would be the wrong thing to offer this unexpectedly Corinthian old buck of a professor, until he saw how deftly and frequently they were being palmed. She had also shed her old blue smock and appeared in a honey-yellow blouse that made her hair look blue-black and her skin as clear and cool as dew. Half an hour ago they had been talking to each other with the cautious forbearance of strangers in order not to quarrel, but whenever events demanded from her a gesture in support of her husband Jean would be there, ready and invincible.
“Is it going to turn out to be anything? I was afraid to touch it myself, but I could hardly keep my hands off it, all the same.”
“You had definite ideas about it?”
“Well, rather indefinite, but very suggestive. Such as its possible date, and the genre it belongs to.”
“Have you shown it to anyone else?”
“A dealer in the town here. He put forward some theory that it was originally a portrait by some local eighteenth-century painter called Cotsworth.”
“Preposterous!” croaked Lucas with a bark of laughter, pointing his imperial at the ceiling like a dart.
“Well, not so much preposterous as crafty, actually, I think. Because he’s offered as high as six hundred for it since.”
“Has he, now! And you turned him down. Good boy! So you must have had an idea you were on to something much more important than a dauber like Cotsworth. As indeed I’m pretty sure you are. Mind you, the actual market value may not be very great, I’m not sure how much commercial interest such a discovery might arouse just at this moment. Ultimately it’s likely to be considerable, when the full implications are realised.”
Leslie was startled to discover that his hands were trembling with pure excitement. He didn’t want to look at Jean, she would only think he was underlining the professor’s vindication of his judgment; she would expect him not to miss an opportunity like that, not out of any meanness of spirit but out of his fundamental insecurity. And yet he was longing to exchange glances with her, and see if she was quivering as he was. There ought to be a spark still ready to pass between them, when they were on the verge of promised discoveries fabulous enough to excite this Olympian old man.
“Its possible date,” said Lucas, harking back. “What did you conceive its possible date to be?”
If he wasn’t actually teasing them he was doing something very like it, offering them marvels and then making them play guessing games for the prize. Well, thought Leslie, if he had to be tested he’d better put a good face on it, and say what he had to say with authority.
“Before fourteen hundred.”
It sounded appallingly presumptuous when he’d said it, he would almost have liked to snatch it back, but now it was too late. He stuck out his chin and elaborated the audacity, refusing to hedge. “It seemed to me that the pose couldn’t be later, or the hands, that want of articulation, the long curved fingers without joints. And then the backward-braced shoulders and head, and even something about the way the blocks of colour are filled in to make the dress. If we get all those layers of repainting off successfully I shall expect to see a kind of folded drapery you don’t get as late as the fifteenth century.”
“And the genre! You said you had ideas about that, too.”
Leslie drew breath hard and risked a glance at Jean. Her eyes, wide and wondering, were on him; he didn’t know whether she was with him or only marvelling at his cheek and expecting to see him shot down the next moment.
“I think she’s local work,” he said in a small voice, “because I think she’s been kicking about here for centuries, never moving very far from where she was first put in position. And that wasn’t on any pub. The only thing out of tradition is the laugh, , , “
“Yes,” said Lucas, his eyes brightly thoughtful upon the young man’s face, “the laugh. Don’t let that worry you. The laugh is one of those things that happen to any tradition from time to time, the stroke of highly individual genius nobody had foreshadowed and nobody ventures to copy afterwards. And extraordinary experiences they can be, those inspired aberrations. Go on. Out of what traditions? You haven’t reached the point yet.”
Going softly for awe of his own imaginings, Leslie said: “That oval inset that looks like a brooch, that’s what first made me think of it. In its original form it was that odd convention, a sort of X-ray plate into the metaphysical world. Wasn’t it?”
“You tell me.”
“It was then. It was an image of the child she’s carrying. She’s a Madonna of the Annunciation or the Visitation, something before the birth, anyhow, , , “
“Of the Magnificat, as it happens. You seem to have done very well without an adviser at all, my boy.”
“I haven’t dared even to think seriously about it before,” owned Leslie with a shaky laugh. “You as good as hinted that I could go ahead with my wildest guesses and they wouldn’t be too fantastic, or I wouldn’t have ventured even now. Do you really mean that a piece of work like that has been lying about in attics and swinging in the wind in front of a pub ever since the fourteenth century?”
“More likely since about the latter half of the sixteenth. No doubt you know that the house from which the panel came was at one time a grange of Charnock Priory? And that the last prior retired there after the Dissolution?”
“Well, a friend of mine did dig out something of the kind from the archives, but until then I’m afraid I didn’t know a thing about it.”
“You didn’t? You cheer me. Neither did I, but it seems it was so. What struck me about this panel of yours was its likeness in proportion and kind to one of the fragments in Charnock parish church. I don’t know if you know the rector? A scholarly old fellow, quite knowledgeable about medieval art. Glass is his main line, but he knows the local illuminators and panel painters well, too, and he’s spent a good many years of his life hunting for bits of the works of art that were disseminated from Charnock at the Dissolution. What’s now the parish church is the truncated remains of the old priory church, of course, and such relics as he’s been able to trace he’s restored to their old places. This head of an angel with a scroll is all he has of what seems to have been a larger altar-piece, probably from the Lady Chapel.”
“And you think we’ve found the lady?” asked Leslie, not meaning to be flippant, simply too excited to bear the tension of being entirely serious. An elevated eyebrow signalled momentary disapproval, but the knowing eye beneath it saw through him, and there was no reproof.
