Who Can Deny Love Read online

  He studied both works for a little while and knew that his instinct, which he had always trusted, told him there was something suspicious about both the paintings.

  He knew the Prince was waiting for him to speak and at last with a sigh he remarked,

  “Strange, very strange – and for the moment I cannot find an explanation. I’ll tell you what I will do, Sire. I will try to find out a little more about where Isaacs obtained these paintings.”

  “That’s a good idea!”

  “Have you bought much from him before?”

  “Only the Lochner,” the Prince replied. “He brought me two or three portraits which were not outstanding, so I did not even bother to show them to you. Then, as you know, we were both captivated by the Lochner.”

  His Royal Highness paused before he added,

  “I paid more for it than I should have, but I still consider it was worth it.”

  “So do I,” the Marquis agreed.

  There was a faint smile on his lips as he remembered that, while the Prince fixed the price, the Marquis paid the bill.

  “Now let me think,” the Prince said, putting his hand to his head. “Last year Isaacs brought me an El Greco which was too damaged to be interesting and a rather indifferent Van Dyck which I also refused.”

  “I remember that one. Anything else?”

  “No, I think that is all, until he called today with this Van Dyck.”

  “It’s certainly a very fine painting,” the Marquis said. “But if you take my advice, Sire, you will say nothing about its resemblance to the Lochner until I have found out all I can about it.”

  “I will leave everything to you, Virgo,” the Prince said. “You know I trust your judgement completely in anything that concerns art.”

  The Marquis accepted this compliment as his right and did not dispute the Prince’s good judgement.

  Instead he said,

  “You have certainly aroused my interest, Sire, and I assure you I shall start work immediately in trying to discover where Isaacs obtained both these paintings. Now I think we were somewhat remiss in allowing him to be so vague about the Lochner.”

  “You are right! Of course you are right!” the Prince agreed.

  He gave an almost boyish smile as he said,

  “I think we were both so delighted with it that we were eager to have it at any price without asking too many questions.”

  “It did cross my mind that it might be stolen,” the Marquis said.

  “And mine!” the Prince ejaculated.

  “Now, if you will excuse me, Sire – ” the Marquis began, only to be interrupted as the Prince cried,

  “You are not leaving, Virgo? If you are, come back and dine with me. I want to go on talking about paintings and a great many other subjects of mutual interest.”

  He was obviously disappointed. He often found it difficult to persuade the Marquis to be his guest, although he enjoyed his company perhaps more than any of his other friends.

  ‘There is nothing I would have liked more, Sire, had I known about it earlier, but you will understand that it would be extremely rude if I cancelled my dinner engagement at the very last moment.”

  The Prince smiled.

  “I can guess that you are dining with some ‘fair charmer’.

  His eyes twinkled as he wagged his finger at the Marquis.

  “Be careful, Virgo! You know as well as I do that your reputation is as bad as mine, if not worse, and we cannot afford to add to our list of crimes!”

  The Marquis smiled.

  “Whatever we do or do not do, Sire, there will be endless people to talk about us, to exaggerate our every action, and if that fails, to invent what they do not know.”

  The Marquis made an expressive gesture with his hands as he continued,

  “Personally, if I have to be verbally hanged, I prefer to have had the pleasure of committing the crime in question!”

  The Prince threw back his head and laughed.

  “That’s good, Virgo, and very reassuring. I feel the same, so we will walk to the gallows together. Let’s hope that we will find that exercise worthwhile.”

  “I think that is likely, Sire,” the Marquis replied, “and yet so often one is disillusioned.”

  “My dear Virgo,” the Prince said, “you must not become a cynic – ”

  “I am certainly not that where paintings and horses are concerned,” the Marquis answered.

  “Only with women,” the Prince parried, then he added,

  “Don’t give up hope. Perhaps one day we shall find The Virgin of the Lilies and she will be as lovely as Lochner portrayed her.”

  “I have a feeling that that would be impossible,” the Marquis remarked. “At the same time it does not cost anything to go on hoping.”

  Again the Prince laughed and the Marquis made his farewells and walked down the stairs.

  As he was driving up St. James’s Street on his way home, he found himself quite unexpectedly regretting that he had not accepted the Prince’s invitation to stay and dine at Carlton House.

  The conversation would be amusing, as it always was and the food and wine excellent, but that was not the reason.

  It was because quite suddenly the slanting green eyes of Lady Abbott did not, in retrospect, seem so attractive as they had earlier in the day.

  Intruding on his memory of her Ladyship’s face was the delicacy of the Madonna in The Virgin of the Lilies.

  Her eyes, dreamy and wistful, looked out on the world as if they saw an enchantment that was part of herself and seemed to emanate from the grace of her figure, holding a bunch of lilies in her arms and surrounded by them.

  Her hair was fair and drawn back beneath the conventional crown, not one of jewels but of flowers and there were at the corners of the painting small angels with pointed wings peeping down at her.

  It was a face that the Marquis could not erase from his mind and there was an expression in her eyes which he had not only never seen in any other painting but certainly in no living woman.

  ‘If only I had known her,’ he found himself thinking.

  Then, as he turned his horses from Piccadilly into Berkeley Square, he told himself that he was being ridiculous and becoming obsessed with a painting in a manner that he would have found laughable in any of his contemporaries.

  Lady Abbott would doubtless be amusing, as he expected and, if she at least put up a few defences and a little opposition to his advances, the evening would not be wasted.

  He hoped the inevitable conquest would not be too easy or too soon.

  *

  Cyrilla opened the shabby unpainted door of the house and carried her basket in carefully, putting it down on the floor before she closed the door behind her.

  Picking it up again, she walked along the narrow passage and into a small kitchen at the back.

  A woman with grey hair, who stood stirring a pot over the stove, looked round to say,

  “There’s no sign of the doctor.”

  “He promised he would come,” Cyrilla said in an anxious little voice, “but I am afraid he suspects we have no money to pay him.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Hannah replied. “You bought everything I asked you to?”

  “Yes, Hannah, and it took our last penny. We have nothing left unless Mr. Isaacs comes today with the money for the painting.”

  “He should have been here before now,” Hannah said abruptly. “I don’t trust that man and that’s a fact!”

  “He is the only dealer who has been kind since Papa has been so ill, but I was thinking, Hannah, that we shall either have to sell something soon or starve!”

  “What can we sell now that there’s not a picture left in the place?” Hannah asked sharply.

  Cyrilla said nothing. She only took off the cloak she wore, thinking, as she did so, that she felt curiously tired and knowing that it was due to lack of nourishing food.

  Everything they could afford went to buy the medicines the doctor had prescribed for
Frans Wyntack, while she and Hannah lived on vegetables and an occasional egg, having no money left to buy anything else for themselves.

  It was three days since she had taken the Van Dyck, the one that Frans Wyntack had been painting before he was taken ill, to Solomon Isaacs.

  Frightened at her own daring, Cyrilla had finished off the last necessary brushstrokes, then aged the whole painting with a process that Frans Wyntack had made curiously his own.

  When her mother had been ill and in need of medical attention, Frans had realised that his own paintings would not sell and he had said bitterly and violently to Cyrilla,

  “If they will not buy my paintings, I will teach them a lesson they will never forget!”

  “What do you mean by that, Papa?” Cyrilla had asked.

  “I mean,” Frans Wyntack had replied, “that when I was learning to be an artist, many years ago in Cologne, I found out how to paint fakes.”

  Cyrilla had stared at him wide-eyed, and he had gone on,

  ‘There was a man I knew who was a bit mad. He used to sit in the gallery painting all day. Because I saw him so often, I began to take an interest in what he was painting.”

  “He was copying the paintings for sale at the gallery?” Cyrilla asked.

  “Yes,” Frans Wyntack agreed, “but so skilfully, so cleverly, that sometimes he would laugh and hold up the painting and say, ‘now, if you saw that framed, would you know which was the original?’”

  “They were as good as that?”

  She had not really believed what Frans Wyntack had said to her, because she knew that he himself was very scornful of fakes and the dealers who ‘touched up’ paintings to make them more saleable.

  “What happened to him, Papa?” she had enquired.

  He had stopped talking and his thoughts were obviously far away in the past.

  “The artist? Oh, he occasionally sold one of his paintings to somebody who wanted a really good copy. But I expect he died of starvation, like so many of our kind.”

  “But I don’t understand – why are you telling me – about it now?” Cyrilla asked.

  “I am telling you because, before I left Cologne, he taught me the secret of painting a picture in exactly the same style as the original famous artist. It meant treating the canvas, using certain kinds of paint and, when the work was actually finished, giving it a polish which would make it impossible for any purchaser to know that it had not been painted centuries earlier.”

  Cyrilla looked at him in surprise as he went on,

  “That is what I intend to do now and, because of the way I have been treated by the art world, I shall put the money in my purse without having any guilty conscience about it!”

  “But – Papa – that will be – cheating! Besides – forgery is a – punishable offence!”

  “Only if you are caught,” Frans Wyntack replied.

  Although she had tried to argue with him, he had gone off to Sir George Beaumont swearing that he would paint a picture that would be so like the original that nobody would know the difference.

  Cyrilla was aware that Sir George Beaumont, who had once come to the house to see Frans Wyntack, was a noted patron of the arts.

  Because in England there were no public picture galleries as there were abroad, Sir George would allow artists to examine his own collection and even copy the famous paintings he possessed.

  Frans Wyntack used to make sketches and notes of a painting he liked and then paint a copy of it at home. He would then sell it to a dealer and go back to Sir George’s house to choose another.

  When the paintings were completed, Cyrilla was absolutely astounded by them.

  “They are brilliant, Papa! Absolutely brilliant! But I am sure – it is wrong.”

  She could not, however, help feeling excited, if rather guilty, when a week later Frans Wyntack gave her enough money, not only to pay the bills they owed, but also to buy everything they needed for her mother for at least a week or so.

  “I have to find another dealer and that is a difficulty,” Frans Wyntack had confided.

  “What is wrong with the one who has always handled your paintings?” Cyrilla suggested.

  “It is far too dangerous to keep going to him. He knows me. He has been here and he knows quite well that I do not own anything of value.”

  “Then why has he bought the paintings from you?”

  He laughed.

  “He thinks I have stolen them, therefore he is not prepared to ask questions.”

  “Oh – Papa – how could you let – anyone think you are a – thief?”

  “I am prepared to let him think I am a great many other things as long as he pays me enough,” Frans Wyntack replied, “Unfortunately, however, crime did not pay in this instance. I was beaten down to a lower figure than I had intended to accept.”

  He spoke angrily and Cyrilla remarked,

  “At least it has bought everything we need for Mama and has paid the doctor’s bills.”

  “He has been here today?” Frans Wyntack asked quickly.

  Cyrilla nodded.

  “What did he say?”

  “That she needs rest and good food. He gave me a list of more medicines for her. None of those we have tried so far is any good.”

  Frans Wyntack’s lips tightened and, when he left Cyrilla, she heard him hurrying up the stairs to her mother’s room.

  Cyrilla stood listening until she heard the bedroom door close, then she said to herself,

  ‘Mama must never know what Papa is doing. She would be shocked – horrified at the idea of his painting fakes deliberately to defraud those who buy them. It is wrong – very wrong – but I do not see what else he can do.’

  Whatever they bought, her mother grew worse.

  Every day she seemed thinner and weaker and the only time her eyes lit up and she seemed happy was when Frans Wyntack came into the room.

  Then the colour would come into her face and for a few moments she would look as young and lovely as her daughter.

  But nothing anyone could do could save her.

  She seemed to slip away from them and one morning, when Frans Wyntack awoke, he found her dead bedside him.

  To Cyrilla it was as if the whole world had collapsed. Her life, her happiness, everything that meant home to her had been centred round her mother.

  Without her she felt as if she drifted like a boat without a rudder, at the mercy of the waves and with no idea how to steer herself or in which direction to go.

  If she was almost prostrate with grief, so was Frans Wyntack.

  Day after day he sat in his studio, staring at a canvas on which he occasionally painted small pictures of her mother’s face and head, then rubbed them out as he felt they were not good enough to portray the woman he had loved.

  “You’ll have to get him painting again,” Hannah said firmly. “There’s no money and even if you’re not hungry, Miss Cyrilla, I certainly am!”

  Cyrilla realised that Hannah was talking common sense.

  Quietly but determinedly, she told Frans Wyntack that he had to paint, for there was nothing else they could sell.

  At first he rebelled against continuing with the fakes he had sold for her mother’s sake and went back to painting his own pictures.

  But these fetched only a few shillings each. Usually, in fact, the price barely paid for the canvases on which they were painted and they would stand dusty and unnoticed in some art dealer’s shop.

  Sadly Cyrilla sold the few items of any value that her mother had possessed – a painted shawl, a lace scarf, a fur muff and when they were gone, she went to the studio and said,

  “One of us will have to earn money. Perhaps I could get a job scrubbing floors. I am not talented enough to do anything else.”

  Frans Wyntack looked at her as if he was seeing her for the first time.

  She had been very like her mother when he had first seen her and he had thought she was the most beautiful creature he had ever imagined in his wildest dreams.


  Unhappiness and hunger had now sharpened Cyrilla’s face until her little chin seemed very pointed and her eyes very large.

  She was speaking to him early in the morning, before they had eaten breakfast, so she had not yet arranged her hair and it fell over her shoulders in a shining cloud, the very pale golden colour of dawn.

  Strangely enough, her hair had a touch of silver in it, as if a little of the moonlight had been left behind by mistake.

  He stared at her in a way that made Cyrilla wonder what he was thinking.

  Then he said,

  “I started a painting, a fake of a Lochner, when your mother was ill, but I couldn’t finish it! God knows if I can ever capture the spirit of it, but I will try.”

  “What are you talking about, Papa?”

  “You want money, so you have to earn it,” he said almost harshly. “Drape that silk about you and sit on the throne over there.”

  “You are making me your – model?” Cyrilla asked unnecessarily.

  Frans Wyntack did not even bother to reply. He was setting up his easel, finding the unfinished canvas he wanted and arranging her so that the light from the window was on her hair. Then he started to work.

  The ethereal Madonnas for which Stephan Lochner was famous had reminded him of his wife. So he had wanted to paint this one almost as a portrait of her, not only because it would be very saleable but because he was never content with anything less than perfection.

  He painted three other pictures while he was still working on the one Cyrilla was now the model for.

  The three, which he described as ‘pot boilers’, he copied as before from paintings in Sir George Beaumont’s collection and sold them to the same man who thought he had stolen them. This brought in enough money to keep Hannah from grumbling.

  He went on working on the copy of the Lochner painting for months.

  Finally, when he had finished, he made Cyrilla stand beside it and urged her,

  “Now look! Criticise! Use your instinct. Is there anything wrong?”

  “It is absolutely beautiful, Papa! I wish I really looked like that.”

  “You do look like that,” he said positively. “However, I am concerned not with your looks, but with my painting.”