'Stop that,' I told her irritably.
Margaret was twisting a pewter burette. On a good day it turns my stomach. You can imagine what it does to me on a bad one.
'Hello, Lovejoy.' She hesitated. 'I'm seeing if it's genuine.'
'Trust its appearance,' I growled. 'Why torture it just because you're ignorant?'
'Charming,' she said, but she had no right to get nettled.
Dealers get me sometimes. We're all as bad. Pewter's the most maligned, crippled and assaulted of all antiques. Dealers who reckon to show they know a thing or two twist pewter, actually grab hold and twist it hard. When you do it hard enough it screams, screams from its poor little soul. Well, wouldn't you? Really tears you apart. It's a terrible, wailing scream like a child in intractable pain. Only pewter does it. Dealers, the bums, think it's clever. People do similar sorts of things to jade. Ignorant collectors say that if you can scratch it with a key it isn't genuine, which is rubbish. Any reasonable jewellers will give you (free) a card showing Mohs' Scale of hardness for semi-precious stones, which tells you al] you need to know about what can scratch what. There's no excuse for sample ignorance. Never be cruel to antiques, folks. They've done nothing to you, so don't go about massacring them. And pewter's got a fascinating history. Of course, it can be very difficult to collect, though you can still buy good ore-Conquest specimens. It was actually forbidden in churches at the Council of Westminster after 1175 AD, but the French allowed it by their Council of Nimes, 1252, so there's plenty around, and eventually our lot saw the light again. More sense in those days.
I took the little wine vessel from Margaret. It looked like the mark of Richard Marbor, 1706 - a Yeoman and therefore fairly well recorded. Good old Henry VIII took a little time off from attending to Anne of Cleeves in 1540 to encourage the York pewterers to record their touch-marks on their wares, so a lot is known. I told her all this, and added that there's no reason to go throttling these delicate antiques when you can learn twice as much by reading and just looking.
'Tea?' Margaret offered by way of thanks.
'Er, no, thanks.' Margaret's tea's a legend among survivors. 'Who's best with Roman coins round here, beside Cooney?'
Cooney's a mad half-Spanish dog-breeder who lives down on the marshes. He's been divorced six times and he's only twenty-eight.
'There's him,' she said, 'and Pilsen. And that magistrate.' She counted on her fingers.
'And that overcoat man.'
We have a few eccentrics hereabouts. The man with the overcoats is a local living legend. Like Charles Peace he's rumoured to have a fatal attraction for women, which of course may just be him boxing clever, it being well known that women are oddly attracted by such stories. He collects overcoats and Stuart coins. The magistrate is an elderly man who fought at Jutland or somewhere. He's hammered Edward I silver coins.
Pilsen's a dealer with a one-room lock-up shop on the Lexton village road. He makes kites and has religion.
'Thanks, love.' I rose to go.
'Lovejoy.' Here it came. I'd watched her working up to it inch by inch. 'What's it about?
You aren't usually uneasy.'
'I'm not uneasy,' I said.
'Anything I can do?'
'Look. If I wanted to find out how somebody died,' I asked, taking the plunge, 'how would I go about it?'
'The doctor, I suppose. But he won't tell unless you're the next of kin.'
'What about Somerset House?'
'Better the local registration office. That's nearer.'
I gave her a kiss and departed.
The woman at the registration office was helpful. Poor old Bexon's death certificate showed he'd passed away without causing the slightest bother or suspicion. Nothing out of the ordinary to hold up wills or bequests. She was pleased at how tidy everything was.
I stood at the bus stop thinking so hard I almost forgot to get on when it finally came.
CHAPTER IV
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I LIVE in this cottage, often alone, on the edge of a village a few miles from our main town. There's a garden, a copse, blackthorn hedges good for purple sloe gin at Michaelmas, and a muddy path I keep meaning to macadam over. The village lane begins at my gate. Further down there's just a path to the river's shallow watersplash at Fordleigh. I always set my break-in alarm because we dealers are forever being burgled. It has to be flicked before unlocking the door or Police Constable Geoffrey, our village Sherlock, gets hauled out of his tomato-ridden greenhouse to pedal over and tell me off again for causing false alarms.
Once in the cottage I was at a loose end. I just couldn't get going. Everybody has a blue patch now and then, I suppose. I'm normally a buoyant sort, but I couldn't settle down to anything. It rained for an hour or two about four, so I washed this week's socks and swept up. The vacuum was on the blink so I did without. The village's one shop had pasties in. I got two for supper and some tomatoes.
Normally I read over a meal. This evening I found myself staring at the same page, reading a paragraph of Dean Inge's essays over and over. Poor old Bexon kept coming into my mind. A forger, but apparently an honest one. Why else that revealing yellow?
So he was honest, the poor innocent. But those Roman golds. Popplewell said they were genuine. The labels said mostly Nero's reign. There were even one or two showing the babes being suckled by the wild she-wolf, Romulus and Remus. Rome's originals. And the famous arched 'DE BRITANN' gold of Claudius the God. Well, all right, but there never was such a thing as a Roman province of the Isle of Man. Everybody knows that. They simply
