The Hogarth Conspiracy Page 37

  Victor nodded. “I understand.”

  “Thank you. I don’t expect you to approve of my decision, Mr. Ballam, only to honor it.”

  Sixty-Nine

  THE HIDING PLACE WAS DECIDED BY VICTOR AND VICTOR ALONE. HE had wondered if he should offer the Hogarth to the royal family, considering the dynastic questions its emergence would be sure to incite. Especially on the eve of the new king’s coronation. But his initial requests to discuss the matter were met with rejection. Naturally Victor was not prepared to expose the story of the painting to any minion in the royal household, and his attempts to contact members of the senior royal staff were met with a rebuttal. His history went against him. Who, after all, would believe anything a proven fraudster said? Victor Ballam had a record. Wasn’t he a known dealer in fakes?

  He realized quickly that his intention to do right was going to be thwarted. He neither wanted nor dared to talk about the painting and its implications, knowing that even in discussing it he would be exposing it. Worse, if he had to go through courtiers, how many others would then hear about the painting’s existence? What other nasty upsurge of interest might follow? What frenzied search for the living descendant? Because he would be searched for—and found eventually. And how inopportune with the coronation imminent. At such a time, the exposure of a royal bastard would be a social, political, and even economic disaster.

  And so Victor Ballam turned away from the court and considered approaching the prime minister. Again he was met with rejection. Finally, he realized that he and he alone must be responsible for the Hogarth. A hiding place must be found, a hiding place so clever, so discreet, no one would ever even guess at it. A hiding place where Frederick, Prince of Wales, could smile forever at his pretty Polly Gunnell and the son she carried within her.

  On the morning of the king’s coronation, Victor Ballam strapped the Hogarth, together with the unopened package from Sonia Peters, to his body with tape. Wrapped in a protective layer of plastic, they nestled against his skin unseen as he boarded a small light aircraft with one piece of luggage. It was to be the first leg of his journey across Europe, and as he sat in a window seat, Victor thought of the fateful trip on Bernie Freeland’s jet and the greed of Duncan Fairfax that had set the murders in motion.

  The weather was fair, and the city’s outskirts appeared suddenly as they came down to land outside Naples. Climbing out of the aircraft, Victor picked up his suitcase, thanked the pilot, and waited to greet the new man who would take him on the next lap. No detail had been overlooked. At both stages of the journey there was to be a different pilot, neither knowing the other or his destination.

  The sun was blistering. Victor stood on the runway in a heat haze that distorted the planes across the tarmac as the second pilot approached. He had put on weight since Victor had first met him and seemed to walk with a confidence that comes with being respected. With being recognized as reliable and discreet.

  Tipping his pilot’s cap to Victor, John Yates glanced up.

  “Hot day.”

  “Hot as hell,” Victor replied. “You look well. You know where we’re going?”

  “Yes, ready when you are.”

  John Yates had come a long way since his days as Duncan Fairfax’s copilot. He was now employed by one of the top Middle Eastern industrialists but retained his interests in London and never forgot the time when he worked with the murderer Fairfax. That was why when Victor contacted him, he was intrigued and open to the offer of a simple trip. Destination to be divulged the night before. Fee excellent. No questions to be asked about the freight. One passenger. Known only to the pilot. Mr. Victor Ballam.

  But there was one last, important condition: if anyone asked, Victor Ballam was supposed to be flying the plane himself, which he was capable of doing. But the deception was really for another reason. Should any questions ever be asked, John Yates would not be incriminated.

  “Can we leave now?” Victor asked, climbing into the plane and putting the suitcase on the seat next to his.

  As John Yates started the engine, and Victor pulled the door to, something caught his eye. Turning in his seat, his saw a stout official frantically beckoning to him from an open car parked a little way off.

  Victor called out to John Yates. “Looks like they’ve got a problem.”

  The man was shouting, yammering in Italian, his arms flailing, his face sweaty in the heat. But as Victor stepped onto the tarmac, the man drove off. Puzzled, Victor was watching the car disappear into the distance when he heard—suddenly and unmistakably—the plane start down the runway.

  Surprised, he called out and began running toward the plane, but it was already well out of his reach, coming to the end of the runway and then taking off. Up into the hot white sky above Naples, up into the cloudless air, to the sun and the heat above. Still running, Victor could see the sun spark off the wings as the plane—and his suitcase—made their way across the unstoppable sky. Dumbfounded, he stood in the heat, his mouth dry. What the hell was happening? And then he realized that every one of his movements had been tracked. John Yates had been hired to abandon him and leave with Victor’s suitcase. The suitcase believed to contain the Hogarth painting.

  He continued to stand where he was, watching as the plane climbed higher and higher. Through his shirt he could feel the tape wound around his body and touched it protectively. And then suddenly—a little way off, over the Bay of Naples—Victor heard the sound of a violent explosion and stared upward into the blinding sky. The plane was no longer a machine but a white-hot flare of wreckage plummeting into a terrible descent.

  What remains there were fell into the cool, deep water of the bay. It fell with the pilot, John Yates, Victor’s suitcase, and his jacket, in which was his money, his passport, his credit cards, and his driving license. Everything he used to identify himself.

  I’ll get my own back. It might take me a while, but I will. One day. One day when you’re least expecting it. No one takes what’s mine and gets away with it.

  Under that smoldering, unforgiving sun, Mrs. Fleet’s words came back to Victor. And he knew that news would reach her in London to tell her that she had won. He could imagine her triumph, the thrill in that frozen heart, the frisson of victory. Because to all intents and purposes the plane, the Hogarth, and Victor Ballam himself had disappeared. Forever.

  She didn’t know that he was still alive. Didn’t know that one day he would come after her.

  Victor took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and began walking. Away from the airport and down a dry, wide road. Shock was slowly being replaced by a plan. In time he would come to a town and then introduce himself by a stranger’s name. He would make a new history for himself and, unwatched and unnoticed, keep the secret that had cost so many lives. He felt no fear, just a sense of absolute freedom. He had succeeded in what he had set out to do and was safe for the first time in years. As was the Hogarth. Because no one would ever know that Victor Ballam had survived.

  No one looked for the dead.

  Walking on, Victor suddenly stopped and, pulling away a little of the tape, took out the small unopened package addressed to Simeon Peters. The handwriting was well formed and clear, the signature that of Oliver Peters. Imagining his old colleague’s well-modulated voice, Victor opened the envelope, and a gold signet ring fell out onto the dry earth at his feet.

  Frowning, he picked the ring up, and began to read the letter:

  My Dearest Son,

  I am sorry and yet proud to pass on this duty to you. Few men are called to serve their country and their Crown, and I have always counted myself honored to be among this little coterie. You will now have been informed of the history of the Hogarth painting, why it has been protected for so long. And why its secret must be kept. The painting is proof, but also—in this letter—is more evidence. An engraved ring, from Frederick, Prince of Wales, to his illegitimate son.

  Mesmerized, Victor stared at the ring, reading the engraved inscription:

 
To my secret child, from his father, Frederick, Prince of Wales.

  Slowly, he turned the heavy gold ring in his hand, given from a father to a son, from a prince to a pauper.

  Sighing, he turned back to the letter:

  There is only one piece of information left to pass on—the name of the living descendant of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and Polly Gunnell.

  This secret must never be divulged, and when the time comes, you will pass it on to your own descendant for safekeeping.

  I cannot express how vital secrecy is. How you hold history in the palm of your hand.

  The living descendant—pretender to the English throne and the one man who could challenge the royal ascension—is Thomas Harcourt.

  Victor stopped reading, a sly breeze ruffling the letter in his hand. Thomas Harcourt, Tully. Breathing deeply to steady himself, Victor realized that in one detail—and one detail only—the gracious Oliver Peters had been wrong. Tully Harcourt would not be the last of the line. Unknown to him or to the powers who had protected the Hogarth secret for so long, there was a successor. When Tully died, he would leave behind an heir—half English, half Norwegian. An unknown heir, centuries away from the cellar where Polly Gunnell had been butchered, generations removed from the boy who had played in the yard of the Foundling Hospital. Out of the reach of killers and conspirators, the descendant of little Hal had somehow survived.

  And only Victor knew who he was: his own nephew, Jack Ballam.

  Tucking the letter and the ring back into his bodystrapping, next to the Hogarth painting, Victor walked on. Against all the odds, Mrs. Fleet’s revenge had played right into his hands. No one would ever look for him again. Or for the Hogarth or the royal pretender. It ended with him. With a dusty man walking down a dusty road. A man without an identity, with no name and no history. A man who didn’t exist. Who carried a secret no one would ever discover.

  What the preoccupied Victor didn’t notice as he walked on was that in a side road, a battered van was parked among dry trees. In it were two men who watched Victor Ballam pass. And then, when enough distance was between them, they began to follow him.

  Before My God, in this year 1755, I stand in solemn witness to this end. Before My God, I take the punishment in this life—and in the world to come—for my culpability.

  In my defence I did once save a child, and loved that child. In my defence, I saw him raised and safe, and tracked his every day into maturity. His life, which my own hands once saved, counted no less to me than those I call my own. His little child’s triumphs and defeats moved me in equal part; his illnesses agonised over, spoken of in whispers.

  His name’s not his, and yet they knew him.

  His name was never given by a mother, but a sham. One planned, to keep the harm away from him. Never was there such a secret born. Never was there such a secret kept. Never was there such a burden placed on such poor shoulders as my own.

  In my defence, I kept the secret. And from the boy himself.

  And yet my sweet Hal’s gone. And all that’s good has gone with him. Last night I visited the hiding place, kept secret for so long. I wanted to see the painting and the ring, but both had gone. All that remained in the hidden cupboard was a button—gold and lapis lazuli—formed into the shape of an owl. One of a set of fasteners I had seen on a waistcoat, a waistcoat that belonged to Nathaniel Overton.

  How long they knew of Hal, I cannot guess. How long they watched, I cannot know. But it was done, and done well. Taken is the boy. Stolen, the last spark of pretty Polly Gunnell and her lover. For all the priests and doctors, the world’s spy master, Overton, and all and everyone who sought this child, I hereby curse them. For all the villains, whores, and hypocrites who aided or abetted his discovery, damn them also. For he is taken. Gone to some other place that I can only guess at. Some other future, far from me and from the Foundling Hall. And yet I have hope for him. That those who took him, took him to be saved. Last night there was a knocking at the studio door and a man slid some little paper in my hand and then scurried off. I took it to my workplace, holding it by the candle to read better what had been written there.

  It said, in all simplicity,

  He is safe.

  I read the message many times. I soothed myself; let my heart slow to a healthy beat; my thoughts quieten; my hopes rise. And finally I turned, fixing my eyes upon the beloved image on my wall. And he—that borrowed child of mine, that princeling with no throne—smiled back at me.

  Bibliography

  Antal, Frederick. Hogarth and His Place in European Art. London. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.

  Berry, Erick, The Four Londons of William Hogarth. London, D. McKay, 1964.

  Bindman, David. Hogarth. London: Thames & Hudson, 1981.

  Clayton, Tim. Hogarth. London: British Museum Press, 2007.

  Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Graphic Works. 3rd ed. London: Alan Wofsey Fine Arts, 1989.

  Quennell, Peter. Hogarth’s Progress. London/ New York: Collins, 1955.

  Uglow, Jenny. Hogarth: A Life and a World. London: Faber and Faber, 1997.

  Webster, Mary. Hogarth. London: Cassell Ltd., 1979.