“What was so funny, Duncan?”
For a little he said nothing. We passed between two silent stone buildings, leaving left the carefully tended forecourt.
“Well, y’see, Ian,” he said finally, “it pleases Miss Elaine to needle Shona about Scottishness.”
“And everybody else about their own particular fancy, eh?”
“Maybe,” he said drily. ’Yon’s my wee factory.” We paused outside a low stone barn, slate roof tethered by large flat slabs against winter storms.
“Is that what Elaine needles you about?” I asked.
“O’course.” His honesty was disarming. I began to like Duncan McGunn. “And my Michelle about being Belgian.”
“The question is why,” I prompted.
“Not so, Ian.” He did things to a padlock to let us in. “The question is what will Miss Elaine find irks you, isn’t it?” I didn’t think much to what he said. I wish now I had, honest to God.
The place’s interior was a hundred feet by forty, give or take, and daylit from a couple of long slender windows running much of the length. Its scent was exquisite to a born faker—oils, varnishes, sawn woods, glues, sweat. Duncan’s current opus stood on a low metal bench.
“Sheraton copy,” I said. I could tell I was grinning from the sound in my voice.
“Where’d you get it?”
Cagey silence. I didn’t blame him. No trader gives his sources away. It was a battered Victorian chest of drawers imitating Sheraton. Three big drawers below two “half”
drawers, with slightly curved short legs. Some nerk had given each drawer wooden bulb handles. The Bramah locks were a giveaway because that locksmithing genius wasn’t around in 1780, the pretended age of this poor relic. I walked around it, pleased to be back in the real world.
“You’ll reduce it, of course?”
He filled a pipe slowly. “How?”
“It looks pretty well made.” I pulled a drawer and inverted it to check the wear and patination of age. Some wicked modern fakers add these small convincing details. It’s terrible to buy a piece like this, only to find once you’ve got it home that it’s phony. We have a saying in this rottenest game, that you can never make anything good from a bad fake. But this was some skilled Victorian carpenter’s forged “Sheraton.” It had once glowed, been really quite stylish.
“Any ideas?” Duncan asked.
All right. He’d a right to expect proof I knew what I was on about.
“Only one,” I said, and tapped its top. “Lose the two smaller drawers. Settle for the bottom three. They’ll need cutting down in size, of course. Replace the handles with brass reproductions. Leave the Bramah locks; when you advertise it, admit quite openly that they’re later additions.”
“Aye, but if a buyer looks at the base he’ll see where the curved front’s been cut through the middle.”
“Then don’t sell it to a skeptic, Duncan.” I’d given him the best recipe and he knew it.
“Fancy your chances?” he said. A challenge.
“Yes.” We got chatting then about some good “reproductions,” as I politely termed them, which I’d seen fetched through East Anglia. It transpired that he’d forged a Hepplewhite pot-cupboard I’d bought and sold on to Dortmund (think of a box with tall straight unadorned tapering legs).
“So you made that torchere I bought last autumn?”
“Aye.”
“God. Was it worth it? It must have cost the earth.”
He sighed, nodding. “It did, Ian. Days and days of work. But it convinced reluctant buyers that somebody up here could do the job as well as most.”
“Well done.” I love a craftsman. The tall torchere had had a tripod appearance—three elegant mahogany legs, with three slender central supports up to an everting triple for the six-sided tray that would hold the household’s oil lamp. Some antiques are too expensive to fake commercially. The decorative torchere is one, because there are plenty of cheap pole screens about—genuine antiques, too—which fakers can buy to make them out of. “Pity you killed a Queen Anne pole screen to build it, though.”
“How’d you spot that?”
I checked myself in time. “Oh, the mulling top and bottom ran different ways, I think.”
“Did they now,” he said evenly, faithless sod.
“Mmmh.” Quite honestly I couldn’t remember. It had been the sad little bleat of the genuine mauled antique that had brought tears to my eyes.
“One thing, Duncan. I thought clans had lairds. Isn’t a chieftainess unusual?”
“The Laird James passed away a few years since.”
Aha. I’d save that bit up. Had plain James Wheeler become The McGunn? Maybe he married into the position. Well, it happens in business empires. Why not?
A bell clonked on the wall. I was glad to see it was an original spring-suspended clapperbell and not some shrill electric foolishness.
