The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [5]
“And this?”
Mrs. Wellwood’s soft finger ran lightly over a platter containing very lively images, in pottery, of a small toad, a curled snake, a few beetles, some moss and ferns, and a black crayfish.
“I’ve never seen anything so lifelike. Every little wart and wrinkle.”
“You may or may not know that the Museum came to grief through the very expensive purchase of a dish—not this one—by Bernard Palissy. Who is immortalised in mosaic in the Kensington Valhalla. It was subsequently realised to our embarrassment to have been made—as this one was—as an honest replica by a modern French pottery. Sold as souvenirs. It is in fact—without incontestable artists’ marks—very hard to distinguish a fake Palissy—or a copy, I should say—from the seventeenth-century thing itself.”
“And yet,” said Mrs. Wellwood, quick on the uptake, “the detail, the precision. It looks unusually difficult.”
“It is said, and I believe it to be true, that the ceramic creatures are built round real creatures—real toads, eels, beetles.”
“Dead, I do hope.”
“Mummified, it is to be hoped. But we do not know precisely. Maybe there is a tale to be told?”
“The prince who became a toad and was imprisoned in a dish? How he would hate watching the banquets. There is a half-stone prince in the Arabian Nights, who has always troubled me. I must think.”
She smiled, catlike and content.
“But you were consulting me about gold and silver treasures?”
Humphry Wellwood had said “Go and ask the Old Pirate. He’ll know. He knows all about hiding places and secret transactions. He haunts markets and antiquaries, and pays pennies, so we are told, for ancestral heirlooms that get onto street stalls after revolutions.”
“I want something that’s always been missing—with a story attached to it, naturally—and that can be made to have magic properties, an amulet, a mirror that shows the past and the future, that kind of thing. You can see my imagination is banal, and I need your precise knowledge.”
“Oddly,” said Prosper Cain, “there aren’t so many gold and silver treasures that are very ancient—and that’s for a very good reason. If you were a Viking lord, or a Tartar chief—or even the Holy Roman Emperor—your gold and silver things were part of your treasury, and always—from the point of view of the artist and the storyteller—in danger of being melted down, for barter, or soldiers’ wages, or quick transport and hiding. The Church had its sacred vessels—”
“I don’t want a grail or a monstrance, or that sort of thing.”
“No, you want something with a personal mana. I see what you need.”
“Not a ring. There are so many tales about rings.”
Prosper Cain laughed aloud, a sharp bark of a laugh.
“You are exacting. What about the tale of the Stoke Prior Treasure—silver vessels buried for safety during the Civil War, unearthed in our own day by a boy hunting rabbits? Or there is the romantic tale of the Eltenberg Reliquary, which was purchased for the Museum by J. C. Robinson in 1861. It came from the collection of Prince Soltikoff—who had bought it with about four thousand mediaeval objects from a Frenchman after the 1848 revolution.
“It was hidden in a chimney after Napoleon’s invasion by the last canoness of Eltenberg, Princess Salm-Reiffenstadt. And from the chimney somehow it reached a canon in Emmerich who sold it to a dealer in Aachen—Jacob Cohen of Anhalt—who called one day on Prince Florentin of Salm-Salm and offered him one small walrus-ivory figure. And when Prince Florentin bought that, Cohen returned, with another and another and another—and in the end the reliquary chest itself, black with smoke and reeking of tobacco. Now, Prince Florentin’s son, Prince Felix, persuaded him to sell the pieces to a dealer in Cologne, and there, we believe, clever modern fakes were substituted for some pieces—the Journey of the Magi, the Virgin and Child with St.