It was that – ‘the value of the painting’, as if it needed repeating – that was most overbearingly pressed upon her. It was an artwork like no other, the collector explained, as he laboriously, reluctantly, and over the course of several hours, handed the oil painting to the conservationist. She nodded politely every few minutes. He seemed nervous to part with the thing.

It wasn’t much to look at, as the collector deprecatingly – perhaps a touch defensively – conceded. A fairly plain, oil-on-canvas representation of a nice day. Cheap oil on cheap canvas, at that. A bright sun, some slapdash trees and their misaligned shadows, people standing gaily at the edge of a lake. Nothing reflected in the water, undisturbed by ripples, ducks, or debris. Only a simple blue expanse. On the face of it, an utterly worthless endeavour.

‘But, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, Louise, it’s never just about the face of a painting,’ the collector continued. A paternal left hand still gripped the frame. ‘If a painting is expensive – and I assure you again, this one is – the value always lies within, or without, or in the name of the artist, or in the circumstances of composition.’

The collector almost removed his hand from the frame to adjust his tie, but thought better of it, and put down his umbrella to free his right hand for the task.

Louise invited the inevitable elaboration. ‘What were the circumstances of this painting?’ she asked.

‘Well,’ he began, proudly embarking upon the story, tie properly straightened for the occasion. ‘It’s a very old painting. The date is written here, see.’ He paused, as if freshly stunned by the sheer age of the artifact. ‘Hundreds of years, this thing has survived. It has outlived everything. War, theft, disaster. Fire. Throughout the 20th century, it was shipped back and forth across the Atlantic, changing hands, drifting from collection to collection. In 1945, it even survived the sinking of a ship. Allegedly in 1912, too, though I’m not so sure about that.’ He smiled. ‘But when it was painted, all those centuries ago, it was by the hand of an artist with a royal connection. A friend to the King of England himself. Like most of his art, it was painted as a gift to the king. But this one… is the sole survivor.’

Louise looked at the date again and reeled through a half-remembered roster of kings and queens. Oh, that king. Her own eyebrows betrayed a moment of genuine interest, which the collector seemed to have been watching for. He laughed.

‘I know. Rather exciting, isn’t it? That this very item once belonged to that crowned ladies’ man.’ The collector paused again, perhaps imagining himself as the monarchal playboy. ‘Therein lies the worth,’ he said eventually. ‘It was painted for the king and kept amongst the rest of the artist’s work, in the royal collection. And then, as you might remember from your history lessons, the entire collection was burned. A tragic mistake by the king himself, stumbling through one night with a bare candle. All was believed lost. But years later, by some miracle, as the king lay on his deathbed – no doubt distraught by the loss of his collection – this lonely piece was recovered! The artist himself brought it to the bedside of his dying friend. A miracle,’ he repeated. ‘And perhaps it was. Addressing its survival, the artist claimed some religion in the image. Perhaps Jesus is just over the horizon of the lake,’ he added jocularly.

Louise scanned the painting again, trying to divine any hint of the Christlike. Not much to see.

‘The king is said to have reacted with a great, final fit of emotion upon seeing the painting again,’ the collector resumed, ‘and he died with a final wish on his lips: that it be buried alongside him. Luckily for us, however, it was snatched at the last minute by some wily and disloyal cohort – perhaps the artist himself – and thus it has survived down the decades, and fallen into my fortunate hands.’

‘And mine, too,’ Louise said, gently trying to pry it from him. He really did not want to let go. He carried on talking.

‘As I say, the painting itself is really quite unremarkable. Observe these strokes, here, and here… and, heaven forbid, here. Quite a mess. The whole thing is really rather amateur. The artist was supposedly much better with a pencil than with a brush. We’ll never know since everything else burned. Perhaps it was something behind this particular picture, as it were, that meant so much to the King, and aroused his passion in those last moments. Something in the intent of the artist.’

He seemed to muse for a few seconds, before snapping back to the present moment, and the small matter of the costly restoration that had brought him to Louise’s studio.

‘But, whatever it was that the King saw in this painting, the fact that he saw something translates into quite some worth in the present day.’ He patted euphemistically at his wallet and raised his not-inconsiderable eyebrows. ‘And so I trust you’ll take great care with it.’

‘I take the exact same care with all my commissions: the utmost.’ It was a line from her website, but she guessed that he hadn’t read that far.

‘Splendid. But if I’m particularly happy with the result, I wouldn’t resent having another zero added to my fee.’ His eyebrows hovered in position.

She knew that he was trying to bribe her into taking extra care over this painting, but it was no use. She really did apply the same meticulous prudence to every case; from priceless royal collections, weathered with great age, to the sentimentally-retained doodles of somebody’s dead grandparent, damaged with spilled milk. To her, they were all worth this alleged ‘extra’ care.

She nodded in conspiratorial agreement. ‘I’ll do my very best with this one.’

His eyebrows sighed with relief and returned to their normal seats. The collector smiled and finally took his fingertips from the edge of the picture.

‘I want to keep the whole thing intact as far as possible,’ he said. ‘It was assembled this way by the artist himself.’

The framed painting was affixed to a wooden backboard. These constructions were always tricky. The canvas had begun to stretch and wrinkle with the expansion and contraction of the wood over the years.
   
‘I’ll do what I can. If I have to take it apart to put it back together again, I will, but you won’t be able to tell. I’ll try to retain all the original materials. The painting itself, of course, will be absolutely fine. The frame, too. I’ll clean it all up.’
   
‘Thank you,’ the collector said, taking up his umbrella and gazing at the painting, as though bading silent farewell to a loved one departing forever on a train. ‘I’ll be back to pick it up in a week, as agreed. Take care – of the painting as much as of yourself.’ He smiled, and finally left the studio, clicking open the umbrella as he disappeared into the rain.
   
‘Right, then,’ Louise said to the painting, as the tinkle of the bell concreted his departure. ‘This won’t hurt a bit.’

She started by cleaning the painting – the simplest part of the process. With wordless music playing, gently she drew solvent-soaked cotton pads and brushes across the image, brightening every stroke of the artist’s own handiwork, stripping away the sticky centuries of smoke, dust, and grime. With the colours restored, it did actually become mildly impressive, and she regarded it for a while before preparing the painting for the removal of its wooden backboard. It was too warped to remain as it was.
   
Some hours later, swaddled now in protective layers of tissue, looking like some sort of rectangular intensive care patient, the painting was delicately turned over, and Louise began to dismantle the thick wooden slab. Within minutes she realised the near-impossibility of the task. The artist had clearly never meant for the canvas and the wood to be separated. They were almost fused, like skin on muscle. It was going to be a painful process.
   
It was also time-consuming. Over the course of the week, Louise rang the collector twice to delay the pickup (and to reassure him that things were going perfectly well, and that, yes, the restored colours were radiant). She didn’t need to tell him that she’d almost torn the painting five times trying to lift it from the wood. That was the sort of thing that made a wealthy collector fret.
    
It was at midnight, to the serendipitous jubilance of ‘Ode to Joy’, that the canvas was finally lifted from the wood. With life-affirming relief, Louise placed the separate elements at either end of the table, and sat back in her chair, smiling, eyes closed, pretending to conduct the orchestra with a ruler and scalpel. The music played to the end, and, with a triumphant exhalation, she finally returned her attention to the painting. It had survived the ordeal.
   
It survived the Titanic, she reminded herself. It was bloody invincible.
  
Having put the painting into temperature-controlled storage for the night, Louise was about to do the same for the backboard when she noticed something; a small piece of paper, folded and tucked into a seam in the wood. There were words on the paper, just decipherable.
 
With gloved hands, she carefully extracted this hidden page and drew the light of the lamp over it. Her laptop stuck on repeat, ‘Ode to Joy’ was playing again, and she unfolded the paper with deliberate, breath-held slowness until it was opened flat on the work surface. Her eyes widened with surprise, as only usually happens in cartoons.
    
Well, she thought. He really was better with a pencil.
  
She hid the secret drawing. She completed the restoration. The brightened painting was reunited with its backboard, fixed, and secure for the next few centuries. The collector came by, shaking his umbrella at the door, to retrieve his beloved relic.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he cried. Louise had put on a small exhibition, revealing the painting to him by way of an easel and a velvet curtain. ‘The colours! They bring it to life. My god. And to think, this is how it looked when the King clapped his dying eyes on it. I’ve never been more glad that it avoided his grave. Just imagine, that he wanted to conceal this thing from the world!’
   
‘It’s inconceivable,’ Louise said.
  
She took the collector’s fee and allowed him to keep the easel, as a gift.
   
‘I had a lot of fun with this one,’ she said.
   
Ready to leave, the collector looked lovingly at the case in his hands. ‘You’ve done an extraordinary job. Amazing, what a proper clean can do. Just imagine,’ he repeated. ‘That foolish old King might have destroyed the whole thing, burning it in that clumsy fire or taking it to his grave. What on earth could have possessed him?’ He patted the case. ‘Well, we needn’t worry. Thank heavens the artist assembled it so securely. It might never have survived otherwise. Such a shame there’s only the one piece.’ He patted the case softly and smiled. ‘Take care, Louise.’ He tipped his hat – for he wore a bowler hat this time – and dashed out through the rain to his waiting car.

Louise waved from the door, and, as the collector vanished into traffic, turned the sign around so that it read ‘Closed’ to the outside world. She went into her office and unlocked her desk drawer. She removed a small case. Inside lay the folded paper. The secret drawing Just one more look. She couldn’t risk damaging it. Its legitimacy would be easy to prove. She put it carefully on the desk and flattened it out.
  
The shading, the outlines, the precise smudges; it had all been perfectly preserved, unextracted until now from its place between the canvas and the wood. The figures of the artist and of the King, beautifully lit. And the caption: In Flagrante.
 
On the other side, something of a love letter to the artist, signed by the King himself. At the bottom, an unheeded instruction to ‘please destroy this letter’.
 
Louise theorised. The artist received the letter from his royal companion, drew this interesting picture on the back, and then concealed it inside his rather pedestrian oil painting. Why? For blackmail, perhaps? Whatever the reason, when the king found out that the damning letter still existed, and was hidden in one of his paintings, he staged an accident and burned the entire collection, rather than risk its discovery. When the artist reappeared at his deathbed, proudly displaying the surviving, dangerous piece, the failing mind of the old monarch made one final grasp: bury it with me.
 
That dying old monarch hadn’t counted, however, on the presence of a thief at his funeral; nor on the work of a particularly talented art conservationist hundreds of years in the future, in a small studio in East London with ‘Ode to Joy’ stuck on repeat. Louise felt a small thrill, a connection across history; she was the only person since the King and the artist themselves to know why the painting had been so valuable.
    
She put the illuminating sketch back in its case, and the case back in the drawer. She wondered about it. She wondered how long to wait before announcing the discovery of a second work by the artist; and one of such an intimate nature. Historians – art and actual alike, she thought cruelly – were in for a surprise.
   
And, more importantly, she wondered just how much to ask for, when selling it back to the wealthy collector with the secretly worthless oil painting. And just how much to charge when it came to restoration. She played the music and began to count out zeroes.

– Thomas Lawrance

Author’s Note: After watching a fascinating video about the restoration of a centuries-old painting, I began to imagine the secrets that might be hidden inside such an object.