Besides, it wouldn’t take me much longer to do two figures once I’ve got the paper set up.”
“Sal, we can’t sell them. Brasses have to be perfect. I know there’s a good market, but no one wants a badly disfigured brass-rubbing.”
For answer, Sally winked. She took out a soft-lead pencil and made a few rapid lines on a sketchpad. There was no doubt that Sally had talent—far more than I. In a moment, a woman’s face had emerged, a calm and peaceful face of the kind that is common on brasses. The woman looked back at me with a wonderful serenity. I pictured her face on the graceful neck and shoulders.
“Well?” asked Sally.
“It’s cheating, but it’s terrific.”
She and I grinned at one another. Any doubts I felt slipped away. We both knew we were cheating, but that’s what the art world’s about. Why shouldn’t we put a face in the roughly-scored space where the Lady Sybil’s face had been before someone got to work on it with a chisel?
Sally took a knife and scored along the edges of the face. She placed the cutout over the brass rubbing. I nodded.
“It’ll do, Sal. Now, where does it come from?”
Sally and I knew about brass-rubbings. They’re a lucrative source of income for impecunious art students. Find a good brass, spend a few pounds on paper and rubbing-wax, and you could net yourself ten times your outlay, say five from a dealer. If the brass was rare, the figure could go considerably higher. The trouble was that too many rubbers were chasing the few high-quality brasses left in the churches. Rightly, the parsons up and down the country were beginning to kick against the way brasses were being exploited.
“You won’t believe this Andy, but it’s from a derelict church a few miles from here. And I’m sure it’s an unrecorded brass!”
That really was amazing. The Church has always attracted scholars, and the British Isles are particularly rich in ecclesiastics who have compiled lists of this or that feature of buildings: vestments, documents, ornaments, funerary, and memorial inscriptions—anything and everything that can be listed and described. Non-clerics have added their contributions, so the literature of church architecture, furnishings, and fittings is massive.
“They couldn’t have missed a brass. Not an important one.” I didn’t want to argue with Sally, but I had to. The likelihood of anyone finding a piece of engraving like this, one that wasn’t listed somewhere, was extremely low.
Sal threw the van keys onto the counter.
“Just where do you think I’ve been all day?”
“I did wonder, my love.”
“I’ve checked three of the leading authorities on brasses. Not one of them lists it. There’s no mention of a Humphrey or a Sybil of Stymead. Not one. I looked in four other books as well, but they’re not systematically indexed, so it took me time. Nothing! We’ve got this to ourselves!
It was worth money, even more now.
I have slightly more than the normal share of natural cupidity. Besides, I wanted to lay the best studio money could buy at Sal’s feet. The rubbing was the only short cut to come our way.
“You’re beautiful, intelligent and lucky,” I told her. “Apart from having my heart in your hands, you have the wit to know when you’re on to a good thing. You brought your find to me. By the way, where did you find it?”
“Stymead.”
“South of here?”
“East. Towards Chapel-en-le-Frith. There’s a back road that leads to Hathersage eventually. I got lost and came across the village.”
“Far?”
“Ten, twelve miles. It’s steep. The Ford got stuck twice.”
All the roads in the Peak Districts get to be steep after a mile or two. They wind as well. Our van was ancient, but it got us about. One of my friends at art school had given it me as an unwedding present: that’s what he called it, so I didn’t argue. There was a craze for Lewis Carroll at the time.
“But you got there.”
“Weird, Andy, weird! You know it rained this morning?”
I looked at the yellow plastic bucket in the centre of the salesroom. It was nearly full again.
“I know.”
“Well, I’d got a load of best quality antique junk from Barlow at Huddersfield—by the way, he wants another fiver, I didn’t have enough with me, but it’s lovely genuine stuff—where was I?”
“On the way back.”
“—and it poured! The road was awash! I had to stop, or I’d have floated down a mountainside. So I pulled in and just waited until the rain stopped.”
“It didn’t.”
“I know. But it slacked off, and just as I was going to start the engine. I saw the ruin.”
“At Stymead?”
“There isn’t much of Stymead. It’s a pub and a post office and about a score of houses. But this was outside the village—on a bit of a hill about a mile from the buildings. It’s overgrown with oaks and birches.” It would be, I thought. Small, stunted oaks and slender birches. “And nettles,” she said, looking down at her ankles. “Even at this time of the year. Bloody nettles everywhere.”
“So you couldn’t resist having a look when you saw the ruin.”
“You know me, Andy, sweetie. I can’t pass a castle or an old barn without looking inside.” She was right. After all, she’d found the barn we lived and worked in on one of her expeditions. I couldn’t complain. “Anyway, I went over the sheep wire and right into this very wet thicket. No one saw me go across the field. Come to think of it, I didn’t see anyone at all in Stymead. It looks like a village underwater—you know, as if it had been left behind in a valley that was flooded. It was a bit like that going into the church.”
“What period?”
“Chancel from about mid twelve hundreds. I think part of the tower’s a good bit older. It hasn’t been used for a long time—no remains of Victorian pews. Just piles of rubble from the roof and smashed gravestones.”
“And the brass engraving.”
“And the brass. It was fantastic the way I found it. I got in through a gap in the wall—I didn’t say the walls hadn’t fallen in. They’re still in fairly good condition to a height of say ten or twelve feet, but there’s not much left of the roof. The porch is rather good. Quite a bit later than the chancel. It was a bit creepy, but not much. I daresay if it had been night time I’d have thought twice about going any further, but it seemed all right at that time in the morning.” She paused, her brow wrinkling.
“Funny thing, you normally get birds in a thicket. Or a building. When it rains, I mean. They shelter.”
“And?”
“I didn’t notice
