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Margaret bends closer.

“The backing was photographed.”

“Was this section exposed?”

“I'd have to check.”

“The reinforcement strip may have shifted since the last examination. There's an older exhibition label here too.”

Margaret studies the mark.

“Munich?”

“That's what I'm wondering.”

She looks at the open ledger.

“The painting went from Hartmann's dealer in Vienna directly to Sir Edmund.”

“According to this.”

Margaret gives me a patient look.

“That ledger is generally reliable.”

“Generally isn't the same as always.”

“No,” she concedes.

I slide the printed provenance chronology toward her.

“The handwriting doesn't match the later Kensington inventory markings, and M-417 isn't part of the numbering system used when the painting entered this collection. If that M refers to Munich, there may have been another owner, exhibition, dealer, or storage location between Vienna and London.”

“Or it could mean absolutely nothing.”

“It could.”

Margaret smiles slightly.

“You don't sound convinced.”

“I'm not.”

The ledger is valuable evidence. Age alone doesn't make it infallible, particularly when I'm looking at a version compiled years after the acquisition itself. Family inventories often contain clean narratives because clean narratives are easier to maintain. Objects are less cooperative. Frames get stamped. Labels survive. Auction numbers remain in corners nobody thought important enough to scrape away. History leaves residue. My job is to notice it.

I sit at the table and enlarge yesterday's frame photographs on my laptop. The first image doesn't show enough. I move to the next, zooming until the old label fills the screen.

The printed text has deteriorated, but not completely.

“Can you adjust the light?” I ask Margaret.

She reaches for the flexible task lamp. “Better?”

“A little more to the right.”

She shifts it.

“There.”