Chapter 32
Mr. Gedge, it seemed, had strong views on the subject.
“A lady may bid,” he said, in the tone of a man who had been waiting some years to be asked. “There is nothing whatsoever to prevent it. It is only that nobody does. So when one does, four hundred people turn around.”
“And if I did not wish four hundred people to turn around?”
“Then you instruct a person to bid on your behalf, and the person stands where he can be seen and you don’t.” He glanced at the picture and then briefly at her. “It is usually a solicitor. I have been known to do it myself, for a consideration.”
“Would you do it for me?”
“I would.”
“For a consideration?”
Mr. Gedge shook his head. “For the pleasure of seeing lot one hundred and four go to somebody who stood in front of it for four minutes and did not once ask who painted it.”
“And what does one pay for four feet of a garden by a man nobody has heard of?” Leonora asked.
“That is a delicate question.”
“Mr. Gedge, I have been married for five weeks and I have not yet spent one shilling of my husband’s money on my own account. He has bought me a great deal. I have bought nothing. I am extremely bad at this. You will have to be vulgar with me.”
Mr. Gedge permitted himself the ghost of a smile.
“Twelve guineas would take it,” he replied. “Fifteen would take it against a man who wanted it. Twenty would take it against a man who wanted it and had been drinking, which at a sale beginning at half past three is something one must consider.”
They agreed on a limit in the space of a minute. Leonora set it at a figure that made her feel slightly sick, and Mr. Gedge wrote it in a little book without comment. Then she went back downstairs and found her husband being talked at by a man about drainage.
“There you are,” Colin said, with an expression of profound relief.
“You looked as though you were enjoying yourself.”
“That gentleman has told me about a ditch in Berkshire for eleven minutes, and I have been unable to stop him because I made the tactical error of feigning interest.” He snatched two glasses off a tray. “You stayed up there a great while after I was carried off.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“There is a hare in a back room, painted by a man nobody has heard of, and it is the best thing in this house.”
“I said that to you an hour ago.”
“You said it about the hare, and you were right. I have gone up and looked at the hare and found that you were more right than you knew, because it is hung eleven inches too low, which means Sir Hugo hung it himself and hung it for a man sitting down.” She took her glass.
“He used to sit in that room and look at his hare. Nobody was ever meant to see it but him.”
Colin was quiet for a moment.
“That is a very great deal to get out of a nail,” he remarked.
“It is the only thing I am good at.”
He looked at her over his glass. “I said that to you in the gallery an hour ago.”
“You did.”
“You have repeated it back to me as though it were your own opinion.”
“I have adopted it.” Leonora shrugged. “You may consider it a compliment or a theft, as you prefer. Either way, I intend to go on doing it, because you are right about pictures more often than you are right about people.”
The sale began at half past three, and for the first hour, it was the most tedious affair Leonora had ever sat through.
They sold the Dutch things. They sold a great many brown landscapes to a man in the third row who did not once look at any of them. The entire wall of Ferrand ancestors went in a single lot, for the frames, to a dealer from Bath.
Leonora watched four generations of somebody’s family carried out of the room in one armful and had to look at the ceiling.
“Sixteen people,” she muttered under her breath.
“What?”
“There were sixteen of them on that wall. Somebody sat for each one. Somebody’s mother put on her best gown and sat still in a chair for a fortnight, and now she is going to Bath in a cart to be taken out of her frame with a knife.”
“Duchess.”
“I know. I know it is only wood and canvas, and I know they owed a great deal of money.” She snapped her fan open. “I would merely like it noted that I do not care for this room.”
Colin fell quiet beside her, but he did not look at the ceiling, which meant he had noticed her doing it.
“How much longer?” she asked, at lot ninety-one.
“You wished to come.”
“I wished to come at half past eleven. Now I have been in this room since half past three, and a man has bought nine paintings of a cow.”
“They are not nine paintings of a cow. Four of them are of a cow.”
“Your Grace.”
“Two are of a bull, which is a different animal and a great deal more expensive, and three are of a barn.” Colin did not look away from the stage. “You are extremely fidgety this afternoon.”
“I am not fidgety. I am warm.”
“You have looked at that door four times.”
“Because I am considering leaving through it, and abandoning you here, and taking the carriage.”
“You would not get to Hounslow.”
“I should get to Hounslow easily. It is Reading I should have difficulty with.” She snapped her fan open. “Nine paintings of a cow, Colin.”
Lot ninety-eight. Lot one hundred and one.
“You are sitting extremely still,” Colin observed.
“I am attending.”
“You have not attended to anything for twenty minutes. You have been counting the rows.”
“Lot one hundred and four,” the auctioneer called. “A garden, in the manner of the Dutch school, artist unrecorded.”
Leonora put her hands in her lap and curled her fingers.
Two men bid; that was all. A fat man near the front who wanted it for a staircase and said so audibly, and Mr. Gedge, standing against the left-hand wall with his little book, who bid the way a man consulted a timetable.
It went up to eleven guineas. Then thirteen.
Stop, Leonora thought at the fat man’s back. Stop, you don’t want it. You have said out loud that you want it for a staircase, but you cannot have it for a staircase. There is a gate standing open, and you have not looked at it once.
The fat man bid fifteen, and Mr. Gedge, without hurrying, bid sixteen. There was a pause of about two seconds in which Leonora forgot to breathe entirely, and then the hammer came down.
“Sixteen guineas,” the auctioneer boomed. “Gedge.”
Leonora uncurled her fingers. Her hands had gone entirely numb, which she had not known could happen to a person over sixteen guineas.
She was aware, with the part of her mind that was still functioning, that she had just spent sixteen guineas of her husband’s money on a present for him, that this was in every sense absurd, and that she did not care.
She turned to make a perfectly ordinary remark about the room being warm, only to find Colin looking at her.
Not at the stage. Not at the fat man, or at the picture being carried off, or at Mr. Gedge closing his little book against the left-hand wall.
He was sitting half turned in his chair with one arm over the back of it, looking at her face.
He had plainly been doing it for a while.
“You held your breath,” he noted.
“I beg your pardon? I did not.”
“Duchess, you held your breath during the bidding, and when the hammer came down, you let it go. I felt the chair move.”
Leonora’s heart was fluttering like a bird in a cage.
“There was a great deal of dust upstairs,” she lied. “It has affected my lungs.”
“Your lungs.”
“It is a delicate condition. My mother has always said so, and nobody has ever believed her. It is very hard on us both.”
“Duchess, you climbed thirty feet of rope ladder one-handed.”
“That was a dry day,” she scoffed.
And Colin, who had not laughed twice in a fortnight, put his hand over his mouth in the middle of a public auction room and did not take it away for some time.
Leonora looked determinedly at the stage and thought that she would remember the shape of that, whatever else happened to the two of them, for the rest of her life.