Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [75]
And then, more than twenty years ago, aged one hundred, widowed for three-quarters of a century, she died. And her lawyer – who had nowhere appeared in any of the legends – turned out to have inherited the palazzo and all it contained, as well as the lands, the investments, and the patent to a process that did something to the strength of cotton fibres, making them resistant to higher temperatures. Whatever it did – and the cloth changed from cotton to silk to wool, depending on the version told – the patent ended up being immeasurably more valuable than the palazzo or the rest.
‘Of course, of course,’ Brunetti said as the tiny figures in his memory moved together and Maria found her Benito: for those were the names of the witnesses to Madame Reynard’s will – Sartori and Morandi – and as such the subject of gossip and speculation that had occupied the city for months. They had worked in the hospital, had no previous knowledge of the dying woman, were certainly not named as beneficiaries of the will, and so were judged to be extraneous to the matter. Brunetti went back to his desk.
‘Weren’t there some French relatives?’ Vianello asked.
Brunetti rummaged through the stories that had been dislodged in his memory and came up with the one he sought: ‘They turned out not to be relatives but people who had read about her fortune and thought they’d have a try at it.’ He let more information seep in and then added, ‘But yes, they were French.’
Both sat for a while, letting their memories gather up bits and pieces. ‘And wasn’t there an auction?’ Vianello asked.
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘One of the last great ones. After she died. They sold everything.’ Then, because it was Vianello he was talking to, and he could say such things to him, Brunetti added, ‘My father-in-law said every collector in the city was there. Every collector in the Veneto, for that matter.’ Brunetti knew of two drawings from that auction. ‘He got two pages from a notebook of Giovannino de Grassi.’
Vianello shook his head in ignorance.
‘Fourteenth century. There’s a whole notebook in Bergamo, with drawings – paintings, really – of birds and animals, and a fantasy alphabet.’ His father-in-law kept his two drawings in a folder, out of the light. Brunetti held up his hands about twenty centimetres apart. ‘These are only loose pages, about this big. Beautiful.’
‘Valuable?’ asked the far more pragmatic Vianello.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ Brunetti said. ‘But I’d guess so. In fact, my father-in-law said that most collectors went because of her husband’s collection of drawings – it wasn’t like today, when you could check everything that was in the auction by going online. He said there were always surprises. But this time, the surprise was that there were so few drawings. Still he managed to get those two.’
‘Pity about Cuccetti, isn’t it?’ Vianello asked, surprising Brunetti by remembering the name of the lawyer who had swept the board.
‘What, that he died so soon after? What was it, two years?’
‘I think so. And with his son. The son was driving, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, and drunk. But it was all hushed up.’ Both of them knew a fair bit about this sort of thing. ‘Cuccetti had a lot of important friends,’ Brunetti added.
As if Brunetti’s statement were the night, and his question the day, Vianello asked, ‘The will was never contested, was it?’
‘Only by those French people, and that didn’t last a day.’ Leaning across his desk Brunetti retrieved the papers Signorina Elettra had given him and said, ‘This is what she found.’ He read the first sheet and passed it to Vianello. In amiable silence, neither