24. Pentimento

Bonnie returned to work the following Monday in excellent spirits, buoyed by the fun time she'd personally enjoyed at the carnival and by the event's resounding success. While the tally for the funds raised was, as yet, preliminary, Christine had felt justified the previous evening in breaking out a bottle of champagne in celebration of what she fully expected would prove, in the final analysis, the most financially-rewarding carnival in family history. The event had received wide media coverage as well, with all reports being extremely positive. As a result, the Foundation had come in for a large share of good publicity and public recognition. Bonnie had rarely seen her mother more happy.

Bonnie did not think her own mood could possibly improve, but then she crossed the threshold into the workroom and saw that her painting, La Coupe d'amour, had at long last been released from the Imaging Lab and was waiting at her work station, securely clamped to an easel. She crossed the intervening distance in a rather undignified rush, impatient for her first look at the actual, physical object that would be her responsibility for the next few months. It did not disappoint: even in its age-darkened and dirty state, the picture of the young lovers speeding ardently toward the frothy promise of first love charmed and captivated. The fountain's attendants, little cupids with chubby bodies and baby faces, were absolutely darling, too; Bonnie knew she would not soon tire of uncovering the creamy whites and rosy tints of their flesh.

Eventually, she dragged her eyes away from the image, and checked the painting's sides and back. The frame had been removed, revealing the far-cleaner edges of the canvas and, Bonnie was glad to see, a slim line of paint that had retained much of the original color. She would be able to harvest tiny flakes from these sections for chemical analysis. The back of the painting was covered in a fine grit, and would need careful cleaning, but there was, thankfully, no obvious damage to the fabric or the wooden stretchers. Structurally, the painting appeared to have fared very well.

Visual inspection was an important first step, but Bonnie had sufficient experience to know that numerous flaws might yet show up on the x-radiographs. She turned to the Imaging Lab Directory on her computer, and quickly located the newly-created file on La Coupe d'amour. At the tap of a key, a rectangle entirely in grayscale filled her screen, presenting a flattened view of the painting's various layers, from the surface paint, through the underdrawing and the ground all the way to the weave of the canvas and the wood grain of the stretchers. There was such a jumble of lines and shapes, it took a long moment for Bonnie to orient herself, and when she did, she couldn't quite believe her eyes. She zoomed in on the center for a closer look. "Oh, my God!" she breathed out. She reached back blindly for her rolling chair, and, finding it, drew it forward and dropped into it before her knees could quite give out.

At the commotion, Gabby Franklin spared a glance up from tiny rent she was repairing. "What is it? Something wrong?"

Bonnie was too overcome by her discovery to do more than wave wordlessly at the computer screen, and beckon Gabby urgently over. Gabby responded at once, setting her tools down and rounding the long table between them to come up behind Bonnie's shoulder. She peered at the screen obligingly, but then, shook her head, at sea. "What am I looking at?"

"This is the x-radiograph of the painting on the easel," Bonnie explained. She zoomed out again so Gabby could more readily make out the correspondences between the two images. "Here's the fountain with the putti, the forest background, and the central figures. See?"

Gabby looked from the screen to the painting and back again, comparing the one against the other. "All right. I'm with you so far."

"Now, focus on the painting, on the man and woman's faces. They're both in profile, right?"

Gabby nodded. "Plain as can be."

"Okay. Now, look at this." Once again, Bonnie zoomed in on the x-radiograph's center. She leaned back in her chair, offering Gabby a clearer view, and, breathless with anticipation, watched for the more experienced woman's reaction. Gabby scowled at first in concentration, but then, comprehension dawning, her eyes widened in astonishment, and her jaw went slack. Bonnie was nearly weak with nervous relief. "I'm not hallucinating, then?"

"No! Holy cow, Bonnie!" For once, Gabby was awed almost speechless. "That's one hell of a pentimento!"

Bonnie could not have agreed more. The underdrawing revealed by x-radiography showed a marked departure from the surface painting. In the artist's original composition, the man's face had not been turned toward the fountain at all, but back toward his companion, and the highlights on his cheeks and the dark curve of his mouth suggested a joyful, loving expression quite at odds with the avid, steely look he wore in the final version. The cup's placement, too, had been reworked: whereas in the finished painting, the putti appeared to be favoring the man, in the underdrawing, the cup was being offered to the woman, with the man looking on with every indication of complacence. The overall impression was not of two people running side by side in a quasi-competitive sprint, but rather of the man acting as the woman's escort, gladly conceding her the first cupful of elixir in the firm expectation that he would have his share, perhaps from his ladylove's own hands. "This is no minor alteration, Gabby. It changes the painting's meaning."

"I see that, yes," Gabby concurred, thoughtful. "It's wonderful how you get a really clear sense of the artist's process: his original idea, subsequent dissatisfaction, leading to that massive correction. It'd be fascinating to know the reason behind that complete turnabout. As you say, the final story's drastically different."

"Hold that thought, Gabby." Bonnie rolled her chair back and pushed herself up and out. "Dr. Baer has to see this!"

She was practically breathless from her mad dash when she reached his office. The door standing open, she could see Dr. Baer writing at his desk, and announced herself with a sharp rap on the jamb. For an instant, she thought he brightened at the sight of her, but the expression was so fleeting, she could not be sure. "Dr. Baer! La Coupe d'amour's x-radiographs! You'll never believe…! There's a pentimento!"

He motioned her in, his regard one of benign amusement. "Such animation, Miss Booth-Hodgins! For that much excitement, you must have found an overpainted signature at least."

Bonnie was too hepped up to mind the mockery. "As good as!"

He raised skeptical eyebrows at this, but turned to his computer and pulled up the image file. What he eventually made out stunned all the humor out of him. "Good God," he said, when she'd drawn his attention to the greatly revised center. "You weren't kidding!" He zoomed in on the couple, and examined the male figure minutely. "The turn of the head and shoulders, the expression on the face, the placement of the cup…" He panned down to their lower bodies. "And look here: his leg's differently posed, too."

Bonnie leaned in, the better to follow the line Dr. Baer traced with his finger. "You're right. I missed that."

"It's a very clumsy-looking position. Improbable, in fact. The correction is definitely more graceful."

Bonnie's mind had been moving along a different track altogether. She'd remembered Doucette's contention that Antoine Lebrun had undergone a significant personal change around the time of La Coupe d'amour's unveiling: from a painter of sentimental, homey scenes, he had transformed into the cynical chronicler of dalliance, lechery and wantonness. How had her grandfather explained it? That Frenchman got his heart broken somewhere along the line, and wound up a bitter, angry guy. The evidence before her seemed to support Grandpa B's assessment quite neatly: a heart-whole Lebrun, enraptured by a first, deep love, had sketched out the underdrawing, and a love-soured, disillusioned Lebrun had revised and finished the painting. The watershed event Doucette had postulated must have occurred during the creation of La Coupe d'amour, and there was little doubt some woman was behind it.

For the moment, she limited herself to saying, "I see what you mean about the leg, but how do you account for the change in the face? He could have kept the happy face even in profile, but he chose to replace it with an angry look."

"Angry?" Dr. Baer echoed, puzzled.

"That's how it looks to me, how it looked even when I saw the painting hanging in the Louvre, though it's more obvious here. The lowered brow, the glaring eye, the downturned mouth — don't you see it? They're supposed to be lovers, but I've always thought they looked more like rivals, trying to beat each other to the fountain."

"I don't think 'angry' is the right word. Serious, certainly, intent, even determined, but angry? I don't agree. It's not impossible, given the other neoclassical elements, that a subtle reference to Venus and Mars was intended. That would explain his martial air and her radiant beauty."

"I suppose," Bonnie allowed. She continued to find her own theory more compelling, however, and resolved to delve more deeply into the matter. She was already considering enlisting Michel Doucette's help in the investigation when Dr. Baer's voice broke into her thoughts.

"You know what this means, don't you?"

As her mind had been wandering elsewhere, Bonnie took a second to hope that the question was purely rhetorical, but Dr. Baer was watching her, an expectant look in his eye. She was reminded, all too vividly, of past oral exams. Fortunately, a likely answer came to her. "It means, at the very least, that our painting was not produced for the tourist trade, as we suspected at first. A simple copy of an acknowledged masterpiece would show a uniform composition through all the layers."

Dr. Baer nodded approval. "And, at most?"

Bonnie breathed in deeply; she could almost not believe, herself, what she about to propose. "At most, the family history is true: it's a genuine Lebrun."

Their eyes met in a moment of shared wonder and incredulity. Dr. Baer laughed shortly, and shook his head in patent disbelief. "I can't get my head around it. A second Coupe d'amour, or maybe even the first! It could easily be the earlier version." He gestured to the computer screen. "This pentimento's not proof positive, by any means, but it's the beginning of a solid case. Which means, I'm afraid, I'm going to have to notify Dr. Cummings."

Bonnie frowned. What was there to apprehend in sharing their extraordinary find with their department head? "But… it's good news, isn't it?"

"For the Jeff, absolutely. The Institute may well have hit the jackpot. But, for you, Bonnie…" He winced in sympathy. "You can appreciate they're not going to trust an intern, no matter how promising, to take lead on conserving so valuable a painting."

"Oh!" She sank down onto the nearest chair, felled by disappointment. She knew, rationally, that she ought to have anticipated such a turn of events, but she'd been too wrapped up in the initial excitement to foresee the cost to herself. "Of course. That makes sense."

"I'm sorry. Really, I am. I know you've already invested a lot of yourself in this project. If you want, I can assign you another painting, or I can lobby for you to have some role on whatever team is put together to treat La Coupe d'amour. It might only be research, or documentation, or it could be more. It all depends of who's in charge."

Bonnie was too powerfully drawn to the mystery at the heart of La Coupe d'amour to simply let it go. "I'd like to keep working on Lebrun, if at all possible. It doesn't matter in what capacity."

"All right, then. Good. I'll see what Dr. Cummings has to say about it, and get back to you as soon as possible. In the interim, I don't see any harm in getting the canvas back cleaned."

Bonnie got to her feet, and attempted a smile. "I'll take care of it." And then, she promised herself, as time allowed, she would go digging into the identity of the Jezebel who had ruined Antoine Lebrun's life.