第6章 (第3/3页)
ded whether she was her brother's tool or his accomplice.'
He discarded Lucrezia, and picked up a second sheet. This proved to be the portrait of a small boy in late eighteenth-century clothes, and under it in faint capitals were printed the words: Louis XVII.
'Now there's a beautiful mystery for you,' Marta said. 'The Dauphin. Did he escape or did he die in captivity?'
'Where did you get all these?'
'I routed James out of his cubby-hole at the Victoria and Albert, and made him take me to a print shop. I knew he would know about that sort of thing, and I'm sure he has nothing to interest him at the V. and A.'
It was so like Marta to take it for granted that a Civil Servant, because he happened also to be a playwright and an authority on portraits, should be willing to leave his work and delve about in print shops for her pleasure.
He turned up the photograph of an Elizabethan portrait. A man in velvet and pearl. He turned the back to see who this might be and found that it was the Earl of Leicester.
'So that is Elizabeth's Robin,' he said. 'I don't think I ever saw a portrait of him before.'
Marta looked down on the virile fleshy face and said: 'It occurs to me for the first time that one of the major tragedies of history is that the best painters didn't paint you till you were past your best. Robin must have been quite a man. They say Henry the Eighth was dazzling as a young man, but what is he now?