The Lost Jewels - Kirsty Manning Page 0,30

to the button in Kate’s hand. Kate tried to push away the whispered thought: liable to prosecution. Essie’s family had been poor. Was it such a stretch to imagine she might have kept something precious that she stumbled across at work or found in the street—or that had been dug up, by someone she knew, from a cellar near Cheapside? Or stolen it? And, if so, who was the rightful owner now?

For the insurance report for her Swiss client, Kate had been tracing the origin of a medieval skull ring over the last few months, a memento mori, distinguished by the engraved words NOSCE TE IPSUM. Know thyself. The ring had featured in a 1574 oil painting of a Flemish gentleman before being sold on to a Jewish collector in Holland. The paper trail had stopped abruptly in 1940. Her client looked embarrassed at the suggestion he had come by this ring illegally when it was sold by an unscrupulous Nazi soldier to his dealer. Kate recommended in her report that her client start the process of repatriation. It belonged—in her opinion and perhaps under international law—with the family of the Jewish collector who was the last known rightful owner.

As if she could read Kate’s thoughts, Bella said, ‘So who’s the rightful owner of Gertie’s gold button? Where’d it come from?’

‘Honestly? I don’t know. Maybe the answer does lie with the Cheapside collection. But there would have been hundreds of almost-identical ones worn by wealthy merchants and their wives throughout Elizabethan London. We have no proof.’

Bella, perhaps sensing Kate’s hesitation, went back to the manila folder from which she’d taken the family tree and pulled out a sepia photo of a gaunt woman leaning against a spinning wheel. She was dressed in a thick woollen skirt, an apron and worn boots. ‘This is Clementine Murphy. Our Irish great-great-grandmother.’

‘She looks like such a frail old woman. It was criminal how hard they made them work.’

Bella’s face clouded over. ‘Clementine was just over forty in this photo.’

Kate felt like she’d just been slapped. She peered at the photo of Clementine Murphy. ‘That’s just five years older than I am now.’

‘Be grateful you weren’t born to the lower classes in Edwardian times, if that’s what a booming economy, free education and “Rule Britannia” looked like … I can’t imagine what it must have been like to watch your babies die.’

As soon as she said it, Bella flushed a deep red and covered her face with both hands for a moment before removing them and looking Kate squarely in the eye.

Her look made Kate nauseous. She tugged at the curl sitting over her eyebrow and smoothed it behind her ear. She knew what would follow and her head scrambled to find some words. A new topic. Anything to stave off the conversation to come.

But it was too late.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Bella softly, her voice cracking with empathy as she reached out and put her hand over Kate’s, covering the button. ‘There’s no grief like the loss of a child.’

All the grief and guilt that had been bundled together and buried for four years was suddenly uncovered and exposed. Kate thought of her baby’s tiny pale face poking out from the swaddling, his head crowned with a mass of thick dark curls—her curls, Essie’s curls. She recalled his heavenly newborn smell. Purple lips. Eyes that never opened.

The left side of Kate’s torso started to ache. She had lain a whole night on this side in her hospital bed, clutching her newborn, pressing him close as if she could spirit some life into him.

Jonathan had sat in a chair in the corner, head between his knees, unable to speak. All his years of medical training had borne down on him, like a glacier of guilt. Kate knew she should have said something that night to console him, to assure him that none of this was his fault. To show how much she cherished him. But how could she? All her words had fled.

The midwife had understood. She had said nothing, yet sat beside Kate for hours with a hand on her shoulder as Kate shivered and shuddered until there were no more tears. Her simple gesture had kept Kate yoked to humanity on that blackest of nights.

Somehow, Kate now forced herself to lift her face to bask in the sun’s last rays, forced herself to breathe in, to inhale the heady scent of summer. After a moment, she opened her eyes and blinked back her tears.

It

readonlinefreenovel.com Copyright 2016 - 2024