I’d been less sure.
When she had gone and I was left alone again, I’d climbed the stairs back to my office warily. I’d hovered in the doorway for a moment.
My desk had been just as I’d left it, all the papers in their semi-ordered piles, and through the window I’d seen Sam at work just as he’d been all morning, in his jeans and hooded sweatshirt. There’d been sunlight coming in my window, and the branches of the nearly leafless tree that grew beside it sent a lacy web of shadows slanting from the window ledge across the wall behind.
But the painting had been turned again so that its back was facing me, the way it had been earlier.
In the old part of the house, a door had slammed, and then another, and another, and I’d done a thing I almost never did: I swore, beneath my breath. In French, because the first swear words I’d learned in childhood in our house had been in French, and somehow they just always came more naturally. And then, because it struck me that the ghost, from all accounts, also spoke French, I’d kept speaking in that language and addressed him as I’d crossed the room to turn the painting so that it faced out again. “I like it this way, thank you.”
It had been a fleeting moment of bravado, nothing more. I wasn’t even sure why it had seemed important to me to assert myself against a force I couldn’t even see, much less control, and I’d felt foolish and self-conscious as I’d sat behind my desk again, determined not to look up from my papers, and yet equally determined not to be a coward.
For a long and stretching moment there’d been silence in my office.
Then I’d heard a lightly muffled thud, not loud. A little like a footstep.
It had taken me at least a minute before I had summoned up the nerve to look, but I’d already known what I would see. The painting leaned where I had left it, up against the wall. Except its back had, once again, been turned towards me.
• • •
At least the painting wasn’t heavy. I was grateful for that now as I leapt back in time to let the yellow taxi speed on past while I watched safely from the sidewalk’s edge. It was a busy Sunday afternoon, and though I’d found space in a garage up on East Twenty-Fourth Street, I still had a few blocks to walk to my cousin’s apartment at Gramercy Park.
To be honest, I didn’t mind. Gramercy Park was one of my favourite neighbourhoods in New York City. Built in the nineteenth century, it had retained the grandeur and the elegance of that lost age, its brownstones and mansions and trees like an echo of Europe a stone’s throw from midtown Manhattan.
At its centre was the park itself, a stately green garden enclosed by a fence of high wrought-iron bars that allowed you to see what you couldn’t enjoy, since the park was kept private for residents who paid a steep yearly key-rental fee. Even those who gained entry were restricted by the tidy iron posts strung with determined chains that kept people from straying off the neatly gravelled paths into the garden borders.
The lowly little sparrows, in a show of class rebellion, took no notice, hopping where they had a mind to, chirping noisily, in company with pigeons who strolled freely in defiance of the militant grey squirrels on patrol, tails up and bristling, who tried to chase them off. One squirrel doing lookout duty from the high branch of a tree that overhung the sidewalk watched me with suspicion, but when I got close it scrabbled down the roughly channelled bark and took off like a shot.
It was quieter here. I could hear the occasional honk of a car horn from farther up Lexington or farther still on Park Avenue South, and a siren passed by in the distance, but in Gramercy Park life moved slowly and gracefully. People walked dogs and pushed strollers. They sauntered.
The towering maidenhair trees in a line down the sidewalk were starting to let go of their golden, fan-like leaves, as were the willow oaks with branches like a lacy web of copper, and every time the breeze picked up it sent a swirling fall of jewel-like colour to the ground.
My cousin’s building held court like a grand old lady at the east end of the square, its soaring white facade a true Baroque Revival masterpiece, ornamented with arches and heraldic shields and scrolls, guarded by gargoyles, the entryway protected by two pedestals that held medieval-looking suits of shining armour.
The doorman didn’t recognize me even though I’d been here several times before. I wasn’t that surprised. We shared a surname, but my cousin Wendy and I moved in different spheres entirely.
Our grandfathers were brothers, born in Amsterdam just after World War I. The next world war had sent them separate ways. My own grandfather, Werner, had escaped the Nazi occupation of his homeland and come over to America. His older brother Anton, Wendy’s grandfather, had stayed behind and worked for the resistance as an art thief, stealing back paintings the Nazis had looted. He’d been good at it. When the war ended he’d had a small room filled with pieces he’d worked to return to their owners, or—as was more often the case, sadly—their rightful heirs. His son Martin, Wendy’s dad, had carried on this work, and in the process had discovered that he had an eye and passion for acquiring a collection of his own.
My father hadn’t talked about his family so I hadn’t known these stories as a child, but I had known my father’s cousin Martin. He had visited us in Toronto a few times, a handsome blond man with a much younger, very smart wife. And though Wendy, their only child, was six years older than me, on those visits we’d always been sent off together to play. She had been a good sport. We had played with my Barbie dolls, or we’d played Clue. And she’d once curled my hair with a curling iron, leaving an impressive accidental burn across my forehead that we’d hidden from the grown-ups. But the things that she had talked about were far outside my own realm of experience. Hers had been a world of riding lessons, tennis, summers in the Hamptons, trips to Paris and Vienna—wealth and privilege at a level I could barely comprehend.
“Can you imagine,” I’d said to my father once, “living like that?” Then, too late, I’d remembered those photos of Bridlemere, and I had realized he probably could. That his life had most likely been just like that before he’d followed his conscience to Canada. But the whole realm of the rich still seemed foreign to me.
Wendy’s apartment reminded me of the divide in our lives. It was so big it had its own foyer, with mirrors, a chandelier, plaster crown mouldings, and old original herringbone parquet wood floors. The table at the centre of the foyer held a vase with fresh-cut flowers, and in every direction were doors standing open to various hallways and rooms, so that as I came in I could see through the high-ceilinged living room, past the ornate plaster fireplace, to the bow windows that looked out on Gramercy Park.
Unsurprisingly, I had to sidestep suitcases.
“Are you going or coming?” I asked as we hugged. Wendy’s hugs were like her—warm and genuine.
“Going,” she told me. “To London, but not until later tonight, so the afternoon’s all ours.” She looked as pleased by that as she had looked when we had played as children, though in fairness Wendy never aged, not really. Today, in fitted jeans and a white broadcloth shirt, her long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, she radiated youthfulness. I might have felt resentful but her unpretentious nature made her too completely likeable.
“I love this.” She was looking at the narrow crate I’d set down on the floor. “I love the handles. Where did you buy it?”
“Sam made it.”
“New man in your life?”
“No. At least, not in that way. He’s the contractor restoring our museum building, meaning both of us work for the board of trustees, and that makes us co-workers, so no, our relationship’s purely professional. I just broke up with one guy, I don’t need to get mixed up with someone else. Not for a while.”
“Wow.”
“What?”
“Well, I have a friend in the FBI,” she said, “and he says whenever a suspect gives really long answers to yes-or-no questions, you know you’re not getting the absolute truth.” She suppressed a smile, then asked, “Who did you b
reak up with?”
“Tyler.”
“Was he the one with you at Niels’s funeral? You made the right choice, then. I thought he was kind of a jerk.”
“Why was that?”
“Because,” she said, “instead of looking after you he spent the whole time trying to convince me he could give me the best rate on my insurance for the gallery. I told him maybe now is not the time, you know, over my cousin’s casket, but he didn’t quit.”
He wouldn’t have. “You should have told me.”
“Why? I’m a big girl. And you had other things on your mind, that day.” Her eyes grew serious. “How are you doing now? How are your parents? How’s Rachel?”
She’d brewed coffee. We sat in the kitchen and talked, catching up. And eventually we moved into the small room across from the kitchen, and opened the crate Sam had built for the painting.
This room was where Wendy worked. I could see why. A corner room, its windows faced in two directions, with a tall bow window like the ones that graced the living room, that also overlooked the beauty of the park. The hardwood floors had been left bare, and the furniture was minimal, the dominant piece being a long, solid block of a worktable right at the room’s centre. And while the walls in all the other rooms were filled with artworks, here there was a single painting hung with care—a path through a forest with shadows and soft morning sunlight on fallen trees, everything quiet and green.
“It’s by Shishkin,” Wendy told me, when she noticed I was looking at it. “Ivan Shishkin. First auction my dad ever took me to, when I was eight years old, he let me bid on that.”
She’d inherited her father’s eye and instinct for collecting, with a better head for business that had made her Soho gallery a notable success. A lot of people looked at Wendy, at her privilege and her pretty face, and underestimated just how smart and competent she was. But in addition to her two degrees, she’d spent a lifetime learning from the experts in the field. She knew her stuff.
On the table she’d spread out a cushioning layer of felt covered by a thin, smooth sheet of polyester film to keep the painting and its frame from being damaged while she was inspecting it. Donning skintight plastic gloves that wouldn’t snag on any surfaces, she passed an extra pair to me so I could help her lift the painting free of its padded case and lay it flat and faceup on the table.
I told her, “It’s signed in the bottom right corner. ‘J. Pigott,’ it looks like.” I’d searched the name but only found a British politician born two centuries too early to be useful.
Wendy didn’t recognize the artist, either. “Let’s see what Sebastian says.” Taking her phone out, she snapped a quick picture and messaged it off somewhere. “He likes a challenge.”
I took her again through the old painting’s history—its provenance. How it had been in the Wilde House until being sold off in Arthur Wilde’s auction, and how it had then been passed down through the Fishers until reaching Isaac. “But before that,” I said, “before the auction, it’s all family history. No documentation. It’s not listed in the inventory made by Captain Wilde’s wife.”
“Well, no, it wouldn’t be,” said Wendy, looking closely at the painted sky. “Whoever painted this most likely wasn’t even born when Captain Wilde was alive.”
“What?”
“Of course, we’d need to put it under a microscope to be certain,” she told me, “but I’m fairly sure this, right here, is cerulean blue, a Victorian pigment. It didn’t exist until the 1860s. And if you look at the canvas . . . here, this will be easier.” Carefully turning the painting, she set it facedown so the back was exposed.
I had studied the back of that painting myself, many times, since the ghost in my office had gone to such trouble to turn it around. I’d been curious, and I had harboured a childish hope there might be something really important to see there—a mark or a label or some other clue that the ghost had been trying to get me to notice. But there had been nothing.
The back of the painting was plain. No one had ever covered it with paper or anything else, so there was only the simple rectangular back of the frame, and within that, the inset wooden stretcher over which the canvas had been fastened and secured. The back of the plain canvas, openly visible, had the patina of age.
But my cousin said, “See how the lines of the canvas are perfectly straight? That’s machine-made. A handwoven canvas would have more uneven lines.”
I frowned, trying to remember when power looms had been invented.
Wendy wasn’t sure of the exact date. “But with a machine-woven canvas, you’re looking at a painting that’s no earlier than the second quarter of the nineteenth century. So once again, Victorian. Although,” she said, “it looks as if it’s been relined, as if they’ve glued another piece of canvas to the back of it, to give it more support. That’s sometimes done with paintings when they’re really old. But this . . .”—she tapped the canvas lightly with her fingers, like a drum—“this looks old, too. And it’s a little loose.”
She was taking out the tools she’d need to separate the wooden stretcher with its canvas from the outer frame so she could check the edges of the painting, when her phone received a message with a loud, triumphant ping.
“That was fast.” Raising her eyebrows, she checked it. “Sebastian says it isn’t ‘Pigott,’ it’s ‘Pigou.’ John Pigou. ‘Born in London in 1809, arrived in New York in June 1830,’ it says, ‘known for his gouache drawings of lively country scenes which were often turned into engravings.’ It says his oil paintings are more rare, he didn’t do them very often, and they were—oh, here you go: ‘They were usually rendered as gifts for his circle of friends, which included’—and it lists a few more artists here, and some of them I’ve heard of—‘and the celebrated poet Lawrence Wilde.’ ” She glanced up from her reading with a look of satisfaction. “So I’d say that’s pretty helpful, then, for provenance.”
An understatement if I’d ever heard one, and she knew it, too. I said, “You’ll have to thank your friend Sebastian for me.”
Smiling she said, “That would only encourage him.” But she did make a reply to his message, and something about her smile moved me to ask:
“Have I met him?”
“Sebastian? Not through me, you haven’t, and you can count yourself lucky. He’s one of those good-looking men who knows just how good-looking he is, and he knows that he just has to smile at most women and they lose their minds, and you just want to smack him. He has this whole line of ex-girlfriends who all think he’s God’s gift, because, I mean, who would find fault with Sebastian St. Croix, right?”
I looked at her. “Wow. That’s a really long answer,” I said, “to a yes-or-no question.”
She grinned. “Brat,” she called me, and bent to her work. “Now, let’s see what’s going on here with this canvas.” Lifting the stretcher free of the bigger gilt outer frame, she set it gently on its own on a clean section of the table. “Well, that’s really weird. There are two . . . no, three . . . there are three layers of canvas here. What’s going on with you?” she asked the painting, then turning to me said, “I’m going to take it right off of the stretcher, okay?”
It took time.
She’d been right. There were three separate layers of canvas—the painting itself on the front, and a plain liner right at the back, but the layer we found in between them was what left me speechless for more than a minute.
At last I recovered enough to ask Wendy, “Have you ever . . . ?”
“No,” she said. “Never.”
There hadn’t been any adhesive between the three layers, and now we knew why. Because fastened to that middle layer was a single sheet of paper, with a drawing on it. And that drawing, done in what looked to be graphite—“black lead pencil,” as they used to call it—was an almost perfect copy of the painting.
Almost.
In the painting, there were three men working on the Bellewether—an older, white-haired man, a younger man, and one aged somewher
e in between them, all dressed in the fashion typical of this part of America in the mid-eighteenth century.
But in this drawing, that third man was wearing a soft cap and wooden shoes and a distinctive waistcoat that, in combination, made me think that he might just be an Acadian.
And also in the drawing there were two men not included in the painting.
One, from his skin tone and features, appeared to be black. Tall and finely dressed, he also seemed to be directing what the other men were doing.
The second man wore a sharply cocked black hat pulled low over his eyes, and a coat that stood out from the clothing of the others by its lack of shading, which suggested it was white. The coat’s sides were split at knee level, and the corners of its hem turned back and hooked up to allow for freer movement of his legs. And on his legs, incredibly, he wore mitasses—distinctive full-length leggings that, from how they fitted, looked to be of the same deerskin as the moccasins he wore upon his feet. I knew this uniform. I’d researched it enough when I was at the Hall-McPhail Museum. Catalogued the pieces of it that we’d had in our collection.
He was not a commonplace French soldier, but a soldier from the Troupes de la Marine.
A tiny chill that went beyond discovery climbed my spine. The ghost had been trying to tell me this, when he’d kept turning my painting around. He’d been trying to get me to look at the back. He had known this was there.
He had known.
Wendy’s focus stayed fixed on the art itself. She said, “This might have been a sketch John Pigou made before starting his painting, but I don’t know. This doesn’t look like the same artist’s hand, to me.” She didn’t try to pry the drawing loose from where it had been mounted, but she did turn its supporting sheet of canvas over, gently.
There was writing on the back.
And as I read the words, the tiny chill I’d felt became a shiver.
The sloop Bellewether, the pencilled note read plainly, being overhauled at Snug Cove in the last years of the French war. Drawn from life, it said, by Captain Wilde’s sister.