Giotto's Hand

But he drew a blank. He opened one box, discovered it contained pictures of Veronica’s wedding and put it back with a shudder as he glimpsed the hairstyles. Then he tried another. Then another, and another, slowly, it seemed, reaching back into the past and the era when the family had enough money to buy paintings. The fifth box contained an old ledger, inscribed on the inside as concerning the marriage of Godfrey Beaumont to Margaret Dunstan. You never know, he thought, as he skimmed his eye down the accounts of the costs, and listings of presents and favours received; a social historian’s dream as a way of picking out the networks of relations which bound English society together. The Dunstans were at least well-connected: earls and knights and baronets all clubbed in to wish the poor girl well. Even some courtiers of high rank and in favour with the King. Even the Earl of Arundel, who, with typical stinginess had skimped on the wedding present. While the others had presented furs and tapestries and even manor farms, he had sent along, so the ledger drily noted, “an anatomy of Sgr. Leoni.” Whoopee! Bet the bridegroom celebrated all night when he opened that.

Probably not. But then, Argyll thought with a sudden feeling of breathlessness in his lower abdomen, maybe he should have done.

He sat back in his chair, took a deep breath, and then had a realization which was about as painful as being hit by a bolt of lightning. Two realizations, in fact, and, as it turned out, he had them in the wrong order. By the time it occurred to him that Arundel had died in 1646, and that Margaret Dunstan must have married before that, the significance of the fact was lost to him.

The thoughts that swamped this information derived from distant memories about the history of collecting. The Earl of Arundel was the biggest collector in England; he had bought the best paintings on offer with an unerring eye. Most importantly he had dealings with a man called Pompeo Leoni.

And Pompeo Leoni had sold him what is now almost every known drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. Seven hundred of them.

Argyll strained to remember. They vanished in the Civil War but six hundred were found, quite by accident, at the bottom of an old chest in Windsor Castle nearly a hundred and fifty years later. They are still there; but the other hundred vanished without trace.

He thought some more, mixing the written evidence with his knowledge and the evidence of his own eyes. And he became more and more convinced. He was as sure as he had ever been of anything that there were now only ninety-nine missing. The other one was in the bedroom with the damp patch. Anatomical indeed. And quite a wedding present. God only knew how much it would be worth. Perhaps not even him: it was decades since anything like that had been on the market. Time for a walk, he thought. This would take some digesting.

15

Bottando’s return to his little office was not a pleasant one. Like most people, he had the tendency to assume that reality only existed within his eyesight and earshot; everybody else, he liked to think, froze into immobility whenever he was not around. If he left the office for the better part of the day, he fondly expected to find things pretty much the same when he got back again in the evening.

Such theories were severely undermined when he returned that particular evening to discover that, in fact, almost everybody had been in a frenzy of activity more or less since the moment that he’d left Rome that morning. Even worse, it appeared that Argan had used his absence to practise running the department.

“A nasty robbery in Naples,” the loathsome man said when Bottando came in and found him squatting at Bottando’s own desk. “While you were away.”

Really?” Bottando said drily, unceremoniously easing him out of his chair and recapturing it for his own use.

“Yes. In your absence, I took control. I hope you don’t mind.”

Bottando waved his hand in a be-my-guestish fashion.

“And a church ransacked outside Cremona.”

“Took control again, did you?”

Argan nodded. “I thought it best. What with you being so preoccupied.”

“Ah-ha.”

“How are the researches?” Argan went on with the faint purr of a cat toying with an injured bird.

“What researches are those?”

“Into Giotto.”

“Good God! Has someone stolen Assisi in my absence as well? I hope you took control there too.”

Argan smirked. “In a fashion. I talked this afternoon to one of the controllers of the budget.”

“Did you? I hope you found it passed the time.”

“A bit of a distressing conversation, in fact. He’s very concerned—as are a lot of people in the Budget office, you know—about the cost/effectiveness ratio of this department.”

“You mean they think we should catch more people. Couldn’t agree more.”

“Good. But I noticed a tone of hostility in his voice, you know.”

I wonder who put it there, Bottando thought.

“Anyway, you know me. Loyalty. So I came up with this brilliant idea for getting them off our backs.”

Our backs? Bottando thought. Here it comes.