Free The Possessions of a Lady by Jonathan Gash

meeting another divvy is logarithmically remote.
Yet here I was being outsmarted, out-started. Reason? There might be another
divvy around.
    Look at the evidence. I turned under my blanket, stared at the
embers. Lydia must be sleeping, selfish cow. She sleeps on her side, hands
bunched under her chin, as if kipping is a sheer slog. She does her hair in a
bun, olden style, except when she goes to bed. My mind wandered after Lydia, deep
in slumber . . . Where was I? A rival divvy.
    Evidence: Tinker was busy searching for Roadie's missing sister
Vyna. Tied up with Thekla, I'd sent Oddly after the mazarine. And it had
already gone.
    More evidence: that fish, Tinker's words, had been shuffed—illicitly
pre-sold. You could count on the fingers of one hand the people who'd spot, as
I had, a J. Cooper display of antique stuffed fish.
    Yet more evidence: lately, I'd been out-sprinted on seven genuine,
heart-burning antiques. One that really grieved me was a plain flat piece of
iron with a sharp angular point. It was priceless, a 1490s fireback from some
country house nigh a century older than Good Queen Bess. In a scrap metal yard
in Goldhanger. The yard gaffer was out, and I was hurrying to meet Betty about
a silver salver so I didn't have time to wheedle the fireback out of the
gaffer's bonny missus. I sent Tinker. Unbelievably, he'd come back
empty-handed. Somebody had bought it minutes before.
    Now, this simply doesn't happen. Never ever. I could understand
losing the mazarine—everybody falls for silver, queen of metals. I could accept
losing the fish display— angling is the kingdom's most frequented 'sport'. I
could even believe losing a Bow Factory soft-paste porcelain mug, decorated
with crude copper-plate printed figures coloured in with enamels. It had the
one feature that makes collectors squeal with joy—a little heart-shaped blob at
the handle's bottom. You may have to look hard to see it, but it means a
fortune.
    But a soot-encrusted chunk of iron from behind a fireplace?
Crudely made, in a sand-floor mould, rope and sword-handle indents its only
decoration?
    Never in a million years.
    I'd only gone into the scrap yard to ask if I could use their
phone. The chimes from the fireback had literally knocked me reeling. I'd told
the scrappie's lass not to sell it please, promised the earth . . . Gone.
    Conclusion: there must be an evil divvy in the Eastern Hundreds. He had a car, and money, therefore a
backer. Uneasily I thought Big John Sheehan, except he is straight as a die and
ferocious, yes. Devious? No. Somebody new in these remote east lands, was
funding my mystery foe. It was driving me to drink.
    Or it would be, if I hadn't alienated Frothey.
    The rain lashed on the windows. The gale howled. The embers fell
with a tiny crash. Dozing, I remembered Jessica, in her church. That
conversation when Tubb arrived was phoney, some way. Two people pretending
they'd never met. Like they both knew all about Carmel's sand job. I watched
the embers.
     
    Antiques are the strangest things. People think that some genius
makes them, the world applauds and the antiques are fixed for ever. Wrong.
    Antiques are a shifting sand. Often they're so ephemeral that
they're gone like will-o'-the-wisps. Other times, they're staring you in the
face unnoticed. Like poor old Vincent van Gogh's paintings that nobody wanted,
and now you have to queue for days even to glimpse them under armed guard. And
Lowry's once-derided paintings of matchstick people in grimy mill townscapes.
And Munch's 'formless, vulgar, brutal' paintings, that caused such an uproar in
Berlin in 1892 that the artist rose to fame.
    It can go the other way. What is at first priceless can become
cheap, like money, that halves in value each decade. A generation ago, you
couldn't give old steam railway engines away. Today, whole towns turn out
merely to see one puff by. We have a well-heeled woman called Fortune Phoebe,
who stands eternally by the council rubbish dump. She makes