Drawing the Line Read Free

Regency spectacle case for another regular client in Birmingham, I made a beeline for Marcus. I wouldn’t do anything indecent like demand to see the Ruskin. No, I’d talk about this and that and ask him about Larry Copeland, his cousin, and maybe drop a hint about a disco I’d seen advertised at a local pub. Marcus would be staying in their trailer’s caravan overnight and might welcome a different sound from his cousin’s snores. He might even welcome a bit of company. Mine. So long as I drove Griff back to Bredeham and promised to be sufficiently awake on Sunday morning to get him back to Detling bright and early he’d be happy to lend me the van.
    Marcus’s cousin’s stall specialised in prints, tarted up for punters and beautifully framed. Mostly they came from tatty old books he’d picked up for peanuts atcountry house sales. The reasoning was that since the books were falling apart anyway it didn’t do any harm to slice out and indeed rescue the odd page. That’s what decent, legitimate dealers did. Others cannibalised books that could – should – have been saved. Both types framed the pages, delicately repairing any damage to any original colour they might have. Opinions differed about how to deal with uncoloured etchings. Some folk left them as they were, plain black and white. Others coloured them, tinting them carefully by hand. That was what Marcus was doing now. Each prettifying brush stroke would make the finished product more saleable and thus more valuable. Except in another sense it took away all the value. I didn’t interrupt. Actually it was quite pleasant simply standing and watching. Marcus had lovely hands, with long thin fingers usually rolling a spliff he was happy to share and the sort of profile that reminded you of those aristocratic young men poncing round in fifteenth-century Florentine portraits. But he was so engrossed I moved away, looking at some of the other stuff already laid out. There was no sign of the Ruskin jar. To my right was a bin full of eighteenth-century maps of all of the South East: Essex; Sussex; Middlesex; Surrey; Kent. Then there were some bird prints, and, Copeland’s speciality, sporting prints. There was also a big sheet, half covered in tissue. I blew the tissue back. Seventeenth, possibly even sixteenth century. A folio sized frontispiece. From a book I knew.
     
    ‘Griff, I’ve just found this book I know! A page, anyway. Very old. All these strange plant-things curling round the outside of the title page,’ I gabbled. ‘Then in themiddle, just where you’d expect it in fact, the title. I reckon it’s in Latin.’
    Griff passed me coffee in the Thermos lid, pretending to be calm. ‘Something else they fail to teach in schools these days, alas. Have you any idea what it might have said? Or must I drift over with feigned casualness myself?’
    ‘Nature something or other.’ Why had I never worked harder at school? OK, why had I hardly ever gone to school?
    ‘Nature
exactly
?’ he pressed. He sounded very interested.
    ‘
Naturam
?’ I hazarded.
    ‘Or
Natura
?’ There was no mistaking his excitement.
    If I wasn’t careful I’d say it was just to please him. But it sounded right. ‘It could have been. Then there was another word. It couldn’t be
Rerum
, could it?’
    He clasped his pudgy little hands across his chest. ‘
Natura
Rerum! The nature of things
. Nothing to do with flora and fauna as such – more a philosophical treatise.’
    ‘What about all the plants and things?’ My fingers described them in the air.
    ‘Well, more to do with what makes a plant a plant as opposed to an animal. I suppose you didn’t notice a date?’
    ‘Come on, Griff – all those Xs and Ms! You know I can never work them out!’
    ‘Author?’
    ‘A Gentleman.’
    Feeling carefully behind him, Griff sat down on the edge of a packing case.
    ‘Actually,’ I said, trying to think straight, ‘it wasn’tRoman numerals. No, it was ordinary numbers. It