'I'm not stupid.'
We chuckled. Any intruder hoping to steal Cedric's precious forger's ingredients would be baffled by Green Vitriol and Aleppo Originate (only ancient names for ferrous sulphate and galls from oak trees). It's Cedric's game. For a few minutes we chatted about Hebborn, the modern English forger who used rotting acorns instead of galls and did pretty well. Then Cedric got down to it.
'Can I suggest bistre, Lovejoy? I have ancient paper. I could split a sheet, though that would cost dearly.'
Gulp. That warning was grave. Cedric was never cheap. Splitting a sheet of heavy ancient linen-rag paper is a fearsome risk, because you might ruin the priceless antique sheet altogether. If it's done just right, you finish up with two sheets instead of one.
You then earn a fortune from both. It's done with two pieces of heavy felt and starch paste. See a true forger like Cedric do it, you can keep your Beethoven symphonies.
They're not half so beautiful.
'Has to be, Ced. Aye, bistre's okay.'
This is nothing more than soot in solution, used as a kind of drawing ink by the Old Masters with their reed and quill pens. You can still buy bistre, but I like Cedric's. He burns willow, beech or pine branches out on the beach, and uses the charcoal and caught soot (on glass plates, incidentally, if you do it yourself). It sounds easy but it's not. He also makes his own quill and reed pens in the old way. God knows who'll have his skill when he finally pops his clogs.
'I'll use powdered pumice stone for lacing the paper, Lovejoy.'
This is an old way of dressing paper before doing a drawing. The ancients used it. I arranged a time to meet in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, where I would do the burglary for Bernicka, said ta and left before he could ask me for a deposit. He might have summoned Elk to enforce his request.
The rest of the night was spent peacefully, meaning lying awake, sweating at what I was drifting into.
9
IT ISN'T ONLY love that fails to recognize its own significance. It's everything. For instance, a theatre in the USA introduced the talkies twenty years before they actually caught on. Cameraphone opened one Monday in 1907. Despite the appeal of Victrola records scratching out audible sounds to match the film's action, the show closed on the Tuesday. It happens in antiques, too. The immortal Turner – greatest artist ever –
had to argue with his housekeeper every morning when she brought out his palette because she was eternally stingy with his blue. Lapis lazuli cost the earth, so she eked it out in miserable amounts, driving the maestro to distraction.
Sorry for the digression. I'm making excuses, on account of the terrible thing that happened. Not realizing love is a flaw in a person.
St Peter's church hall stands at the top of North Hill. Tinker, my barker, sleeps in the churchyard on good nights. He tries to break in if it's raining, but Christian charity excludes vagrants and other poor. When he's sloshed, he kips in some antique shop and tells the police, should they bother to leave their snooker game and respond to the security alarm, that he's fallen asleep in situ after making a delivery. He was nowhere, which worried me. He's got a cough like thunder so I couldn't miss him. A group of folk huddled in the doorway as I entered the churchyard. The actors I'd phoned Tina for.
Dunno what it is about burgeoning youth, but they all look so blinking tired. In their teens they somehow become exhausted, bags under their eyes, drained of energy.
Those that aren't skeletal are bulbously heavy, all floppy thighs. A bloke I know reckons he can date old films by merely looking at the body fat on the extras. Some smoked thin hand-rolled scraggly fags.
'Wotcher. Are you the actors, please?'
'That's us,' a bloke said, ready for a fight. 'I live in the park.' He was the scrawniest of the bunch, his clothes fraying, as if he'd left home and never washed since. 'I'm Larch.
Classical and Stanislavski acting.'
'Larch.' Evidently a tree guardian from remote forests. 'Come in, please.'
'Tina told us wait outside.'
'Did she, now.'
Drill halls and church halls are the same the world over, musty, dusty, rusty, with the dank aroma of unswept floors. Tina was lazing on the stage while some bloke desperately urged everybody once more into the breach dear friends. She was reading a catalogue, casually shouted, 'Next, please.' The man, thirties and nervy, retired in shame. I felt sorry for him.
'Give me your modern piece,' Tina told a woman who stepped forward.
'It's an Oscar Wilde, Lady Bracknell—'
'Get on with it.'
The woman was weak, but gamely tried to be the frosty dowager. I kept quiet. Tina chatted to me, spoke ill of performers in general and ignored the auditioner.
'What's your name, love?' I asked as the actress finished.
'Wilhelmina. I trained at—'
'You're hired,' I told her. 'Where'd you get your shawl?'
'Shawl? My grandmother.' She picked it up from where she'd cast it before her audition.
I lusted force nine at her garment, my breathing quickening. I felt hot and giddy. Her old shawl was worth a mint.
For in the Himalayas there lives the chiru, a long-horned antelope that's fast petering out. An ancient breed, it has made a few ghastly mistakes. One was to flourish in Tibet, a place desperate for hard currency. Another clanger was to be covered by the finest grade of wool on earth. The importance? Tibetan shawls made of the chiru's neck wool are the most desirable known to mankind. A wrap-around shahtoosh, a kind of shawl, costs a new motor. But a genuine antique Tibetan shawl (meaning over fifty years old, since Customs and Excise cynically decided that that duration defined antiques for all eternity) will cost you an average house plus a round-the-world cruise.
Wilhelmina's garment was a truly ancient shawl made of chiru neck wool. As she shelled it to start her piece, it had folded like silk. No other wool does that. I've only ever seen two genuine shahtooshes, both in a boot fair. Caution: don't import any, no matter how cheaply you can get them while trekking through Asia. The whole world has banned the sale of this poor antelope's wool, so it's clink for you as you reach Customs.
Tip: the occasional shahtoosh is still around. You can still find a stray shawl. If you're in doubt, there's an important test. Take off your wedding ring and try to pass the long shawl through the ring. If it goes through without a single crease, buy it. Remember history? Back in the halcyon days, the Victorians did what they jolly well liked, for wasn't Mother Nature infinitely generous? And, the Edwardians reasoned, the Almighty surely must intend to provide Planet Earth's largesse for ever, in His perfect world. Like ivory, and like those stuffed animals that we admired so much that we made them extinct. Poor chiru. Poachers nowadays hunt the chiru with jeeps, gun them down in the headlights, then shear the corpses. They make aphrodisiac powder from the horns.
The sale route is Hong Kong to London's Mayfair. (Incidentally, what exactly did Scotland Yard do with those twelve dozen priceless shahtooshes they collared so triumphantly not long ago ...?)
We're a rotten species.
'Am I?' Wilhelmina asked, stunned.
'Lovejoy!' Tina fumed, flinging her catalogue down. 'She's not!'
I don't know why, but I felt rotten. Maybe the thought of all those dead antelopes. I mean, for Christ's sake, pashmina wool from Tibetan goats is nearly as fine, so why don't we use that instead and leave the poor sodding chiru alone? Whatever it was, Tina took one look at me and shut up.
'I'm in a hurry, Tina. Do it fast, you're in. I'll need you and three others. Bring that Larch bloke, Wilhelmina, and one other bloke.'
'Right, Lovejoy. What's wrong?'
Maybe I should have tried to buy Wilhelmina's shawl for a groat, but something was needling me, dunno what. I spoke quietly to Wilhelmina in a corner of the faded old assembly room, and told her about her granny's garb, chiru, the wool, the lot.