XIVFourteen pieces

✦The cases

Laid to rest

Nothing I make leaves the workshop loose. Every planchette sold on its own lies in a case of its own; the master case lays all seven together; and every board comes in a case of its own, with a fitted place beside it for the Ankh. I made them as Carl Fabergé might have, had he lived to see Tutankhamun’s tomb opened and Art Deco born from it: an Egyptian coffin in shape, a jeweller’s case in finish.

Each stands on a plinth of three gilded steps. Its sides are translucent guilloché enamel, Fabergé’s own art: silver or gold engine-turned into fine rings and ribs, then flooded with coloured glass and fired, so the light goes down through the colour and comes back up off the cut metal. Every case has its own colour: royal blue, imperial green, mauve, oyster, oxblood, imperial yellow, black. The corners are joined with double dovetails in ebony, every joint outlined in a fine line of holly, ebony and ivory as in Tutankhamun’s chests; the tails are laid out on the golden ratio, the middle one widest and each pair outward smaller by phi.

Every proportion is the golden ratio, as the board’s own playing surface is. Each case is phi times as long as it is wide; chest, lid and crown stand phi squared, phi and one; the two eyes on the long side stand at its golden sections, and the cartouche between them is a golden rectangle. The eyes are the coffin’s own: coffins of the Middle Kingdom carried a pair of eyes on the side facing the sunrise, so that the one inside could look out at the world of the living. On the ends stand the djed and the tyet, Osiris and Isis.

The lid rises in three gilded steps, the step pyramid of Djoser and the Deco skyscraper in one, edged with seed pearls and set with a cabochon at each corner of its crown. The crown itself is engraved in polished 24-karat gold plate, the engraving filled with black enamel: at its centre an ankh, the sign of life, its height the crown’s width divided by phi, with rays fanning out behind it; on either side, facing it as the carvings face the centre of a temple door, the title of Spell 2 of the Book of the Dead, the spell for going out into the day and living after death; and beneath it, given life, stability and dominion for ever.

Open the lid and the sun comes up. Its underside is marquetry, an Art Deco sunburst of East Indian satinwood and curly bubinga, each satinwood ray phi times the width of the bubinga beside it, ringed three times in ebony and holly, each ring phi times the last. At its centre is my mark, the Paranormal Products plate, the pyramid and the Eye, in 24-karat gold plate polished to a mirror, its engraving filled with black enamel; its base is the lid’s short side divided by phi. The lid turns on a gold-plated piano hinge the length of the back, twelve millimetres across, and every case locks: a small box lock under the front cornice, and a key whose bow is the same pyramid, all of brass plated in gold.

Inside, every case is lined in black flocking laid over a carved form in deep, even folds: a sunburst radiating from the planchette at its centre, and upright pleats round the walls. Black was never the colour of mourning in Egypt. It was the colour of the silt the Nile left behind it every year, of the fertile earth and of rebirth; the Egyptians called their own country Kemet, the Black Land, and Osiris was called the Great Black One, the god who rises again. Every planchette is pressed down into the folds, its window under a domed watch crystal; beside the board, the Ankh is held by two gilded turn-buttons, the way amulets were laid in the wrappings, each in its place.

The master case holds seven planchettes in one bed of silk. The oldest tombs held stone tablets with seven hollows for the seven sacred oils used in the Opening of the Mouth, the ceremony whose spell is cut round the bumper of every board. Fourteen will be made. They ship free, anywhere in the world, like everything I make.