CHAPTER THREE
Wednesday, 13 May The Ashmolean Museum
There was a brisk traffic in stolen antiquities around the turn of the century, as a number of wealthy industrialists attempted to use the patina of antique treasures to burnish their newly acquired wealth and bolster their sense of belonging to the aristocracy.
Lord Charles Sheridan stood at the door of the Ashmolean’s Knossos exhibit, just off the main gallery, and looked around the room, shaking his head in disbelief. It was overwhelming, this immense collection of pottery, stone, and metal artifacts, all of it dug up on the island of Crete, where Arthur Evans, the Ashmolean’s chief curator, had recently uncovered a remarkable Minoan palace. It looked as if, Charles thought, the entire contents of the palace were being crated up and transported, bit by bit, to England.
Charles admired Evans’s archaeological work and hoped that the new site would open the way toward a better understanding of a hitherto unknown civilization, whose princes had once thought themselves the lords of the earth. But this wholesale exportation of artifacts-Well, some critics argued that it was little more than thievery, just another example of the British Empire’s habit of pilfering the priceless treasures of other cultures, and on the whole, Charles had to agree with them. If the precious antiquities could be safeguarded against the attacks of time and human greed, Crete’s ancient treasures had better be left in Crete, rather than put on display in an English museum.
If Charles had thought about it, he would also have had to admit that this was rather an odd point of view for a British peer. He was, after all, the fifth Baron Somersworth, patrician owner of a sprawling family estate and country house in Norfolk and holder of a hereditary family seat in the House of Lords. He should have been entirely committed to maintaining and preserving, at all costs, the long and proud traditions of his landowning family and governing class. He should have been wholeheartedly and unreservedly delighted to see the British Empire extending its influence to the far corners of the globe and acquiring the treasures of ancient civilizations to burnish its own.
But these were not traditions from which Charles took any comfort. He had the feeling, as Joseph Chamberlain had remarked in the House of Commons, that the center of power was shifting, the old order giving way to a new, founded on democratic rather than aristocratic principles. In time, he suspected, the landed aristocracy of England would find itself entirely anachronistic, every bit as extinct and forgotten as the unremembered kings and queens of ancient Minoa, and exactly as dead and dusty as the dinosaurs.
“Sheridan!” a voice exclaimed. “So glad to see you! And what do you think of our little exhibit, eh? Quite a sight, is it not?”
Charles turned. The man striding energetically toward him, hand extended, was John Buttersworth, the Ashmolean’s Curator of Classical Antiquities.
“Little exhibit?” Charles managed a chuckle. “I must say, Buttersworth, you and the museum have outdone yourselves this time.”
“Indeed.” Buttersworth beamed. “And there’s more to come, Sheridan, much, much more. The number of artifacts Evans is uncovering is simply astounding, and each of them is a treasure in its own right.” His smile became broader, the light glinting off his gold-rimmed spectacles. “And it’s all to be shipped right here, every bit of it. A real feather in the Ashmolean’s cap, if I may be permitted to say so. The museum shall be acknowledged throughout the world as the chief repository of the glories of Minoan Crete.”
“I’m sure,” Charles said dryly. There was no point in confiding his feelings about the exhibit to Buttersworth, who could neither understand nor share them. Instead, he raised the question that had been his real purpose for coming to the Ashmolean.
“I haven’t been upstairs to look,” he said, “but I take it that the Warrington Hoard has been restored to its proper place.”
“Indeed it has,” Buttersworth said warmly. “I must admit that we would have been lost without your assistance, Sheridan. To work through the usual channels would have been to risk scandal, and that was out of the question. I was utterly at my wits’ end when you came to tell me that you’d got word of the Hoard.”
By “the usual channels,” of course, Buttersworth was speaking of the Oxford police. Charles understood the museum’s reluctance to involve them in the theft of a major holding, such as the Warrington Hoard. While local constabularies were adequate to the tasks of suppressing street crime and preserving order, they lacked the tools and finesse required to perform complex investigations. And once the police were brought into a case, all hope of confidentiality flew out the window.
This was a special problem where adverse publicity-“scandal,” as Buttersworth put it-might cause just as much damage as the theft itself. The museum’s reputation would have been irretrievably ruined if the public had got wind of the theft of the Warrington Hoard, causing prospective donors to think twice before they trusted the Ashmolean with their precious collections. If the museum couldn’t safeguard the Hoard, how could it protect other acquisitions?
The Hoard-a dozen major pieces of fine jewelry and tableware, perhaps the most exciting cache of Celtic gold and silverwork ever unearthed in England. It had been one of the Ashmolean’s most popular exhibits until some six months before, when the museum had abruptly closed it-for cleaning and conservation, officials said. The truth was that the Hoard had been stolen. Suspicion had fallen on a recently hired char woman, who, it appeared, possessed a remarkable talent as a screwsman (or in this case, a screws-woman) and had made copies of all the necessary keys. Charles Sheridan, known to his friends and associates as an amateur sleuth of some reputation, had been instrumental in the Hoard’s recovery. He felt he could hardly claim any credit in the business, however, since his involvement had been entirely fortuitous.
It was an interesting story. Mr. Rupert Dreighson of Castlegate Hall, some fifteen miles from Oxford, had retired from a profitable career as the owner of a string of drapers’ shops in Liverpool and Manchester and, now that he could afford such things, had become an enthusiastic collector of Celtic antiquities. In his passionate search for treasures to add to his collection, Mr. Dreighson had suggested to antiquities dealers that if a hoard should happen to turn up, he would be willing to pay a handsome price for it. Of course, everyone knew that such a transaction would have to take place on the wrong side of the law, for one who dug up a cache of gold and silver objects was required to turn over everything to the Crown. But these days there were a great many collectors who possessed more money than scruples, and the legalities were frequently disregarded.
In the event, Mr. Dreighson was delighted when an unknown lady-a well-bred woman of quiet demeanor and modest dress-called upon him at Castlegate Hall one day and offered to sell him an antique golden earring, with the suggestion that if he were interested, several similar pieces might be available, the price to be negotiated. The earring’s workmanship being quite extraordinary and Dreighson, being confident that it was without a doubt the real thing, handed over the money without demur, expressing an enthusiastic interest in the remainder of the collection.
Within a few days, he received a letter describing the pieces in detail and quoting a price for the whole. While the amount was high enough to raise Dreighson’s eyebrows, he was not the sort of man to quibble when it came to something he wanted as badly as he wanted this. Arrangements were made, the required amount was deposited, in cash, in the designated London bank, and the collection-a dozen pieces of great beauty and rarity-was safely settled in Dreighson’s capacious private vault.
And there it might have safely remained, if Rupert Dreighson had not been a braggart. He could not resist the temptation of showing off his newly acquired treasures to a friend from London, who had come for a weekend’s fishing to Castlegate Hall. A few days later, the friend happened to bump into Lord Charles Sheridan, and casually mentioned that a chap in Oxfordshire had privately got his hands on something rather remarkable, which-dash it
