by Ron Benrey
Flick watched a sly grin form on Oxley’s face. She realized that he was about to tell the juicy part of his story.
“Desmond was unquestionably the smarter businessman of the two,” Oxley said. “He decided to protect his investment by bribing one of Mansfield’s bookkeepers. As a result, he received a wealth of insider information. He realized a full year before it actually happened that Mansfield was doomed to go under. And so Desmond sold his shares in the Mansfield Manufactory for a hefty profit, long before the company’s financial ill health became publicly known. But—”
Flick couldn’t help interrupting. “But he neglected to warn his partner.”
“Exactly! Desmond stood by as Neville lost nearly everything when Mansfield collapsed. He then proceeded to make his desperate friend an offer that Neville couldn’t refuse. Desmond bought out Neville’s half of the partnership for pennies on the pound.”
Flick nodded glumly. That was the sort of behavior she had expected from Desmond Hawker in his early years of his company. A genuine robber baron saw nothing wrong with crushing friends along with foes. All that counted was his personal gain, his individual success. He made no concessions to such squishy concepts as morality or ethics—or even friendship.
“That’s appalling,” she said. “Truly despicable.”
“I agree. But Desmond’s maliciousness doesn’t stop there. Neville had built a superb collection of objets d’art related to tea. Paintings, ship models, maps, a bit of everything. The collection had considerable value. Brackenbury could have sold the items and paid off a large part of his debts, but Desmond never gave him the chance. He asserted that the collection was part of the partnership’s assets. I assume that Desmond threatened to assert his rights to the objects by bringing an action in court and that Neville didn’t have the money to pay the cost of an effective legal defense. In any case, Neville felt compelled to sell the collection to Desmond at a fraction of its worth.” He added, “In his later years, Desmond considered this a fraudulent transaction, akin to actually stealing the objects from Neville.”
With great effort, Flick kept her expression from revealing the colossal shock she felt. “You must be aware,” she said evenly, “that the Hawker collection represents the lion’s share of the antiquities on display in my museum.”
“Of course.” He offered a wry smile. “If my book had ever been published, I would have asked permission to include photographs from the museum’s catalog of antiquities. One item in particular upset Neville Brackenbury above all others. He had commissioned a set of elegant tea caddies, decorated with wooden mosaics, that was destined to become an anniversary present for his wife, Lucinda. Desmond swept them up with everything else.”
Flick gasped. The All the Teas in China” Tunbridge Ware tea caddies. She covered her abrupt distress with a cough.
“Have some more tea,” Oxley said. “These digestive biscuits are dry as desert sand.”
Flick took two long sips, then said, “The picture you painted of Desmond Hawker makes him look irredeemably evil. And yet your book talks about his transformation into a fervent man of faith.” She recalled her discussion with Nigel as they drove to Tunbridge Wells. “Do you think Desmond really changed his stripes?”
Oxley spread his hands on his desk. “Something happened to Desmond Hawker. I can’t say what was in his mind and heart, but he really did act a different person as he grew older. He died believing that God had forgiven his many sins.”
“That seems remarkably generous of God, given the heartlessness of Desmond’s transgressions.”
Oxley laughed. “I made that very point to a minister when I was doing research. He said, ‘Indeed, that is what God’s grace is all about.’ ” The professor’s face became somber. “Unfortunately, there were members of Neville Brackenbury’s family who chose not to forgive Desmond Hawker.”
“The fire at Lion’s Peak,” Flick said with a sigh. “ ‘The Flying Scroll Vendetta.’ ”
“I have no proof,” Oxley said, “but I feel that vengeance is the best explanation of what happened in 1925. It is a matter of public record that Neville died in 1883, although I never was able to track down the cause of his death. My theory is that he committed suicide, creating a pool of hatred that festered for fifty years among his survivors. Again, it is public record that Neville had two sons, twins, in fact. The best evidence I have suggests that Lucinda and the boys left England after Neville died in 1883 and immigrated to Canada. I believe that one of the sons was responsible for the arson at Lion’s Peak and accidentally died during the fire.”
Flick watched Oxley’s face as he spoke. She didn’t see any sign of doubt, any hint of hesitation. He clearly believed everything he had alleged. She decided that his hypothesis made good sense to her, too. Then she saw him glance furtively at the digital clock atop his desk.
Time to leave.
Flick stood, brushed a few digestive biscuit crumbs from her skirt, and said, “I won’t make any promises, but I will try to get the Hawker family’s permission to place a copy of your book in our library, where it will be available to scholars.”
Oxley stood, too. “I think of my manuscript as an incomplete work in progress—many loose strings remain to be tied up. But feel free to use my research in your new exhibit.” He extended his hand. “Oh, please do let me know if you discover anything new about Desmond Hawker and family. I would like very much to learn how the Hawker saga ends.”
“Badly!” she murmured under her breath.
Philip Oxley had mused about a pool of hatred that festered for fifty years and exploded in violence in 1925. But the murder of Elspeth Hawker—and the thefts of the Tunbridge Ware tea caddies—happened in the twenty-first century.
Could hatred continue to boil and bubble for more than 120 years?
Flick shivered as she considered the possibility.
Fifteen
Nigel’s phone rang at 3:40 in the afternoon. He knew without looking at the caller-ID panel that it was Flick’s cell phone, and that she had just stepped off the 14:45 from London Charing Cross. He snatched up the receiver.
“Welcome back to Tunbridge Wells,” he said. “How was your day in Oxford?”
“Productive,” she said. The brief sound of her voice made Nigel realize how much he had missed seeing her today. But he also felt a stab of unease. He could hear something ominous in her tone. Anger? Disappointment?
He waited patiently without speaking for her to find the right words.
Flick began with a low moan. “The truth is, I learned too much about Desmond Hawker today. I feel like stripping his name off every exhibit in the museum. He was a bona fide, unreconstructed…”
Nigel drew in his breath, surprised at Flick’s choice of epithet. It was a ripe four-word expletive that he had never heard her use before. She started to say something else, when an announcement on a loudspeaker at Central Railway Station drowned out her voice.
“Hang on a sec!” she shouted. “I’m almost at the Mount Pleasant Road exit.”
Nigel imagined Flick walking through the old station, the cell phone pressed to her ear. She probably had worn one of her trim business suits to visit the professor of history, perhaps the blue one that accentuated her abundant curves and made her look nothing like the usual museum curator.
Flick’s voice returned. “I’m outside the station, approaching Vale Street. How did your day go?”
“I am over the moon with delight!” He tried to incorporate the right touch of sarcasm. “There is nothing I relish more than humbling myself before our charming trustees. I needed every minute of the morning to wheedle and whinge, but I finally convinced them all to show up at three o’clock on Friday afternoon. I swore on my mother’s head that this would be our last meeting for at least a month.”
Silence.
“Flick, are you there?”
“You may want to cancel the meeting,” she said gravely.
“What?”
“Or at least postpon
e it a few days.”
“Impossible!” Nigel struggled to regain a scintilla of self-control. “Why can’t we hold a trustees’ meeting on Friday?”
He heard Flick sigh. “Philip Oxley filled in many of the missing pieces. I am beginning to understand Elspeth’s concerns about the provenance of our antiquities. She may have been right to worry.”
“Worry about what? As you pointed out to me, the Hawker family assembled the collection more than a hundred years ago.”
“I don’t know a thing about property law in the United Kingdom, but I think we have a problem—or rather that the Hawkers do.” She added, “I should be at the museum in twenty minutes. I’ll tell you the whole, miserable story.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Put a kettle on. It’s Wednesday, the Duchess of Bedford Tearoom is closed, and I am dying for a cuppa.”
Nigel rang off and told himself not to speculate about the dimensions of their “problem.” Soon enough, Flick would be there with the facts. Ownership of antiquities was fertile ground for conflict at museums throughout the world—why should the Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum be exempt? The “Elgin Marbles” on display at the British Museum were the most notable examples: fifty-six sculpted friezes removed from the Parthenon in Athens in 1799 by Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The modern nation of Greece demanded their return. And scores of famous art museums were embroiled in fights over treasures that the Nazis stole from lawful owners before and during World War II.
He took a yellow pad and began to make a list of resources that might be useful as Flick and he reviewed the provenance of the Hawker antiquities:
The binder full of computer-generated inventory logs that Flick had consulted when she showed him the objects on loan from the Hawker family.
A photographic catalog published by the museum that pictured the most important items in its collection.
The original loan agreements between Mary Hawker Evans and the museum.
Scholarly books about the Hawker antiquities written by art historians. Nigel had seen two in the bookcase in Flick’s office.
Miscellany.
He underlined the last entry. Nigel’s files were chock-full of magazines, white papers, and other publications written for museum directors. He would ask Polly Reid to look for anything relevant.
Nigel’s phone rang again.
“I’m approaching the bottom of High Street,” Flick said. “I wanted to make sure you’ve put a kettle on.”
“Indeed I have,” he fibbed. “By the way, let’s meet in the boardroom. I am gathering every piece of information we have on the Hawker collection. We will need a big table to spread it all out.”
The one item on his list that he could not find in his or Flick’s office was the museum’s photographic catalog. He decided to borrow one from the gift shop on the ground floor. He skipped down the stairs, waved to the security guard on duty in the Welcome Centre kiosk, and entered the one space in the museum he liked least. The gift shop stocked teapots, tea filters, teacups, tea mugs, teakettles, tea cozies, tea caddies, tea makers, tea infusers, tea bag holders, tea towels, Japanese tea ceremony sets, souvenir teaspoons, games about tea, and two hundred kinds of loose and bagged teas grown on five different continents.
He made his way past a shelf crowded with teddy bears drinking tea and dolls participating in tea parties, then skirted a long metal rack of postcards and photographs of the museum’s most noted antiquities. Along the shop’s back wall, a tall bookcase presented volumes on the history of tea and the serving of tea, cookbooks full of tea-related recipes, and a selection of novels set in tearooms, on tea plantations, or that involved tea-infatuated characters. He spotted several copies of the antiquities catalog on the top shelf—the shelf dedicated to slow-selling “professional” books—tucked next to a tome on tea tasting.
Nigel glanced around the gift shop, uttered a soft whimper of despair, and fled with the copy of the catalog that seemed the most shopworn.
He came face-to-face with Flick in the long ground-floor hallway. She looked a bit knackered from six hours of train travel, but the brisk walk from the station had given her complexion an astonishing rosy glow that took his breath away.
“Where’s my cuppa?” she said.
“In the boardroom,” he managed to say, “and I am equally pleased to see you, too.”
Cha-Cha, who had enjoyed the run of the museum that day, had apparently spent the afternoon in discussions with Earl the Grey. Nigel caught a flash of red out of the corner of his eye as the Shiba Inu—who had somehow heard Flick’s voice—clattered around the Welcome Centre kiosk and hurled himself at her legs.
Flick, who invariably smiled at the dog’s antics, did not smile today.
“Beat it, Cha-Cha,” she said gently. “I’m not in the mood.”
An hour later, Nigel fully understood Flick’s unhappy disposition. In fact, he had descended to her level of gloominess.
“I think we should review the bidding,” he said.
“Be my guest.”
“If we believe Philip Oxley—”
Flick interrupted. “And I do.”
“As do I.” Nigel raised both hands in a gesture of surrender. “Because we believe Philip Oxley, we must deal with the strong likelihood that Desmond Hawker fraudulently acquired the antiquities that we call the Hawker collection.” He added, “In other words, the historical evidence suggests that he copped the lot from Neville Brackenbury.”
“So does the evidence from a noted art expert.” Flick dove into the papers, booklets, and documents scattered across the large boardroom table and retrieved a hefty textbook. She had used a yellow “sticky” as a bookmark. “This was written about the Hawker collection in 1965.” She began to read aloud.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Hawker family’s collection of tea-related antiquities is the relative mystery that surrounds its acquisition. The late 1800s was a time of enormous activity for wealthy collectors in England and America who scoured Europe and Asia in search of artistic masterpieces. Some collectors were art experts in their own right and made their own purchasing decisions; others hired agents to acquire the finest available artworks on their behalf. There are no indications that Desmond Hawker did either, although his one-time partner, Neville Brackenbury, is known to have commissioned the services of two agents in Europe and one renowned authority on objets d’art from India, China, and Japan. Most of the purchases attributed to these surrogate buyers seem to have made their way into the Hawker collection. The most likely explanation is that Mr. Hawker had, for some reason, tasked Mr. Brackenbury with the role of acquiring artworks for him.
Flick snapped the book shut. “Wrong!” she said. “The most likely explanation is that Desmond Hawker was a bloody thief.” She lobbed the book at the pile of paperwork.
Nigel rolled his chair backward as the heavy book skittered down the long conference table and sent smaller items flying in all directions.
“On the other hand,” Nigel said as he pushed detritus away from the edge of the table, “does any of this nineteenth-century intrigue amount to a hill of beans? Any wrongs done to Neville Brackenbury are ancient history. The collection has been in the Hawkers’ possession for more than a hundred years, and we don’t really know whether Desmond acted illegally. Who can possibly argue that the family does not own the antiquities in every legal sense?”
“Dame Elspeth Hawker can,” Flick said sharply.
“And therein lies our dilemma,” Nigel said. “Elspeth seems to have been spot-on in her other concerns. Is there a chance—even a wee chance—that the museum will make a serious mistake if we move ahead with our decision to buy the collection from the Hawker heirs?”
Flick raised her index finger. “The very same Hawker heirs who probably know all about the shaky provenance and would love to unload their dodgy collection on an unsuspecting tea museum.”
Nigel grunted. “With the help of Barrington Bleasda
le, their slick solicitor.”
“We are caught between a rock and a hard place.”
“Granted. But what do we tell the trustees? They will skin us alive if we simply unrecommend our decision to go forward with the purchase. We need a substantial reason to veer from our announced course.”
“Actually, we need some good legal advice.”
“I could call Iona Saxby. She is a top-notch solicitor.”
“And she likes you.”
Nigel wrinkled his nose, then looked at his watch. “It’s five thirty. She may still be in her office.”
Nigel dialed Iona’s business number. “No joy,” he said. “Her voicemail picked up.”
“Try her at home.”
He dialed a second number and listened to the phone ring. He hung up when her personal answering machine invited him to leave a message. “Not there, either.”
“Rats!”
Nigel nodded his agreement with Flick’s frustration, although he felt relieved that he had not reached Iona. It made more sense for Flick and him to sort out the “problem” before they involved any of the museum’s trustees.
“Do you know any other handy lawyers?” she asked.
“Now that you mention it, I do have an old friend in London.” He reached for the phone once more.
A basso male voice answered, “Andrew here.”
“Greetings, it’s Nigel Owen.”
“Nigel! Good man! Have you returned to civilization? Or are you still disgruntled in Tunbridge Wells?”
Nigel moved his finger to his lips, then pressed the speaker button so Flick could hear both sides of the conversation.
“My tenure at the tea museum has another five months to run.”
“Poor blighter!”
Flick clapped her hand to her mouth and turned away. Nigel fought not to laugh along with her. He swallowed hard and said, “Andrew, I need a soupçon of free legal advice. After five years as a bureaucrat in London, do you still remember the law?”
“An adequate touché. Not bad for a provincial living so far from town. What do you want to know?”