From the private diary of Mr. Thomas Reginald Linnett, junior clerk to Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, kept in a small black leatherette notebook in the drawer of his bachelor lodgings, 14 Coram Street, Bloomsbury. Black ink, neat clerical hand. Reproduced here are the entries of 20 November 1879 (the morning after the sale) and 1 February 1880. The diary continued through 1893; the firm did not, in Mr. Linnett's lifetime, know of its existence. After his death the diary was found by his nephew Mr. Wallace Linnett, who placed it with the family papers at the bank.
Thursday, 20 November 1879. — late, after supper.
I have done a thing this evening of which I am not ashamed and yet which I cannot conceive myself doing in the morning, when the firm's bell rings me into the offices.
Mr. Karras came to me last evening at the Strand entrance as I was locking up, having waited (I judge) the better part of an hour for the public to clear. He greeted me by name, which he should not have known, and asked whether I would oblige him in a private commission, the matter being delicate but neither illegal nor injurious to my firm. He named a sum of two hundred pounds, in five-pound notes already counted into a clean linen envelope which he showed me but did not yet offer.
The matter was Lot 47. He asked whether I could, between the close of the sale and the wrapping for the carrier on Friday morning, exchange the Barlin piece for a near-identical piece which he would supply me from his own pocket before I left for Bloomsbury. He asked it without raising his voice and without altering his face from the polite, slightly tired face of a gentleman who has spent the afternoon at the rostrum without bidding. He said that the substitution would not be discovered for some weeks at the earliest, and that when it was discovered it would be referred to the firm and not to me; and that the firm would in due course apologise, recompense, and forget. He said this with a confidence that I think came from having done such a thing before.
I asked him why the Barlin piece. He said: it is the colombina of the Casa Venier of San Polo; it has not been in Christian hands by right since the year of grace 1204. I asked him what he proposed to do with it. He said: I will return it to the hands it was taken from, which are the only hands a thing of that kind has any business being in. I did not believe him entirely. I did not entirely disbelieve him.
I took the two hundred pounds. I made the exchange this evening, before locking the box. The substitute piece is a Vienna copy of perhaps thirty years' age, not bad workmanship; the niello is wrong if a careful eye looks for it and the inscription is absent altogether. Mrs. Penrose, the buyer, will notice. I know she will. I have decided not to be the one who explains it to her.
The Barlin piece is in Mr. Karras's pocket. I have a question, on which I am writing in this private book and not in the firm's day-book.
Who took it from those hands in 1204?
Mr. Karras did not say. I did not ask. I have a feeling, from his face when he said the only hands a thing of that kind has any business being in, that he is not a man who is restoring it to Constantinople. I think he is a man who is taking it from one Venetian house to another, and the two hundred pounds is the price the second house is paying for the indignity of having an Englishman's hand in the matter at all.
I shall write to my sister in the morning. I shall not tell her any of this.
— T. R. L.
Sunday, 1 February 1880.
The firm has, this Friday past, paid Mrs. Penrose of Bath the sum of one hundred and fifty pounds in compensation, with the firm's regrets and Mr. Hodge's personal letter, and the matter is closed. Mrs. Penrose has agreed not to pursue the matter further, on the understanding that the firm has made what enquiries can be made and that the substitute pendant — the Vienna copy — is hers to retain as a souvenir of the affair, the firm not requiring its return. Mr. Hodge does not know how the exchange was effected. He suspects me; he has not said so. I have not denied it. I have not been dismissed.
Mr. Karras has not been seen at the firm since the morning of the 20th. The doorman, when I asked him this week, said he had seen Mr. Karras step into a cab on Wellington Street at half past nine that morning; the cab was sent to Liverpool Street. Sent. The doorman is a man of careful prepositions.
The colombina is, I judge, in Italy by now. I do not know whose hand has it. I have written Karras / colombina / 19 Nov 79 / £200 on the inside back cover of this diary in pencil so small as to be readable only by a hand that knows what it is looking for.
I shall continue to keep this diary. I am twenty-six years old.
— T. R. L.