“Look at these,” she said, holding a set of black earrings up to her ears. She couldn’t resist showing off. “French jet. They came from Lady Trotter’s estate. Glenda says they were quite fortunate to get a tanner for them.”

“Glenda’s right,” I said. “French jet is nothing but glass.”

It was true: I had recently melted down a ghastly Victorian brooch in my chemical laboratory, and found it to be completely silicaceous. It was unlikely that Feely would ever miss the thing.

“English jet is so much more interesting,” I said. “It’s formed from the fossilized remains of monkey-puzzle trees, you see, and—”

But Feely was already walking away, lured by the sight of Ned Cropper, the ginger-haired potboy at the Thirteen Drakes who, with a certain muscular grace, was energetically tossing wooden batons at the Aunt Sally. His third stick broke the wooden figure’s clay pipe clean in two, and Feely pulled up at his side just in time to be handed the teddy bear prize by the madly blushing Ned.

“Anything worth saving from the bonfire?” I asked Daffy, who had her nose firmly stuck in what, judging by its spotty oxidized pages, might have been a first edition of Pride and Prejudice.

It seemed unlikely, though. Whole libraries had been turned in for salvage during the war, and nowadays there wasn’t much left for the jumble sales. Whatever books remained unsold at the end of the summer season would, on Guy Fawkes Night, be carted from the basement of the parish hall, heaped up on the village green, and put to the torch.

I tipped my head sideways and took a quick squint at the stack of books Daffy had already set aside: On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers, Pliny’s Natural History, The Martyrdom of Man, and the first two volumes of the Memoirs of Jacques Casanova—the most awful piffle. Except perhaps for Pliny, who had written some ripping stuff about poisons.