The Sleepers of Erin by Jonathan Gash

Author:Jonathan Gash [Gash, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781472102959
Google: z1NhAAAACAAJ
Amazon: B00ET3NOZC
Barnesnoble: B00ET3NOZC
Goodreads: 19190675
Publisher: C & R Crime
Published: 1983-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

She was a long time coming, but I didn’t care. Women, basically unreliable, have one enduring characteristic: their conduct narks you endlessly, year after year. Irritating a bloke’s their natural pastime. Yet a woman’s a sort of necessary gout, especially if you’re an itinerant antique dealer, temporarily broke in a strange country, and on the run from one – or was it two? – teams of rich homicidal fraudulent con-merchants. I had a headache.

The hall turned out to be a grand old place, everything I’d hoped. And a bonus, it was plonk in the middle of safe old Trinity College’s grassy swards. The library was so worn and real that the coldest heart would have responded to the loving warmth of those emanations. Not just the walls and the books, but the flooring and the ceiling – and the Book of Kells.

One reason there’s so much crap about nowadays masquerading as ‘good’ antiques is that most folk are too silly for words, too greedy, and bone idle. I mean, go and look at the blindingly clever artistry of the Book of Kells (it’s actually in four ‘books’, but they put two on show usually) and you begin to appreciate the scale of the manuscript geniuses who created such illumination. Do the same with the British Museum’s Lindisfarne Gospels. Then try to copy a single inch of a single page of the complex decoration of either, and your education’s under way. (If you can’t afford the trip to see the real things, a postcard repro teaches you the same lesson.) That little try-out will only take ten minutes, but after it you will be ten – twenty – times harder to fool when some dealer offers you a ‘genuine mediaeval French page manuscript from a devotional Missal . . .’ It’s a very gratifying feeling to be able to look a fraud in the eye and say sweetly, ‘Thank you. It’s lovely. But do you have any genuine antiques, please . . . ?’ See what I mean about being bone idle? A little effort, and you get the true feeling of an antique. That feeling is love, true love.

Apart from a couple of students reading on a central bench, an elderly geezer creaking among high shelves on a library ladder, and a pair of ladies blinking at such accumulated learning, the place was empty. I stood humbly before the open Book in its glass case, bathing in the unseen radiance of such a treasure.

You’ve seen some oafs pretending they’re antique porcelain experts, by running a lead pencil round the rims of cups and saucers? Well, ask them why they do it and they’ll have no idea. Oh, they’ll say something like: ‘If it leaves a pencil mark, it’s genuine,’ which sounds okay and deeply knowledgeable until you demand, ‘Genuine what?’ and they’re stuck. As I say, too silly for words. The pencil-on-the-rim legend actually arose from the writings of a wise old Victorian character called Litchfield, who advocated this

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