Buried in Clay by Priscilla Masters Read Free Book Online

took the jug from her and held it myself. ‘He tried to. Luckily for me he didn’t really understand the way salerooms work so his bid wasn’t accepted.’
    She was watching me now. ‘Didn’t he try and buy if off you?’
    ‘Why do you think he bought me lunch?’
    ‘But you didn’t sell?’
    ‘I promised him first refusal but no I didn’t sell.’
    ‘Good for you,’ she said then added, ‘What’s he like?’
    ‘Very suave,’ I said smiling. ‘And very nice too.’
    She smiled. ‘Well if I were you I’d give him a wide berth. There’s a murky connection somewhere.’ She gave me a playful punch. ‘And bad blood will out.’
    ‘Yes.’ I stood up. ‘Maybe. But he wasn’t telling me any of it. Anyway. I can look after myself. Now then I’ve kept you late. I’ll give you a lift home.’
    We set the alarm and locked up the shop. I left behind the pieces which would be for sale. Joanne and I would price them up tomorrow. I loaded the pottery that needed restoration back into my car, together with the box containing the precious jug.

CHAPTER THREE
    After dropping Joanne off at the house she shared with two other girls in Milton I drove towards my home.
    My home was a grey-stone cottage in a tiny hamlet called Horton, north-east of the Potteries, just off the A53 road to Leek. Horton was a small village with little more than a pub, a thirteenth century church and a group of farm workers’ cottages clustered round a large, elegant, stone farmhouse. Mine had been one of the farm workers’ cottages set a mile along a narrow road. This road skirted a shallow, marshy valley populated by cows – and little else. It was a haven of peace and tranquillity and I loved it.
    Horton Cottage too was my idea of perfection. Built in 1847 it had a small sitting room with views right across the valley, a dining room just big enough for four chairs round a Victorian, walnut loo table and a narrow kitchen at the back which overlooked my patch of garden – now bright with daffodils. Upstairs it had twobedrooms with low, sloping ceilings and gabled windows and a good-sized bathroom. I had bought Horton Cottage not long after I had bought the antiques shop and soon after I had moved in I had resolved that I would never sell it. It was such a comfortable home. A haven. My stability. Perhaps even then I sensed that it would, one day, become both a retreat and a refuge.
    I reversed my car into the drive and carried the boxes inside. There was no hall. The front door opened straight into the sitting room, small and square with a brick fireplace, a comfortable sofa, a table, two chairs and beneath the leaded lights of the window an oak coffer. I set the boxes down on the table and, as I inevitably did when I had been out for the day, crossed the room to stand in front of the fireplace and stare up at a painting I had bought last year. I had known at the time that it was valuable but at dawn in an open-air antiques fair, people are not quite concentrating and the vendor had failed to recognise the antiquity and quality of the picture. This, of course, is the very fish hook which drags dealers out of their beds even at dawn on a cold, winter’s morning. I had felt the quickening almost before I had spotted it on the floor, on a grubby sheet, propped up against a cartwheel. I had picked it up, affecting nonchalance. This affectation of nonchalance is as important an attribute to a dealer as that great well of knowledge. The dealer had demanded fifteen pounds for it, eyeing me slyly and though I had known it was worth more than a hundred times that amount I had demurredand grumbled. It was all part of the game; he had let me have it for fourteen.
    Haggling becomes a habit and to agree too readily to a price implies that the object is worth more. Far more.
    The subject should have told the vendor of its value but I’d realised he had assumed that it was a recent copy. True it was dark and unattractive. It needed cleaning. It was a