The Eleventh Commandment Read online

  The Eleventh

  Commandment

  ❖ ❖

  A

  John Singer Sargent/Violet Paget Mystery

  ❖ ❖

  Mary F. Burns

  Copyright © 2022 by Mary F. Burns

  Published by Word by Word Press

  San Francisco, California

  Burns, Mary F.

  The Eleventh Commandment

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Text Font: Garamond

  Titles Font: Perpetua Titling

  Violet Paget, c. 1880

  Born October 14, 1856, Violet Paget was Welsh-English, and like the Sargent family, hers travelled throughout Europe and Great Britain, keeping company with artists, writers, intellectuals, and many socially prominent people. She was a prolific writer, using the pen name Vernon Lee, and she and John Sargent were close friends from childhood—they met when they were ten years old, in Rome. Violet died in 1935 at her villa, Il Palmerino, near Florence.

  John Singer Sargent, c. 1880 Sargent was born on January 12, 1856 to American parents living in Florence, Italy. Sargent became the most sought-after portrait painter in Europe and America from the early 1880’s to his death in 1925. He produced some 900 oil paintings, mostly portraits, and 2,000 watercolors, which became his preferred medium.

  The Eleventh

  Commandment

  Based on a True Story

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  Author’s Note

  Reality and Fiction

  Picture Gallery

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Other books by Mary F. Burns

  Prologue

  I can see him as he described it to me, that strange day back in ’84, in March, in Paris—I told him I could picture it completely—so John kept talking, describing, getting it out of his system. He said he had been incessantly drumming his fingers on the armrest in his first-class train compartment as it sped on its way from Paris to Haarlem in the Netherlands. It was mid-February when he took that trip; at night, nothing to look at through the windows, only the reflections of the gas lamps near the door—he’d turned off the ones nearer to him, he said.

  It was off-season; he was alone. He crossed his legs; uncrossed them. Stood up, undid the buttons of his coat, arranged his overcoat on the seat beside him, sat down again to the continuing, soothing rhythms of the wheels on the track.

  The portrait of Madame X was still driving him mad—I knew this at the time, even without him telling me—and it was a mere two months before he had to submit it to the Salon. The original painting had been scraped and re-painted, touched up, layer upon layer—it was beginning to craze all over, sending out sparks as light hit the varied surfaces. He’d started a copy, hoping to re-create it all in one fell swoop, make it work.

  He said he had needed to see the Franz Hals again—the master’s portraits that had inspired him the previous summer with exactly what he needed to capture the insouciant, troublesome, arrogant beauty of Madame Gautreau—the insufferable minx, in my not very humble opinion.

  He’d taken the night train, telling no one; he planned to come back in three days. He had smiled, thinking of Albert de Belleroche and Paul Helleu—they had gone with him in August, good and true companions. This time, he needed the time to himself. Though winter, he would find warmth and solace in the extensive exhibit of Hals’s works at the Haarlem City Hall.

  And of course, he’d had no idea whatsoever that he—and I—would subsequently become embroiled in an international scandal, a seething tribal and religious conflict involving ancient and modern theft, fraud, revenge—and death.

  Possibly suicide, but more likely, murder.

  Violet Paget

  Il Palmerino

  Fiesole, Italy – 1928

  ONE

  Paris – Tuesday, 11 March 1884

  The package arrived unceremoniously enough, delivered to the door of John’s charming house near Parc Monceau—plain brown wrapping, tied neatly with string, about the size of a volume of Trollope. I happened to be there, up on the studio floor with its large windows and the smell of paint and linseed oil, when Guido, John’s truculent major domo, brought it in with other parcels and envelopes and set it on a side table near where I was sitting.

  Unabashedly curious, I picked it up—there was no return address, which seemed odd.

  “Look at this, Scamps,” I said, calling my old friend by his childhood nickname. I chuckled. “It’s addressed only to ‘The famous portret painter, John Sarjeant, Paris, France’.”

  John put down his paintbrush and quickly cleaned his hands on a small towel hanging from the easel.

  “It’s a wonder it got here at all,” I remarked. “Given the chaos that is the French mail.” I smiled at him. “But clearly, your growing fame made it easier!”

  “Let me see,” he said, coming over to the table. We made a funny pair standing next to each other—John a good foot and more taller than I, brown and bearded and broad-shouldered to my scrawny, bird-like frame, wire spectacles perched on my nose and wrapped in a shapeless black dress—I was trying out the new, daringly avant-garde fashion of not wearing stays, which would normally serve to “perfect” my figure. I had little desire for such perfection.

  I peered closely and made out the tiny letters of the city of origin in the stamped circle. “It’s from Rotterdam, of all places,” I said, handing him the parcel. I looked up at him. “Whom do you know in Rotterdam?”

  He shook his head. “No one I can think of,” he said with a shrug. He turned it over a few times, both of us examining it for marks or writing that weren’t there. He set the package on the table, pried his pocket-knife open, and cut the string, then folded back the brown paper. Nestled in several layers of thick wrapping were some half-dozen or so blackened strips of something like leather or tarred parchment, about four inches high by maybe eight or ten inches long. We let them lay there, uncertain whether to touch them or not—they seemed fragile, possibly sticky with the tarry substance.

  “Is there a note?” I touched the edge of one of the leathery strips to see if anything lay beneath it.

  “Wait, here’s something,” John sai
d. He carefully separated a couple of leaves of wrapping paper where a tiny corner of white paper peeped through. He pulled it out, a thin slip about five by seven inches or so. There was writing on it.

  “It’s stationery from a hotel,” I said, pointing to a modest crest stamped in foil at the top.

  “Hotel Willemsbrug,” John said aloud, then proceeded to read the body of the note.

  “Dear Mssr Sarjeant,” he read. “I shall not forget your kindness to me last month, inviting me to dine with you, and lissening to my sad tales of woe. I hesitated long to burden you with these contents but am in

  great distress for living any longer, and I beg you to take great care of this and your own self whilst they are in your posession. I trust you will know what to do with them, with such friends as you have. Sincerely, with blessings. Moses S, known to you as Aaron S.”

  “What on earth?” I exclaimed, much intrigued. I took the note from his hand. “It’s dated last week, 6 March, that would be Thursday?” I re-read the note to myself, while John was carefully moving the leathery strips with a tentative finger.

  “Is this truly someone you met and had dinner with—in Rotterdam?”

  “Haarlem,” John said. “We had dinner together in Haarlem.” His gaze was unfocused, remembering. “Yes, strange man, foreign, I took him at first for a Russian Jew, but he said he was a Christian, from Jerusalem. Very engaging.”

  We both looked at the paper again.

  Frowning, I tried to catch at something in the far reaches of my mind that seemed familiar—Jerusalem, Moses S, strips of leathery parchment—of course!

  “Good Lord,” I said, shocked and exhilarated. “Do you know what this is?” I pointed to the contents of the package. “What these are?”

  John turned puzzled eyes to mine and shook his head.

  “These are the fraudulent archaeological treasures that made such an uproar, last summer in London, surely you remember?” I peered closely at the leather strips. “See, very faintly? Hebrew letters, I’m sure of it, these are the...” I cast my mind back, and closed my eyes, to better see the headlines in the Times and the Athenaeum. “The Shapira Scrolls! That’s what they called them. It was the only thing people talked about for nearly three months!”

  John seemed baffled. “I don’t recall anything about that, but then, I wasn’t in London last summer. And that wasn’t the name he gave me.” He turned the paper over again. “Ah, I see, yes, he wrote known to you as Aaron S., I remember now, but the last name wasn’t Shapira, it was...” He thought a moment, then had it. “Sampson.” He looked at me. “So the M stands for...?”

  “Moses Shapira!” I said triumphantly. I gazed in awe at the leather strips. “But why in the name of all that’s holy would he send these to you?” I looked at the note again. “He says he thinks you will know what to do, especially with such friends as you have.”

  John had an odd look on his face as he turned to me. “You know, I remember—he was telling me about how he was an agent for the British Museum, in connection with some manuscripts he had sold to them, and I mentioned I had a friend who spent a good deal of time there when she was in London—in short, you!”

  I pondered this curiosity. “And?” I prompted.

  “Well, he asked your name, thinking, I suppose, that he might know you, so I told him your nom de plume—as you’re getting so famous now, you see,” John grinned down at me, and I cuffed him lightly on the arm as he continued.

  “ ‘Wernon Lee?’ he repeated, and again Wernon Lee?” John said it with a slightly Russian accent. “Then he said he recalled actually meeting you and being very impressed.”

  I was astonished, and searched my memory for that encounter, buried as it was by intervening time. Something clicked.

  “Yes,” I said. “It was at the museum itself, at the exhibit they had mounted of two of these strips of leather.” I pointed to the package on the table. “I remember now, there was such a crush of people—but Edward Bond was there—he’s the head librarian at the British Museum—and introduced me to Mr. Shapira.” I shook my head. “We couldn’t have had more than a few minutes’ conversation.”

  John laughed. “A few minutes’ conversation with you, dear Vi, is more than enough to provide an indelible impression!”

  I smiled wryly at him, then grew serious. Suddenly fearful that we could be overheard, I spoke in a lower voice, although that was clearly nonsensical thinking.

  “He is warning you of danger—and he may be in danger himself,” I said. “You must tell me everything he said to you when you dined that night in Haarlem.” I looked again at the note.

  “He says he is in ‘great distress for living any longer’,” I read aloud, and turned to John. “That sounds rather dire. Did he give any such indication when you dined with him? And how exactly did you meet him?”

  John was silent as we walked over and sat on a little sofa near the window, and briefly took in the lovely silver light glinting off the steep roofs of Paris, slick with rain from earlier in the day. John picked up a decanter of sherry—always to hand—and filled two crystal stemmed glasses, handing one to me. I sipped at it gratefully as he started his narrative.

  “I met Mr. Sampson—Shapira, that is—as I was wandering through the Franz Hals rooms at the Haarlem City Hall, where they have an enormous number of their native son’s paintings.” He smiled, a bit ruefully. “I believe he was there mainly to get in from the cold, but he did show a certain appreciation for the portraits.” He sipped his sherry.

  “He was seated on one of the benches in front of the Young Man with a Skull,” John continued, glancing at me. “I dare say you haven’t seen it, but it’s classic Hals, all rich, deep browns and burnt siennas and a flaming orange feather in the boy’s cap.” John warmed to his description and I let him go on. “I’ve always fancied it was Hals’ version of Hamlet when he’s addressing the skull of his father’s jester, what was his name?—Yorick, that’s it, alas poor Yorick. In this painting, the boy has the skull in his left hand, and his right hand is directly pointed toward the viewer—incredible sense of perspective that—but his eyes are glancing to his left—off-stage as it were—as if something has just caught his attention, and his soft red lips have this faint smile just starting...” John was silent a moment, seeing it in his mind’s eye.

  “Distracted from the contemplation of death,” I interposed, “by someone more lively in the wings perhaps?”

  “Yes, exactly so!” John put down his empty glass. “And that’s what started our conversation, you see. As I drew near, Mr. Shapira, not even looking up at me, but clearly sensing that someone was also looking at the painting, spoke to that very point. Look at that little smile, he said.” John sighed. “And it went on from there.” He shifted his position, leaning back into the sofa and facing me more directly.

  “He said he could tell I was an artist,” he said, smiling a little. “Something about my hands, he said, and, I imagine, the way I discussed the Hals portrait with him—not so very hard to discern.”

  “Did he say anything about the scrolls? Then, or when you went to dinner?” I was impatient to hear about them.

  John was silent a few moments, thinking. “He told me about the journeys he had taken into Palestine and Arabia—with Bedouin guides and camels and donkeys—searching out old caves where ancient things—bowls and statues and parchments—had lain hidden under mounds of rocks for centuries.” He shook his head in admiration and, I thought, a little envy. “How I would love to go on such adventures!”

  “And you truly had no idea who he really was?” I took a sip from my glass.

  John snorted mildly. “Why would you think I would know that? You said all the publicity about those scrolls—or whatever”—he waved his hand at the pile of papers on the table—“was last summer, in London.” He shook his head. “You know I don’t pay attention to the newspapers much, and besides, as I said, I wasn’t in London at the time.”

  I put my glass on the table and
leaned forward. “But surely he must have said something that would clarify the note he sent you—why would he be in fear of his life? Why would he warn you to be ‘careful’ while the scrolls are in your possession?” I looked at him with some intensity. “Think, John, he must have said something.”

  My old friend did indeed look as if he were thinking seriously, then a light broke on his handsome face. “Yes! There was something, now that I—at one point, we had gone off to dine by then, as it was late when we met, and I could tell he was rather hungry and down on his luck, you see—so I offered to take him to dinner, saying I was so entertained by his stories and experiences, you see—” He looked at me to see if I understood, and I couldn’t help but smile at his kindness and care for the downhearted man. I nodded.

  “We had at first been offered a table near the front window, but he asked me, very politely, if we might sit farther away, towards the back. Of course I agreed to it, but he apparently felt his request needed some explanation, for he said something like, There has been someone following me, I believe—he was very apologetic—nothing serious, of course, just someone I wish to avoid. I thought it odd, but had forgot about it til now.” He mused a little.

  “I thought that he was very sad, but trying to cover it up with all his talk; I could see, when he didn’t think I was looking, that there was such a tiredness, an abject, almost desperate unhappiness in his face, especially when he talked about his family, particularly his daughter Myriam, back in Jerusalem. Clearly, he missed them very much—he told me how he had his antiquities shop in the Christian quarter of the old city, and in his very backyard was, apparently, the pool where Bathsheba bathed and King David caught sight of her and fell in love.” He paused a moment. “He was a great storyteller—he made that Bible story come to life.”

  John shook himself. “I do hope nothing has happened to him.”

  TWO

  Jerusalem – 1856

  The Jaffa Gate was teeming with pilgrims and traders jostling each other alongside camels and donkeys as they made their way through this ancient entrance to the Old City. The Tower of David loomed ahead, and young Moses Shapira stopped in his tracks to gaze at it. The noonday sun was hot on the soft hat that covered his shaggy head, his beard itched, and his whole body seemed covered in sticky, dusty grime—it had been a long trip from Romania to Palestine—and he looked forward to bathing and sleeping indoors, as he had been promised would await him at the mission of Christ Church, the Jewish-Christian church in Jerusalem. His heart beat fast and felt as if it were growing big in his chest. He thought of his grandfather, buried in old Bucharest among strangers, and choked back his rising emotions. And where was his father? How would he find him among all these people, if indeed he were still alive? The Tower of the ancient king blurred and wavered as he blinked away the tears.