It was three days since she had taken the Van Dyck, the one that Frans Wyntack had been painting before he was taken ill, to Solomon Isaacs.
Frightened at her own daring, Cyrilla had finished off the last necessary brushstrokes, then aged the whole painting with a process that Frans Wyntack had made curiously his own.
When her mother had been ill and in need of medical attention, Frans had realised that his own paintings would not sell and he had said bitterly and violently to Cyrilla,
“If they will not buy my paintings, I will teach them a lesson they will never forget!”
“What do you mean by that, Papa?” Cyrilla had asked.
“I mean,” Frans Wyntack had replied, “that when I was learning to be an artist, many years ago in Cologne, I found out how to paint fakes.”
Cyrilla had stared at
