A Rather Lovely Inheritance (31 page)

“Yes,” I said finally.

“Yes, what?” he said, and kissed me again.

“Yes, I feel the same way, you big bully,” I said. I kissed him back as ferociously as he kissed me, and then you couldn’t tell anymore who was kissing who, and we kept that up until we simply had to come up for air.The sun was streaming across the whole earth, warming every creature on it now, pushing hard against the sky.

“Well, then, that’s settled,” he said, and he grinned. “Now perhaps we ought to be seeing about your legacy? Before Rollo figures out that we didn’t go back to the villa.”

“
Our
legacy. She wants us to share it, Jeremy,” I reminded him.

He stared at me and shook his head.“You will never learn to look out for yourself,” he said reproachfully. “Technically it’s all yours. And I mean to see that Rollo doesn’t ever take it away from you again. Then, at our leisure, I’m going to find out, once and for all, how I got all mixed up with this Laidley clan.” He sounded energized, like his old confident self, and I knew why. Shocking as the whole thing was, Aunt Penelope had practically anointed him as a bona fide, and very much beloved, member of this family.

He gazed up at the view as if seeing it for the first time. And I thought that, perhaps, he was seeing the city of Genoa the way a warrior prince might, after he’d been away fighting battles and slaying dragons, glad to come home triumphant.

“Fifty-fifty,” I said recklessly. This is why I don’t go around kissing just anybody. I can never do it without throwing myself totally into it.

“Come on, then, Penny Nichols,” he said. “Let’s at least find out just what it is that Aunt Penelope wanted us to have.”

G
ENOA WAS A FAIRY-TALE CITY, GUARDED BY MOUNTAINS AT ITS back, with its face gazing out at the salty, sensuous sea. Ships slid regally to and from its harbors, and at each labyrinthine turn of its ancient streets you could find yourself in the time period and locale of your choice—a Roman house from the first of the “A.D.” centuries, medieval walled forts from the Dark Ages, Renaissance churches and palaces, vestigial buildings bombed in World War II. Go round a corner to a nearby museum and you’d stumble across streets made of marble, galleries glinting with gold, halls of mirrors. You’d find artifacts said to be a dinner bowl from the Last Supper, letters written by Christopher Columbus, Paganini’s violin rumored to be the gift of the devil, a blue plate that supposedly served Saint John the Baptist’s head to the queen; and various stunning mosaics, frescoes, sculptures, and tapestries in buildings surrounded by fragrant gardens of roses, lemons, oranges and olives.

Under normal circumstances, a person like me could have gone delirious with delight, dashing around trying to see every historical tidbit. But Jeremy and I were on a mission, to locate an expert I could trust who might identify, in this city of countless treasures and priceless art, one little painting of the Madonna and Child. His office was in the medieval part of Genoa, not far from the museum of fine art.

“Dr. Mateo will see you now,” the secretary said, and she showed us into his office anteroom in an old stone building. It was a narrow, modest workroom with no windows, dominated by a high, big wooden table with one lone high stool; three windowed bookshelves filled with musty old tomes; and, in a corner alcove, a very large light table.

Dr. Mateo was seated in a tiny office just beyond the anteroom. His door was open and he was on the telephone when we first arrived, but now he rose from behind a desk heaped with stacks of portfolios and file folders. He was a neat little man with a headful of black and silver hair and a matching trim little beard, and black-rimmed eyeglasses, and one of those tweed suits that professors wear which smell vaguely of pipe smoke.

I had telephoned ahead, so he was expecting us. He gave me the smile of pleasure with which older academics sometimes greet young women; he nodded very politely at Jeremy. Dr. Mateo waited patiently through our murmured preliminaries, but as soon as I opened my portfolio and unwrapped the painting, removing the cardboard and tissue, he leaned forward eagerly, bringing his nearsighted eyes close to it. Even before he reached for his magnifying glass, he had begun murmuring to himself, “Hmm, mhmmm, hmmm, ah-hem . . .”

He turned to a book written in Italian and perused it. Jeremy had raised his eyebrows at the humming sounds, looking at me inquiringly, as if to say, “Is this guy for real?”

But I knew what the humming meant. Dr. Mateo was excited, intrigued, trying to keep his emotions at bay while using two methods—scientific inspection of the canvas, and historical documentation. These may seem like compatible techniques, but many authenticators actually choose either one or the other, as if choosing soccer teams; some rely on intricate machinery, DNA and lab samples if they lean toward the scientific-inspection approach; or, if they favor historic research, they rely more on cumulative documentation from historical archives.

And then there are men like Mateo, who see their job as picking up the pieces of a shattered whole, as if the truth to each mystery were a rare, delicate and precious vase whose shards needed to be painstakingly and intelligently pieced together, not further dissected. He once wrote a paper describing the world that any artist lived in as a complete cosmos, requiring a unifying eye . . . and an understanding heart.

So you can’t rush a guy like Mateo. Most of all, you can’t act like a lawyer interrogating a witness. But Jeremy didn’t know this, so when he asked, “Have you ever heard of Fabrizi?” he wasn’t prepared for Mateo to smile at him with supreme but impenetrable tolerance.

“Certo,”
Mateo murmured, without feeling any compunction to volunteer further information. Jeremy turned to me pleadingly, with barely concealed exasperation. I tried to signal him to shut up, but Mateo glanced up, caught our signals, and looked amused.

“You are perhaps a professor in America?” Mateo asked me politely as he continued to inspect the painting with the magnifying glass. His tone indicated that one must be patient with people from a younger civilization whose experts were eager and smart, but limited in experience.

“No,” I said.“I am an art history researcher. I work with professors, and also for the movies.” It was the first time I’d ever mentioned my modest income ahead of my more supportive one. He nodded gravely, very carefully lifting the painting up to the light.

Dr. Mateo is known for his fine instincts and his precise theories. So when, after more “h’mm”-ing, he asked if he might X-ray the painting, I was prepared to give my assent. When he left the room Jeremy could barely contain himself.

“Will that hurt the painting?” he demanded. I shook my head. “For Christ’s sake, he’s maddening,” Jeremy hissed.“He won’t even let on if he thinks the thing is valuable or not.”

“He doesn’t want to rush to judgment,” I said. “It would alter the way he conducted his investigation if he did. He knows who Fabrizi is, but he doesn’t want to draw preliminary conclusions until he’s sure it isn’t something other than Fabrizi.”

“You mean it could be another artist’s?” Jeremy demanded.

“Or a copy, or an outright fake,” I said.“I don’t know what he’s on to, but trust me, he’s like a bloodhound on some scent. He may not look excited, but he is.”

We didn’t have to wait long. Dr. Mateo returned with the painting and set it back on the table with the same polite reverence he would give any painting.Then he disappeared again.

“Now where’s he going?” Jeremy groused. “To eat his lunch?”

It did seem like forever before Dr. Mateo returned with an X-ray, which he put on the light table, much as a doctor would in order to deliver a prognosis. He glanced at Jeremy and me, saw the look of suspense on our faces, and smiled.

“Doctor?” I said softly. “Do you have an idea what this might be?”

For the first time Mateo looked excited, like a boy who wants to show you something he found. “See for yourself,” he said, and motioned for us to approach the X-ray. “These figures in the background. They are a clear indication of underdrawing.You see here?”

Without ever touching the X-ray he used his little finger to trace the ghostly figures he saw in the background so that we could make them out. What at first appeared to be background scribbles, or even long curls of human hair caught on film, or random scratches on a negative . . .soon emerged as deliberately drawn figures, smeared and smudged at some points as if erased and redrawn on the canvas, before the artist changed his mind and decided to paint the study from a very different angle of the Madonna and Child.

“This underdrawing, I believe, is a preliminary, abandoned sketch of the Madonna and her infant. See the different way the Madonna’s head is turned? The way she is seated? The arms, too, and the position of the Child? Even the background is altered, with the window much wider. Can you see this?”

I had already begun to make out the heads and arms of the ghostly figures beneath.As I gazed harder they emerged with more clarity, and all during Mateo’s narration, I actually felt a chill through my body that made me shudder with delight, as if the painter himself were alive and had just sketched the images for us right here and now, and we were watching him do it.

“I see it.Yes.Yes.What does it mean?” Jeremy asked respectfully.

Dr. Mateo’s voice was like a rich deep humming, calm and steady. “If it were a copy, I do not think that there would be an underdrawing of a different angle of the same study. And see also, that even in the underdrawing there are changes, alterations? A man who paints a copy simply copies what he sees. He does not create in this way, searching for his subject.”

“Then—this is an original?” Jeremy asked in a deadly quiet tone.

Dr. Mateo looked up slowly, as if awakening from a dream of his own thoughts. “Oh, dear boy,” he said. “Yes, this is clearly an original work of art.That much I do not think will find argument.The question is, whose original?”

“I don’t know about Fabrizi,” I admitted. “Was he important enough to have imitators or students? I simply assumed—you know, a Renaissance artist, with the work dating from the late 1400s, perhaps early 1500s. I’ve been studying this period rather closely because of research I’m doing on the Borgias.”

“Ah, yes, the Spanish pope,” Mateo said. “Your dates are correct. Then of course you would know with whom this artist was likely to study, in those days.” His eyes twinkled as he gave me a hint. “Fabrizi found some favor with Ludovico Sforza in Milan . . .”

“Who was the uncle of Lucrezia Borgia’s first husband,” I told Jeremy, unspooling some of Lucrezia’s Spunky Woman chronology that my head was stuffed with. “But they say her family wanted to bump off her husband. Politics. She probably warned him, though, because he escaped. Her second husband wasn’t so lucky. Stabbed in a dark alley, survived, but was finally murdered in his own bedroom while he was still recuperating!”

I turned to Mateo and said, “Was Fabrizi from Milan?”

Mateo looked pleased and amused. “Born and died in Milan, but there was a lot of travelling in between. After the plague, for instance, Fabrizi went to Florence for a time, and did some portraits for the king of France. Fabrizi also studied in Modena, Ferrara . . .”

“Oh,” I said, gazing at the beautiful brushstrokes of the painting. “Well, judging by the tones of this canvas, and the places where you say the artist worked, Fabrizi probably was a student of . . .”

Suddenly it hit me. Not in an intellectual way, strangely enough, but with a physical sensation of light-headedness, as a sensual illumination like light breaking across the sky.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“What? What?” Jeremy demanded. Dr. Mateo smiled at me, knowing what I was thinking and, above all, what I was feeling. He was pleased, as only a teacher can be, that he had guided me to think of it myself.

“Was—did Fabrizi study with Leonardo?” I whispered.

“Yes, I believe so,” he said.

“Oh, God,” I repeated.There was a long pause. Nobody moved.

“You don’t mean . . . da Vinci, do you?” Jeremy asked tentatively, struggling with his own feelings of, for once, being out of his depth and therefore, like a true Englishman, not wanting to make a fool of himself by voicing something that he might have gotten completely wrong.

But in trying to play it cool, he sounded even funnier, to me, than he dreaded. I guess it was the unusually tentative voice, so unlike him—it just made me giggle. And once I started giggling I couldn’t seem to stop. And this of course made Dr. Mateo smile rather broadly. Then he allowed himself a deep, throaty chuckle.

“What? What is it? Am I wrong?” Jeremy asked a trifle defensively.

But Dr. Mateo was not a man who enjoyed another’s discomfort. Quickly and reassuringly he said,“No, no, my boy.You are quite right. Come closer and I’ll show you. I thought so the moment I saw it, of course, because I have made an especial study of Fabrizi, who is a particular favorite of mine.You see, there was a triptych attributed to Fabrizi, known as the ‘Three Virgins.’ The first painting was the engagement of Mary to Joseph; the second was Mary with her mother, Saint Anne, and then there was the third—this one—which has been missing for years. I am very familiar with the first two panels of the series, for they are owned by private collectors who kept the paintings in their families; and I spent twenty years waiting for the owners to trust me enough to allow me to examine each Fabrizi closely.

“And then of course there were the rumors that all of the Three Virgins were only copies,” he continued, “and that the originals had long been stolen or destroyed. But I do not believe that there were ever any copies made of these paintings. Then, there were other rumors that the third Virgin never existed, except in studio sketches that were never painted because Fabrizi didn’t live long enough to paint the final study. But I’d heard that this last painting did, in fact, exist, and the owner simply did not wish to bring it to light. Now here I find the proof I need.”