Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street by David Marcum (books to read to be successful TXT) 📗

from around the corner in Russell Square, has been doing some research lately, and he wants to write something up for the journals. And then there’s talk again of removing it and selling it to a collector. They asked me to be here today, and I thought of inviting the two of you. ”

“Remove it?” scoffed Holmes. “Impossible.”

Entering the oddly-shaped room, squared at the front windows but rounded at the back, we encountered a grouping of three other men, standing opposite to us beneath a tall and wide painting, about six feet square, affixed above the fireplace. Strangely it didn’t hang there, as it was painted directly onto the plaster. I had seen it before on the few occasions when I had visited this address, most notably to investigate a murder on the top floor in Holmes’s old room that had taken place a number of years earlier.

“Richardson,” bellowed Sir Clive to a scholarly looking fellow, thus identifying for me the man in question. “Still trying to nail down the provenance of this old painting?”

The man responded good-naturedly. “You know how it is to get a bee in one’s bonnet, Clive,” he said. “I have some fresh correspondence from the Duke of Bedford that almost makes it certain that the painter was James Ward.”

“I’ve told you that it was Ward for the last forty years. I knew it when I first saw it, and we had additional confirmation from Abel Granger’s people, who had hired Ward to paint a very similar painting. The man,” said Sir Clive to me, “was rather specialized in what he liked to paint.”

“Anecdotal evidence is certainly valuable,” sniffed Richardson, “but one’s case is always so much more solid with the written word.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a packet of folded yellow papers. “Letters, Sir Clive!” He waved them about. “The proof!”

“I don’t need any such proof,” said one of the other two men. He was a cadaverous looking fellow with unhealthy dark hollows under his cheeks. Speaking with an American accent, he added, “I recognized it for a Ward from the minute I saw it. Those letters will simply make it even sweeter when it’s hanging in my own little museum in Pittsburg.”

“And I can’t make it any plainer than I already have, Mr. K--------,” said the third man, whose origins were clearly British, “that the painting cannot be moved. It was applied directly onto the ordinary plaster surface above the mantel. A massive and expensive effort would have to be undertaken to remove it, and even then it’s likely that you would fail. We would need to construct a special steel underpinning and frame, and after all of that, it would likely crumble to pieces.”

Sir Clive gestured with his thumb toward the third man. “Grigsby. British Museum.”

The man nodded, looking curiously at Holmes and me, obviously wondering why we were there. Sir Clive made no move to introduce us.

The American shrugged his too-heavy coat up around his thin shoulders. “Don’t care. Whatever it takes. Money is no object. And keep looking for that canvas version as well.”

“It was lost nearly a decade ago,” said Grigsby.

“Money’s no object,” K-------- repeated, and then, with a quick and hungry look toward the painting, he turned and stalked from the room. Grigsby looked with frustration to Sir Clive, and then hurried to follow.

We three and Richardson were left in front of the fireplace, naturally turning our gazes upward at the object under discussion, I had seen it before, of course, but had never given it more than a passing glance. Now, I studied it more carefully.

It was a landscape, done in rather unpleasant yellows and browns. The upper two-thirds portrayed a brassy sky, with sour-looking and strangely lit clouds mostly hiding the light but dull blue that peeked through in just a few places. On the ground beneath them was a rural and timeless scene, tedious in its plainness and, frankly, lack of imagination. In the center, taller than almost anything else in the painting, was a figure seated on a downtrodden white horse, both man and beast with their backs to the viewer. The rider, in a brown hat and matching brown clothing, was holding out a hand to a boy at his right. The lad was wearing a blue coat and red pants – the only unusual colors in the whole artwork. The man on the horse seemed to be reaching for a hat that the boy was offering, in spite of already having his own hat upon his head.

Incongruously, there were three cows spread around them, all of apparently different breeds (or so it seemed to me, as I know little of cattle), two lying down and one standing, facing indifferently away from the men and beasts. To the left, the land dropped off to a dark hollow and distant forest, while on the right, set back at what seemed to be a couple of hundred feet, were some ill-defined trees, with the lop-sided roof of a two- or three-story house barely showing amongst them. It was competently painted, no doubt, but not – to my view – anything that would inspire a collector to declare, “Money’s no object.”

“It was the cows,” said Sir Clive, to my obvious confusion and his amusement. “That’s how I first knew it was a Ward, you see. The old Duke of Bedford, who owned of all the property around us, including this house – and the family still owns it, by the way! – took Ward under his wing over a hundred years ago. Ward, you see, was the most popular painter of cattle of his day.”

“Cattle?” I said. “Are you serious? That was a specialty?”

“A most sought-after specialty,” asserted Sir Clive. “The early 1800’s was a period of romanticism, a reaction against classicism, wherein people wanted paintings that glorified nature and invoked an emotion,