and several others. But now and again he comes up against less highly coloured but even more grave difficulties, as in the Cambridge tragedy, Police at the Funeral, and now in the present story.

The two types of experience are distinct and it is perhaps surprising that they should touch the same person. However, most of us have a serious as well as a lighter side, and Mr Campion is no exception to the rule.

M.A.

LAFCADIO, John Sebastian, R.A., b. 1845, d. 1912. Painter. Entered studio of William Pakenham, R.A., 1861. Lived in Italy, 1865–1878. First exhibited Royal Academy 1871. A.R.A. 1881. R.A. 1900. M. 1880 Arabella Theodora, d. of Sir J. and Lady Reid of Wendon Parva, Sussex. One son, John Sebastian, b. 1890. Killed in action, 1916. Best known works include: ‘The Girl at the Pool’ (Nat. Gallery), ‘Group in Sunlight’ (Tate), ‘Belle Darling’ (Louvre), ‘Portraits of Three Young Men’ (Boston), ‘Meeting of the Magi’ and ‘Satirical Portrait’ (Yokohama), etc., etc. Also Loan Collection of forty works destroyed in Moscow 1918.

Cf.	The Life and Work of Lafcadio, Vols 1, 2, and 3. Max Fustian.
	The Victorian Iconoclast. Mrs Betsy Fragonard.
	The Moscow Tragedy. Max Fustian.
	Lafcadio the Man. Max Fustian.
	Biographie d’un Maître de Peinture à l’Huile. Ulysse Lafourchardière.
	Weitere Bemerkungen zur Wahl der Bilder von John Lafcadio. Günther Wagner.

Weber’s Who’s Who in Art

LAFCADIO, J. See Charles Tanqueray, Letters to. (Phelps, 15s)

Dent’s Dictionary of Authors

‘John Lafcadio … the man who saw himself the first painter in Europe and whom we who are left recognize as the last.’

K.J.R. in The Times, 16 April, 1912

CHAPTER 1

Interior with Figures

–

THERE are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.

The assassination of another by any person of reasonable caution must, in a civilized world, tend to be a private affair.

Perhaps it is this particular which accounts for the remarkable public interest in the details of even the most sordid and unintellectual examples of this crime, suggesting that it is the secret rather than the deed which constitutes the appeal.

If only in view of the extreme rarity of the experience, therefore, it seems a pity that Brigadier-General Sir Walter Fyvie, a brilliant raconteur and a man who would have genuinely appreciated so odd a distinction, should have left the reception at Little Venice at twenty minutes past six, passing his old acquaintance Bernard, Bishop of Mold, in the doorway, and thus missing the extraordinary murder which took place there by a little under seven minutes.

As the General afterwards pointed out, it was all the more irritating since the Bishop, a specialist upon the more subtle varieties of sin, did not appreciate his fortune in the least.

At twenty minutes past six on the preceding day, that is to say exactly twenty-four hours before the General passed the Bishop in the doorway, the lights in the drawing-room on the first floor of Little Venice were up and Belle herself (the original ‘Belle Darling’ of the picture in the Louvre) was seated by the fire talking to her old friend Mr Campion, who had come to tea.

The house of a famous man who has been dead for any length of time, if it is still preserved in the condition in which he left it, is almost certain to have a museum-like quality if it has not achieved the withered wreaths and ragged garlands of a deserted shrine. It is perhaps the principal key to Belle’s character that Little Venice in 1930 was as much John Lafcadio’s home as if he were still down in the studio in the garden fighting and swearing and sweating over his pigments until he had thrashed them into another of his tempestuous pictures, which had so fascinated and annoyed his gentle and gentlemanly contemporaries.

If Belle Lafcadio was no longer the Belle of the pictures, she was still Belle Darling. She had, so she said, never had the disadvantage of being beautiful, and now, at two months off seventy, ample, creased, and startlingly reminiscent of Rembrandt’s portrait of his mother, she had the bright quick smile and the vivacity of one who never has been anything but at her best.

At the moment she was wearing one of those crisp white muslin bonnets in which Normandy peasants delighted until fifty years ago. She wore it with the assurance that it was unfashionable, unconventional, and devastatingly becoming. Her black gown was finished with a little white fillet round the neck and her slippers were adorned with shameless marcasite buckles.

The room in which she sat had the same lack of conformity to any period or scheme. It was a personal room, quite evidently a part of someone’s home, a place of strange curios but comfortable chairs.

L-shaped, it took up the entire first floor of the old house on the canal, and although nothing in it had been renewed since the war it had escaped the elegant banalities of Morris and the horrors of the Edwardian convention. It was Belle’s boast that she and Johnnie had never bought anything unless they had liked it, with the result that the deep Venetian-red damask curtains, although faded, were still lovely, the Persian carpet had worn silky, and the immense over mantel which took up all one narrow end of the room and which was part of a reredos from a Flemish church had grown mellow and at one with the buff walls, as things do when accustomed to living together.

What was odd was that the sketch of Réjane by Fantin-Latour, the casual plaster study of a foot by Rodin and the stuffed polar bear presented to Lafcadio by Jensen after the 1894 portrait, should also live together in equal harmony, or for that matter the hundred and one other curios with which the room was littered; yet they did, and the effect was satisfying and curiously exciting.

Mrs Lafcadio’s visitor sat opposite her, an unexpected person to find in such a room or in such company. He was a lank, pale-faced young man with sleek fair hair and horn-rimmed spectacles. His lounge suit was a little masterpiece, and the general impression one received of him was that he was well-bred and a trifle absent-minded. He sat blinking at his hostess, his elbows resting upon the arms of his chair and his long hands folded in his lap.

The two were friends of long standing, and the conversation had waned into silence for some moments when Belle looked up.

‘Well,’ she said with the chuckle which had been famous in the nineties, ‘here we are, my dear, two celebrities. Isn’t it fun?’

He glanced at her. ‘I’m no celebrity,’ he protested fervently. ‘Heaven forbid. I leave that to disgraceful old ladies who enjoy it.’

Mrs Lafcadio’s brown eyes, whose irises were beginning to fade a little, smiled at some huge inward joke.

‘Johnnie loved it,’ she said. ‘At the time of Gladstone’s unpopularity after the Gordon business Johnnie was approached to make a portrait of him. He refused the commission, and he wrote to Salmon, his agent: “I see no reason to save Mr Gladstone’s face for posterity”.’

Campion eyed her contemplatively. ‘There’s always a new Lafcadio story about this time of year,’ he said. ‘Do you invent them?’

The old lady looked demurely at the handkerchief in her hand.

‘No,’ she said. ‘But I sometimes improve on them – just a little.’ She became suddenly alert. ‘Albert,’ she said, ‘you haven’t come here on business, have you? You don’t think someone’s going to steal the picture?’

‘I sincerely hope not,’ he said in some alarm. ‘Unless, of course, that super-salesman Max is planning a sensation.’

‘Max!’ said Mrs Lafcadio, and laughed. ‘Oh, my dear, I’ve had a sweet thought about him. His first book about Johnnie which came out after the Loan Collection in Moscow was lost was called The Art of John Lafcadio, by one who knew him. His eighth book on Johnnie came out yesterday. It’s called Max Fustian Looks at Art – a critical survey of the works of John Lafcadio by Europe’s foremost critic.’

‘Do you mind?’ said Mr Campion.

‘Mind? Of course not. Johnnie would have loved it. It would have struck him as being funny. Besides, think of the compliment. Max made himself quite famous by just writing about Johnnie. I’m quite famous, just being Johnnie’s wife. Poor dear Beatrice considers herself famous just being Johnnie’s “Inspiration”, and my blessed Lisa, who cares less about it than any of us, really is famous as “Clytemnestra”, and “The Girl at the Pool”.’ She sighed. ‘I think that probably pleases Johnnie more than anything.’ She looked at her visitor with a half-apologetic grimace. ‘I always feel he’s watching us from somewhere, you know.’

Mr Campion nodded gravely. ‘He had the quality of fame about him,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing how persistent it is. If I may say so, regarded from the vulgar standpoint of publicity, this remarkable will of his was a stroke of genius. I mean, what other artist in the world ever produced twelve new pictures ten years after his death and persuaded half London to come and see them one after the other for twelve years?’

Belle considered his remark gravely. ‘I suppose it was,’ she agreed. ‘But you know, really Johnnie didn’t think of it that way. I’m perfectly certain his one idea was to fire a Parthian shot at poor Charles Tanqueray. In a way,’ she went on, ‘it was a sort of bet. Johnnie believed in his work and he guessed that it would boom just after his death and then go completely out of favour – as of course it did. But he realized that as it was really good it would be bound to be recognized again eventually and he guessed that ten years was about the time public opinion would take.’

‘It was a wonderful idea,’ the young man repeated.

‘It wasn’t in his will, you know,’ said the old woman. ‘It was a letter. Didn’t you ever see it? I’ve got it here in the desk’.

She rose with surprising agility and hurried across the room to a big serpentine escritoire, and after pulling out one untidy drawer after another, finally produced an envelope which she carried back in triumph to the fireplace. Mr Campion took the curio reverently and spread out a sheet of flimsy paper scribbled over in Lafcadio’s beautiful hand.

The old lady stood beside him and peered over his shoulder. ‘He wrote it some time before he died,’ she said. ‘He was always writing letters. Read it aloud. It makes me laugh.’

‘Belle darling,’ read Mr Campion. ‘When you return a sorrowing widow from the Abbey, where ten thousand cretins will (I hope) be lamenting over some marble Valentine inscribed to their hero (don’t let old Ffolliot do it – I will not be commemorated by nigger-bellied putti or uni-breasted angels) – when you return, I want you to read this and help me once again as you have ever done. That oaf Tanqueray, to whom I have just been talking, is, I discover, looking forward to my death – he has the advantage of me by ten years – to bask in a clear field, to vaunt his execrable taste and milk-pudding mind unhampered by comparison with me. Not that the man can’t paint; we Academicians are as good as beach photographers any day of the week. It’s the mind of the man, with his train of long-drawered village children, humanized dogs, and sailors lost at sea, that I deplore. I’ve told him that I’ll outlive him if I have to die to do it, and it has occurred to me that there is a way of making him see the point of my remark for once.

‘In the cellar I shall leave twelve canvases, boxed and sealed. In with them is a letter to old Salmon, with full particulars. You are not to let them out of your hands for five years after the date of my death. Then I want them sent to Salmon as they are. He will unpack them and frame them. One at a time. They are all numbered. And on Show Sunday in the eleventh year after my death I want you to open up the studio, send round invitations as usual and show the first picture. And so on, for twelve years. Salmon will do all the dirty work, i.e. selling, etc. My stuff will probably have gained in value by that time, so you’ll get the crowd out of mere curiosity. (Should I be forgotten, my dear, have the shows for my sake and attend them yourself.)

‘In any case old Tanqueray will have an extra twenty-two years of me hanging over his head, and if he outlives that, good luck to him.

‘Many people will try to persuade you to open the packages before the date appointed, urging that I was not of sound mind when I wrote this letter. You, who know that I have never been of sound mind in the accepted sense of the term, will know how to treat any such suggestion.

‘All my love, my dear. If you see a strange old lady not at all unlike the late Queen, God bless her, mingling with the guests on the first of these occasions – it will be my ghost in disguise. Treat it with the respect it will deserve.

‘Your husband, Madame,

‘John Lafcadio.

‘(Probably the greatest painter since Rembrandt.)’

Mr Campion refolded the letter. ‘Did you really see this for the first time when you returned from his funeral?’ he demanded.

‘Oh dear me, no,’ said Mrs Lafcadio, tucking the envelope back into the drawer. ‘I helped him write it. We sat up one night after Charles Tanqueray and the Meynells had been to dinner. He did all the rest, though. I mean, I never saw the pictures packed, and this letter was sent to me from the bank with the rest of his papers.’

‘And this is the eighth year a picture has been shown,’ said Mr Campion.

She nodded, and for the first time a hint of sadness came into her faded brown eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And of course there were many things we couldn’t foresee. Poor old Salmon died within three years of Johnnie, and some time later Max took over the Bond Street business from his executors. And as for Tanqueray, he barely lasted eighteen months longer than Johnnie.’

Mr Campion looked curious. ‘What sort of man was Tanqueray?’ he said.

Mrs Lafcadio wrinkled her nose. ‘A clever man,’ she said. ‘And his work sold more than anyone else’s in the nineties. But he had no sense of humour at all. A literal-minded person and distressingly sentimental about children. I often think that Johnnie’s work was unspoilt by the conventions of the period largely because he had a wholly unwarrantable dislike of children. Would you like to come down and see the picture? All’s ready for the great day tomorrow.’

Mr Campion rose to his feet.

As she tucked her arm through his and they descended the staircase she looked up at him with a delightfully confidential smile.

‘It’s like the mantelpiece in the Andersen story, isn’t it?’ she whispered. ‘We are the china figures. We come alive on one evening of the year. Tomorrow afternoon we shall retaste our former glory. I shall be the hostess, Donna Beatrice will supply the decorative note, and Lisa will wander about looking miserable, as she always did, poor creature. And then the guests will go, the picture will be sold – Liverpool Art Gallery this time, perhaps, my dear – and we shall all go to sleep again for another year.’

She sighed and stepped down on to the tiled floor of the hall a little wearily.

From where they stood they could see the half-glass door to the garden, in which stood the great studio which John Lafcadio had built in eighty-nine.

The door was open, and the famous view of the ‘master’s chair’, which was said to be visible to the incoming guest once he stepped inside the front door of the house, was very clear.

Belle raised her eyebrows. ‘A light?’ she said, and added immediately, ‘Oh, of course, that’s W. Tennyson Potter. You know him, don’t you?’

Mr Campion hesitated. ‘I’ve heard of him and I’ve seen him at past Private Views, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually met him,’ he said.

‘Oh, well, then –’ She drew him aside as she spoke, and lowered her voice, although there was not the remotest chance of her being overheard. ‘My dear, he’s difficult. He lives in the garden with his wife – such a sweet little soul. I mean, Johnnie told them they could build a studio in the garden years ago when we first came here – he was sorry for the man – and so they did. Build a studio, I mean, and they’ve been here ever since. He’s an artist; an engraver on red sandstone. He invented the process and of course it never caught on – the coarse screen block is so like it – and it blighted the poor man’s life.’ She paused for breath and then rushed on again in her soft voice which had never lost the excited tone of youth. ‘He’s having a little show of his engravings, as he calls them – they’re really lithographs – in a corner of the studio as usual. Max is angry about it, but Johnnie always let him have that show when an opportunity occurred, and so I’ve put my foot down.’

‘I can’t imagine it,’ said her escort.

A gleam came into Mrs Lafcadio’s eyes. ‘Oh, but I have,’ she said. ‘I told Max not to be greedy and to behave as though he was properly brought up. He needs his knuckles rapped occasionally.’

Campion laughed. ‘What did he do? Hurl himself at your feet in an agony of passionate self-reproach?’

Mrs Lafcadio smiled with a touch of the most innocent malice in the world.

‘Isn’t he affected?’ she said. ‘I’m afraid Johnnie would have made his life unbearable for him. He reminds me of my good grandmother; so covered with frills and furbelows that there’s no way of telling where they leave off. As a child I wondered if they ever did, or if she was just purple bombasine all the way through. Well, here we are. It’s a darling studio, isn’t it?’

They had crossed the narrow draughty strip of covered way between the garden door of the house and the studio, and now entered the huge outside room in which John Lafcadio had worked and still entertained. Like most buildings of its kind, it was an unprepossessing structure from the outside, being largely composed of corrugated iron, but inside it still reflected a great deal of the magnificent personality of its owner.

It was a huge airy place with a polished floor, a glass roof, and two enormous fireplaces, one at either end. It was also bounded on the northern side by a low balcony, filled in below with cupboards composed of linenfold panelling rescued from a reconstructed farmhouse in the nineties. Above the balcony were five long windows, each about twelve feet high, through which was a magnificent view of the Regent’s Canal. Behind the fireplace nearest the door was a model’s room and lavatory, approached by a small archway at the extreme western corner below the balcony.

The skeleton of the room, which is always in evidence in a building of the kind, was far more massive than is usual and effectually removed the temporary air of church hall or army hut.

At the moment when Belle and Campion entered only one of the big hanging electric lamps was lit, so that the corners of the room were in shadow. There was no fire in the grate opposite the door, but the big old-fashioned stove in the other fireplace at the near end of the room was going and the place was warm and comforting after the chilly garden.

Out of the shadows the famous portrait of Lafcadio by Sargent loomed from its place of honour over the carved mantel.

Of heroic size, it had all the force, truth, and dignity of the painter’s best work, but here was an unexpected element of swashbuckling which took the spectator some time to realize as a peculiarity of the sitter rather than of the artist. In his portrait John Lafcadio appeared a personage. Here was no paint-ennobled nonentity; rather the captured distinction of a man great in his time.

It is undeniably true, as many critics have pointed out, that he looked like a big brother of the Laughing Cavalier, even to the swagger. He was fifty when the portrait was painted, but there was very little grey in the dark red hair which galloped back from his forehead, and the contours of his face were youthful. He was smiling, his lips drawn back over very white teeth, and his moustache was the moustache of the Cavalier. His studio coat of white linen was unbuttoned and hung in a careless bravura of folds, and his quick dark eyes, although laughing, were arrogant. The picture has of course become almost hackneyed, and to describe it further would be superfluous.

Belle kissed her hand to it. She always did so, and her friends and acquaintances put the gesture down to affectation, sentimentality, or sweet wifely affection according to their several temperaments.

The picture of the moment, however, stood on an easel on the left of the fireplace, covered by a shawl.

Mr Campion had taken in all this before he realized that they were not alone in the room. Over in the corner by the stove a tall thin figure in shirt-sleeves was hovering before a dozen or so whitewood frames arranged on a curtain hung over the panelling of the balcony cupboards.

He turned as Mr Campion glanced at him, and the young man caught a glimpse of a thin red melancholy face whose wet pale eyes were set too close together above the pinched bridge of an enormous nose.

‘Mr Potter,’ said Belle, ‘here’s Mr Campion. You two know each other, don’t you? I’ve brought him down to see the picture.’

Mr Potter put a thin cold hand in Mr Campion’s. ‘It’s very fine this year – very fine,’ he said, revealing a hollow voice of unutterable sadness, ‘and yet – I don’t know; “fine”, perhaps, is hardly the word. “Strong”, perhaps – “dominating” – “significant”. I don’t know – quite. “Fine”, I think. Art’s a hard master. I’ve been all the last week arranging my little things. It’s very difficult. One thing kills another, you know.’ He sent a despairing glance into the corner whence he had come.

Belle coughed softly. ‘This is the Mr Campion, you know, Mr Potter,’ she said.

The man looked up and his eyes livened for an instant. ‘Not the –? Oh, really? Indeed?’ he said, and shook hands again. His interest faded immediately, however, and once more he glanced in misery towards the corner.

Campion heard the ghost of a sigh at his elbow and Belle spoke.

‘You must show your prints to Mr Campion,’ she said. ‘He’s a privileged visitor and we must take him behind the scenes.’

‘Oh, they’re nothing, absolutely nothing,’ said Mr Potter, in agony; but he turned quite brightly and led them over to his work.

At first sight of the array Mr Campion began to share Mr Potter’s depression.

Red sandstone does not lend itself to lithography, and it seemed unfortunate that Mr Potter, who evidently experienced great difficulty in drawing upon anything, should have chosen so unsympathetic a medium. There was, too, a distressing sameness about the prints, most of which appeared to be rather inaccurate and indefinite botanical studies.

Mr Potter pointed out one small picture depicting a bowl of narcissi and an inverted wineglass.

‘The Duke of Caith bought a copy of that once,’ he said. ‘It was the second year we started this posthumous show idea of Lafcadio’s. That was 1923. It’s now 1930: it must be seven years ago. That one has never gone again. I’ve put in a copy every year since. The picture business is very bad.’

‘It’s an interesting medium,’ said Mr Campion, feeling he was called upon to say something.

‘I like it,’ said Mr Potter simply. ‘I like it. It’s a strain, though,’ he went on, striking his thin palms together like cymbals. ‘The stones are so heavy. Difficult to print, you know – and shifting them in and out of the acid is a strain. That one over there weighed thirty-seven pounds in the stone, and that’s quite light compared with some of them. I get so tired. Well, let’s go and look at Lafcadio’s picture. It’s very fine; perhaps a bit hot – a bit hot in tone, but very fine.’

They turned and walked down the room to where Belle, who had removed the shawl from the picture, was fiddling with an indirect lighting device round the frame.

‘This is Max’s idea,’ she said, shaking herself free from the tangle of flex. ‘People stay so late and it gets so dark. Ah, here it is.’

Immediately the picture sprang into prominence. It was a big canvas, the subject the trial of Joan of Arc. The foreground was taken up with the dark backs of the judges, and between their crimson sleeves one caught a vision of the girl.

‘That’s my wife,’ said Mr Potter unexpectedly. ‘He often painted her, you know. Rather fine work, don’t you think? All that massing of colour. That’s typical. Great quantities of paint too. I used to say to him – in joke, you know – it’s lucky you make it yourself, John, or you’d never be able to afford it. See that blue on her scarf? That’s the Lafcadio blue. No one’s got that secret yet. The secret of the crimson had to go to help pay the death duties. Balmoral and Huxley bought it. Now any Tom, Dick, or Harry can get a tube for a few shillings.’

Belle laughed. ‘Both you and Linda do so begrudge anyone having the secret of his colours. After all, the world’s got his pictures; why shouldn’t it have his paint? Then they’ll have the copy and the materials, and if they can’t do it too, then all the more honour to Johnnie.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Potter, ‘remember Columbus and the egg. They could all make it stand up after he’d shown them how to crack it at one end. The secret was simple, you see, but Columbus thought of it first.’

Belle grinned. ‘Albert,’ she said, ‘as one of the busiest investigators of our time, has the real significance of the Columbus story ever dawned on you?’

Mr Campion indicated that it had not.

‘That the egg was boiled, of course,’ said Belle, and went off laughing, the white frills of her bonnet trembling.

Mr Potter looked after her. ‘She doesn’t change,’ he remarked. ‘She doesn’t change at all.’ He turned back to the picture. ‘I’ll cover it up,’ he said. ‘Lafcadio was a chap you didn’t mind waiting upon. He was a great man, a great painter. I got on with him. Some people didn’t. I remember him saying to me, “Potter, you’ve got more sense in your gluteus maximus than old Charles Tanqueray has in the whole of his own and his damned art committee’s heads put together.” Tanqueray was more popular than Lafcadio, you know, with the public; but Lafcadio was the man. They all see it now. His work is fine – very fine. A bit hot in tone – a bit hot. But very, very fine.’

He was still muttering this magic formula when Mr Campion left him to rejoin Belle in the doorway. She took his arm again as they went into the house.

‘Poor Tennyson Potter,’ she murmured. ‘He’s so depressing. There’s only one thing worse than an artist who can’t draw and who thinks he can, and that’s one who can’t draw and knows he can’t. No one gets anything out of it then. But Johnnie liked him. I think it was all the stones he uses. Johnnie was rather proud of his strength. He used to enjoy heaving them about.’

Her remarks were brought to a sudden end as they came into the hall by the appearance at the top of the stairs of an apparition in what Mr Campion at first took to be fancy dress.

‘Belle!’ said a feminine voice tragically. ‘You really must exert your authority. Lisa – oh, is that someone with you?’ The vision came down the stairs and Campion had time to look at her. He recognized her as Donna Beatrice, a lady who had caused a certain amount of flutter in artistic circles in 1900.

In 1900, at the age of thirty, she had possessed that tall beauty which seems to have been a peculiarity of the period, and she had descended upon the coterie which surrounded Lafcadio, a widow with a small income and an infinite capacity for sitting still and looking lovely. Lafcadio, who could put up with anything provided it was really beautiful, had been vastly taken by her and she was referred to as ‘his Inspiration’ by those romantic feather-brained people who were loth to be uncharitable and at the same time incapable of understanding the facts.

There were two superstitions connected with Donna Beatrice. One was that in the days when everyone was chatting about the beautiful peacock strutting so proudly about the studio, she had approached Mrs Lafcadio and, in that sweet vacant voice of hers, had murmured: ‘Belle darling, you must be Big. When a man is as great as the Master, no one woman can expect to fill his life. Let us share him, dear, and work together in the immortal cause of Art.’ And Belle, plump and smiling, had patted one of the beautiful shoulders and whispered close to one of the lovely ears: ‘Of course, my dear, of course. But let us keep it a secret from Johnnie.’

The other superstition was that Lafcadio had never allowed her to speak in his presence; or rather, had persuaded her not to by the simple expedient of telling her that her pinnacle of beauty was achieved when her face was in repose.

For the rest, she was an Englishwoman with no pretension at all to the ‘Donna’ or the ‘Beatrice’, which she pronounced Italian fashion, sounding the final ‘e’. Very few knew her real name; it was a secret she guarded passionately. But if in Lafcadio’s lifetime she had been content to remain beautiful but dumb, on his death she had developed an unexpected force of character inasmuch as she had shown very plainly that she had no intention of giving up the position of reflected glory which she had held so long. No one knew what arguments she had used to prevail upon Belle to permit her to take up her residence in the house, but at any rate she had succeeded now, and occupied two rooms on the second floor, where she continued her hobby of manufacturing ‘art’ jewellery and practising various forms of semi-religious mysticism to which she had lately become addicted.

At the moment she was dressed in a long Florentine gown of old rose brocade, strongly reminiscent of Burne-Jones but cut with a curtsy to Modernity, so that the true character of the frock was lost and it became an odd nondescript garment covering her thin figure from throat to ankle. To complete her toilet she had draped a long pink and silver scarf across her shoulders and the two ends rippled beneath her with the untidy grace of a nymph on the cover of Punch.

Her hair was frankly 1900. Its coarse gold strands had faded and there were wide silver ribbons amongst them, but the dressing was still that of the Gibson Girl, odd in a convention not old enough to be romantic.

An incongruous note was struck by a black cord running from beneath her hair to a battery on her chest, for her hearing, never good, had declined with the years and she was now practically stone-deaf except when equipped with this affront to her vanity.

Round her neck was a beaten silver chain of her own making, hanging to her knees and weighted by a baroque enamel cross. She was a figure of faintly uncomfortable pathos, reminding the young man irresistibly of a pressed rose, a little brown about the edges and scarcely even of sentimental value.

‘Mr Campion?’ A surprisingly hard bony hand was thrust into his. ‘You’ve been seeing the picture, of course?’ The voice was soft and intentionally vibrant. ‘I was so thrilled when I saw it again after all these years. I remember lying on the chaise-longue in the studio while the Master painted it.’

She dropped her eyes on the name and he had the uncomfortable impression that she was about to cross herself.

‘He liked to have me near whilst he was painting, you know. I know now that I always had a blue aura in those days, and that’s what inspired him. I do think there’s such a lot in Colour, don’t you? Of course, he told me it was to be a secret – even from Belle. But Belle never minds. Dear Belle.’

She smiled at the other woman with a mixture of affection and contempt.

‘Do you know, I was discussing Belle with Doctor Hilda Bayman, the Mystic. She says Belle must be an old soul – meaning, you understand, that she’s been on the earth many times before.’

Campion gave way to the embarrassment which Donna Beatrice’s mystic revelations invariably produced upon her more acute acquaintances. Pampered vanity and the cult of the Higher Selfishness he found slightly nauseating.

Belle laughed. ‘I love to hear that,’ she said. ‘A dear old soul, I always hope. A sort of old Queen Cole. Has Linda come in yet? She went to see Tommy Dacre,’ she continued, turning to Campion. ‘He came back from Florence last night, after three years at mural work. Isn’t it tragic? The students used to paint cathedral ceilings: now they paint cinema roofs.’

Donna Beatrice’s still beautiful face adopted a petulant expression.

‘I really don’t know anything about Linda,’ she said. ‘It’s Lisa I’m worrying about. That’s why I wanted to see you. The creature simply refuses to wear the Clytemnestra robe tomorrow. I’ve had it let out. She ought to defer a little to the occasion. As it is, she simply looks like an Italian cook. We always look like our minds in the end – Belle, what are you laughing at?’

Mrs Lafcadio squeezed Mr Campion’s arm. ‘Poor Lisa,’ she said, and chuckled again.

Two bright spots of colour appeared on Donna Beatrice’s cheek-bones.

‘Really, Belle, I hardly expect you to appreciate the sacredness of the occasion,’ she said, ‘but at least don’t make my task more difficult. We’ve got to serve the Master tomorrow. We’ve got to keep his name green, to keep the torch alight.’

‘And so poor Lisa’s got to put on a tight purple dress and leave her beloved kitchen. It seems a little severe. You be careful Beatrice. Lisa’s descended from the Borgias on her mother’s side. You’ll get arsenic in your minestrone if you tease her.’

‘Belle, how can you? In front of a detective, too.’ The two bright spots in Donna Beatrice’s cheeks deepened. ‘Besides, although Mr Campion knows it, I thought we’d agreed to keep Lisa’s position here a secret. It seems so terrible,’ she went on, ‘that the Master’s favourite model should degenerate into a cook in his household.’

Belle looked discomforted and an awkward moment was ended by a peal on the front-door bell, and the almost instantaneous appearance of Lisa herself at the kitchen door.

Lisa Capella, discovered by Lafcadio on the slopes outside Vecchia one morning in 1884, had been brought by him to England where she occupied the position of principal model until her beauty passed, when she took up the household duties for Belle, to whom she was deeply attached. Now, at the age of sixty-five, she looked much older, a withered, rather terrible old woman with a wrinkled brown face, quick dark angry eyes and very white hair scraped back from her forehead. She was dressed completely in black, the dead and clinging folds which enveloped her only relieved by a gold chain and brooch.

She shot a sullen, vicious glance at Beatrice, sped past her on noiseless, felt-slippered feet over the coloured tiles, and swung the front door open.

A rush of cool air, a little dank from the canal, sped down the hall to meet them, and instantly a new personality pervaded the whole place as vividly and tangibly as if it had been an odour.

Max Fustian surged into the house, not crudely or noisily, but irresistibly, and with the same conscious power with which a successful actor-manager makes his appearance in the first act of a new play. They heard his voice, deep, drawling, impossibly affected, from the doorway.

‘Lisa, you look deliriously macabre this evening. When Hecate opens the door of Hell to me she will look like you. Ah, Belle, darling! Are we prepared? And Donna Beatrice? And the sleuth! My salutations, all of you.’

He came up out of the shadow to lay one very white hand affectionately on Belle’s arm, while the other, outstretched, suggested an embrace which included Mr Campion, Donna Beatrice, and the stealthily retreating Lisa.

When one considered Max Fustian’s appearance it was all the more extraordinary that his personality, exotic and fantastic as it was, should never have overstepped the verge into the ridiculous. He was small, dark, pale, with a blue jowl and a big nose. His eyes, which were bright and simian, peered out from cavernous sockets, so dark as to appear painted. His black hair was ungreased and cut into a conventional shock which had just sufficient length to look like a wig. He was dressed, too, with the same mixture of care and unconventionality. His double-breasted black coat was slightly loose and his soft black tie flowed from beneath his white silk collar.

He had thrown his wide black hat and black raincoat on to the hall chest as he passed and now stood beaming at them, holding the gesture of welcome as one who realizes he has made an entrance.

He was forty, but looked younger and appreciated his good fortune.

‘Is everything ready?’ The indolent weariness of his voice had a soporific quality and he swept them down to the studio again before they had realized it.

Potter had gone and the place was in darkness. Max switched on the lights and looked round with the quick, all-seeing glance of a conjuror surveying his paraphernalia.

A frown spread over his forehead and he returned to his hostess.

‘Dear Belle, why do you insist on those nauseating lithographs? It degrades the occasion into a church bazaar.’ He pointed contemptuously to the unfortunate Mr Potter’s display. ‘The fancywork stall.’

‘Really, Belle, I think he’s right.’ Donna Beatrice’s low sing-song voice was plaintive. ‘There’ll be my little table over here with the Guild’s jewellery upon it, and really I think that’s enough. I mean – other people’s pictures in his studio – it’s sacrilege, isn’t it? The vibrations won’t be right.’