The Children's Book

“Came across?”

“Aye. Came across. I’ll give it back. Here, take it.” Tom said

“It must be horribly frightening, down here alone at night.”

“Not near so frightening as t’streets in t’East End. Not near.”

Julian said “Please come with me now. You must come and explain all this to my father. He’s talking to Tom’s mother. This is Tom. Tom Wellwood. I’m Julian Cain.”

Major Prosper Cain, of the Royal Engineers and the Department of Science and Art, had an Elizabethan manor house, Iwade House, in Kent. He also lived in one of the small dwelling houses which had grown up round South Kensington’s monstrous steel and glass Boilers. (The purpose-built, cast-iron building, designed by a military engineer for the Museum, had three uncompromising long rounded roofs, which were mockingly known as the Brompton Boilers.) The dwelling houses were largely inhabited by the successors to the sappers who had originally constructed the Boilers after the Great Exhibition in 1851. Major Cain had what was not exactly an official residence, slightly larger than those of his men. There were ambitious projects to extend the museum buildings, and murmurings against the military presence. A competition had been held. Precise visions of palaces, courtyards, towers, fountains and ornaments had been scrutinised and compared. Aston Webb’s project was declared the winner, but no work had taken place. The new Director, J. H. Middleton, appointed in 1894, was not a military man, but a reserved ascetic scholar, who came from King’s College Cambridge and the Fitzwilliam Museum. He was at odds with Major-General Sir John Donnelly, secretary of the Science and Art Department. Moves had been made by keepers and scholars to demolish the inner dwellings, on the grounds of fire hazard and leaking flues. Twenty-seven open hearths, with chimneys, had been counted. The art students complained of soot and smoke rising into their studios. The military pointed out that the team of Museum fire-fighters was composed of the sappers who inhabited the buildings. The argument continued and nothing was done.

Prosper Cain’s narrow little house had elegant hearths, both on the ground floor, and in the first-floor drawing- room. They were decorated with delightful tiles by William de Morgan. He had offered Olive Well-wood a French gilt chair, carved in an ornate style detested both by the Arts and Crafts movement, and by the Museum keepers. His eye was eclectic and he had a weakness, if it was a weakness, for extravagance. He took pleasure in the appearance of his visitor, who was dressed in dark slate-coloured grosgrain, trimmed with braid, with lace at the high neck and fashionably billowing sleeves above the elbow. Her hat was trimmed with black plumes and a profusion of scarlet silk poppies, nestling along the brim. She had a bold, pleasant face, high-coloured, eager, firm- mouthed, with wide-set huge dark eyes, like the poppy centres. She must have been, he judged, around thirty-five, more or less, probably more. He deduced that she was not in the habit of wearing such tight corsets, kid shoes and gloves. She moved a little too freely and impulsively. She had fine flesh, fine ankles. She probably wore Liberty gowns or rational dress, at home. He sat opposite her, alert and fine-featured, like his son, his hair still as dark as Julian’s, his neat little moustache silver. His wife had been Italian, and had died in 1883, in Florence, a city they both loved, where their daughter had been born, and christened Florence, before the fever struck, and the place became tragic.

Olive Wellwood was the wife of Humphry Wellwood, who worked in the Bank of England, and was an active member of the Fabian Society. She was the author of a great many tales, for children and adults, and something of an authority on British Fairy Lore. She had come to see Major Cain because she had a project for a tale that would turn on an ancient treasure with magical properties. Prosper Cain said gallantly that he was delighted she had thought of him. She smiled, and said that the most exciting thing about her small success with her books was that she felt able to disturb people as important and as busy as he was. It was something she could never have expected. She said his room was like a cavern from the Arabian Nights, and that she could barely resist getting up and looking at all the wondrous things he had collected. Not much Arabian stuff, actually, said Prosper. It was not his field. He had served in the East, but his interests were European. He was afraid she would find no scholarly order in his personal things. He didn’t believe that a room needed to be set slavishly in one style—most particularly not when the room was, so to speak, a room within the multifarious rooms of the Museum, as the smallest eggshell might be in a Faberge nest. You could set an Iznik jar very well next to a Venetian goblet and a lustre bowl by Mr. de Morgan, and they would all show to advantage.

“I hang my walls with mediaeval Flemish needlework, next to the small tapestry my friend Morris wove for me at Merton Abbey—greedy birds and crimson berries. Do look at the very satisfactory strength of the twist of the leaves. He never lacks energy.”

“And these?” enquired Mrs. Wellwood. She stood up impulsively, and ran a grey-gloved finger along a shelf of incongruous objects with no apparent relation to each other, aesthetic or historical.

“Those, dear lady, are, as it were, my touchstone collection of fakes. These are not mediaeval spoons, though they were offered to me as such. This nautilus is not a Cellini, though William Beckford was led to believe it was, and paid a small fortune for it. These baubles are not the Crown Jewels, but skilful glass replicas of some of them, which were exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1851.”

“And this?”

Mrs. Wellwood’s soft finger ran lightly over a platter containing very lively images, in pottery, of a small toad, a curled snake, a few beetles, some moss and ferns, and a black crayfish.

“I’ve never seen anything so lifelike. Every little wart and wrinkle.”

“You may or may not know that the Museum came to grief through the very expensive purchase of a dish—not this one—by Bernard Palissy. Who is immortalised in mosaic in the Kensington Valhalla. It was subsequently realised to our embarrassment to have been made—as this one was—as an honest replica by a modern French pottery. Sold as souvenirs. It is in fact—without incontestable artists’ marks— very hard to distinguish a fake Palissy—or a copy, I should say—from the seventeenth- century thing itself.”

“And yet,” said Mrs. Wellwood, quick on the uptake, “the detail, the precision. It looks unusually difficult.”

“It is said, and I believe it to be true, that the ceramic creatures are built round real creatures—real toads, eels, beetles.”

“Dead, I do hope.”

“Mummified, it is to be hoped. But we do not know precisely. Maybe there is a tale to be told?”

“The prince who became a toad and was imprisoned in a dish? How he would hate watching the banquets. There is a half-stone prince in the Arabian Nights, who has always troubled me. I must think.”

She smiled, catlike and content.