“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 break 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?”