People began looking across to see where the noise was coming from as soon as he started. His cutlery fibrillated, his crockery clattered. He sounded like a foundry. Once he actually did tremble himself off his chair trying to pick up a fallen spoon. A kindly waitress came to ask if my father was all right.
“Yes, ta, love.” I gave her a soul-deep smile. “He improves with the day.” I didn’t tell her Trembler’s age. He’s thirty-one. Wine and women have transformed him. Trembler recovered enough to lust feebly after her. Luckily his vision peters out at ten paces, a spent arrow, so to speak.
“How much do I know, Lovejoy?”
Funny how glad hearing your own name makes you. “It’s a weird place, Trembler. Near derelict. They keep three rooms to impress visitors. The owner’s a lady, seventeen, in a wheelchair. There’s a few retainers still. All are suspect. So far I’ve a heap of rubbish which I’m transforming into salables.”
Trembler nodded his understanding, it seemed to me. He quakes so much normally, it’s difficult to distinguish a nod in his version of immobility.
“Where’ll you get the stuff, Lovejoy?” he quavered.
“Tinker’s organizing a convoy.” I hesitated, giving him time for the unpleasant bit. He managed to slop half a yolk-dripping egg into his mouth. I looked away, queasy. “I want no whizzers who’re in trouble, Trembler. Sorry.”
Normally an auctioneer, crooked or straight, has the final say on staff. Whizzers are those blokes—scoundrels to a man—who hump antiques about. An auctioneer’s whizzers stay with him for life, part of his team, so I was asking for heresy.
“I heard it was special, Lovejoy.” He resumed his idea of eating, with distaste.
“Margaret sent me the list.” I passed it over. “You’ve only two who’re holy enough for this, Trembler. Agreed?”
“A sad reflection on modern morality.”
It’s amazing what good grub and a job’ll do for a man. Before my very eyes Trembler was filling out. His eyes were clearing, dawn mist from an estuary autumn. He drank another pint of tea. I gave him more, sent for another ton of toast, marmalade. Years were starting to fall from him with every mouthful. Even his voice, the querulous whine of an ancient, was becoming the measured and tuneful instrument of a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Auctioneers. I watched admiringly. He only looked fifty now. A couple more breakfasts and he’d be down to a spritely forty, maybe make thirty-five.
“So far, Lovejoy, you’ve told me nothing.” He dabbed his mouth with a napkin, rearranged the condiments, crockery. All really good signs. “Are you bringing in valuers?”
My laugh made people smile across the tables. “Who on earth can afford five guineas percent, Trembler?” Valuing is robbery, money for jam—indeed, for not even jam. He’s the bloke who comes to value your precious old table, guesses a guesstimate (always wrong), and you pay him a huge percentage of that guess, for nothing. No, never let a stranger into your home, especially if he’s a valuer. They are the antiques game’s equivalent of politicians. “There’s some pinning to be done.”
He smiled. “Thought as much. Who’s the mark?”
“Are,” I corrected. “Tell you nearer the day.”
“Pinning” is a noble art practiced by auctioneers ever since time began. It means manipulating the bidding so as to land a particular lot on a poor unsuspecting member of the public who doesn’t want it. When the Emperor Caligula auctioned off his dud antiques—he’d wasted a fortune buying forgeries—he ordered his auctioneer to pin Aponius Saturnimus. This rich Roman had nodded off during the bidding. He woke up poor.
“And I want a phone bank. Two.”
“Right-o.” He knew I meant false ones, because otherwise I’d have asked the phone people. Big bidders phone live bids in as the auction progresses.
“About the money, Trembler.”
He shed another two years. “I’ve put this hotel on my credit card, Lovejoy.” He carries only phony credit cards, but he was trying to help me by deferring the cost of his stay.
“Good lad. You stay here and enjoy the… facilities. Now, Trembler, when I call, there’s to be no delay. Get it? Ten minutes’ notice, you move out. There’s a code word. It’s Lovejoy.”
“Your name’s the codeword?” He was puzzled.
“That’s because I’m under an alias; Ian McGunn.”
He repeated it to prove he was back among thinking men. “One thing, Lovejoy. Can I bring my own tallyman?”
“No, Trembler. Sorry.” Trembler always picks some gorgeous tart without a brain in her head. I saw him once at an auction near Southwold where he’d hired a bird who actually couldn’t count or write. Talk about a shambles. “I’ve already got you a tallywoman. She’ll need training in, the day previous.”
He brightened. The deal done, we had another breakfast each to celebrate, seeing it was getting on for coffee time. Then I rang Doc the genealogist and had my suspicions confirmed. Couple of good bookshops in Inverness. I got some paperback reprints for Duncan’s benefit.
Michelle was working flat out now. Letters were coming in so fast, the postie had graduated to a van. She was becoming conscious of the pressure. Each night we phoned up the list of antiques et al from Tinker. Next morning we sifted through them, and next night she’d tell Tinker which I’d accepted and which were refused. Tinker gave her nightmares: “He doesn’t seem to make any notes!” she complained. I’d go,
“Mmmh.”
There was a growing body of cards filed in old shoeboxes, a card for each collector writing in, and a spare list of antiques for which people, mostly genuine collectors, were writing, urgently wanting special lists. These are almost always coins, medals, hand weapons, clothes, or paintings. Then there was the catalog file, the biggest. Michelle tried talking me out of one card per antique, thinking she’d discovered a quicker way.
She tried the wheedle, even the vamp, to no avail. I made her stick to my scheme. I also made her keep an nth file, of those antiques which I’d told her to reject. She again played hell. “What’s the point of recording details of antiques we’ll never see—?”
I clapped a hand over her mouth. This was the alluring lady who’d so joyously rushed to find me when the first letters came. Now we were inundated, she was falling behind and inventing ever-dafter ways of ballsing up the documentation. A born administrator.
“You, Michelle, are attractive, desirable, and rapidly becoming a pest for other reasons, too. Get help if you like, but do as I say. And hurry up.” I let go. I had to sort the last of Tachnadray’s genuine stuff out in the Great Hall. “I’ve a job for you to do, later.”
This time the items arranged at the far end of the Great Hall were superb. Among them I recognized Shona’s—well, Elaine’s—double snuff mull. Some things make you smile.
The silver wasn’t plentiful. One triumph was a bullet-shaped teapot. Not a lot of people admire the shape (“bullet” meaning spherical, as an old lead bullet), which is a ball with a straight spout. The lid completes the roundness, with a mundane finial topping the lid off. They were made from the late 1700s for sixty years. The engraved decoration of these characteristically Scottish teapots is one pattern carried round the join of lid and body. It sat among the rest glowing like, well, like Elaine smiling. Edward Lothian of Edinburgh, 1746, before the fluted spout came in. There was also a silver centerpiece.
These so-called épargnes (it’s posh to give things French names) usually weigh a lot, so you’re safe buying one by weight alone, never mind the artistry. This was 1898, Edinburgh, a dreadful hodgepodge of thistles, tartan hatching, drooping highlanders, wounded stags. It was ghastly. It’d bring in a fortune.
The furniture was dominated by a genuine Thomas Chippendale library table. It was practically a cousin of the mahogany one at Coombe Abbey, mid-eighteenth century, solid and vast. I honestly laughed with delight and clapped. You see so many rubbishy copies that an original blows your mind. Five Hepplewhite-design chairs (where was the sixth?) with shield backs and an urn-pattern center splat were showing their class. A few good Victorian copies of the lighter Sheraton-style chair were ranged along one wall. In the catalog I’d call them something like “Louis Seize à l’Anglais,” as Tom Sheraton designs were termed in Paris at the time. Only I’d be sure to put it in quotation marks, which would legalize my careful misattribution. It’d give Trembler a chuckle.