“This is my colleague Dr. Dorion.”
Dorion extended a hand to Allenby, and when she reached out, he took hers and made a gentlemanly bow as if to kiss it. “A pleasure to meet you, cherie.”
Jade recalled how awkward her own first meeting with Dorion had been, and had to suppress the urge to giggle. “We were hoping you could help us with some research.”
Allenby, still smiling in response to Dorion’s charms, spread her hands. “I make no promises, but I’ll help if I’m able.”
“We’d like to have a look at some of the relics in your Religion and Ritual collection, specifically an obsidian mirror and a crystal globe, both of which are believed to have originated in Mexico.”
“You’re talking about the Dee artifacts? I knew that the mirror was an Aztec piece, though I wasn’t aware that the origin of the crystal had been determined. Its provenance has always been a bit dodgy.”
“That’s actually what we’re hoping to establish,” Jade said. She was winging it, but it seemed to working. The obsidian mirror gave her a plausible connection to the Dee artifacts. “Not formally, you understand,” she added hastily. “Not yet at least. We just want to have a quick look.”
“It shouldn’t be a problem, thought I’d rather prefer it if you could wait until after hours. If word got out that I let you have a look at it, there’d be no end of trouble.”
“Trouble?”
Allenby rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t believe how many people want to put their hands all over Dr. Dee’s magical crystal ball. It’s an obsession for them. And not just the kids. I’ve had businessmen, actors, MPs even, offer me thousands of pounds if I’d just let them have it for a night.”
Jade cast a surreptitious glance at Dorion. “Is that so?”
“And the really daft bit is that the diabolical Dr. Dee probably never even touched it.”
Coming on the heels of the previous statement, that revelation hit Jade like a physical blow. “He didn’t?”
Allenby quickly backpedaled. “I’m sorry, I really shouldn’t have said that. You must know how it is with acquisitions. These things pass through a lot of hands before they come to us. The Dee artifacts came from the collection of Horace Walpole, who lived more than a century after Dee. Lord Walpole was a collector, so he could have got that crystal anywhere. We actually found it in the gem collection. We put it with the Dee items because of his reputation for using crystal balls, and who knows? Maybe we got it right.”
Jade pondered this for a moment. It had never occurred to her that the crystal ball in the display might not be the same orb Gil Perez had used to read Dee’s manuscript. “Were there other crystal balls?”
“Quite a few of them, I should imagine. But I know of only one other. It’s in the collection at the Science Museum. It’s my understanding that the provenance of that piece is rather better established than this one.”
“We’re going to have to have a look at that one too.”
“I’ll ring the curator at Science,” Allenby volunteered. “Tell him to expect you.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that very much.” Jade turned to Dorion. “It looks like this is going to be more work that I expected. So much for good omens.”
Two hours later, Jade’s dire forecast took an even more discouraging turn.
With the museum closed for the day, Allenby let them have a look at the artifacts in the Enlightenment Gallery. Jade made a show of examining the authentic Aztec obsidian mirror, which Dee had actually used in his divination rituals, and then inspected the ball of smoky quartz. Whether or not the occult scholar had used it, Jade could not say, but she felt nothing — no sense of distorted space-time, not even the strange tingling of the sphere on Isla del Caño. She dutifully took a few pictures and notes, and did her best to hide her disappointment.
“Any chance of getting a look at the crystal in the Science Museum?”
“Ah, that.” Allenby sighed. “I’m afraid I have rather a bit of bad news. The Dee crystal ball has been removed from the permanent display. It’s now in the archives at Blythe House. Inventory number A127915.” She handed Jade a sheet of paper. “Here. I wrote it down for you. You can take this to Blythe house in the morning and request a viewing.
“I should warn you though,” Allenby went on. “About ten years ago, that item was stolen. The thief smashed the display case, grabbed it and ran. The police later apprehended the thief and recovered the item, but…” She sighed. “There’s some question about the authenticity of the item that was returned.
“Just between you and me, there are some who suspect that the theft was engineered to cover the fact that the original had been replaced by a fake years before. Remember what I told you about people wanting to get their hands on those artifacts? It’s possible that an unscrupulous curator switched it with a fake decades ago, and sold it off to a wealthy occult enthusiast. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened.”
Jade felt her disappointment give way to ire. This was turning into a wild goose chase. There has to be a better way to go about this than bouncing from one museum to the next, asking for permission to fondle John Dee’s crystal balls.
She shook Allenby’s hand and put on her most winning smile. “Thanks so much for following up on that for us, and for letting us inspect these artifacts. I’m curious about one thing: If, as you suggest, the crystal ball from the Science Museum was replaced with a fake…who, in your professional opinion, would be the most likely suspect?”
Allenby seemed astonished at the question. “Why, I haven’t the slightest. I make it a habit to avoid the criminal element whenever possible.”
“Of course,” Jade said quickly. “I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. It’s just…” She recalled something Allenby had said earlier. “Well, you know how it is with acquisitions. You know who the collectors are, and who has a reputation for…questionable dealing.”
“I honestly have no idea.” Allenby still seemed a little ruffled by Jade’s inquiry. “Occult enthusiasts are a different breed than most art collectors. They care nothing for the intrinsic or artistic value of a piece; only whether or not it has,” she waggled her fingers dramatically, “strong juju. They are also very secretive.”
“Just point me in the right direction.”
Allenby sighed. “Well, there is this one fellow…”
According to his website, Gerald Roche was the world’s leading authority on the life and career of Dr. John Dee. He had not merely written the book on Dee, he had written several.
To his legions of devotees, Roche was a visionary and a crusader, piercing the manifold veil of deception that had been thrown over the eyes of the world by a diabolical conspiracy intent on enslaving the masses. His supporters claimed he had accurately predicted the international banking crisis, the near-collapse of the European Union, and even accurately foreshadowed, nearly a decade in advance, groundbreaking theories about quantum physics and the true nature of the universe. His suggestion, which had seemed at the time ludicrous, was that the universe was a holographic projection, like something from Star Trek, controlled by an omniscient computer that had been misidentified as “God.”
According to most reputable news agencies, he was both deluded and dangerous. Roche preached a strange blend of conspiracy theory and New Age mysticism, which included the evidently sincere belief that world leaders, bank executives, and captains of industry were all renegade computer programs he called ‘changelings’ — so named for the demonic faerie creatures of folklore that were substituted for human children — engaged in an ongoing plot to control humanity.