Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 129951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 650(@200wpm)___ 520(@250wpm)___ 433(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 129951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 650(@200wpm)___ 520(@250wpm)___ 433(@300wpm)
“Holy crap,” I exclaimed.
Her head popped out from behind a massive, broken chandelier deep within the bowels of a huge mess. “Vivi!”
“Hey,” I called, wending my way through bureaus and boxes and armoires and ancient ice skates. “It’s like the room of requirement in here.”
She giggled. “I know. I’m about to ask Scotty and Harry to help me lug some stuff out into the hall so I have more room to move around.” She frowned. “I found more papers for you, but not anything from Harmony.”
“I’ll take all I can get,” I said, gazing at a pair of large, elaborate gilt torchères balanced on top of something covered with a heavy, quilted mover’s blanket. “Jesus, honey, I think these are Chippendale.”
She picked one up and examined it. “You think?”
“Babe, if they are, those alone might be worth a million pounds.”
Her gaze flew to me. “Really?”
“Totally.”
She looked back at the candlestick. “How do we know?”
“Chippendale didn’t put a maker’s mark on his pieces,” I told her. “They have to be authenticated by an expert. Unless you have some documentation somewhere.”
She glanced through the room. “We probably do, it’s just finding it.”
I glanced through the room too, saying, “Prue, I had no idea, but I don’t think this is a project you can handle on your own. You need to call Christie’s, or Sotheby’s, or Criterion and ask them to send someone out here. Though, they’ll be salivating to get this stuff on the auction block, so maybe contact the National Trust or the British Museum or the Victoria and Albert. I mean,”—I did a full circle—“it appears to be at least three centuries worth of a lot of stuff. They needed a bigger boat in Jaws to take on the great white. You’re gonna need a fleet of coast guard to handle this white whale.”
Prue grinned at me.
I touched the torchère with the reverence a possible Chippendale piece deserved, saying, “But man, I’d kill to dig through this mess.”
“First things first, Vivi,” Prue advised. “I promise not to do anything with this stuff until you have a look at all of it. But you keep at your book.”
Ah, my Prue.
I just knew she’d been guarding my book time.
She continued, “In the meantime, I’ll make a few calls. And I’ll definitely ask Scotty and Harry to help me move some things out so anyone who wants to look at it can get around better. But I have this crazy feeling there’s something in this house somewhere that you need. I just can’t seem to find it, and since I can’t get to half this stuff because the other half is piled on or in the way, I can’t get my hands on it.”
“Not that you won’t, but please, you and Harry and Scotty need to handle all of this with the utmost care. I think this may be a treasure trove, honey.”
She beamed. “I thought so too. And since we probably won’t keep most of it, we can auction it off and augment The Fund!”
Again with The Fund.
I didn’t ask.
I said, “Listen, I came to find you because Gingerface and Snowball want to come out to the studio with me. Can they come?”
“Oh, sure,” she replied breezily. “They aren’t outdoor cats, but they won’t do anything but follow you. Sometimes Floofy gardens with Chassie. She never leaves her side. But she does like to snooze in the sun.”
And that was my conversation with Prue and my introduction to the attics before Snowball, Gingerface and I went to the studio and got to work.
She was right.
They pranced through the turf and along the walkways right behind me all the way there.
And now I was studying the butler’s ledgers from 1946.
Primarily, two weird entries for two footmen.
Okay, we’ll begin with the fact that The Downs still had footmen in 1946, which, for that time, was very rare.
Sure, they had Scotty and Harry now, and even though they served dinner, like a footman would, I still thought they were around more to look after the occupants of the house than to serve food and tend fires.
But that wasn’t the weird part.
Bonuses, the line item in the ledgers denoted them. But when I kept going back and forth, there were no other bonuses listed for any staff that I could find.
Ever.
And they each got three hundred pounds, and once I adjusted that number for inflation, it made it over ten thousand pounds in today’s currency.
That was a massive bonus.
Especially since the footmen made the whopping amount of forty pounds per year.
And if that wasn’t enough, it was dated the day after Marie’s entry about something dire happening at The Downs.
“Bribes to be quiet? Or bribes because they were asked to do something they shouldn’t have to do, and they also had to be quiet about it?” I whispered to the ledger as my phone vibrated on the desk beside me.