Lucan Ash

Lucan Ash deals in relics, devotional fragments and the papers that vouch for them. In London’s black-market rooms his name is spoken softly, and it is the name given whenever piety and fraud grow hard to distinguish.

London keeps yielding its past: flooded chapel silver, prayer tablets, saintly fragments, old seals and objects whose purposes have become conjectural. Such a city inevitably breeds curators, cabinet men and relic brokers, and among the brokers Lucan Ash is the one most often named in quieter rooms. He belongs to no formal underworld roster. Like most of illicit London’s recognised operators he is known through one trade and one caution, and his is the trade in which devotion and fraud become difficult to separate.

His prosperity rests on a need the lawful city cannot meet openly, quickly or without shame. Relics need discreet verification, and a parish, collector or private household that wants a doubtful object examined without a formal inquiry has few better doors to knock on. Ash works on the border between the relic trade and religious fraud, and he has never been obliged to say on which side of it any particular sale fell. In the rooms where goods pass through hands that could plausibly belong to either world, his name is uttered softly, as though it might carry.

What an object truly is lies outside his ledger. What Ash sells is examination, provenance and a buyer: an opinion on age and handling, a paper that reads well, a quiet introduction to someone who will pay. His dress, sober and high-collared enough to pass for clergy at a distance, does nothing to discourage the confusion, and Londoners disagree about whether he ever held any office in the Church.

Companies returning from the undercity, a flooded chapel or a ruined parish with devotional objects in their packs will hear his name sooner or later, usually from someone who expects a share of the introduction. He buys, he authenticates for a fee, and occasionally he hires: a company may be asked to recover a particular piece, to carry one discreetly, or to learn whether an object he has already sold has been shown to the wrong examiner. Crossing him is unwise less because he is violent than because his clients include people who cannot afford to have their purchases discussed.

In person

Lucan Ash is about forty, tall and slender, with shoulder-length jet-black hair and a pale, narrow, severe face, clean-shaven, with dark eyes. A small scar marks his lower lip. The effect is refined but unsettling. He wears a black coat whose cut sits somewhere between antiquarian and clergyman, with a dark waistcoat, high collar and gloves, and the ambiguity appears deliberate. At work he is surrounded by reliquaries, devotional fragments, provenance papers and a discreet sale ledger, together with the fine tools and restrained testing apparatus of authentication, some of it evidently made for reading wards.