The Rembrandt Secret Read Online Free PDF

banked on top of the net over the pond, whilst a stone cherub stood gloomy watch next to a U-shaped space under the far fence where the foxes had visited for decades.
    Thoughtful, Samuel cleaned his reading glasses absentmindedly and stared into the sobering morning. He was, he thought irritably, tired. But then again, he was eighty-six and had an excuse for still being in his dressing gown at eleven o’clock. In the passage outside, he could hear the vacuum cleaner start up on the other side of his study door. Mrs McKendrick, his housekeeper, had been withhim for over twenty years, but no matter how many times he told her, she would try and get into the study.
It needs tidying
, she would say, but Samuel liked the sheen of dust on the high bookshelves. Why remove it when he seldom needed those volumes? The books he
did
refer to were close at hand, used so often no dust had time to settle. As for the dust in his old sofa and easy chair, he liked that too. Found it comforting to settle himself amidst the flotsam of years.
    The only thing Samuel missed was a dog. Since he had lived in the Sussex countryside – in the house which had sagged under neglect, and grown so out of fashion it had become fashionable again – there had always been a dog. Someone living, getting older with its master. Sleeping by the fire, steaming when they came in from a walk, or farting into old age, an animal had been as much a part of the house as the door knocker and entry sign – Samuel Hemmings, Art Historian.
    Even though he had collected a batch of awards and letters after his name, Samuel liked to keep his identity simple. He could afford to, as can all illustrious people, knowing their reputations speak for them. Wincing as the vacuum started up again, Samuel turned to the papers on his desk. He was amused by the latest auction where a Mark Rothko was expected to reach a record price, and wondered what the picture would fetch in a hundred years. Would Rothko’s reputation increase? Or sink as so many had done before …
    Having had no truck with the art world, Samuel hadwritten numerous anarchic pieces on the absurdities of modern art and the gangster tactics of some dealers. Always outspoken, he had become even more so as he grew older. Courageous at seventy, he had become reckless as he turned eighty, and was hoping for martyrdom at ninety.
    His thoughts were interrupted by the door opening behind him. Irritated, Samuel turned in his wheelchair, but his sparse eyebrows rose in pleasure when he saw who his visitor was.
    ‘Hello,’ Marshall said, moving over to the old man and taking a sheaf of papers off a nearby chair before sitting down. ‘I was passing by and—’
    ‘Liar. You’ve never
passed by
here in twenty years,’ Samuel retorted, looking intently at his visitor.
    He was reminded – not for the first time – that Marshall Zeigler bore little resemblance to his father. Where Owen was patrician, Marshall was more heavily built, his thick hair as darkly brown as his eyes. On the street, a passer-by might have taken Owen for a diplomat, while his son looked like someone in the media. Even their voices were dissimilar, Owen’s elegant speech a world apart from Marshall’s deeper, cosmopolitan tone.
    ‘So,’ Samuel asked, ‘what really brought you here?’
    ‘My father.’
    Samuel’s eyes fixed on Marshall. His sight was failing, his left eye milky with a cataract, but his right eye was brilliant, blue as a delphinium and missed nothing. ‘Is he all right?’
    ‘Not really. I saw him last night. He’s in debt, badly in debt.’
    ‘Your
father
?’
    ‘Yes. I’d have thought he was the last person to get into trouble like that …’
    Hearing the vacuum cleaner start up outside the door, he paused while Mrs McKendrick banged it against the panelling, and waited until she’d worked her way along the hall.
    ‘It’s serious too. He sold the Rembrandt—’
    ‘
What!
When was this?’ Samuel asked urgently, scooting