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cleaning. Patrick, Leland cleaned your Asmore. How many cotton balls did you say you used to get rid of that miserable shellac?”
    “Three thousand one hundred and twenty-seven,” Leland said, “give or take a few.”
    “That was only the first problem we had to overcome. Termites did such a job on the strainers that when you pressed on the wood it crumbled and turned to dust, and there was all that tunneling, more evidence they’d been there. It’s a miracle they didn’t eat the painting.”
    “They wouldn’t dare,” Patrick said.
    “Sure they would,” she said. “Termites will eat most anything they encounter. We’ve seen valuable paintings that were eaten to bits. Termites track upward from the soil munching away as they climb. In the wall of a house they devour the wood and the wallpaper and then whatever happens to be hanging on the wall. Paintings don’t stand a chance.”
    “Tell them what else,” said Leland from his perch.
    “Well, roaches love to eat paintings, too. Actually, they love the rabbitskin glue and wheat starch on the reverse of paintings that have been previously lined. Patrick, your dinner party the other day was nothing in the feast department compared to some of the meals I’ve seen roaches enjoy. Rodents like glue, too. People set rat traps with cheese, but they’d get more takers by pouring glue on the traps. There’s a world-famous antique store on Royal Street whose name I’d better not divulge. One morning the owner called and said he’d discovered that his most valuable painting had a huge hole in it. He couldn’t understand how this had happened. The painting was secure on the wall and hadn’t been moved in weeks, and the damage wasn’t a tear or a rip that would indicate it had fallen against anything. No, there was a jagged hole, as if it had been cut out with the serrated edge of a knife. The painting was a huge thing worth about a hundred thousand dollars. When we moved it to the studio Leland and the girls and I studied it under a loupe. You could see the teeth marks where a rat had supped on it. He’d come in from behind and eaten out a hole six inches in diameter, and the hole was in the most unpleasant of places.”
    “Unpleasant?” said Patrick, in the exact moment when it occurred to him which part of the anatomy she meant. He looked down at the spot on his own person. “Thank you for that story, Rhys. Thank you ever so much. Of course I won’t be able to sleep tonight fearing a rat assault. You know those athletic cups baseball players fit into their jock straps to protect against stray balls? From here on out I sleep in one of those.”
    “Sometimes I can’t get over the problems we’re asked to fix,” Rhyssaid. “Your Asmore is nothing in comparison. As for the termite damage, we ended up replacing the strainers with stretcher bars made of poplar. Also, we played it safe and lined the burlap with Belgian linen and consolidated the painting to prevent against future losses. By consolidate I mean we massaged the surface with a mixture of beeswax and damar resin to readhere loose paint pieces and flakes. Joe did the retouch.”
    “Did you have time to make a frame for it?”
    “Yes. And you’re going to love what we did. It’s really beautiful: twenty-three-and-three-quarters-karat gold leaf with a gesso ground and yellow bole. Joe gets credit for that, too. He did the water gilding. And he carved the moulding by hand, working from a design that was popular with the American Impressionists.”
    “Sounds expensive,” Patrick said.
    “It’s
damned
expensive,” Rhys answered. “But don’t think about the money yet. You’ve taken the most important step by electing to conserve something that potentially could change your life. Even more significant, you’re doing a good thing. We don’t just patch old paintings here. We give them new life. We save them so that future generations can enjoy them. I’m proud of you, Patrick.”
    We followed