Church plate is weighed and photographed annually for the insurance schedule, on a jeweller's balance, by the same assessor, and silver does not change weight. The chalice has gained eleven grams a year for eight years, the assessor's photographs show a hallmark on the foot that was not there in the first one, and no assay office struck it.
I am the treasurer, and the plate is on my schedule because the insurer wants it valued every year.
How the plate is recorded.
The assessor comes in the spring with a balance and a camera. Each piece is weighed to the gram, its hallmarks are photographed under a lens, and the schedule lists the weight, the maker, the assay office and the date letter. Silver is valued by weight and by age, and a piece that does not match its last entry is a piece the insurer asks about.
Silver is stable. It tarnishes, which weighs nothing, and it wears, which takes grams off over centuries.
The chalice, which is seventeenth century by its marks and its style, has gained weight on every schedule since 2016.
Eleven grams a year, near enough. Eighty eight grams in eight years, on a piece that weighed four hundred and twelve, on the same balance, with the same assessor.
Eighty eight grams of silver is a spoon. It has not been added to the chalice, because the chalice is in the safe between services and I have the only key, and because you cannot add silver to a chalice without a silversmith and a mark, and there is no seam and no repair.
What has been checked.
The balance. The assessor's, calibrated, and a second balance, the jeweller's in town, on which I took the chalice myself, in the car, in its bag. Five hundred grams, this year, on both.
The chalice. Examined by a silver specialist from an auction house, who found it to be what it is, a seventeenth century chalice in fine condition with no repairs, no additions, and no later work.
The photographs. The assessor photographs the marks every year, and the marks on the foot are, in the 2016 photograph, four: the lion, the office, the date letter and the maker.
In this year's photograph there are five.
The fifth mark.
It is on the foot, in the row with the others, struck the way a mark is struck, with the same depth and the same age of wear as the four beside it, and it was not there in 2016, or 2017, and it is faintly there in 2019, and clearer each year since, the way a mark comes up when tarnish is cleaned off it, except that the foot is clean and it is not tarnish. It is arriving.
The specialist looked at it under his lens for some time. It is a maker's mark, he said, of the right form for the period, and he did not know it, and he has a book, and it is not in the book, and he asked whether he could photograph it for the society, and I said no.
What is done about it.
The schedule is updated each year with the weight as measured, and the insurer has queried it once, and the assessor wrote that the discrepancy was within the tolerance of historic silver assessment, which it is not, and which the insurer accepted.
The fifth mark is not on the schedule, because the schedule has four boxes.
What I do.
I keep the safe.
The one thing I have changed is that I do not polish the chalice.
It was polished before every major festival by me, with the cloth and the paste, for twenty years.
The last time, at Easter, I had it in my hands with the cloth, working the foot, and under the cloth, on the foot, I felt the fifth mark, which I had only ever seen, and it was raised. Not struck in, the way a mark is. Standing proud of the silver, the height of a coin's edge, and warm under my thumb in a way the rest of the cold metal was not, and I put the cloth down and the chalice in the safe, and the priest polishes it now, and I have not told him why.