assurance than blokes.
'I felt under the rim, Lovejoy,' she said anxiously. 'No ledge that I could flick with my fingernail.'
'Don't worry, love. There's not many ledges on a thing this shape.'
You have to feel sorry for Sheffield plate. I do. It was always seen as a second-rate cheap substitute for real silverware, even back in the 1740s when it started. Yet the minute an even cheaper lookalike came in – it was electroplating – the hard-hearted public instantly switched their affections and lovely, clever Sheffield plate vanished like snow off a duck. It's so sad. Everybody forgot it quick as blink, though it's now regarded as a genuine antique. I think the inventor Thomas Bolsover was a hero, even if he was only a Sheffield cutler. People made (and still make) the calamitous mistake of polishing his plate so much that the silver layer gets worn away to the copper beneath.
Even so, genuine Sheffield plate is fairly easy to tell. Alicia meant that if you trail your fingernail under the rims and you feel your nail catch on an edge, then you've found where one sheet of silver-sandwiched copper joins another. There's no such edge in crummy old electroplating. I don't like electroplate, because it's simply 'German silver'
or some other miserable alloy that has been lobbed into an electroplating tub. People talk of it like it's artistic, but it's only them trying to sell you junk. It's usually a stamp-cast thing that's been coated thinly with silver by being hung between two electrodes.
Big deal. Real Sheffield plate has the mellow, milkier sterling look instead of the harsh pure silver coat of electroplating.
Love the real thing. It does no harm.
'Brilliant, love. Ten out of ten.'
The porcelains were simply forgeries of old German wares. One was so neatly faked that I almost filled up, remembering Consul Sommon who'd smashed the Meissen to teach me a lesson. He'd succeeded. I wasn't sure, but I blamed him for Bernicka's death.
'What's the matter, Lovejoy?'
'Nothing. Shut up.'
Still, they were decent fakes, and you can always sell good forged porcelain. I told her this, though she was disappointed. She was still looking at me, suspecting emotion, when she ought to have been listening and learning. My main worry was, why exactly hadn't she used a phoney name when registering us tonight? Almost like she was deliberately leaving a trail.
'You said this was dud. It's real Lalique, Alicia.'
She stared at the glass pot. 'Is it?' And smiled. 'I'm better than I thought! I thought he never used blue.'
'No. It was that horrible raspberry red he loathed.'
The moulded glass vase didn't look much, but its thin collar and graded opalescence were class. I think Laliques are seriously over-priced, but whatever opens collectors'
wallets . ..
Unbelievably, she'd got two copies of Vogue, that magazine everybody now raves about, depicting 1920s women. I like Art Deco things. The Art Nouveau turn-of-the-1900 look I find a bit macabre.
'Alicia, you're brilliant.'
Well, being only 1927 and so not antique to me, the two magazines meant nothing.
Collectors would go berserk, though, and pay through the nose.
'Really?' Her eyes widened. 'I thought you'd get cross. I could have lifted two prints instead, but wanted to read the fashions.'
'You did right. Genuine prints are only worth a fifth of the magazine.' Another antique oddity. 'Anybody can fake them. You stencil them in goache, make a decent living. That girl Vestra does them down Brightlingsea.'
'Bitch,' Alicia said, without irony. 'Sorry about the porcelain, Lovejoy. I thought you'd say they were real Frankenthal figures.'
'No. Their hands are too accurate. Genuine figures have bigger hands than they should, and the bases are wavy, not level like these.' I turned one over, a huntsman, hound and dead deer. I winced. 'These that you nicked are soft paste. See where it looks sandy instead of smooth, where the porcelain is left raw and unglazed?'
'Thank you, Lovejoy. One thing.'
'What?' I asked, uneasy. She had that distressed look. I waited. She gathered herself, bridling.
'I feel I have to tell you this,' she said finally. 'I don't resent many things, Lovejoy. But I really must rebuke you about your choice of words.'
'Eh?' I was frankly done for. My friends were dropping like flies, and here she was yakking about what, exactly?
'You continually say nick, steal, thieve.' Her lips set in a thin line. 'I find the terms singularly distasteful. I am a shoulder expert, not a thief or a robber. I also know that Peshy resents your tone. He is highly sensitive to nuances ...'
I'd lost two, if not three, of my pals, was on the run from God-knows-what, and she lectures me on the finer feelings of a kleptomaniac midget canine?
My mind shut down. I was worn out. It wasn't the right time to tell her about my – well, Bernicka's – day, in case we got nicked before posting the goods off to little Henry's mum Eleanor. So I apologized profoundly to her and, can you believe, her mongrel. We saw that he had enough raw meat to feed a zoo, then went to bed. We made smiles, me utterly done for but desperate not to lose the chance of love. You can never tell where your next passion's coming from.
During the night she spoke, knowing I'd be awake because I often mostly usually nearly always am.
