The Venemous Serpent. Brian Ball
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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 it at the time, but I didn’t hear any bird calls.”
Our twin kittens woke up at that moment. They must have heard Sally’s voice before, but they had been fed only an hour since, so they had decided to ignore her. We called them the Furry Queens. No separate names. I can’t remember why. They made for her, wet as she was, and fawned about her ankles. She gave me an accusing look.
“They’ve been fed! And the dog!”
We had a large dog of mixed parentage that came and went as it pleased. We only needed a marriage licence to turn us into a properly domesticated household.
“Oh, you darling Queens!” Sally purred to the kittens. They purred back in the way female kittens do.
“You were in the church. Sal.”
“Creepy and a bit disturbing, love. Come to Momma, pretty little things,” she ordered. They did. “You see, the brass was sticking out of a heap of roof struts—they’d fallen onto it.”
I could imagine the scene now. The rain, still wild in the heavy breeze, the slim figure of Sally Fenton bending over a blackened metal tablet, the mist swirling on the hills high above, and Sally exulting in what she had found.
“You had to clear the rubble?”
“It wasn’t difficult—but, do you know, Andy, I think it had been concealed. There was quite a lot of rubble, but not all of it the kind of stone the roof had been tiled with.”
I should say that in Derbyshire the local stone was used to a couple of hundred years ago not just for the walls, but for the roof-tiles of most important buildings. Slates came later.
“What sort of stone?”
“Alabaster.”
Alabaster is a strangely beautiful white stone, very hard and durable. It isn’t easy to work, so it’s expensive as a building material. Its main use is in funerary monuments. I wondered why an alabaster structure should cover a brass engraving.
“So what then?”
“I saw that I could clear the rubble away. It didn’t take long. I knew it was good right away. The detail’s terrific. Just look at the lion of Humph’s feet.”
I hadn’t looked at the animals. Usually there’s a lion at the knight’s feet and a lapdog at his lady’s. Humphrey’s lion had a half-snarl on its face, tongue protruding, and its claws threatened Humph’s plump, armoured claves. Altogether a very proper beast. The lapdog was something else. Beneath Sybil’s slender feet, a rather odd creature cowered.
When I say cowered I don’t mean it looked afraid. It seemed to be hiding, as if it didn’t like the light. A bit of drapery served to half conceal it, so there wasn’t much of its face showing. One eye looked out of a squarish face. There was a disproportionately large muzzle. It didn’t look like any dog I’d ever seen; I supposed that in medieval England they had some odd breeds. If Cornelius, our wandering hound, had seen it, he would have fled.
“The lion’s fine, but the dog’s odd.”
Sally looked at it