The Children's Book

“But you were consulting me about gold and silver treasures?”

Humphry Wellwood had said “Go and ask the Old Pirate. He’ll know. He knows all about hiding places and secret transactions. He haunts markets and antiquaries, and pays pennies, so we are told, for ancestral heirlooms that get onto street stalls after revolutions.”

“I want something that’s always been missing—with a story attached to it, naturally—and that can be made to have magic properties, an amulet, a mirror that shows the past and the future, that kind of thing. You can see my imagination is banal, and I need your precise knowledge.”

“Oddly,” said Prosper Cain, “there aren’t so many gold and silver treasures that are very ancient—and that’s for a very good reason. If you were a Viking lord, or a Tartar chief—or even the Holy Roman Emperor—your gold and silver things were part of your treasury, and always—from the point of view of the artist and the storyteller—in danger of being melted down, for barter, or soldiers’ wages, or quick transport and hiding. The Church had its sacred vessels—”

“I don’t want a grail or a monstrance, or that sort of thing.”

“No, you want something with a personal mana. I see what you need.”

“Not a ring. There are so many tales about rings.”

Prosper Cain laughed aloud, a sharp bark of a laugh.

“You are exacting. What about the tale of the Stoke Prior Treasure—silver vessels buried for safety during the Civil War, unearthed in our own day by a boy hunting rabbits? Or there is the romantic tale of the Eltenberg Reliquary, which was purchased for the Museum by J. C. Robinson in 1861. It came from the collection of Prince Soltikoff—who had bought it with about four thousand mediaeval objects from a Frenchman after the 1848 revolution.

“It was hidden in a chimney after Napoleon’s invasion by the last canoness of Eltenberg, Princess Salm- Reiffenstadt. And from the chimney somehow it reached a canon in Emmerich who sold it to a dealer in Aachen— Jacob Cohen of Anhalt—who called one day on Prince Florentin of Salm-Salm and offered him one small walrus-ivory figure. And when Prince Florentin bought that, Cohen returned, with another and another and another—and in the end the reliquary chest itself, black with smoke and reeking of tobacco. Now, Prince Florentin’s son, Prince Felix, persuaded him to sell the pieces to a dealer in Cologne, and there, we believe, clever modern fakes were substituted for some pieces—the Journey of the Magi, the Virgin and Child with St. Joseph, and some of the Prophets. Very clever fakes. We have them. This is a true story, and we are convinced the original pieces are squirrelled away somewhere. Would this not make a great tale, the tracking and restoration of the pieces? Your characters could go on the trail of the artisan who made the fakes …”

Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here appear to be lies.

“I should need to change it a great deal.”

The scholar and expert in fakes looked briefly displeased.

“It is so strong as it is,” she explained. “It has no need of my imagination.”

“I should have thought it calls upon all our imaginations, the fate of those lost works of art and craft…”

“I am intrigued by your toads and snakes.”

“For a tale of witchcraft? As familiars?”

At this point the door opened, and Julian led Philip Warren in, followed by Tom, who closed it.

“Excuse me, Father. We thought you should know. We found—him—hiding away in the Museum stores. In the crypt. I’d been keeping an eye on him and we tracked him down. He was living down there.”

Everyone looked at the dirty boy as though, Olive thought, he had risen out of the earth. His shoes had left marks on the carpet.

“What were you doing?” Prosper Cain asked him. He didn’t answer. Tom went to his mother, who ruffled his hair. He offered her the story.

“He makes drawings of the things in the cases. At night he sleeps all alone in the shrine of an old dead saint, where the bones used to be. Amongst gargoyles and angels. In the dark.”

“That’s brave,” said Olive, turning the dark eyes to Philip. “You must have been afraid.”

“Not really,” said Philip, stolidly.

He had no intention of saying what he really felt. This was that if you have slept on one mattress, end to end with five other children—a mattress moreover on which two brothers and a sister had died, neither easily nor peacefully, with nowhere to remove them to—a few old bones weren’t going to worry you. All his life he had had a steady craving for solitude, hardly even named, but never relaxing. He had no idea if other people felt this. On the whole it appeared they did not. In the Museum crypt, in the dark and dust, briefly, this craving had been for the first time satisfied. He was in a dangerous and explosive state of mind.

“Where are you from, young man?” asked Prosper Cain. “I need the whys and the hows. Why are you here, and how did you get into a locked space?”

“I come from Burslem. I work in t’Potteries.” A long pause. “I run off, that’s it, I ran away.” His face was stolid. “Your parents work in the Potteries?”

“Me dad’s dead. He were a saggar-maker. Me mum works in th’ paint shop. All of us work there, one way or another. I loaded kilns.”

“You were unhappy,” said Olive.

Philip considered his inner state. He said “Yes.”

“People were hard on you.”

“They had to be. It weren’t that. I wanted. I wanted to make something…”

“You wanted to make something of your life, of yourself,” Olive prompted. “That’s natural.”