workbench while he recovered. He laughs like a distant zephyr. Unless you know him you think nothing is happening. I waited the riot out.
'It was only their joke, Ced.'
He sobered. 'Not so, Lovejoy. That Dennis is pressing for it. He's got into money trouble. A frightened man. And three others. Your son—'
'Mortimer's okay, wack. I've cleared it all up.'
'They mean damage, Lovejoy. That lady Mrs Eggers called the raj.'
My belly griped.
'How can she, for God's sake?' It came out as a terrified squeak. 'She's a Yank. She's no right. She can't.'
'She's got some contact in there.' He sighed, adjusted his spectacles. Respectfully I kept quiet, hoping. Instead the silly old sod finally came out with, 'The last full meeting of the raj last year was on the feast day of St Sebbi, King of Essex. I distinctly recall—'
'You daft old burke!' I yelled. A thunderous growl shook the boards upstairs as Elk stirred. I silenced. 'I meant, er, good gracious! That long ago?'
'Almost certain of it, Lovejoy. Though we can't take St Sebbi's date of AD 697 as altogether proven, can we?'
'Certainly not,' I said, sweating, because my death sentence might well be hanging out there in the dark. 'Look, Ced. Sorry about this, but I need a drawing of Leonardo's Il Cavallo.'
'What in?' The old savant didn't turn a hair. 'Silver-point? The Three Crayons? How much licence will you allow?'
You have to admire class. Here was me, disturbing this elderly sage at midnight, and he goes straight to the heart of the problem. True professionalism.
Silverpoint is a sharpened piece of lead or lead-tin alloy. Ancient artists drew outlines, leaving scarcely any indentation. They'd then maybe fill the sketch out using white chalk, black argillite or red chalk – a trois crayons, as the French have it.
'I don't want sepia, Cedric.'
There's a pathetic tendency these days among stupid forgers of Old Master drawings.
They're all duckeggs, bone idle. They assume that if they make a dilute solution of some pigment – raw ochre down to burnt umber – then call it sepia and do a drawing on Woolworth paper, it will pass as something dashed off by Michelangelo and be worth a million. Laughable. You see scores of these freaks in any country auction (and in sales in capital cities, I might add). Sepia proper is ink of the cuttlefish, only fashionable in the late eighteenth century.
'Leonardo, to modern innocents, means oak-gall and copperas.'
Cedric smiled affectionately at the bottles ranked on his workbench. I knew he loved Francis Clement's old slow recipe of 1587. It's long out of fashion, because modern forgers haven't Cedric's patience. They heat the ink with French wine and ox blood.
Clement let it fester for days. See? Patience.
'You still use the old labels, Cedric.'
'I'm not stupid.'
We chuckled. Any intruder hoping to steal Cedric's precious forger's ingredients would be baffled by Green Vitriol and Aleppo Originate (only ancient names for ferrous sulphate and galls from oak trees). It's Cedric's game. For a few minutes we chatted about Hebborn, the modern English forger who used rotting acorns instead of galls and did pretty well. Then Cedric got down to it.
'Can I suggest bistre, Lovejoy? I have ancient paper. I could split a sheet, though that would cost dearly.'
Gulp. That warning was grave. Cedric was never cheap. Splitting a sheet of heavy ancient linen-rag paper is a fearsome risk, because you might ruin the priceless antique sheet altogether. If it's done just right, you finish up with two sheets instead of one.
You then earn a fortune from both. It's done with two pieces of heavy felt and starch paste. See a true forger like Cedric do it, you can keep your Beethoven symphonies.
They're not half so beautiful.
'Has to be, Ced. Aye, bistre's okay.'
This is nothing more than soot in solution, used as a kind of drawing ink by the Old Masters with their reed and quill pens. You can still buy bistre, but I like Cedric's. He burns willow, beech or pine branches out on the beach, and uses the charcoal and caught soot (on glass plates, incidentally, if you do it yourself). It sounds easy but it's not. He also makes his own quill and reed pens in the old way. God knows who'll have his skill when he finally pops his clogs.
'I'll use powdered pumice stone for lacing the paper, Lovejoy.'
This is an old way of dressing paper before doing a drawing. The ancients used it. I arranged a time to meet in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, where I would do the burglary for Bernicka, said ta and left before he could ask me for a deposit. He might have summoned Elk to enforce his request.
The rest of the night was spent peacefully, meaning lying awake, sweating at what I was drifting into.
9
IT ISN'T ONLY love that fails to recognize its own significance. It's everything. For instance, a theatre in the USA introduced the talkies twenty years before they actually caught on. Cameraphone opened one Monday in 1907. Despite the appeal of Victrola records scratching out audible sounds to match the film's action, the show closed on the Tuesday. It happens in antiques, too. The immortal Turner – greatest artist ever –
