Authors: Guy Fraser-Sampson
Equally clearly, however, the remaining occupants of the room had no such intention. Led by Mr Wyse and the Padre, they were already rising to their feet and starting to mumble embarrassed thanks and farewells to Lucia.
‘Dear friends,’ Lucia said rather plaintively, ‘must you all go?’
It seemed they must. As Mapp glowered ferociously at the disappearance of her audience, the party began to take their leave, leaving Lucia to shame and disgrace.
‘G
eorgie,’ Lucia suddenly spoke up uncertainly, ‘what about that coin you found? Where did you put it?’
Georgie looked blank, as well he might, for he knew perfectly well that he had found no such thing. He attempted to retrieve the situation by saying, ‘Oh, I really don’t know,’ but his agitation was palpable.
‘The box is empty, dear,’ Elizabeth reminded Lucia somewhat viciously, rustling the tissue paper inside to emphasise her point.
Diva, herself on the verge of tears, came back across the room to Lucia.
‘Give it up, Lucia. Much the best thing,’ she said quietly.
Then she turned to Mapp, her cheeks flushed.
‘Time to leave, Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘Best for everyone. Enough said.’
‘Hear, hear,’ said Mr Wyse, bowing to the room at large. With relief written plainly on their faces, the company made once again for the door.
Then Lucia’s voice issued forth again, rather stronger this time.
‘But how silly of me, I had quite forgotten the little drawer in the base of the box.’
With an audible collective sigh at this fresh sally, the others turned back, each trying to avoid catching anyone else’s eye.
‘Mr Chesworth,’ she cooed, ‘would you be so kind as to try it? I think one of those ornamental carvings at the bottom operates as a knob with which to pull it out.’
‘Why, so it does,’ he replied, after fiddling with the box for a minute. ‘Now, what have we here?’
He removed a very small piece of tissue paper and carefully opened it.
‘I say!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is more like it.’
‘What is it?’ Elizabeth asked, a hint of uncertainty appearing in her voice for the first time.
‘A coin,’ came the response, and then, like a casual rapier thrust into her vitals, ‘and definitely Roman.’
‘No!’ chorused the room.
‘Yes indeed,’ he assured them. ‘In fact, wait a minute, surely not …?’
He reached into his pocket for a small magnifying glass and scrutinised the coin intently. The room held its breath.
‘It can’t be,’ Elizabeth said instinctively. ‘It’s a trick, whatever it is.’
The others ignored this sally. Their attention was focused on Mr Chesworth, and his gaze was fixed on the coin.
‘Oh!’ he exclaimed in surprise. Then, as if an unseen blow had suddenly knocked all the breath from his body, he buckled at the knees and sat down very heavily on his chair.
‘Oh,’ he said again, but this time it was a weak, tremulous, unbelieving sort of ‘oh’ uttered with a rounded mouth and glazed eyes.
‘Is it of any interest?’ Lucia asked casually.
Mr Chesworth looked at her and nodded soundlessly. Then he took a big gulp of air and responded.
‘It is an aureus,’ he said. ‘A gold coin equivalent to twenty-five denari.’
‘A denarius was a penny, wasn’t it?’ Susan Wyse asked. ‘That’s the “d” that we use for pennies?’
‘Quite correct, madam,’ Mr Chesworth confirmed, ‘though the denarius was not a trifling unit of currency. There were coins right down to the quadrans, of which there were sixty-four to the denarius.’
‘Hardly very valuable, then,’ Elizabeth ventured hopefully. ‘Twentyfive pennies is only just over two shillings, after all.’
The rest of the room were then treated to the spectacle of Mr Chesworth looking surprised and trying not to laugh, which most afterwards agreed had been very nearly as satisfying as if he had actually done so.
‘Well,’ he said, clearly struggling for a sensible response, ‘in terms of its purchasing power at the time you have to think in terms of a soldier’s wages for nearly a month, but that’s not the point.’
‘The point, of course,’ came Lucia’s old, strong, confident voice, ‘would be its historical significance. If it had any, of course,’ she added innocently, ‘which I’m sure it doesn’t.’
‘Well, of course it doesn’t,’ Elizabeth interjected.
‘Oh, but it does,’ Mr Chesworth assured her.
‘Perhaps,’ Mr Wyse suggested, ‘the British Museum might enlighten us as to what that might be?’
The British Museum stood up, placed the coin and his magnifying glass on the table with a hand which trembled noticeably and spoke in a firm, clear voice as if addressing a lecture hall.
‘This is undoubtedly the most exciting numismatic find from Roman Britain ever made.’
‘No!’ came forth again the instinctive Tilling response to any item of news.
‘It is, as I said, an aureus,’ he went on, ignoring the interruption. ‘That in itself is quite unusual. Very little trade in Roman Britain required gold coins, and they were unpopular because they needed to be broken into so many smaller coins. If you imagine trying to pay for newspaper today with a five pound note you will understand something of the irritation of merchants of the day.
‘But this,’ he said, picking it up again with gleaming eyes, ‘is
very
special. It is stamped with the details of Gaius Marcus Aurelius Marius. As I am sure you know, he was one of those Emperors who was set up by the local soldiers, of whom he was General, despite the fact that there was already at least one other Emperor already on the throne.’
Everyone nodded in what they hoped was a knowledgeable fashion.
‘But surely,’ Lucia drawled languidly, ‘he only survived for a few months before being overthrown didn’t he?’ She furrowed her brow, obviously dredging up the details from her encyclopaedic knowledge of the twilight years of the Roman Empire. ‘He was killed by … Victorinus, wasn’t it? In 269 ad I seem to remember.’
‘Indeed he was,’ Mr Chesworth replied, with a nod to her powers of memory and erudition, which she acknowledged in a manner that hinted strongly at the urbane. ‘Which means it is very rare to find any of his coins at all, let alone an aureus. Why, until this very afternoon I had no knowledge that any even existed. Certainly none has ever been found – anywhere in the world.’
During the stunned silence that greeted this remark Lucia glided across the room and touched the bell.
‘And to think,’ she said as she gazed at the stupefied faces of her guests, ‘that it has been lying around in that old box all this time since Georgie found it in the mud so many years ago.’
Georgie found his throat so constricted that he could only gasp, ‘Well, just fancy!’
Mr Chesworth came to his senses. It occurred to him that any unknown assistant curator who launched a previously unsuspected archaeological phenomenon on the world would be unlikely to remain an unknown assistant curator for much longer. Newspaper headlines referring to the Chesworth aureus flashed giddily through his mind.
‘Might I ask, madam,’ he enquired cautiously, ‘what your plans might be for this amazing discovery?’
Lucia laughed gaily. ‘Why, I really hadn’t given it any thought. This is all so sudden, after all.’
‘I venture to suggest,’ he went on, ‘that it might properly be displayed in the British Museum. With its loan from your good self suitably acknowledged, naturally.’
For one who really hadn’t given it any thought, Lucia’s response was surprisingly swift and decisive.
‘Since it was my husband who found it, it is he who should be acknowledged,’ she replied firmly. ‘It shall be known as the Pillson aureus and it will not be lent, but
given
. My husband will donate it to the nation.’
Mr Chesworth goggled.
‘I am sure the nation will be very grateful,’ he gasped.
Lucia waved away such a quaint notion.
‘Should the Chairman of the museum wish to express his gratitude, perhaps by asking Georgie to open a new exhibition with the aureus as its centrepiece, I am sure he would be only too happy to oblige,’ she said graciously.
Mr Chesworth looked uncomfortable.
‘Ah, if only, Mrs Pillson. Sadly, the mounting of new exhibitions costs money, and funding has been in short supply since the war.’
‘Then your committee must talk to Georgie and he will see what can be arranged,’ she said with an even more gracious smile. ‘Really, I can’t think why they haven’t approached him before. He is already a well-known patron of the Royal Opera House.’
Naturally everybody’s gaze turned to Georgie at this point, and he tried to compose his face into an expression that was at the same time cultured, wealthy and generous.
Elizabeth’s mouth had for some time been opening and closing silently. Now suddenly she found her voice.
‘Suppose it’s a fake?’ she asked.
‘Like your family portrait, you mean?’ Diva countered at once.
Mr Wyse, who had been the innocent cause of its unmasking, winced visibly.
Major Benjy said, ‘Here, steady on, what!’
‘I can assure you, Mrs Mapp-Flint, that the coin is genuine,’ Mr Chesworth said.
‘But you just said that you’d never seen one before, that nobody had.’
‘That is so,’ he replied quietly yet firmly, ‘but I would stake my life on its being genuine. Apart from anything else, something like this would be almost impossible to fake. You would need an original coin from which to take an impression.’
‘But if you’ve never seen an original,’ she persisted desperately, ‘then you wouldn’t know what one would look like, would you?’
‘I beg to disagree,’ said Mr Chesworth, who was clearly beginning to be irritated by such dogged opposition. ‘Just because nobody has ever seen one doesn’t mean that we don’t know what it would look like, what it should look like, if it did in fact exist.’
‘Perhaps it was bought in a coin shop?’
This time Mr Chesworth really did laugh.
‘Oh dear me, no,’ he said. ‘Seeing this coin in a coin shop, even a specialist one like those around the British Museum, would be like seeing a Rembrandt in a high street antique shop. Why, it would be recognised and noticed at once.’
‘It’s a trick!’ Elizabeth repeated, her voice becoming very shrill. ‘Can’t you all see? It’s a trick!’
Fortunately at this point Grosvenor came into the room and asked, ‘You rang, madam?’
‘Champagne please, Grosvenor, and lots of it,’ Lucia commanded. ‘I find we have something to celebrate.’
‘Champagne, is it?’ marvelled the Padre.
‘Indeed, Padre
mio
,’ Lucia cried. ‘And since the weather is so wonderful perhaps we might take it in the garden.’
Amid the ensuing murmur of acclaim and agreement, she turned to Mapp and smiled sweetly.
‘Will you join us, Elizabeth dear, or must you dash off?’
Mapp’s red and contorted features goggled at her noiselessly, and then she turned towards the door. Major Benjy followed her stiffly, aware that total defeat rather than total victory had attended his wife’s best efforts, nervous of having to endure her emotional outpourings for their walk back to Grebe and the evening which lay ahead, and deeply regretful at having to leave behind what sounded like limitless supplies of champagne.
Mr Chesworth hovered indecisively as his host and hostess for the weekend made their departure.
‘Do stay, Mr Chesworth,’ Lucia implored him. ‘We have so much to celebrate, and so much to discuss. Cadman can run you back later in the Rolls.’
To reinforce her plea, she tucked her arm in his and steered him deftly into the garden.
‘What I don’t understand,’ she said as the others pressed round, smiling excitedly and raising their champagne glasses, ‘is what you were doing staying at Grebe for the weekend in the first place. Elizabeth never has house guests.’
‘Truth to tell, madam, no more do I,’ he replied. ‘Mrs Mapp-Flint started corresponding with the museum some time ago about some valuable Roman finds which were in the possession of an eccentric lady who lived locally, and asked if someone could come down and persuade her to reveal them so they could at least be catalogued. Naturally, as her letter concerned Roman Britain, it was passed to me, it being my specialty. Things just sort of moved on from there.’
‘Now I see things very clearly,’ Lucia said drily. ‘So you don’t work in a bank, you and Elizabeth don’t have mutual friends in London, and you’re not on the south coast for a walking holiday and to study birds?’
‘Is that what Elizabeth said?’ Diva asked, shocked, as Mr Chesworth shook his head in response to Lucia’s question.
‘It is indeed,’ Lucia confirmed sadly. ‘Poor Elizabeth! We must pity her.’
‘Pity is a charitable instinct indeed, Lucia,’ Susan Wyse observed, ‘but I am not sure the rest of us take quite such a charitable view. Why, her conduct recently has been quite appalling, even by her standards.’
‘Hear, hear!’ seconded Irene, who had been recalled from Taormina by telephone, where she had been sobbing convulsively, and was already on her second glass of champagne.
The Padre murmured something Anglican and platitudinous, whereupon Lucia fixed him with a brilliant smile.
‘And of course we have yet one more thing to celebrate, namely the winning of the amateur prize at the bridge tournament by a team from Tilling.’
More clinking of glasses ensued, with embarrassed mumblings from the Bartletts and Diva. Irene by contrast shouted, ‘Aren’t we all wonderful?’ delightedly and drained her glass.
‘Yes, Irene, dear,’ Lucia agreed as she gazed contentedly around the garden, ‘I rather think we are.’
S
o successful was Lucia’s impromptu champagne garden party that few of those attending it had any clear idea the next morning of how they had got to bed that evening, let alone when.
Georgie called for coffee with his breakfast in a rather hoarse voice, and sat slumped at the breakfast table. He gazed at Lucia, who also looked a little peaky, strangely so, for, as was her habit, she had imbibed very little.
‘Are you feeling all right, Lucia?’ he asked. ‘Not too much champagne, surely?’
‘No indeed,
caro mio
, not like you,’ she said with a smile. ‘Though I did get bitten by some wretched insect in the garden yesterday evening. Unfortunately it’s right between my toes and rather painful. I must put some camomile lotion on it after breakfast.’