The Lies of Fair Ladies

by Jonathan Gash

  Her name was Elizabeth Clark, God rest her.

  Sick and crazy, the witch hunts stormed on in the name of God. Even reeling from the carnage of civil war the nation was appalled by the murderous progress of the Witch-Finder. But everybody did nothing. Just like you and me would have done. Like we do today. Everybody kept quiet—and watched their innocent friends and relatives tortured, drowned, hanged. Not even the clergy were spared. One poor old octogenarian. Reverend Lowes of Brandeston, Suffolk, was kept awake for over a week by running him about. His parishioners did nothing. The witch-seekers bound him, threw him in Framlingham Castle moat. He floated, so was condemned to be hanged. The poor old cleric begged for a burial service. The laughing Witch-Finder forbade it. The parishioners—you, me—did nothing. The old priest shakily read his own funeral service. And was hanged. His friends, neighbors, parishioners watched. And d.n. He'd been their vicar for fifty years. Of course, the Witch-Finder was a holy Puritan who would make money from the judicial murder. Sound familiar? Piety is lucrative, properly applied.

  The reason I was so distressed was something I knew in my heart of hearts. Had I been there in 1646, I too would have stayed silent.

  And d.n. Like now. Like you.

  But even crazed blood lust ends, thank God. It came to pass that one man in the kingdom suddenly thought. What the hell is going on? To John Gaule, of Great Staughton Village, it seemed absurd for a so-say civilized nation to be torturing itself on the whim of a madman. And, unbelievably, he stood up and said so! One frightening, ghastly day, this brave cleric actually strode to the pulpit—it's still there—and preached against the Witch-Finder General himself. He even had the nerve to publish his conviction that the real witches were the witch-hunters themselves. And then walked home from his appalled congregation and waited, trembling but firm in spirit, for the heavens to cave in.

  Great Staughton held its breath, stunned. All Huntingdonshire—home of Oliver Cromwell the arch-Puritan himself, remember, whose Roundheads clanked on every skyline—waited for the Witch-Finder's vengeful team to ride into town.

  And waited.

  They didn't come. They bottled out. Chicken.

  So let's hear it for brave John Gaule of Great Staughton. Drink to his eternal memory. What makes a wimp suddenly heroic? God alone knows. I don't. Because all his life John Gaule had been wet, a drip. He'd fawned and groveled, bowed and scraped. Until that fateful day when he became a lion. Light a candle to his courage. He deserves it.

  The Witch-Finder General complained—but he never came.

  And suddenly everybody halted, looked at each other. The witch-finding stuttered. It was the Emperor's New Clothes. People read the vicar's rebuke and were ashamed. Then they smarted, felt cheated. Then furious. With whom? Why, with the Witch-Finder General! They invented a legend. It goes that, on an angry day, they rushed to where he was staying, dragged him out and lobbed him into a pond in savage mimicry of his own witch-finding test. He floated, so they hanged him from the gibbet.

  History is more mundane. After John Gaule's denunciation. East Anglia simply calmed down. The Witch-Finder died in his bed in 1647, of tuberculosis.

  He was a local bloke. Wenham's but a stone's throw from here. On the bench alongside him sat two somber figures, Edmund Calamy and Sergeant John Godbolt. Famous names, when you bother to remember. They had a grim sergeant, one Fairclough, to play the heavy. I'm sorry it's such a horrible tale. It's the worse for being true. Mistley-cum-Manningtree knows that. Theirs is the unenviable distinction of having the Witch-Finder General sleeping soundly—or maybe not so soundly—in their churchyard.

  No names I'd managed to find in the non-library matched any of Luna's family names. I was still sitting on my half-finished wall when Luna arrived in a snarly two-tone Ford. She approached across the grass in trepidation. I watched her.

  I must have been something of a tribulation. She must be at the end of her tether. She stood in front of me. A worried woman. My one ally, whose patience nearly equaled mine.

  "Hiyer, pal," I said at last. "Friends?"

  She gave a radiant smile. "Oh, Lovejoy! You're better!"

  "I haven't been poorly," I said, narked. "Come inside."

  She put her arm through mine. "Antiques at last?"

  "Lots, love. Lots and lots." I meant enough to make a huge scam, the sort East Anglia doesn't have.

  The answer phone, a real nuisance, had a message.

  "This is Mayor Carstairs, Lovejoy. I want to know what's going on. This degree of interaction—"

  There's an off switch, works a treat. "He's got nothing better to do, love?"

  "It's only the motor," she said, quite cheerfully. "Oliver wanted me to use the one you don't like anymore. I borrowed this from Oliver's cousin Emily.”

  “Tell Emily ta, love. She pretty?" "No," she said evenly. "Hideous, nasty." "Pity. We're going to need help with the forgery." Luna turned, kettle in her hand. "Did you say forgery?" "Eh? No. I said copying. An antique, for a friend." In silence we sat and listened to the news. One Joseph Godbolt had been found dead, possibly some days, in a reed cutter's hut in a marshy area off the river Deben. His death was being investigated. The police suspected foul play, had set up an Incident Room in a local tavern.

  I held up a warning finger as Luna, instantly thrilled, drew breath to exclaim at the extraordinary coincidence that Godbolt was the very name . . .

  "Don't," I said. She didn't. And I started convincing her that forgery was nearly, but not quite, the same as faking or copying or simulating. Words are great, aren't they? Prove anything, used right.

  Fourteen

  “Strip off, Lovejoy, or I’ll bring Geronimo.”

  The threat did it. I felt a right duckegg. It must be great to take your clothes off and not feel daft. We look misshapen, a down's joke. Women look exquisite, tailored by an expert. I didn't look at the mirror.

  "Not underpants and socks. Veil?" No, maybe socks. Men's socks look the last laugh.

  She tutted. "Lovejoy, get on. You’ve paid for an hour. Prospective fortune, para-psycho analysis, massage. So far you've wasted ten minutes. I can't oil you with your clothes on."

  "Oil?" I cried, alarmed. "What oil?"

  You use oil for motor cars and painting, not for Lovejoys. Though there's one antique called an oil clock, where time is marked by the fall in an oil reservoir as a flame burns—

  "Stop talking!” She was getting really narked. "Oil's for the massage, Lovejoy! For heaven's sake.”

  I'd made Veil's inner sanctum by making an appointment for The Great Marvella's services. There didn't seem any other way. A casual call meant possibly running into her clients. For once, I wanted to avoid a big seduction scene. Wondrous exalting, yes, but with death now dealt into the antiques game I needed mileage. Fortune-telling meant looking into Geronimo's terrible flat-headed gaze while he decided what the next month held for me. I also passed on the para-psychologic analysis, because Geronimo did the analyzing with Veil's demented ventriloquism. That left Reconstructile Autosynthetic Massage. It sounded like a set of girders.

  She started undoing my clothes. I tried to deflect her.

  "This is ridiculous!" she cried, determined. "You're like a child. Stand still!”

  Hell of a way to get an interview.

  "Listen, Veil." I struggled to keep my shirt. I’d conceded shoes in token gesture of seriously wanting her bloody massage. "I haven't really got any aches. Maybe if I do some gardening—"

  She brushed a wisp of hair away from her forehead as we grappled politely. "I think I must be mad, Lovejoy. I've given you open invitations before now. And you've run a mile. Now you are here you're wriggling like a—"

  "I'm stripping! I'm stripping!"

  I looked about for somewhere to put my shirt. She snatched it, exasperated, and flung it on a couch. The inner sanctum had plenty of furniture. It was a vaulted place, really surprising. Old roof beams quite chapel-like. I mean, the little street hardly seemed to have anywhere to keep
a space this size. It must have been an old meeting hall from the seventeenth century, when new sects came in grace abounding.

  The massage table stood grandly in the middle, ready for a Lying In State. She had heating, I suppose for her female clients. Women are always on the search for draughts, real or imagined. They'd choose a different masseuse with a different snake if it wasn't warm. She had a large expanding divan, embroidered damascus cushions and everything, and some good Edwardian upright furniture.

  "Have I to get up on that?"

  That left my trousers, no socks, and underpants. Clean on, as if I was going to the doctor. I'd even done my teeth a second time, just as if I was going snogging.

  "Up, please. Remove all outer clothing before ascending the Autosynthetic Rostrum."

  These catchphrases are meaningless, aren't they? Delivered in an even, bored tone, they sound full of weighty authority. Sheepishly I lowered my trousers, folded them with defiant slowness, and dropped them on the floor. I wasn't walking the thirty or so feet to put them on the clothes mane provided, not with her looking. A bloke in underpants looks as daft as he does naked. No. Delete that. He doesn't. Couldn't.

  The raised table was like in Doc Lancaster's surgery. Pillow the wrong thickness. A blanket, cream-colored, with a red stripe. No compound light glaring down at me, thank God. If there had been, I’d have been off. I could almost hear the sound of clinking instruments and the hiss of sterilizers.

  "You lie, prone. I can't do a massage with you propped up on your elbow like that.''

  Prone, face down. Supine, face up. Right.

  "Lovejoy. The blanket over your feet. Let go!”

  "In a minute—"

  She ripped the blanket away. "Lie still. Relax, please."

  Some trolley trundled near. Bottles chinked. Her hands slapped.

  "Only oil." Warm, her hands in the middle of my spine. "It's unscented. Is this your first massage?"

  "Mmmh." A lie, because I've been out East. I wanted to get information out of her, not put information in.

  "You'll be pleasantly surprised. People have wrong ideas. They think sordid goings-on, instead of psycho-physical restorative con tactile stimulus."

  "Quite honestly, I think we do," I agreed. "Er, forget the psycho-restoration, er, thing." I wanted to butter her up, get her to talk. "Do you have plenty of sufferers?"

  Her hand smacked me smartly. "Clients, Lovejoy. I don't inflict suffering."

  "I meant clients. Honest." I thought only lawyers and prostitutes had clients.

  "Business picked up about a year ago." She was working. "Even among your cynical profession." Profession was a laugh. Antique dealers call rich antique-buying smoothies professionoils (oily professionals, get it?). Sotheby's and Christie's are full of them. And TV nowadays, those road-show people with antique shops syndicated on the side.

  "Veil. I came on condition you don't tell."

  She laughed. "Men all want confidentiality. Not the women. And Sandy, of course. But he doesn't count. As if it mattered! Massage is therapy, not something to be embarrassed about."

  "I know, I know." Smooth, smooth. I think I meant that I was being smooth, not that her hands were moving so pleasingly. I began to feel sleepy. I could see how folk got to like this sort of thing. “It was Connie suggested I came. I've been very, er . . ." Why did people come, anyway? "Er, fed up, lately."

  "I heard Tinker's away. And your little fat cow. Doing quite well for herself. Selling wood, isn't she?"

  "My apprentice? Mmmh." Veil hated Lydia. My erstwhile

  apprentice had given her the sailor's elbow once in the Arcade. Lydia's very beautiful, but if Veil wanted to bitch Lydia up, fine by me. Lydia was seconded to an august antique furniture showroom off Bond Street for a year. "Selling wood," as Veil sweetly described it.

  "Arms extended. Over the end of the reclination."

  Reclination? I noticed there was a blemish in the door, like for a cat flap. The infilling wood was wrong. The door itself was lovely ancient English oak.

  "Had a flood?" We were on an upper floor.

  She looked, laughed. "Oh, you know. Clients like to hear tales. Geronimo—"

  I shot up, shoving her away. "He comes in here?"

  Veil shoved me down. "No, silly. He stays in his cage."

  Calmed, I felt myself slipping into a quiet bliss. Veil was really quite good at rubbing. I made myself come to.

  "How do you advertise. Veil? I don't see your postcards."

  They're still called sixpenny cards, from thirty years ago. You write out your advert on a postcard and a shopkeeper sticks it in his window.

  "Honestly! What do you think I'm running, Lovejoy? I advertise, when need be, in expensive magazines. Not in alleys."

  "Course not. Big stuff, eh?" I was there at last. "I know. Cassandra Almighty Clark."

  Veil gave one of those half-embarrassed laughs that make you wonder. "Cassandra and I are friends. Sort of. Except she went to a different school."

  A little bitterness there? I could imagine, though. Cassandra Clark filthy rich. Veil peddling ventriloquism.

  "Nice you've met up." Time for a shot in the dark. 'I'm hoping to sell Cassandra some good stuff soon. But she's not bought much since she arrived in the area." Meaning never. Not a piceworth. Yet I couldn't remember an auction Cassandra Clark hadn't been at. How odd. A dealer groupie?

  "You are?" Very guarded, all of a sudden. Had the hands stilled a fraction before smoothing onward?

  "I can lay my hands on a mountain of superb stuff."

  She trilled an unconvincing laugh. "Cassandra might not like them, Lovejoy. She's very discriminating."

  "She will. I'm looking for a really wealthy, er, client."

  "Over, please." I could have sworn she was so sad; I'd thought she was jolly. "Lovejoy. Stay in your own league. I know it's none of my business, but—"

  "Antiques are my league, love.” I smiled up at her. “The others aren't on the scale I want. Hey, Veil. You're making me nod off. Is there a surcharge if I do? I'll have to owe."

  She was smiling in a queer way. "Thought as much, Lovejoy. Wait." She went to the outer room. I heard her bleep some message service. "No calls until further notice."

  She returned and got on with her work. Refreshing.

  It was three o'clock before I rose from her divan, bathed, found all my clothes. She lay on the damascus cushion watching me go. It felt odd, like farewell. Yet in one sense we'd only just met. But with women you can't ever quite work out exactly what you should be exactly working out, if you follow. I've often found that.

  Time I went down the estuaries. But not with Luna in her snarly two-tone. I didn't want Drinkwater wondering what sorts of motors Mayor Carstairs and his wife possessed, in case he lucked onto some report of her near Prammie Joe's place. I should have thought of that beforehand, but you're sometimes too scared to go to some places on your own. I've often found that, as well.

  "Lovejoy, dear. Old scrubber Luna is positively charming! I told her everything about your dreadful past!"

  "Hello, Sandy."

  He came gushing to welcome us. "Oh, here she very is, Lovejoy! Woolworth's, dear, your wig? A bargain seconds?"

  "Sandy," I warned, uncomfortable. Luna didn't seem to mind.

  "We got on very well, Lovejoy. Didn't we, Sandy?"

  "Like my outfit?" He drew Luna inside. He looked loony. A long Eastern caftan, a decorated print blouse, pearls, and mirrors on each fingernail. "Wait!"

  He snapped his fingers. The fireplace rotated. A bar, complete with stools, pivoted out. "You worship? Admire?"

  "I'd rather have the fireplace." It wasn't anything special, but Carrara marble and nineteenth century is something you don't see every day of the week. It made me think of pricey house furnishings. Cornish Place would make some dealer a prince.

  Sandy fluttered his eyelashes at Luna. "Isn't he the one? Nothing but antiques. He must adore you, Luna! Are those still your own teeth?"

  "Now behave."
Luna was smiling. Women always seem so well adjusted to, well, Sandys.

  We hadn't had time to do much. I'd been preoccupied. Luna was relieved we were moving into antiques. I'd given her a session on jewelry. Costume next. Riches to rags.

  "Sandy told me that antique dealers use delaying tactics for payment, Lovejoy.”

  "He did?" I said, while Sandy did his eyes in another ton of mascara. The lashes were like bats' wings, stuck out a mile. "Let's hope he pays The Great Marvella on the nail. She has a snake for a debt collector."

  "Isn't Geronimo perfectly sweet?" Sandy crooned, pouring a vodka and vermouth in a glass with a five-foot stem. It stood on the floor alongside him. "So erotic! Visual! Drinkie-poos?"

  Luna asked for orange juice. I had nothing.

  "Question One!" he announced. "Who used a wineglass exactly like this in a film?" He tapped Luna playfully. "You ought to guess this, dear. He too wore a blonde wig!"

  "Dirk Bogarde. I loved the Mediterranean terrace!"

  Sandy's smile vanished. ''Aren't we a clever cow, then?"

  "Sandy has a pal," I explained to Luna. "Spoolie. He's showbiz ephemera. The Ghool Spool. He's not long out of jail."

  Sandy eyed me. "That doesn't make him a bad person."

  Luna frowned. "Rod Steiger? Played a multiple murderer?"

  I yelled, "Shut up, Lune." She thought Sandy was playing his famous film quotes game. "Which jail, Sandy? Parkhurst?"

  "Not the same," Sandy said quickly. Which meant he'd already been on the phone to Spoolie, discussing Prammie Joe's demise. The rotated fireplace was one I'd seen auctioned some time since, so nothing suggestive there.

  "That's good," I said. "See, I want a place burgled."

  Quietness supervened. Sandy's face set to mutiny. I looked at a breakfront bookcase. It was a really pleasant fake. I'd done it myself out of an elderly wardrobe.

  "Luna. Come and look. Remember I was telling you about fakes?"

  "Fake?" Sandy shrieked so loud I reeled, but kept doggedly on. Time to stop mucking about. I wanted help, not tantrums.

  "There was an old furniture man in antiques called Crawley. He published a number of maxims. He had records of fifty-three thousand pieces of furniture he'd worked on over twenty years. Either altered, or complete fakes. That shows the size of the market."