His manner was so completely negative, so toneless that Peregrine wondered if by any extraordinary chance he did not understand the full implication. He was wondering how, without offence, he could find out when Mr Conducis continued.

‘I have not looked it all up but I understand the age of the boy at the time of his death is consistent with the evidence and that the grandfather was in fact a glover.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the initials inside the gauntlet do in fact correspond with the child’s initials.’

‘Yes. Hamnet Shakespeare.’

‘Quite so,’ said Mr Conducis.

CHAPTER 2
Mr Greenslade

‘I know that,’ Peregrine said. ‘You don’t need to keep on at it, Jer. I know there’s always been a Bardic racket and that since the quartocentenary it’s probably been stepped up. I know about the tarting-up of old portraits with dome foreheads and the fake signatures and “stol’n and surreptitious copies” and phoney “discovered” documents and all that carry-on. I know the overwhelming odds are against this glove being anything but a fake. I merely ask you to accept that with the things lying there in front of me, I was knocked all of a heap.’

‘Not only by them, I understand. You were half-drowned, halfdrunk, dressed up in a millionaire’s clobber and not knowing whether the owner was making a queer pass at you or not.’

‘I’m almost certain, not.’

‘His behaviour, on your own account, seems to have been, to say the least of it, strange.’

‘Bloody strange but not, I have decided, queer.’

‘Well, you’re the judge,’ said Jeremy Jones. He bent over his work-table and made a delicate slit down a piece of thin cardboard. He was building a set to scale for a theatre-club production of Venice Preserved. After a moment he laid aside his razor-blade, and looked up at Peregrine. ‘Could you make a drawing of it?’ he said.

‘I can try.’

Peregrine tried. He remembered the glove very clearly indeed and produced a reasonable sketch.

‘It looks OK,’ Jeremy said. ‘Late sixteenth century. Elaborate in the right way. Tabbed. Embroidered. Tapering to the wrist. And the leather?’

‘Oh, fine as fine. Yellow and soft and wrinkled and old, old, old.’

‘It may be an Elizabethan or Jacobean glove but the letter could be a forgery.’

‘But why? Nobody’s tried to cash in on it.’

‘You don’t know. You don’t know anything. Who was this chum Conducis bought it from?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘And who was M. E. whose dear grandma insisted it had belonged to the poet?’

‘Why ask me? You might remember that the great-great-grandmother was left it by a Mrs J. Hart. And that Joan Hart – ’

‘Née Shakespeare, was left wearing-apparel by her brother. Yes. The sort of corroborative details any good faker would cock up. But, of course, the whole thing should be tackled by experts.’