Was he dead to shame, Simon had asked himself? Was he now a contented, successful criminal, unhampered by his clerical vows? He did not attempt a philosophical answer; he was wholly in the grip of the biographer’s covetous, unappeasable spirit. He was on to a good thing, and nothing should stand in his way. He would chance losing his soul, if only he could write a really good book. A deathbed repentance would probably square things with God. Meanwhile, this was Life.
“My wife is quite delighted with what you have brought,” said Prince Max. “You are sure it is complete—every preliminary study?”
“To the best of my knowledge,” said Simon. “I went through all Francis Cornish’s drawings, his own and all the Old Masters he had copied, and I saw nothing related to the portrait of the Princess except the studies I have put in your keeping.”
“Admirable,” said the Prince. “I shall not say we do not know how to thank you, because we do. Amalie shall tell you all she knows about le beau ténébreux. And so shall I, though I did not know him so well as she. I only met him once, at Düsterstein. He made an immediate favourable impression. Handsome; modest, even witty, when wine had overcome his reticence. But you must continue, my dear. Meanwhile, another glass of wine?”
“Francis Cornish was everything Max says, and a great deal more,” said the Princess. She drank little; a great professional beauty and a razor-sharp woman of business cannot afford to be a soaker. “He came into my life just as I was emerging from girlhood, and was beginning to be seriously interested in men. Seriously, I say; every girl notices men and dreams about them from the time she begins to walk. But he came to my family home just when I was beginning to think about lovers.”
“It is strange to think of the Francis I knew as greatly attractive,” said Simon. “He became rather an oddity as time went on.”
“But I am sure it must have been a ruined beauty you saw as oddity,” said the Princess. “Men do not notice such things, unless their romantic interest is in other men. Surely you have photographs?”
“He hated being photographed,” said Simon.
“Then I can surprise you. I have many photographs, that I took myself. A girl’s snapshots, of course, but revealing. I have one that I used to keep under my pillow until my governess discovered it and forbade it. I told her she was jealous and she laughed, but it was a laugh that told me I had hit the mark. Very handsome, and he had a nice deep voice. Not quite American; there was a Scottish burr in it that melted my soul.”
“I am already jealous,” said the Prince.
“Oh Max, don’t be silly. You know what girls are.”
“I knew what you were, my darling. But I knew what I was, too. So at the time I was not jealous.”
“Odious vanity!” said the Princess. “Anyhow, we all have our early loves whom we keep in the back of our minds all our lives. I am sure you know what I mean, Professor.”
“There was a girl with ringlets, when I was nine,” said Darcourt, taking a sip of his wine. “I know what you mean. But please go on about Francis.”
“He had everything a very young girl could love. He even had a rather untrustworthy heart. He had to keep watch on it, and report to his doctor in London.”
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.”