The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

appraising, male way, that made this even more complicated. She would have to be blunt. “I understand you brought this here in good faith, hoping it might be worth money. But I have to warn you that it could land you in serious legal trouble if you tried to sell it. Not a windfall, sir, but quite possibly a prison sentence.”
    “So, none of this kind of thing is ever sold, nor ever appears at auction,” he said. “There is no market, and so no value. I am left with a curious and highly unsavory family memento, and the thought that my father may have been a bit of a rogue.”
    “You are left with an obligation,” Lydia said. “I think we ought to try to find out if this is real, and if so, where exactly it comes from. There may be a hole in a cave painting, although I don’t know of one offhand. Anyway this probably belongs in a museum. Sometimes there can be a finder’s fee, but in this case, which looks like the result of an act of vandalism, that might be difficult.”
    She looked at it again, noticing the way the curve of the jaw and of one of the horns followed carefully the folds and indentations in the rock, using the shape of the stone to give a sense of force and muscle in the beast. Where the jaw met the neck, the painter had suddenly blurred his line, as if to suggest movement. She had not seen the real Lascaux cave, only the copy that the French government had built when the breath of too many tourists threatened to damage the original. But she remembered this trick of the blurred line to suggest movement, and the way that artists would try to follow the shapes of rock on which they drew. If this were a fake, it was a remarkably fine one.
    “What do you suggest I do? Take it home to Wiltshire and put it back on the bookcase?”
    “No,” said Lydia firmly. “I strongly suggest you leave it with me, and I shall give you a receipt, and ask one or two experts in the field where it might have come from. If your father found it in 1944, there were then very few painted caves. Lascaux was only found in 1940. If it comes from this region, or from the Spanish caves at Altamira, they’ll identify it quickly enough. If not, we’ll have to think again about its provenance. But the style says Lascaux, and so does your father’s estimate about its age. But even if it comes from somewhere altogether different, I don’t think you would be able to sell it, not publicly at least.”
    “How long would these consultations take?” he asked. “And how long would you want to keep the rock?”
    “I’ll photograph it digitally, and send that with an e-mail to two or three people. I should hear something within a day or two. Just to be sure, I’ll send copies to an expert on the Hagar paintings, and check out one or two more possibles. I’m not an expert on Cro-Magnon man, but I know the people who are.”
    “Cro-Magnon, was he the one with the low, thick forehead, the missing link back to the apes?”
    “No, absolutely not. Cro-Magnon man had a skull and brain cavity not unlike our own, and in creating these cave paintings he gave us the first recognizable human culture. He replaced—and we are not sure how—Neanderthal man, who did have a low, thick brow. But even his brain capacity was just as big as ours—even bigger, I seem to recall. I’m not even sure we know whether or not the two types could interbreed.” Lydia was suddenly aware that Manners was watching one of her more irritating habits, twisting a lock of her hair around and around a single finger as she talked. She only did it when she was nervous. She dropped her arm to her side and spoke quickly. “Would you like me to give you a receipt for this, or do you want to take it away with you? I’d like to photograph it anyway, if I may.”
    He leaned back casually, perched on the table, and for the first time he smiled openly at her. It was a very agreeable smile, with no guile in it. “But if you can’t sell it for me, why would you want to go to all this bother? Why not just refer me to a museum and save yourself the effort?”
    “Perhaps I should,” she said, and gave her coolest, most professional smile in return. “I suppose that having come across this, and suspecting what it might be, I feel rather responsible. If it has been wrenched away from a cave wall, I think we ought to try to get it back.”
    “Do you feel the same about statues from Egyptian temples and giving the Elgin marbles back to Greece?” His tone was