Dead as a Scone (8 page)

Appropriate weather to talk about impending doom.

“If we had more time,” Flick said, “we could launch a fund-raising campaign to purchase the antiquities. We could go after donations and grants and approach other foundations for support. The Hawkers weren’t the only family in the tea trade.”

Nigel replied with a halfhearted grunt that made Flick spin around and peer at him.
Does the oaf really care? After all, he’ll leave just about when the museum gets cleaned out.

She guiltily banished the disagreeable thoughts. Nigel hadn’t acted anything like an oaf in recent days. He had gone beyond the call of duty to put together an excellent send-off for Elspeth. Moreover, he seemed as upset as she felt over the threat to the museum. Happily, Nigel hadn’t noticed her fleeting glare at him.

“Your predecessor served for, what, fifteen years as chief curator?” he said.

“Malcolm Dunlevy held the post for closer to twenty years.”

“Why didn’t he purchase the items owned by the Hawker family?”

“I’m sure he never saw the need,” Flick said. “The Hawker Foundation built the museum as a showcase for the Hawker collection. Over the years, Mary Hawker Evans donated many items to the museum. Upon her death, she bequeathed us a number of valuable antiquities, and her will made arrangements to pay the inheritance taxes on the other items. Malcolm probably assumed that Elspeth had done the same. I certainly did
—
up until a half hour ago.” She added, “I wonder how much of the Hawker collection we’ll be able to purchase.”

“I don’t suppose we will have a definitive answer until Bleasdale sends in the appraisers and we learn how large a bequest Elspeth gave the museum.” Nigel sprang upright in his chair. “Oh bother!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Your question reminded me that I don’t know our collection as well as I ought. In truth, I have no idea what we own and what the Hawkers own.”

“There’s a register of the family’s property in my office.”

“Brilliant! Would you be willing to show me around the museum this afternoon? I don’t want to be at a hopeless disadvantage when I meet with Bleasdale on Monday.”

“Sure—I’d rather visit the exhibits than mope. We can start in the Hawker Memorial Library and then work our way down.”

Flick retrieved the register—a one-inch-thick binder stuffed with computer-generated inventory logs—from the bookcase in her office. She also swapped the three-inch-heel pumps she had worn to the funeral for a pair of comfortable walking shoes. She found Nigel waiting for her in the library, holding a legal pad and staring at the tall bookshelves that lined the walls.

“Another penny for your thoughts,” she said.

“I’m forever amazed that so many books have been written about tea,” he said.

“There are many different aspects of tea to write about. Agriculture, manufacturing, economics, history, geography, marketing, shipping, chemistry, food preparation, etiquette, chinaware, silverware…”

“I take your point,” Nigel said. “How many books do we have?”

“Roughly three thousand, including about six hundred nineteenth-century tomes from Commodore Hawker’s personal library. They are on loan to us.”

“Do you have a sense of their value?”

“Oh, the commodore’s books are old and unusual, but I doubt there are many collectors who covet specialized volumes about tea. I’d guess an average price tag of say fifty pounds each.”

“Perhaps thirty thousand pounds in all—between fifty and fifty-five thousand dollars.”

Flick nodded.

Nigel made notes on his pad, then said, “I rarely see ordinary museum guests perusing these shelves.”

“True. The library is mostly used by visiting academics and students—and, of course, my staff of curators.”

“Does anything else on this floor belong to the Hawkers?”

“No,” Flick answered. “The museum owns all of the paraphernalia in the Conservation Laboratory and our office equipment.”

“In that case—onward and downward.”

Flick followed Nigel down the staircase to the second floor. Directly across from the bottom of the flight of steps was the doorway to the Tea in the Americas Room. She peeked inside. No museum guests.

“I love this exhibit,” Flick said. “The two most important items belong to the Hawker family.” She pointed at two large oil paintings hung on opposite walls. “They are both by Lilly Martin Spencer, an American painter who worked in the nineteenth century. One is the renowned Boston Tea Party of 1773…the other of the lesser-known Edenton Ladies Tea Party of 1774.”

“Where might one find Edenton?” Nigel asked.

“It’s a small city not far from the coast of North Carolina. During the autumn of 1774, fifty-one Edenton ladies held a public meeting and resolved not to drink East Indian tea until the Crown eliminated the import tax. They also refused to wear any clothing from England.”

“Nasty rebels!” Nigel said with a wink. “But I agree that the paintings are lovely.”

“I can’t begin to estimate their worth.”

“Several hundred thousand pounds at a minimum, one would think.”

“And then there are many related artifacts on display. English newspaper articles about the ‘outrages’ in the colonies. Other illustrations and cartoons. Tea chests of the late colonial era. An original parliamentary copy of the Tea Act of 1773.
Rats!”

Nigel looked up from his writing. “Say again?”

“I can’t get used to the idea that all of this may disappear. The Hawkers own everything—except the tea bag exhibit.”

“Ah! I’ve wanted to ask you about that ever since my first look-see through the museum. It seems odd to me that a Yank invented the tea bag.”

Flick smiled. “Legend says that it happened in New York City, back in 1908. A tea merchant named Thomas Sullivan supposedly became annoyed with the cost of the little tin boxes he used to send samples to customers. So he switched to small silk bags. One of the recipients brewed a pot of tea by simply pouring hot water over the bag—and the rest is history.”

“From your tone, I assume the legend isn’t true.”

Flick pointed at a framed document. “That’s a copy of the U.S. patent issued in 1903 for a ‘tea leaf holder’ made out of fabric. Tom Sullivan seems to have received the credit for an invention actually made by two gentlemen named Lawson and McLaren.”

“Where next?” Nigel asked.

“We’re done with this floor. The only other permanent exhibit room is the Tea and Health Gallery—we own all of the displays.”

“And a
fascinating
read they are.”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic. Studies have shown that tea is good for your teeth because it’s a natural source of fluoride, and it’s also brimming with flavonoids, antioxidants that have all sorts of healthful properties.”

“Coffee is good for the health, too. On many occasions it has kept me from falling asleep behind the wheel of my BMW.”

“Very droll.” Flick strode into the second-floor lobby, Nigel close behind.

“The small silver lining in this cloud,” he said, “is that we can immediately reclaim the square footage set aside for the Hawker family suite.” He pointed to a door labeled PRIVATE. “To begin with, I doubt Alfred or Harriet plans to spend any time in the museum. To end with, I see no need for us to provide the greedy rotters any office space in this institution.”

Flick caught her breath.
He’s talking about Elspeth’s room.

Directly under Nigel’s office was an equivalent space on the second floor set aside as an office for the Hawkers. It had a large desk, a comfortable sofa, a private loo, even a small kitchen area. Mary Hawker Evans had occupied it sparingly—chiefly on days when the trustees met—but Elspeth had used it almost daily. “My pied-à-terre in Tunbridge Wells,” she often said. “My home away from home.”

“Someone will have to pack up Dame Elspeth’s kit,” Nigel said.

“I’ll put it on my list of things to do.” Flick sighed. She had intended to browse through the Hawker Suite as part of her efforts to gather additional facts about Elspeth’s relationships with museum people before her death, but her private investigation, if that was the right term for it, had run out of steam. Her plan had been both simple and vague: Engage trustees and museum employees in conversations about Elspeth and listen carefully to everything they said. Well, she had heard nothing the least bit irregular at her dinner with four of the trustees, or in a subsequent chat with Archibald Meicklejohn about her desire to add a professional tea taster to the museum’s staff, or in routine meetings with the curators and docents. Every passing day seemed to soften her conviction that Elspeth had been fed an overdose of barbiturates.

So much for your delusions of detective grandeur.

“Let’s head downstairs,” she said to Nigel.

“Before we do,” he replied, “what about the paintings in the Grand Hall?”

“Blast!
I forgot all about them.”

The Grand Hall, the largest room in the museum, filled the western side of the second floor and was used both for scholarly conferences and special exhibits. Flick loved the décor: Chinese silk draperies, wooden moldings painted in yellow and blue, and comfortable gilded “salon chairs” upholstered in matching blue damask. The dozen oil paintings in the room—each done by a different member of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts in the late nineteenth century—depicted various personalities associated with the history of tea, commencing with the possibly mythical Chinese emperor Shen Nung, who purportedly discovered that tea was good to drink in 2,737 BC, and running down through the ages to Commodore Desmond Hawker and Sir Thomas Lipton.

“The paintings are probably worth millions,” she said.

“I agree,” he answered as he scribbled.

She pirouetted in place. “I can’t have forgotten anything else. The two other rooms on this floor are classrooms we use for seminars.”

“To the staircase!”

Flick trod down the steps behind Nigel, dreading the coming few minutes. “Better sharpen your pencil,” she said. “The first floor overflows with Hawker property.”

The lobby on the first floor was part of the Tea at Sea Gallery, the museum’s second most popular exhibit. Only the History of Tea Colonnade on the ground floor drew more visitors. The seven guests in the gallery were wearing the bright blue headsets that enabled them to listen to the room’s audio tour guide system.

“Everything here is on loan from the Hawkers,” Flick said. “The forty models of tea clipper ships. The binnacles and compasses. The ships’ logs. The antique charts. The ships’ wheels. The figureheads. The photographs and paintings. The chronometers and navigation tools. The nautical relics. Everything.” She opened the binder and flipped through a sheaf of pages. “There must be six hundred cataloged items.”

“Each of the clipper ship models will fetch a pretty penny,” Nigel said. “I’ll guess ten thousand quid apiece. That’s four hundred thousand, right there. I’ll be generous and estimate two and a half million for everything in the room.” He glanced at Flick. “What do you think?”

She shrugged.

“Is that a ‘too high’ shrug or a ‘too low’ shrug?” he asked.

“Your numbers are beginning to make me feel queasy.”

“Then I withdraw my question. Press on!”

Flick peeked into the gallery at the front of the first floor that held the Hawker collection of tea-related antiquities. As she anticipated, there were five guests widely scattered around the room, looking at individual objects on display. Guests seemed to choose favorite items and linger around them.

Nigel came up behind her and said, “Every time I pass this gallery, I am reminded of an antique store. It offers the same kind of cluttered ambience. A happy jumble of porcelain, silver, and wood.”

“I see it as more of a treasure trove. Each antiquity is a gem. Unique. Irreplaceable. Priceless.”

“Priceless in a symbolic sense,” Nigel said with a soft laugh. “Appraisers always manage to come up with fair-market prices.”

Flick nodded glumly. “And there are scads of wealthy collectors around who can pay them—although it would be tragic to hide these objects in private collections.” She gestured inconspicuously. “That woman in the green sweater and brown slacks is standing next to the earliest surviving examples of
Yixing,
purple-clay teapots. They were fired in China, in the thirteenth century, during the Sung Dynasty.” She gestured again. “The man wearing blue jeans is looking at a gold and silver eighteenth-century samovar that belonged to the royal family of Russia. Again, the earliest surviving example. And the woman in gray is browsing through our collection of Japanese tea ceremony utensils. We have some of the finest Edo-period porcelains in Europe. They date back to the early sixteenth century.”

“I need a guesstimate of value,” Nigel said. “How about a few million?”

Flick chuckled.

“What is so funny?” Nigel said.

“Which do you suppose is my favorite tea antiquity?”

“I have no idea, though I doubt it’s the tsar’s tea machine.”