Lionel James Petherick

Lionel James Petherick makes a public business of collector London’s traffic in relics, instruments and condemned apparatus. If a curious object is sold openly in the capital, there is a fair chance it passed under his hammer.

Collector London lives in the same world of money as debt and salvage do. Old instruments and saint-metal, ruined chart books, funerary miniatures, seals from before the Breaking, bronzes of the old religion, painted panels and the fragments of condemned apparatus all pass through the capital by the channels through which everything else passes. Some go through company warehouses under polite and false descriptions. Some appear only at supper, among men who style themselves patrons of art and ask, quietly, what a relic may still know, still empower, or still attract. Of this traffic Lionel James Petherick, of the Black Gull Auction Rooms near King’s Basin, makes a public business.

The Black Gull is where such things are sold in the open, by lot and by hammer. Petherick is a performer on the rostrum, quick, long-armed and theatrical, able to coax a room of rival collectors into bidding against their better judgement. Before a sale he holds private viewings by daylight in the warehouse by the Basin. After it he examines whatever did not sell with a brass inspection rig and a Cambridge-certified indicator for anomalous objects, a sensible precaution in a trade where a lot may prove to be more than its catalogue admits.

His rooms draw an unlikely crowd: dealers and antiquaries, agents for banks and noble houses, company factors, salvage men and the merely curious. His work sits beside that of Ambrose Nicholas Cattermole, whose catalogues give the trade a language respectable enough for banks, widows and curious nobles.

Adventuring companies deal with Petherick as sellers first. A party returning with salvage can consign it to the Black Gull and let the room set the price, less his commission. They may also come as buyers, hunting a chart book or instrument an expedition needs. Petherick hires, too: guards for a sale night, porters for an awkward lot, or a discreet crew to trace a consignor who vanished, or to remove an unsold object his indicator did not like.

In person

In person Petherick is a tall, notably thin man of about forty, narrow-shouldered and extraordinarily long in the arm. Straight, bright ginger hair falls to his shoulders from a pronounced widow’s peak, framing an angular, almost fox-like face with a sharp chin, a long nose and unusually vivid green eyes; very narrow ginger sideburns are his only whiskers. He dresses in scarlet, charcoal and brass: a fitted scarlet waistcoat, a long charcoal coat, a high cream collar, black gloves and an extravagant brass watch chain. Hammer, numbered paddles, sale ledgers and inspection tools are his constant company.