The Lost Island

5

After a quick trip back to his hotel room for a change of clothes, Gideon set off with the precious page for the London offices of Sotheby’s, where the final test of his scheme would take place. It was a stiff three-mile walk that took Gideon through some fascinating byways, as well as Hyde Park. It was a splendid late-summer day, and in the park the ancient trees were in full leaf, cumulus clouds drifting overhead like sailing ships, the greensward alive with people. London was an extraordinary city, and he told himself he really should spend more time there — maybe even live there.

And then he remembered his terminal medical condition, and such thoughts were quickly forced from his head.

The Sotheby’s building was an unpretentious, nineteenth-century edifice of four stories, newly whitewashed. The staff were most solicitous when they saw the little illuminated manuscript page he wanted to place with them at auction, and he was ushered into a neat little office on the third floor, where he was greeted by a charming, roly-poly man with gold-rimmed spectacles and a huge shock of Einsteinian hair, dressed in an old-fashioned tweed suit with a vest and gold watch chain, looking like a man out of a Dickens novel. He was considered to be — Gideon had done the research — one of the world’s greatest experts on illuminated manuscripts.

“Well, well!” the man said, smelling of tobacco and perhaps even a hint of whiskey. “What have we here, eh?” He held out a fat hand. “Brian MacKilda, at your service!” He spoke as if always out of breath, punctuating his phrases with a huff-huff as if catching his wind.

“I’ve got an illuminated manuscript I’d like to place in auction.” Gideon held out the small leather portfolio.

“Excellent! Let’s take a look.” MacKilda came around the desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a loupe, which he pressed into one voluminous, winking eye. Adjusting a special lamp — which threw a pool of white light onto a smooth black tray — he picked up the portfolio, took out the plastic-covered page Gideon had just purchased, slipped it out, and stared at it with a few nods, which set his fluffy hair a-wagging, accompanied by grunts of approval.

He then put it under the light. Several minutes went by while he examined it with the loupe, making more animal noises, all of which sounded positive. After that, MacKilda switched off the bright light, reached down into his desk, and removed a small, peculiar-looking flashlight with a square face. He held it close to the page and turned it on. It cast a deep ultraviolet light. MacKilda shone it here and there, lingering only briefly, and then switched off the light. The noises suddenly turned into negative snorts.

“Oh, dear,” the man said finally. “Dear, dear, dear.” This was followed by some huffing and puffing.

“Is there a problem?”

MacKilda shook his head sorrowfully. “Fake.”

“What? How can it be? I paid four thousand pounds for it!”

The man turned a pair of sad eyes on him. “Our business, sir, is sadly rife with fakes. Rife!” He rolled the r with particular emphasis.

“But how can shining a light on it for five seconds be definitive? Don’t you have other tests?”

A long sigh. “We have many tests, many, many tests. Raman spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence, carbon 14. But in this case there’s no need to do other tests.”

“I don’t get it. One five-second test?”

“Allow me to explain.” MacKilda took a deep breath, followed by several huff-huffs and a general throat clearing. “The illuminators of yore used mostly mineral pigments in their inks. The blues are from ground lapis lazuli, the vermilion from cinnabar and sulfur. Green came from ground malachite or copper verdigris. And the whites were usually made from lead, often in combination with gypsum or calcite.”

He paused for more stentorian breathing.

“Now, the point is that some of these minerals fluoresce strongly under ultraviolet light, while others change color in certain ways.” He paused, breathing hard. “But look at this.”

He shined the black light once again on the manuscript page. The surface remained dark, dull, unchanged. “There, you see? Nothing!”

He snapped it off. “These pigments are therefore cheap aniline dyes, none of which react to UV light.”

“But it looks so real!” Gideon said, almost pleading. “Please take a look at it again, please. It’s got to be real!”

With another long-suffering sigh, MacKilda turned to it again and in fact did look at it for more than five seconds. “I admit the work is quite good. I was fooled at first. And the vellum looks original. Why a forger with such evident talent would go to the trouble to create an artistic fake like this — and then use aniline dyes — is beyond me. My guess is that it’s Chinese. It used to be most of the fakes came out of Russia, but now we’re starting to see some out of the Far East. The Chinese are a bit naive — hence the aniline dyes — but they’ll catch on, unfortunately.”

He shook his head, the hair waggling, and held the page back out to Gideon. “It’s most certainly, most definitely, without a doubt, a forgery.” And he punctuated this with a final jiggle of hair and a loud huff-huff.