‘Please, call me Mariana,’ Mariana said.
‘And I’m Jocelyn.’ She shook their hands warmly. ‘Come in, come in.’ Two black and white springer spaniels bounced around at her heels; Jocelyn shushed them and sent them back to their beds, then led Mariana and Angelo through a red-tiled hallway to the kitchen containing an Aga and a scrubbed pine kitchen table, where she made them all some very strong coffee.
‘Keith—my husband—is away, but he’ll be thrilled to know about it when he gets back. I had a rummage through what he likes to call the archives—we probably shouldn’t keep them in the cellar and ought to deposit them in the Records Office, but you know men.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Anyway. I’ve found an awful lot. It’s terribly exciting—almost like being on one of those genealogy shows and discovering things about relatives you had no idea about.’
‘We’re featuring the painting on Hidden Treasure, so there’s a chance you could be on the show,’ Mariana said.
‘Well, not me—it ought to be Keith, really, as he’s the Fisher. And obviously I realise it’s all terribly confidential. Come and see what I found. Bring your coffee.’
The spaniels pattered behind them as Jocelyn led them to the dining room; the table was easily big enough to seat twelve, and there were papers stacked neatly across it.
‘Charles Fisher—he must be a cousin or some kind of great-uncle to Keith, though I haven’t sat down and worked it out properly—owned the house in 1862. In 1863 the household account book shows a payment to a drawing master.’ She opened the book with a flourish. Next to a modern index tab marking the right place on the page, in neat Victorian copperplate, were the words Drawing Master, Domenico Carulli.
‘There’s some paperwork here, too. It seems Carulli was allowed to stay in one of the farm cottages on New Road.’
‘That ties up with the letter he wrote his brother,’ Angelo said.
‘Now, Harriet Fisher—Charles’s wife—kept a diary. Her writing’s terribly cramped and it took me ages to work it out, but it seems this Domenico Carulli painted matching portraits of Harriet and Charles in 1862 in return for being allowed to staying at one of the cottages and paint landscapes over the summer.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ Angelo said. ‘Do you still have the paintings?’
‘Sadly not,’ Jocelyn said. ‘But we do have some sketches.’
There were sketches of a man and a woman, both signed; the back of the sketches held their names and the date, June 1862.
‘They’re both very fashionably dressed,’ Mariana said. ‘And, although I’m guessing you’d never want to sell them, Angelo’s grandfather’s gallery might ask if they can borrow them from time to time for an exhibition.’
‘I’m sure we can arrange something,’ Jocelyn said with a smile. ‘I photocopied these for you, and the diary, because I think you’ll find them interesting. Now, we also had a photographer at the house who came from London—you know they did these cartes de visite thingies?’
‘There was a real craze for them in the eighteen-sixties,’ Mariana said. Angelo looked blank, so she explained, ‘They were paper prints mounted on thin card, the same size as a calling card. They were the first cheaply available portraits, and as well as taking portraits of ordinary people, photographers sold portraits of Queen Victoria and Dickens and other celebrities of the day. People used to collect them and put them in an album.’
‘That’s what they did at Barrington,’ Jocelyn said. ‘Everyone in the house had one done, somewhere around the summer of 1861. And I mean everyone, including the servants and the labourers on the farm—at some point someone’s put them neatly in an album. I don’t know who, as it’s not the same handwriting as Harriet’s.’
She showed them a small leather-bound album, not much larger than the size of a carte de visite, which had a spring-loaded clasp. She unclipped it to reveal the pages inside; each had a square mount and a slot underneath it where the carte de visite was slid into the album and underneath the slot was a small box where someone had written in names in copperplate handwriting.