by Lyn Hamilton
He’d joked at the time that he didn’t know what he’d do with such a large table when he’d only been able to find five antique goblets in a pattern he’d begun to collect: Cape Cod. Even though North American pressed glass was not my specialty, because he was such a good customer, and a really lovely person, I’d done some research on the subject and discovered that the molds for pressed glass were regularly passed across the U.S./Canadian border, and for a period of time the pattern might have been manufactured at the Burlington Glass Works on the Canadian side.
Armed with this knowledge, I’d been able to find a goblet at an estate sale outside Toronto, and I’d sent it to him with one of his shipments as a little gift from the shop. He’d been thrilled, as I knew he would be. He accepted the goblet as a gift, but insisted that, if I found any more, he wanted to pay for them. I’d come across two more after that, and he’d been able to find one himself, so now he had nine. Seven to go. And here in the Molesworth & Cox catalogue were six of them. Jean Yves would be pleased indeed.
The day of the auction was hot and muggy, and I entered the august and cool premises with a sense of both relief and anticipation. I don’t buy much at auctions: Most of my buying is done direct from the craftsperson, or from my agents and pickers in various parts of the world. But there is nothing like an auction to get the adrenaline flowing and to bring out the competitive spirit in most of us.
Molesworth & Cox brought a veneer of old-world class and sophistication to that competitive flame. An old British company, founded almost 150 years ago, when treasure from the far reaches of the Empire poured into London, it proudly displayed the escutcheons that heralded it as a purveyor of goods to Her Majesty the Queen and one or two of the lesser Royals. The company had expanded to North America several years earlier and had established auction houses in New York, Dallas, and Toronto. The Toronto establishment was located on King Street just a block or two from the towering bank edifices where a considerable amount of Molesworth & Cox merchandise could be found gracing the boardrooms of these modern-day cathedrals where mammon reigns supreme.
The outside of the establishment was so discreet that you’d be inclined to miss it unless given explicit directions, just a subdued bronze plaque beside a quietly elegant door hinting at what was within.
The place still had an air of British Empire, carefully maintained, and it always reminded me of what I imagined a British club in India during the days of the Raj to be: lots of palm fronds; large windows shuttered against the sun and the heat; highly polished brass; dark wood; worn leather chairs; and strong, dark tea—Assam, perhaps—served in translucent china cups from an etched brass tray, the quiet smell of expensive cigar lingering in the air.
Visitors rang the doorbell to gain entry, and once inside found themselves in the viewing rooms, two on either side of a center hall. The rooms were painted in a dark, dark green, and Oriental carpets covered the floors. As I always do at an auction, I quickly surveyed the room, checking to see if there was anything of interest beyond the specific objects I was looking for. I found Maud’s things right away, and mentally settled on a couple of sterling silver frames for myself, and three pairs of old brass candlesticks for the shop.
The water goblets were in the second room, and as quickly as I could, I checked them out. Pressed glass is highly collectible these days, and the prices have reached the point where there are inevitably fakes around. They looked okay to me, and of course they had a Molesworth & Cox certificate of authentication to back them up. There was a reserve bid of $175 on them, which was fine. Jean Yves was prepared to pay about $50 per goblet, and this left some maneuvering room.
Following my usual auction strategy, I spent as little time as possible on the objects I really wanted, feigning indifference, and then spent time looking at what I didn’t want, in this case a set of Royal Doulton china with an impeccable pedigree, having belonged at one time to the Duke of something or other, and purportedly commissioned especially for a visit to the Duke’s castle by none other than Queen Victoria. I don’t know what I think I accomplish with this mild subterfuge; I can’t imagine anyone bids high on objects because they saw me looking at them. Superstition, perhaps.
At Molesworth & Cox, purchasers are required to register and establish credit, and once they have proved themselves worthy, are given a number and a paddle with that number on it. No unseemly yelling at M & C. To make a bid, one merely raises one’s paddle with a hand sign for the amount if necessary, in as refined and dignified a way as possible.
I took my seat early, sitting as I usually do in the middle of the row toward the back and watched others take their seats in front of me. The usual suspects were there—about a dozen dealers, one or two of whom I knew by name, the others only by sight. I was a little disappointed to see Sharon Steele. She’s a dealer with an antique store on Queen Street West specializing in old glass, and I expected she too would be interested in the water goblets. There were also a few yuppie couples, an Arab businessman or two, and a few obviously wealthy Chinese. There was also Ernie, an older gentleman who had been at every auction I’d ever attended in this place, and someone I’d never seen buy anything whatsoever.
One person seemed rather out of the ordinary, and I’d never seen him here before, not that that meant anything. I noticed him only, I think, because he seemed rather out of his element. He was medium height and build, dark, his collar and cuffs were a little worn, his shoes a little scuffed, his greyish-green suit a little shiny, nothing that would look out of place anywhere but here, perhaps. He was nervous, and if anything, rather furtive. He kept his hands in his pockets, his eyes kept darting about the room, and from time to time his tongue would flick quickly out of his mouth and back. In the very bad habit I have of giving strangers nicknames, I mentally named him Lizard.
I half expected Lizard to leave when the time for the auction came, but he didn’t. In fact, he had obviously passed muster because he had a paddle, number nine, and he took a seat several rows ahead of me and off to the right.
Maud’s mirrors and candlesticks were to be the third and fourth items up for sale, and the goblets, the tenth. Bidding was brisk for the first few items, but I had little competition for Maud’s possessions and got both the frames and the candlesticks for what I considered a satisfactory price. I then sat back to wait for the goblets. Sharon Steele had not yet bid on anything, so I figured she was waiting for the goblets too. I knew her to be a conservative bidder, so I thought I stood a reasonable chance of getting what I wanted.
Sharon was number eighteen, I was twenty-three. When the goblets came up, opening with the reserve bid, a number of people put in bids, but by the time the bidding reached $230, only Sharon and I were in. The auctioneer seesawed between the two of us until we got to $300, Sharon’s bid. This was Jean Yves’s limit, but I raised her to $310 hoping that would be the end of it. It wasn’t. Sharon, it seemed, wanted these pretty badly too. By this time I was mentally calculating how much of a loss I was prepared to take. Jean Yves was a good, no, a great customer, and business wasn’t bad these days. But Sarah and I would never get rich, and as the saying goes, on a good month we could almost pay the rent.
As another saying goes, he who hesitates is lost.
The bidding hit $400, and for a few seconds I lost my nerve. Much to Sharon’s surprise and mine, someone farther back raised the bid to $450, and the gavel came down. “Sold to thirty-one,” the auctioneer said.
I was sitting dealing with my disappointment when a voice I knew only too well came from behind. “I think Jean Yves will be pleased with the goblets, don’t you?” the voice asked amiably.
Clive. I turned around to find my ex-husband, a smug expression on his face, sitting directly behind me. He was very elegantly attired, maybe Armani, I remember thinking—Moira would know—with very trendy little wire glasses and an expensive-looking haircut.
“Why are you doing this?” I hissed at him. He was stroking his moustache as I spoke, a gesture that
at one time, I seemed to recall, I had found profoundly attractive, but which now just incensed me.
“Doing what?” he asked innocently. “I just thought I’d pick these up for Jean Yves. I was afraid Sharon would get them, so I leapt in.”
“You didn’t do it for Jean Yves. You did it for the same reason you opened up across the street from me,” I whispered, acutely conscious that people nearby were watching us, but too angry to care.
“You did it to spite me,” I went on. “Why? I gave you half the money for the store, and surely Celeste has enough money to keep you in style,” I hissed.
“But it was never the money, my darling. I just need a chance to express my creativity,” he said.
Yeah, right, I thought. “I’m not your darling,” I sputtered, getting up from my seat and heading for the door.
By the time I’d climbed over the legs of several people sitting between me and the aisle, the tears of rage I was determined not to show pricking at the back of my eyes, the bidding on the next item had already begun. As I was about to stumble out the door at the back of the room, I saw someone lurking—there is no other word for it—behind a potted palm. I could not imagine what he was doing there. He didn’t appear to have a number, and he looked, if anything, even more out of place than Lizard. He was dressed completely in black, and he was concentrating very hard on the bidding that was going on. As I went by his hiding place, he turned, his concentration broken by my passing, and for a moment he stared right at me. It was all I could do not to gasp out loud. His eyes were very dark and hooded, and the backs of his hands were covered in dark hair. For some reason I cannot explain, something about the way he held his arms out from his body, almost like pincers, reminded me of a crab, or perhaps an enormous black spider, and a poisonous one at that. His eyes held mine for a second or two, and then he turned back to the bidding.
Intrigued, I turned back as well. The bidding was getting really competitive, and two parties were battling it out for something, number nine and number thirty-one: Clive and the Lizard.
The item that was being auctioned was a box of small objects that had not been claimed in customs and was therefore on the block. I’d seen it on my quick survey before the auction began. I really hadn’t taken much notice of it, and in my haste to get out of the place, I hadn’t heard the description of it from the auctioneer. My vague recollection was that there was a fair amount of junk in the box, and maybe a couple of things that looked interesting, although nothing I cared about.
But I knew which object held Clive’s attention: a small carved jade snuff bottle. Collecting was one of Clive’s passions, and on a scale of one to ten, snuff bottles would score a nine point five with him. He had an impressive collection which at one time we’d displayed on the shelf beneath a glass coffee table in our living room. I’d managed to find a few nice ones as Christmas and birthday presents, and he’d invariably been pleased with them.
The bidding was getting quite hot and moving up fast. Lizard, when he wasn’t holding up his paddle, was casting desperate glances back toward Clive. The price continued to rise. Clive was leaning forward in his chair, and Lizard was mopping the sweat from his brow; he wanted the box that badly. But it was clear that Clive had the resources, Lizard did not.
As the gavel was about to come down on his bid, smelling victory and convinced he had won, Clive leaned toward a pretty young woman sitting next to him and whispered something to her.
And then, on impulse, I did to Clive what he had done to me. I held my paddle up, and before he knew what was happening, I found myself the proud owner of a box of junk that was suddenly worth, by my own action, $990. It was a malicious thing to do, to say nothing of infantile, reckless, and even foolhardy.
It was also one of the worst mistakes I have ever made.
2
Clive got them!“ Moira shrieked. ”How awful!“
We were sitting in the little office at the back of the store, just after closing, contemplating the wretched box of junk I’d purchased. As we did so, Diesel, an orange cat who holds the title of Official Shop Cat, leapt up on the table and stuck his nose in the box. After a moment or two of poking about, he looked up and, giving me a look of pure disdain, stalked off to more interesting and rewarding activities. “Dumb, I know,” I said to the little beast’s retreating back.
My moment of triumph at having wrenched the snuff bottle away from Clive was very short-lived. In fact, I didn’t make it out of the building. The feeling lasted only until I used my personal credit card (how could I charge this moment of madness to the shop?) to pay for it. The $1000 tab, $990, to be precise, put my credit card perilously close to the limit, and I skulked back to the store in despair.
An hour or so later, Moira appeared, her dark hair in a sleek and sophisticated new hairdo, dressed in a long grey cotton sweater with matching leggings. She looked spectacular, as usual, and I had the feeling she had a date, but she said she’d just been passing by and decided to drop in. I had my suspicions that Alex, sensing my gloom, had called her, but neither of them said anything.
“I think what you really have to do,” Moira said, after a few minutes of quiet contemplation on both our parts, “is to get someone to make this jade thingy into a pendant of some sort which you’ll wear every day. Every single day,” she added, “while you parade up and down in front of Clive’s store.”
I had to laugh. “That’s better,” she said. “Now let’s see what else you’ve got here. Maybe there’ll be a treasure and you’ll get to recoup your losses.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “If there’d been something of value here, Molesworth & Cox would have found it and pulled it out for a separate sale, wouldn’t they?”
“You never know,” Moira insisted. “Let’s look. What do you figure you could get for the snuff bottle?”
“Four, maybe five hundred, tops,” I said.
“See, we’re halfway there,” she said. “Only five hundred or so to go.”
We began to delve into the box, the contents of which were not, in my opinion, worth anything near what I’d paid, even allowing for a generous $500 for the jade bottle. Undeterred, Moira rummaged around.
“Isn’t this cute?” she said, pulling a small object out of the box. We both stared at it. Moira often used words like cute and thingy, and some people made the mistake of assuming she wasn’t too smart. In fact, she’d enjoyed a private school education, finishing school in Switzerland, and a couple of years at Cornell before she thumbed her nose at her snotty family and went off to become a hairdresser. Now she owns one of the smartest and most successful salons in the city. Over the past year or two, since I’d been back in the shop, she’d become a really good friend.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It looks like… a peanut. A silver peanut,”‘ Moira said. I rolled my eyes, and we both collapsed laughing. It did, indeed, look exactly like a peanut, and it was approximately life-size. I felt the weight of it in the palm of my hand.
“Actually,” I said, after a moment or two, “I think it’s real silver, and possibly old. The workmanship is excellent. It’s so real-looking, you can almost imagine breaking it apart and finding the two little nuts inside. And look, here,” I said, pointing to a tiny hole in each end, “I think it must be a bead.”
“See, what did I tell you?” Moira said. “A treasure. Hard to say if there’s a market for a single silver peanut, though,” she added, and we both laughed again. I was happy to find I was beginning to see the humor in all this.
“At least it’s not plastic like these,” Moira said, pulling out a string of beads that would have made someone in the sixties proud. I sighed. “Or ugly like this,” she added, displaying a particularly awful brooch.
“No wonder this wasn’t claimed in customs,” I moaned. “It wouldn’t be worth the trip to pick it up!” I said, opening a wooden box. Inside, carefully packaged in straw, was a flared bowl or vase, about six or seven inches high. On the inside of the flare was
drawn, in beautiful detail, a serpentlike creature, which undulated around the rim. On the outside, below the flare, another fine line drawing had a quite fantastic scene in which elaborately clothed figures, some of them quite human looking, others with the heads of birds and animals, wrapped around the stem.
“Wow. That’s beautiful!” Moira exclaimed as I carefully lifted it out of the protective packaging. “What is it? It looks very old.”
“It does,” I agreed. “However…” I turned the bottom of the pot toward her, so that she could see where the words hecho en Peru—made in Peru—had been etched into the clay.
“And then there’s this,” I said, holding up a small card which I translated for her. “Replica of a pre-Columbian flared vase,” I read. “Made in Campina Vieja, Peru, which, if my Spanish serves me well, means old small farm. A small town, I expect.”
She laughed. “It’s a good thing I’m not in your business,” she said. “This might have fooled me.”
“Well, it might fool just about anybody,” I said. “The thing about replicas, you see, is that unlike reproductions, which are essentially copies, replicas are made to exactly match whatever is being copied: same materials, same method of manufacture, everything. In fact, sometimes when a replica is made, a mistake is deliberately put in it somewhere, so that it will not be taken for the original, should the documentation that identifies it as a replica get separated from the work. It’s possible here, for example, that one of the lines of the drawing is different from the original. Replicas are very costly to make, by and large, but pre-Columbian works are so valuable that I would think it might pay to make one. And at least in this case, it is clearly marked as such, and not the work of the unscrupulous among us who have a short lapse of memory, shall we say, and forget to put the hecho en Peru on the bottom.”
