He remembered the first one clearly.
The small brass plate on the bottom of the frame said it was by Eric Bailey R.A., though Mandeville wasn’t sure what the initials meant. Possibly “Royal Artist,” as the man had been English.
It was a large portrait of a modest young woman conversing with a canary in a cage. She wore a dress like a puritan’s, with a white collar and cuffs, and her hair was smoothed, nunlike, into a low chignon. Though it was impossible to ignore the nubile curves of her body. On her face was an expression that struck Ryan as rapturous imbecility.
The title of the picture was The Pretty Maid .
“She looks double-stupe,” Dean whispered to his father. “Like she was going to eat that jaybird.”
Mandeville didn’t hear him, striding on ahead, hands locked behind his back, beaming with a proudly proprietary air.
Mildred and Doc boggled in amazement at some of the paintings, which they said were very famous, though both of them, making sure that Mandeville didn’t hear them, suggested that they thought that quite a lot of them were either fakes or prints of the original pictures.
Ryan couldn’t find many to admire, though he enjoyed a large canvas of a fallen tree with dark, jumbled branches, against a field of bright rapeseed. The signature looked like “Alan Burgess,” but he couldn’t be certain.
One of the few pictures from the over-the-top collection that everyone liked was an impressively plain painting of a rectangular adobe building, with a shadowed door, against a reddish-pink Southwestern landscape.
Mandeville said he didn’t know who it was by, but had traded a pair of matched Navy Colts for it a few years earlier.
Doc and Mildred were in agreement that it had been painted by a woman artist called Georgia O’Keefe.
Names flowed by Ryan as the pictures blended into a mosaic of multicolored wallpaper.
Hopper, Alma Tadema, Picasso, Winslow, Warhol and Remingtonone of the few names that prompted any interest at all from J.B.
“One of your relatives, Mildred?” Michael asked, peering at the name beneath a portrait of a sturdy naked woman with a plait of reddish hair.
“Andrew Wyeth? No. No relation.”
The smoke settled on Ryan’s chest, making the atmosphere more oppressive.
The talk had been fairly desultory at the beginning, but by the time they’d all joined the baron at the distant end of the gallery a gloomy silence had descended over them all.
Mandeville was sitting on a brocaded chaise longue, waiting eagerly for them.
“Well?”
“Amazing,” Ryan commented after a moment’s consideration. “Double amazing.”
“Yeah,” the Armorer echoed. “Never seen so many pictures all in the same place.”
“Beautiful.” Krysty looked back at the diminishing perspective of the gallery, its distant entrance quite invisible in the dusty haze.
“No criticism? Just unstinted praise?” Baron Mandeville beamed.
“I thought there was too many of them,” Dean said. “I liked some, like that desert house and that woman lying on the hillside. And I thought the one was a hot pipe with the raft and everyone chilled. But there was just too many all at once. Sorry, Baron, but you asked.”
“Too many pictures,” Mandeville repeated. His merry little face had gone cold, as though a mask of ice had been slipped into place. “You think”
“Mozart, the great composer, was once told by his noble patron, the emperor, that a piece of music contained too many notes.” Doc looked to make sure he had the baron’s attention. “Mozart asked the emperor which particular notes he thought that he might profitably remove.” And he gave a great bellow of laughter to underline the fact that it was supposed to be a joke.
“Yes, yes, I see. Too many notes. Too many pictures! Of course.”
Mandeville threw back his head and joined in Doc’s merriment, the ice vanishing and his rosy Father Christmas cheeks and smile returning. But Ryan noticed that the meltwater look never left the eyes.
RYAN HAD GLANCED at his chron several times during the interminable visit to the ville’s art gallery, watching the digits tick over with agonizing slowness.
Yet, somehow, it was already close to noon and a faint rumbling in his stomach warned him that some more of the baron’s excellent food would be welcome.