Page 76 of Road Trip
“You can’t be serious. Maeve, I was attracted to you the minuteyou walked into my whiskey tasting. I broke the company rules… hell, I broke my own rules, when I asked you out. And no, I’m not just saying that because I want to get into your knickers, although, yeah, eventually I do want that…”
“Oh my God.” Maeve covered her face with her hands again. “I can’t believe you just said that out loud.”
“How about this,” he said, finishing his drink. “We’ll take it slow. And when you are ready for something more… physical, you let me know. Will you?”
CHAPTER 33
It rained through the night, and Maeve, more than a little tipsy, slept so soundly she never heard a sound until she woke the next morning to the soft sound of fingertips tapping on a keyboard.
She yawned, stretched, and blinked.
Therese was sitting cross-legged on her bed, with Maeve’s laptop open. Scattered around her were sheets of the inn’s letterhead, covered in her nearly illegible scribbles.
“Morning,” Maeve croaked. “What are you up to over there?”
“Research!” Therese said. “And hey, Maevey, you’re not going to believe what I figured out! I’ve been thinking about how we keep wondering how there could be two authentic portraits of Lady Geraldine, right? I couldn’t sleep last night—probably because I was trying to decide if I should call Interpol about my missing sister—but anyway, while you were out having your so-called nightcap, I decided to find out more about the artist. Valerian DeJongh.”
Maeve didn’t comment on the casual dig. “Good idea. What did you find out? And how did you manage to fire up my laptop without a password?”
“That part was easy. You use the same password for everything. Maxxy05. You really should be more careful about that, you know. What if I was a criminal who managed to hack into your bank account?”
Maxine was the name Maeve had given the kitten she’d foundhiding behind their garbage can in the lane when she was a little girl. She’d somehow convinced their mother, who disliked cats, to allow her to keep this one, possibly because their dad had died the same year, and Mary Helen realized her daughters were grieving. Maxxy had led a long, pampered life until she’d died in her sleep sixteen years later.
“I’ll get right on the password thing,” Maeve said.
“Okay, so I found out there’s a museum in Amsterdam…”
Therese tapped some keys and pulled the museum’s website onto the computer screen.
“The Rijksmuseum; I know about it. They’ve got a huge collection of Old Masters,” Maeve said.
“Yeah, anyway, they have four DeJongh paintings in their collection. Two are of the same man, a rich banker named Nicholas Oosteriech.”
Therese scrolled down through an index of the museum’s collection and clicked on the listing of works by Valerian DeJongh.
“I took a look at the paintings, and at first glance, they look the same. But then I read the captions, which thankfully were in English, and I saw that one portrait was painted two years before the second. The description of the first painting calls it a preliminary study.”
“Like an author’s first draft,” Maeve said.
Therese clicked a key and now they were looking at an impressive portrait of an important-looking gentleman, probably in his early fifties. The colors were dark and moody, and the subject was seated at a desk of some kind, looking every inch the prosperous businessman.
“Look at the first portrait, the one they call a study. In this first one, the banker looks a little jowly. And he’s got a definite potbelly. And his hair, which is silvery around his face, is parted on the left. See how he has his hand resting on a book?”
Therese clicked over to the next painting.
“Now here,” Therese said, “this is the finished portrait. Look at the hand on the book. Now he’s wearing a thick gold signet ring. And if you notice, there’s a pocket watch strung across the vest ofhis suit that wasn’t there in the study. Also, his face and body are now miraculously slimmed down, and his hair is parted on the right and the gray’s gone away.”
“Like the nineteenth-century version of Photoshopping,” Maeve said. “Let me guess. You’re saying you think one of the portraits of Lady Geraldine was the finished painting, and the other was just a preliminary study?”
“Bingo,” Therese said triumphantly. “But there’s more. From my research I knew that DeJongh’s most famous painting was a portrait he did in the late 1800s of Ernest, Lord Philpott, who was a member of Parliament. So I did some digging. That painting is in the National Gallery in London.”
Therese’s face was alight with barely suppressed excitement. She opened another tab, and now they were looking at the National Gallery’s website, and then, after some more typing in the museum’s search engine, they were looking at a striking portrait of a handsome youth in his late teens, perhaps. Unlike the formal, seated portraits of the banker, DeJongh had painted a full-length version of the young nobleman. Philpott was posed standing in a verdant field, dressed in shooting gear, with a shotgun braced against one shoulder. A sporting dog, maybe a setter or a spaniel, sat on its haunches, looking up at his master, who was holding a large, dead pheasant in his gloved hand.
“He looks like something out of the first season ofDownton Abbey,” Maeve commented.
“I looked it up. The painting was commissioned by Lord Philpott’s father, and it was exhibited, to much praise, at the Paris Salon of 1889,” Therese said. “This was probably a few years after he painted Lady Geraldine. I’m no art expert, but this painting seems more complex, and more compelling than his earlier work.”
“Did you find any studies of this painting?” Maeve asked.
