And he’d been busy—I was relieved to see that the bullet wound to his shoulder was not creating problems. The place was a chaos of works both in progress and finished. Three canvases stood on easels. Another, ten feet tall, leaned against the west wall with a stepladder to hand. One long table was all but buried under over-sized drawings, rough and finished, realistic or not. In one corner was a stack of half a dozen drawings with a bowl on top. Curious, I went to look, and found it contained, not an abandoned meal, but a handful of things gathered from a beach—sand, three shells, a tiny dried-up crab, some threads of crisp seaweed. The drawing beneath it, despite being a quick dash of ink across the page, was clearly meant to be a seashore. And I was intrigued to find the sketches beneath it growing more realistic as they went. Or more probably, he had started with realism and been hunting for the abstract essence of the seaside experience.

  On the table’s other corner, the corner nearest the door, lay three thick little sketchbooks, their cheap, paperboard corners bent with wear. I’d seen Damian pull one like these from his pocket to jot down thoughts and images last year in Sussex. I opened the one on top, and looked down at Estelle, squatting in the garden to examine something at her feet. On the next page, he’d made a close study of one side of her head, capturing the way her heavy, black hair fell across her shoulder. He had written a note in one corner, saying, That black silk from Taipei. The next page showed a modernistic-looking rag-doll leaning against a rock: Kiki, it said. Then came Dr Henning striding down the path. Mme LaRue frowning into a steaming saucepan. A dead bird: A throng of ants. Not all had notes, but each was dated. This top book, nearly full, was no more than a week old.

  I put it down and glanced through the others. The earliest of the three began with line drawings of dramatic, modern-looking buildings that I recognised from newspaper articles—the Decorative Arts exposition. Damian had gone to see it in early August, and it looked as if he’d spent the whole time planted amidst the crowds, sketching furiously. Most of these pages had notes along their margins—one showing the Japanese pavilion remarked on the gloss of lacquer and the smell of bamboo. A boxy construction with many stairs leading up to an entrance framed by a huge, decorative flare noted, in French, The explosion of capitalism. The Soviet Union page simply said, Pluie! Perhaps a rain shower provided the artist with some key memory.

  The three books between them covered little more than a month. He must do ten or twelve drawings a day—and there were stacks of similar books on the shelves. I shook my head and put these back as I’d found them.

  By contrast, both to the quick sketches and to the disarray of his worktable, two hyper-realistic paintings of young Estelle and one of a certain red-haired doctor, her mouth quirked in amusement, had been framed and mounted onto the high southern wall in a rare display of organisation. Like Holmes’ laboratory, I thought with a smile. It, too, appeared chaotic—except for one wall, where Holmes had neatly displayed the painting of his mother that I had stolen for him as my wedding gift.

  Unlike the Holmes work-space, one corner of Damian’s had been claimed by a younger generation, with a half-sized chair and table, blocks of sketching pads, a half-sized easel, and a unit of shallow drawers with the child’s artistic endeavours. I was rather relieved to find that Estelle’s daunting cleverness did not extend to her drawings, which seemed no more sophisticated than those of any other infant her age (although, in an era of Picasso and Duchamp, what did I know?). It was also good to think that Damian was not fobbing his child off onto a new wife, along with the other household responsibilities.

  An array of books on a shelf near the diminutive table—neatly lined up, in contrast to the rest of the room—brought a mental picture of Damian deeply immersed in his latest inspiration, paint flying and deaf to the world, while his small daughter sat and pored over The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan. This, too, reminded me of Holmes, unmindful of Mrs Hudson tidying around him—or come to think of it, a painting I’d laughed over showing Holmes’ great-uncle, Horace Vernet, in a studio inhabited by two dozen men, a barking dog, a monkey, and a nervous-looking white horse, with an épée duel going on in the centre while two bare-chested boxers waited their turn, accompanied by a drummer, a bugle player, three conversations—and over at the side, oblivious to it all, a man at an easel.

  It would appear that, in addition to piercing eyes, aquiline nose, and the varied permutations of “art in the blood,” one could also inherit an extreme ability to block out tumult, discomfort, and distraction.

  I shuffled over to examine the recent portrait of Estelle. She had grown since last I saw her, but she still radiated brightness, from her glossy black hair to the mischief in those grey eyes. Her great-grandmother, source of that eye colour, would have turned one hundred this year. What would she have made of the tyke?

  I went on.

  The rest of Damian’s work was either figures or city images, with—unexpectedly—some tentative ventures into the French countryside. The nightmare theme of his earlier paintings appeared to be fading, while his colours grew ever more vibrant, his shapes more electric. Even in my relative ignorance of artistic trends, I could see that Damian Adler’s style was changing dramatically, from the slightly cold, hyper-real absurdity of Surrealism to something softer and more nearly Expressionist.

  I wondered what the critics made of it.

  Twenty minutes later, I caught myself up short. Russell, that lascar wasn’t out to steal a Damian Adler painting! And there, off in a corner, half-hidden behind two rolls of canvas and a bundle of kiln-dried wood, I spotted some threads of excelsior and tracked them to their source: two old tea chests, one steamer trunk, and a sturdy shipping crate some thirty inches on a side. Each container had a label glued to the top, with Damian’s name and telephone number, sent by the Institut de France, care of the railway station in Délieux.

  Had the boxes been securely fastened, I might have hesitated. But the timing of the break-in, so soon after men had been asking about the name Vernet—as well as the lascar’s blatant failure to use his knife on Damian—suggested that he could have been after something in one of the recently arrived Institut boxes.

  And in any event, they’d all been recently opened—the trunk’s padlock lay on a nearby shelf, while the shipping crate and one of the tea chests showed signs of having had their tops prised up, with the nails crudely straightened and shoved roughly back into place. The top of the other tea chest, which bore the stencils of a Ceylon estate, would no longer close all the way, and its nails had been hammered flat, to protect either hands or the contents.

  I pulled over a wooden chair, hoping that its rainbow splatters of paint were mere accident and not some genius work of art, and used it to sit down before the crates.

  I began with the Ceylon tea chest.

  Beneath the top was an old, once-pretty, knocked-about Chinese lacquer box some fifteen inches square and half that deep. I rested it on the edge of the chest and worked its tarnished brass hook with a thumb-nail, lifting its hinged lid.

  The box was purpose-built for what it contained, with a lining of ancient, dark blue silk following the nooks and hollows that cradled the pieces of a device that had to be some kind of lantern, or a particularly elaborate candle-holder.

  The main piece, catty-corner across the top, was eight inches of Chinese cloisonné enamel-ware in old and intricate abstract designs. The curve of it invited the hand to lift it from its silken bed—but before my fingers had made contact with the worn silk around the narrow riser, I forced myself to stop, and hobbled over to wrestle a sturdy table into place.

  I took out the base, enjoying the shape and texture. My fingers located a few chips out of the enamel, and repairs had been made at one point, but it was mostly intact. I stood it on the table, secure on its wide base, and set about unpacking the rest of the device, laying all the pieces out on the table.

  Glass cup. The bowed wires of a lamp-shade’s harp that ended in a finial with three washers and a screw cap. A metal hoop some three inches high and a dozen across with thin windows cut all along its top. A fan with half a dozen blades, slightly smaller across than the hoop—and I recognised what this was even before I came to the strips of paper. It was some kind of zoetrope, the child’s toy that spun around and mimicked animated motion from the drawings on the paper strips—but this one was a far more complex machine than the one I’d had as a child.

  It took some time, and several retracing of steps, before I had the thing together. It was indeed a spinning zoetrope, but it was built around a lamp—which would not only illuminate the drawings as one peered through the slots in the whirring shade, but might generate enough heat to drive the blades of a kind of fan at the top. Like a cross between a zoetrope and one of those German Christmas carousels.

  I was grinning as I inserted one of the paper strips into the shade and blew the device into motion. A dancing girl tossed a long scarf into the air and caught it, again and again—but I had to see it working correctly.

  I found candles in the kitchen, broke one down to a couple of inches, rested it in the glass cup, and set it alight.

  At first, nothing happened. Disappointed, I nudged the shade into motion—and that was all the encouragement it needed.

  It was a self-propelling zoetrope, a remarkably early form of animation. The flickers of twelve drawings, each one slightly different, fooled the eye into seeing it as motion. Up and down went the girl’s scarf, the motion seamless, hypnotic, with no jump at all between the strip’s final drawing and the start of its next circuit. Around and around, this precursor of Felix the Cat, by the looks of it more than a century old.

  I will admit, I fed quite a few of the paper strips into the shade, going back for more candles. And even when I let the device go still, it wasn’t because I’d grown disinterested in it, merely that I became aware that spending a day mesmerised by antique moving images was somewhat childish.

  I was also amused to find some new paper among the strips: Damian had produced four image-strips for his daughter—a flapper performing the Charleston, a delightfully wriggling snake, an exuberant tumbling gymnast, and an egg that hatched into a bird and flew upwards, disappearing just in time for the eggshell pieces to come together and hatch again.

  I held the flapper up to the light, admiring the man’s technique. A child’s plaything, any details of which would be rendered invisible by the blur of the spin, and yet each of the twelve drawings was an exquisite miniature, an inch of ink figure capturing the high spirits and effort of the young dancer. Her long pearl necklace rose and swung, the fringe on her skirt bounced. In the same way, the egg-to-bird progression seemed to tell a tale, from a simple oval of pure potential to a celebration of winged freedom.

  I could imagine these strips perfectly framed and hung for sale in a gallery.

  With some reluctance, I returned the strips to their slot and blew out the candle.

  I stretched hard, to rid my shoulders of the kinks, and looked from the image-lantern to the three remaining boxes.

  Delightful though the lantern might be, Damian’s lascar had not broken in searching for an archaic bit of whimsy. So, what was he after?

  Chapter Seven

  I felt an odd hesitation about violating the remaining crates. Unlike the one containing the lamp, the lids of these had been nailed down again. By Damian. Who was not even my blood relation, although the previous year, we had begun to form a relationship that was—inevitably—unique. Holmes was barely the man’s father. I was not his stepmother in anything other than a roughly sketched family tree. The most I could hope for was that we might be…friends.

  However, if there was some threat to Damian and his family, the answer might lie in these boxes. And in any event, I was here and Holmes was not and four shipping crates were what I had to investigate.

  I began again with the Ceylon tea chest, pulling out what lay beneath the lamp’s lacquer box. It was mostly clothing, exotic garments from all over—a silk kurta tunic from India, indigo blue and embroidered around the neckline; a cotton abayya from Egypt or Palestine, originally purple but faded to lavender on the shoulders and back; a linen cap with a band of Russian embroidery. All, I found, men’s garments, but for a small man, some inches shorter than I. It had all been stuffed inside, willy-nilly, although hard fold-lines in the fabric spoke to a long storage before its recent disturbance.

  When the crate was empty, I poked at the wood itself, hoping for hidden secrets. There were none. I checked the seams and pockets on the garments as I folded them away, in case of hidden treasure, but neither ring nor brooch-jewelled choker appeared—not so much as a faience bead. When I finished, the neatly-folded contents left ample room for the lantern’s box back on top.

  The lantern itself I left assembled on the table.

  The second tea chest weighed a young ton. I prised off the top with a hefty screw-driver left conveniently nearby, and found it lined with thick velvet and filled with daguerreotype plates. These I removed with considerable caution, and was pleased to discover that, although they seemed loose, they had been packed with enough care that only two had cracks in their glass. They, like the clothing, were of the exotic, mostly capturing scenes of Egypt and Palestine, some with posed figures. One showed a slim, middle-aged European with full moustache and thinning hair, dressed in an odd combination of vernacular garments, including loose trousers, a snug shirt, and a fringed sash around his waist. Another captured a raffish man sprawled beside a campfire, his dark hair and beard giving him a Middle Eastern look, although the way he stared into the camera struck me as European. A third plate had both men, posed in Bedouin garb, from kaffiyeh to soft boots, reclining self-consciously in a Bedu tent with a hookah on the carpet between them.

  I returned the plates in the order I’d found them, but again, they seemed loose—and I remembered the daguerreotype propped up on the mantelpiece in the sitting room. It had shown some men in native clothing, standing in front of the Great Sphinx.

  I retrieved my crutches and went to the sitting room. The Sphinx daguerreotype on the mantelpiece did indeed capture that same slim European, dressed in clothing that looked like a tourist’s recent purchase. Two of the other figures were clearly European, although standing behind them with the reins of a somewhat blurred donkey was a young lad, probably a local guide or assistant, dressed by contrast in an everyday abayya, a casual head-wrap, and plain sandals.

  Was it the Sphinx or the men that had caught Damian’s eye? (Though I supposed it could have been Aileen, or even Estelle, who claimed it from the box.) I imagined it was the landmark, or he’d have chosen the other photograph showing the man alone.

  I went back to the studio and turned my attention to the steamer trunk.

  To my surprise, it was nearly empty—at least, though the interior was fitted side-to-side with drawers and trays, most of them held nothing but stains, scrapes, and small bits of paper. It was an artist’s travelling workshop, from a drift of charcoal in one of the small drawers to the smears of oil-based paint in another—and then one of the drawers slid out completely and I was holding a self-contained watercolour paint box, with palette tray, blocks of dry pigment, and its own slim drawer for brushes and such. The paint was there, cracked into desiccated bits; the brushes were not.

  The sides, lining, and backs of the drawers held no hidden secrets beyond fragments of leaves and some sand picked up on its travels.

  This left the one actual shipping crate. Here, Damian had tamped down the top firmly enough that I needed the screw-driver again.

  Its contents echoed the daguerreotypes, although they were a different medium: paintings, standing edge-up. Unlike the glass plates, these were all different sizes, which explained the need for excelsior, although most of that seemed to have been swept up after Damian and his family looked through them.

  The crate held fourteen paintings, the largest thirty inches by twenty-four, the smallest eight by twenty. All oils except one, a watercolour version of the Sphinx photograph that had been romanticised by the addition of three camels and an unlikely palm tree. They were difficult to judge while in the box, and I didn’t want to simply pile them in a heap, so—cursing the awkwardness of a foot that jabbed pain whenever I put weight on it—I arranged them against the wall in more or less chronological order, guided by the signatures and occasional dates.

  I knew something about the Vernets, and could generally distinguish one from another in a museum. The dynasty had begun with Joseph Vernet—more fully, Claude Joseph—whose dramatic seascapes and moonlit clouds were greedily sought after by young eighteenth-century blades doing the Grand Tour. Joseph’s son, Carle (his full name was Antoine Charles Horace Vernet), had turned from horses to Napoleonic battles after his beloved sister was executed by the Revolution in 1794. Then came Carle’s son, Horace (strictly, Émile Jean-Horace, not to be confused with his nephew Carle Émile—the number of recurrent names found in this family could give a genealogist a headache). Horace Vernet was also hugely popular for his vast battle scenes, but in his middle years he began to travel, and expanded the usual European themes to the romantic (often biblical) possibilities of North Africa and the Middle East. Horace’s sister, Camille, married an artist named Hippolyte Lecomte, starting a dynasty of their own (although their son Émile was the one who chose to confuse matters by adding the Vernet to his name). So far as I knew, none of the Vernet women had been artists—typical, in a system based on patrons and benefactors—but Camille’s youngest, Louise Estelle (not to be mistaken for Horace’s wife, Louise, or his daughter, Anne Elisabeth Louise, or Camille’s granddaughter, Camille Elisabeth Louise, or…), had married an Englishman, thus bringing the Vernet “art in the blood” into a family of country squires.