Bohemian Girl, The by Cameron Kenneth Read Free Book Online

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    ‘Heseltine,’ he barked at the attendant. ‘I’m expected.’
    ‘Name, sir?’ The man looked old enough to be Denton’s father, frail enough to be on sticks; he moved with a maddening slowness. If he was the guardian, the Albany could have been easily breached - except that this was Piccadilly, and the real guardian was respectability, and habit, and the horror of ‘scenes’.
    He was passed in and directed, and he strolled down the court, feeling its sense of comfort and pleasant isolation, disliking it for the same reason that he disliked having a servant. He was a democrat.
    To his surprise, then, Aubrey Heseltine opened his own door. There was no mistaking him for a servant - wrong clothes, wrong manner. Aubrey Heseltine was younger than Denton had expected, shyer than he had expected, pretentious - if he was - out of unsure-ness. He was a type: almost emaciated, not much chin, prominent cheekbones with cheeks like planed surfaces, high colour, tall. Handsome in his way. ‘Neurasthenic’, to use a fashionable word.
    ‘Oh, do come in,’ he said as soon as he understood who Denton was. Denton’s wide hat and old boots seemed to have no effect on him. He moved about, muttering and making quick, incomplete gestures, said his man was out, apologized, said the place wasn’t his, only borrowed, stammered, blushed, then stood in the middle of the room and looked stricken.
    Denton found himself pitying him. Something was very wrong with him. Damaged , Denton thought, not knowing why he thought so. He looked away to relieve the younger man’s embarrassment. The room was almost shabby, much lived in, Georgian without being distinguished: a fireplace with a simple mantel, two deeply set windows in one wall, what had once been called ‘Turkey’ carpets on the floor, a great many books that filled three walls, and a single framed picture between the windows.
    ‘Is this “the little Wesselons”?’ When Heseltine looked puzzled, Denton said, ‘That’s what you called it in your note.’ It didn’t take much to puzzle Heseltine, he thought; the young man was either injured somehow in the mind or terribly distracted.
    ‘Did I? How affected that must have seemed to you. Oh, I am sorry. It’s what the chap, Mr Geddys, in the shop called it - “a little Wesselons”.’
    ‘Well - it is little.’ Denton went to it. Inside a tarnished gold frame almost three inches wide was an oil no bigger than his hand. ‘Is it a Wesselons?’
    ‘Oh, yes, yes - he assured me. There’s a signature. Of sorts. There in the corner. And the name on the brass plate - Andreas Wesselons, 1623 to 1652. It’s a sketch, really, an oil sketch. Of a lion. In a menagerie.’
    ‘Dutch?’
    ‘Yes - all that brown. Somebody important at the time had a menagerie. Wesselons made these sketches - the animals - quite a famous painting, one of them - of the lion, actually. This is a sketch for it.’
    The brushwork looked as if it had been quickly laid on, the tracks clear in the thick paint, yet the animal was almost alive. Enormous vigour. Denton said, ‘And the envelope you sent to me was in the back.’
    ‘Yes, yes - behind.’
    ‘Could you show me exactly where?’
    ‘Oh, yes, yes—’ Heseltine snatched the painting from the wall and turned it over. Denton thought his hands were shaking. The twisted wire by which it hung was almost black with corrosion. ‘In this corner,’ Heseltine said. He pointed at the lower left. ‘Tucked in between the canvas and the stretcher. There’s room, you see.’ He sounded hurt, as if Denton had suggested that the envelope couldn’t possibly have been there; in fact, Denton could see that the small envelope could have easily been tucked way down where most of it would have been masked by the wide frame.
    ‘Odd that somebody in the shop didn’t find it.’
    ‘I thought that, too! Yes, oh, yes. But they didn’t. If they had - well, it wouldn’t have been there, would it?’ He stood there,