Drawing the Line Read Free Page B

had to buy that page – work made the best sense.
    The idea was that each time I bought damaged ware cheap and restored it to a saleable state I would plough the profit into more and more items, thus bringing in bigger and bigger returns to my part of the business. I’d agreed with Griff that I should keep back a small proportion to keep me in clothes and what he called gewgaws. Actually, most of the jewellery I bought was from fairs like this, since I was into retro-chic in a big way. Plus, if I didn’t like something I could always sell it again, usually at a profit. This was my very own money, not something to contribute to the stall. Today I was wearing a big pair of Lalique glass ear-clips, lovely to be seen wearing but murder on the earlobes. I had an original – but not
the
original – mounting card tucked into my box of tricks. You never knew when such odds and ends might come in handy. I transferred it to my bag. I could always take off the clips – which would be a relief all round – and, attaching them to the mounting card, flog them this morning. Though it cost a month’s gewgaws, a year’s,
Natura Rerum
would be mine. Well, a small part, at least.
    Josie was an elf of a woman, probably never morethan five feet tall and now shrunk into a wizened question mark. Griff said she’d got something that hunched spines called osteoporosis. She might have been any age between sixty and ninety. She looked with grudging approval at the Majolica plate I showed her. I’d spent hours soaking off disgusting old glue, which left a thick ugly scar where some hamfisted idiot had tried to repair a nice clean break, and replacing it with slow-setting, practically invisible epoxy-resin. The plate was now almost as good as new. Or old. It wasn’t really valuable anyway, not a sixteenth-century piece a dealer would have given his teeth for. Nineteenth-century manufacturers had twigged that naïve tourists to Italy would give a mint for what they thought were mediaeval plates. I suppose you could call what they produced either forgeries or tributes. This particular plate yelled it was nineteenth century. The young woman in the centre – a damsel, Griff called her – sat there like some drapery-hung sack of potatoes. Queen Victoria on a bad day. I’d been tempted to paint in a double chin, for spite.
    The price Josie offered, I wished I had. I didn’t like offending Josie, because apart from being an old mate of Griff’s she’d let me loose on odds and ends when I was still at the kindergarten stage. But I wanted at least fifty per cent more. Mumbling that I’d think about it, which meant leaving the posy bowl where it was, I drifted to the exit Griff had told me about, in search of the new lad. The only male stallholder around was about sixty. Still, Griff always did like a spot of poetic licence, so I dawdled to a halt. A rather prissy floral sign at the back of his stall announced,
Arthur Habgood, Devon Cottage Antiques
.
    He seized the plate like a starving man grabbing his dinner. ‘
Istoriato
Rafaelle ware!’ he crowed.
    I pointed out the join. I’d rather not have done, but I had my reputation – and Griff’s – to think of. Never, ever, he’d said, should one ever try to pass off damaged goods as the perfect article. Not if one wanted to stay in the trade. I’d seen plenty of people flourishing in the trade like dandelions while ignoring his dictum – maybe even
because
they ignored it – but felt better, if poorer, being straight.
    Habgood favoured me with a rundown of the genre, full of detail, mostly wrong. I smiled and nodded, not daring to offend a potential buyer by a look at my watch or even a glance back at Marcus. But if he didn’t stop waffling soon, all the profit in the world might be in vain, and that frontispiece in someone else’s hands.
    ‘And how much did you want for this?’ he asked at last.
    ‘I’d really keep it on our own stall,’ I lied, ‘but it’s not really our