Bushell didn’t answer. He was giving the background of the painting the same careful scrutiny he’d used with the figures of George Washington and George III. Some of the men in the palace chamber he recognized at once, as most subjects of the British Empire would have: there stood the elder Pitt, prime minister at the time, his face thin and intelligent-looking, dominated by a fleshy nose and intense, penetrating eyes, the ermine trim of his robe so perfectly rendered that Bushell could almost count the individual hairs; not far away, his successor, Lord North, plump and soft-faced almost to the point of effeminacy, plucked a roasted chicken leg from a serving girl’s silver tray. Benjamin Franklin stood nearby. He seemed to have one eye on the ceremony, the other on the serving girl, a detail reproductions invariably missed. And there was Samuel Adams, fleshier than Washington but with a face every bit as determined. The colonies had sent their best to London. Kathleen Flannery waited till Bushell took a step back from The Two Georges , then pointed out some of the men whose names, while prominent during their lifetimes, had since faded: Newcastle, first lord of the treasury; George Grenville, who nearly gained the prime ministry; the political pamphleteer Sir Philip Francis; John Wilkes, another firebrand; and more.
“And there, off in a corner” - Kathleen pointed - ”sketching busily away, is Thomas Gainsborough himself. He doesn’t seem to have painted himself into the picture till the very last moment, when he realized he’d created a painting that would live forever.”
“I never noticed him before,” Bushell said, almost angrily, for he hated to overlook anything. “You’re right, Miss Flannery: he’s made himself as immortal as The Two Georges itself.”
“Dr. Flannery, if you don’t mind, Colonel.” She kept her tone light, but he could tell she meant it. A man might not have stressed the title so hard, but a man wouldn’t have had to go through so much to earn it and the respect of the world afterwards - either.
“Dr. Flannery; I beg your pardon,” Bushell said. “After I check the lift and that other stairway, shall we go back down to the reception? If you’ll let me, I’ll get you a drink and do my best to make amends.”
She visibly thought it over before she nodded. He was glad; he hadn’t warmed so to a woman on brief acquaintance since Irene. . . . But if he let himself think too much about Irene, he’d go back down to the reception and drink himself blind. He’d done that too many times before to doubt it. Nodding to the RAM guards, he went out into the hallway and looked over the opening for the lift and the stairs Kathleen had mentioned. “Surely you’ll have seen those in the plans for the mansion,” she said.
“You’re very thorough, to want to inspect them in person.”
“The same here as with The Two Georges,” he answered. “Until you see something for yourself, you never know what you might be missing.”
She studied him as he’d studied the painting. He wondered what she might find lurking in his background to point out. But all she said was, “You must be good at what you do.”
“If a RAM isn’t good at what he does, he should go do something else,” Bushell said. “And shouldn’t we go back to the reception downstairs?”
Kathleen nodded. “Yes. I ought to get back. But making sure The Two Georges is safe came first.”
“As it should.” Bushell patted the sleeve of his scarlet coat. “I’ll look official and soldierly and frighten away all the art thieves with my impressive military bearing.” He raised an eyebrow to show this was not to be taken seriously. As they reached the head of the stairs, he offered her his arm. She took it, and they descended side by side.
Governor Burnett came over as they reached the ground floor. “Everything as it should be, Colonel?” he asked anxiously.
“Yes, Your Excellency,” Bushell answered. To his regret, Kathleen Flannery, seeing him engaged, turned aside to a waiter who carried a tray of shrimp, oysters, and marinated slices of abalone on a bed of ice. She speared a shrimp with a toothpick, popped it into her mouth. Bushell set about reassuring the governor. He had trouble blaming Burnett for sounding nervous. The picketers in front of the mansion were chanting louder now, loud enough for their rhythmic calls to travel down the hall and penetrate the chatter that filled the Drake Room.
“I don’t want trouble of any sort tonight,” Burnett said, “especially not with press people and wireless reporters here from all over the NAU and from England, too.”
“That’s why the picketers are here, too,” Bushell replied. “They want the reporters to take their protest far and wide.”
The governor nodded impatiently. “I know that. It’s just - ” He stopped, perhaps not sure how frank he wanted to be.
“You want the story to be about how Upper California is proud to have The Two Georges here, not about coal miners complaining over the state of their lungs,” Bushell suggested.
“Exactly!” Burnett said, beaming. But his face fell. “For all you do, sometimes the story you get isn’t the story you want.”
“As long as they picket peaceably, they have the right to be here.” Bushell cocked an ear toward the front of the mansion. “No matter how raucous they are.”
The coal miners started a new chant: “Hey, Tricky Dick! Hey, Tricky Dick! Our air stinks worse than your burners!” They seemed to like it; it got louder with every repetition. Bushell glanced around to see how the used-car magnate was taking that. By the way he’d acted outside the mansion, Honest Dick didn’t fancy being the butt of ridicule. Now he slammed his whiskey-and-soda down on the bar and growled, “God damn those sons of bitches to hell, and I hope the devil stokes the fire with their own coal. They’re all full of shit - every fucking one of them, do you hear me?”
Everyone in the Drake Room must have heard him, for he made not the slightest effort to keep his voice down: on the contrary. Women looked away in embarrassment; a couple of men let out significant coughs. That kind of language might have gone unremarked over cigars and port when the sexes separated after supper, but it was more than startling in mixed company.
“Not a gentleman,” someone murmured, a verdict which garnered low-voiced agreement from around the room.
No matter how old the Steamer King was, he still had sharp ears. “Not a gentleman?” he said (shouted, actually; Bushell wondered how many whiskey-and-sodas he’d had before this latest one). “No, I’m not a gentleman, and I’m proud of it - what d’you think of that? My father grew oranges and lemons and ran a general store. He didn’t have two shillings to jingle in his pocket, and I didn’t have two ha’pennies. My wife wore a plain, cloth coat till the day she died, God bless her; no fancy furs and silks for her. I worked my way to where I am with these two hands” - he held them high - ”and anybody who wants to look down on me for not being some toffee-nosed toff, all I have to say is, fuck him, too!”
But for the soft strains of Vivaldi, an awful silence filled the Drake Room, which only made the miners’ chant easier to hear. No one seemed to know where to look, or to want to look at anyone else. Very quietly, for Bushell’s ears alone, Governor Burnett said, “Every word of that is true, you know about his being a self-made man, I mean.”
Bushell wondered what part of Honest Dick’s millions had found its way into the coffers of the governor’s party. At the moment, though, that was not the point. As softly as Burnett had spoken, Bushell replied, “A man who is not a gentleman is one thing; as with Honest Dick, hard work may have kept him from having the chance to become one. But a man who boasts of not being a gentleman .. . he, in my opinion, is something else again.”