watery sun was slanting across the huge ornamental gates.
I didn't know what to say, kept looking at the lad.
'This way.' He led me down a gully. No time at all, we were among trees, then undergrowth. I finally halted, tired. The dog Jasper was with us.
'Look, Mort,' I said lamely. 'I'd better get home.'
'We're here.'
A ramshackle hut was somehow there. You could stand within yards and not notice it. I heard a brook's gurgle nearby. He pulled branches aside. I recalled Maeve's remark about Colette's boy who lived wild. Yet Mr Hartson the head gamekeeper trusted Mort completely, left him alone with all those priceless guns. I stepped in after him.
'I collected these for you,' Mort said, shy.
'For me?' I was stunned.
'I knew you'd come.'
Garden implements, maybe a score, and all different. It sounds stupid, but nothing's more elegant than Edwin Budding's lawn mower. The world's first, patented in 1830.
Looked at from the side, it has a lovely Hogarthish curve. His pal John Ferrabee manufactured them, in Stroud.
Budding actually invented the idea from watching machines cut cloth in a textile mill.
Check that it has that delectable curve, its five blades arranged as a sort of empty cylinder, with a strange toothed roller to adjust cutting height, and you've found a fortune. It's worth a look in your old garden shed, I promise. By the following year, 1831, Budding's lawn mowers were being used in Regent's Park - one man pulling, one pushing, doing the work of 'six men with scythes and brooms', Loudon the great gardener wrote.
Snobbery persisted, though. Traditionalists grumbled that all 'effective' grass cutting must be done 'by the scythe'.
'You haven't raided any gardening museums, have you?' I croaked.
He shook his head. 'Mr Hartson lets me have old implements the nearby estates throw out.'
'Does he now.' I sat on a stool, weak. On rough shelves stood arrays of watering pots and cans. Every single one was a genuine antique. 'Watering pots' were from 1706 on.
Somehow, Mort had acquired examples of all the important variants. He had a bulbous Dutch mid-eighteenth- century thing, fifteen inches tall, black-painted copper with a vast rose on its spout and a hooped top handle. Shining bright was a Victorian teapot can, its copper polished to a gleam, with a dainty drooping spout and no rose, hardly a hand's span tall. Desirable enough to make my mouth water was an English clay watering pot, seventeenth-century, jug-shaped and hardly a foot tall, with a fixed half-cover and a stubby spout ending in a flattish rose. I'd only ever seen one of these before in my whole life, even in East Anglia. I gaped at the lad.
'You're rich,' I told him. 'How did you know what to save?'
Mr Hartson stepped into the hut. 'He says they tell him.'
I jumped. 'I wish you'd stop bloody creeping about,' I said, narked. 'You lot scare me to frigging death.' I waited. 'They tell him?'
'Like speaking.' The gamekeeper shrugged. 'He feels odd. Sometimes he has to sit down.'
Quickly I stood up. 'Well, between you, you've amassed a fortune. The great gardener J. C. Loudon advocated all of these.' I pointed. 'That one is Money's 'inverted' watering can. Date 1830, give or take a day. Loudon was a strict old codger, especially about watering seedlings. Said water should never fall with 'more than its own weight'. Very stern on what he called 'carelessness on the part of the operator' washing soil from seedlings. Have you got one of Loudon's French thumbers? The flow's controlled by your thumb on a hole. It had been invented in England a decade earlier, but…' I petered out. 'What?'
'Mortimer needs your help, Lovejoy,' Mr Hartson said.
'To sell this lot? It's serious money.' So the lad had the divvy gift, same as me. Two rare birds in one shed. What are the chances of that?
'Not these, Lovejoy,' the old gamekeeper said. 'We believe Saffron Fields is in the wrong hands, and rightly should be returned to Mortimer.'
'Aye,' sez me, thick as a plank. 'But rightly doesn't work.' I looked at Mortimer's fantastic array. 'I mean, if I wanted a pricey collection of gardening implements, I'd get two serfs and steal the greatest assembly in the world, Queen Victoria's children's handmades at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, all tools labelled and no security to shake a stick at. See what I mean? Rights are only what you can hang on to.'
'Wrong, Lovejoy,' Mr Hartson said directly to me with those gamekeeper's eyes. 'Rights must be preserved.'
And then the most astonishing thing happened,
'That will do,' Mortimer said quietly.
That was it. No more. Yet Mr Hartson, head gamekeeper and Mortimer's boss, with wellnigh absolute power over several large estates and scores of underlings, simply nodded and said, 'I'll be getting on, then. I bid you good day, Lovejoy.' And left. That will do, from a sprog young enough to be… My thoughts ran out of steam.
Minutes later, me and Mort stood by the roadside. Evening was falling.
'How long will it take?' I asked after a bit.
'The bird numbers? They'll be up this time next year. To die again.'
What to say to his quiet voice, these haunting words? He gave a little click and Jasper materialized at his side.
'Don't do that,' I said, narked. 'Can't you shout his bloody name like ordinary people?'
He almost smiled, didn't make it. 'You live in a cottage,' he said. 'I walk past it. Can I visit?'
