Gerald was not a man who read significance into things. He had spent thirty years as a civil engineer. He believed in observable data, calculations, and the dull reliability of facts. But that evening, sitting at the kitchen table with the pendant under Miriam’s reading lamp, he found himself affected by it in a way he couldn’t rationalise. The craftsmanship was, even to his untrained eye, extraordinary. Each tiny granule in the border was perfectly spherical, no larger than a grain of sand, fixed to the surface with no visible solder. He’d looked up Castellani after leaving Ackerman’s, and the reproduction jewellery from that period had a certain self-consciousness to it, the slightly-too-perfect quality of work made to impress. This was something else. It had an unguardedness, as if it had been made not to demonstrate skill, but simply because the maker knew no other way to work.
Miriam sat across from him, reading nothing, watching him. “You’re going to follow this up,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
Gerald contacted the Yorkshire Museum the next morning. The finds liaison officer—a brisk, practical woman named Dr Sarah Okafor, agreed to see him within the week. When she arrived, she examined the pendant with the controlled focus of someone accustomed not to revealing what she was thinking until she was certain. Then she set it down, folded her hands, and told him that under the Treasure Act 1996, he was likely obliged to report the find.
“Why likely?” Gerald asked.
“That depends,” she said, “on what it actually is.”