The concern, Ackerman explained, was not about age alone. If the pendant were merely old—Victorian, say, or even Georgian, he could have offered a valuation and sent Gerald on his way. The issue was the combination of features. The granulation technique. The inlaid stone, which under the loupe appeared to be not garnet but a polished red carnelian, a stone favoured in Mediterranean antiquity. And the reverse markings, which Ackerman had tentatively identified as not letters at all, but a series of symbols that bore resemblance to early Tuscan script.
“I want to be careful here,” Ackerman said. “I’m a jeweller, not an archaeologist. I could be wrong. The piece could be a later imitation—there were fashions in the 1800s for this sort of thing, and some of the reproductions were extraordinarily good.” He picked up the pendant again, tilting it under his bench lamp. “But if it isn’t an imitation, and it has been sitting six inches beneath your garden in Harrogate for some considerable time, then it raises questions I’m not qualified to answer.” Gerald asked what he should do.
“Don’t sell it,” Ackerman said immediately—and it was the speed of the answer that stayed with Gerald, walking back through town with the pendant in his coat pocket. A flat, immediate instruction, delivered with the gravity of a man who had seen something he did not wish to be responsible for mishandling.