The Lost Jewels - Kirsty Manning Page 0,33

gemstones out of her mind. She’d wanted to stay for a closer look at this treasure, but Mr Hepplestone had ordered everyone to down tools and step out of the cellar and sewerage lines onto the footpath. No-one was to breathe a word about what they’d seen.

With every step she tried to rid herself of the picture in her head of the foreman’s warm and open smile, the way he’d touched the brim of his hat and greeted her like a lady. She’d been drawn to him, a bit like Gertie staring at her gold button, as if she couldn’t quite believe something so shiny and golden existed. Just like the button, the foreman wasn’t meant for the likes of her.

And yet, he’d written after they met yesterday. His ivory calling card stamped with gold copperplate letters was tucked into her apron pocket. On the back was a hastily scrawled note.

Dear Miss Murphy,

I hope you don’t think it impudent of me to write. Our conversation was somewhat interrupted yesterday and I’m most sorry.

I would be delighted if you would agree to correspond with me, if not meet for tea with an appropriate chaperone of your choosing.

I’m hoping this note may find you by way of your brother. Most sincerely,

Mr E. Hepplestone

Freddie had been so caught up with the button game, and then trying to untangle himself from Flora and Maggie, that it was only later in the evening that he’d remembered to deliver the card. He muttered, ‘He’s a strange one, that Edward, Es. You’d better not tell him ’bout what I brought home …’

Essie touched her pocket and withdrew her hand as if it had been stung. She wasn’t sure what to make of the foreman’s card, so she decided to do nothing. Besides, she had enough on her plate caring for Ma, Freddie and the girls. It wouldn’t do to be all giddy over a gentleman she’d met briefly in a muddy ditch.

The coal bucket was heavy and Essie switched arms. As they passed by the back lane, smells of cooking escaped from kitchen windows and hung thick in the air. Essie pictured mothers divvying up loops of Cumberland sausages and mash to clean, ruddy-faced children, with some stewed rhubarb or perhaps a sliver of still-warm butter cake to finish.

The twins scampered along shoulder to shoulder with their noses in the air, inhaling the delectable scent of other people’s suppers. Only bread and dripping awaited them at home, though they never complained.

Gertie dawdled behind Essie and the twins, running her hands across ivy-clad walls and admiring orange nasturtiums and purple pansies spilling out of window boxes. London was exploding with life and colour as the days drew longer and warmer.

Every now and again Essie would find a hole in the fence and gaze at gardens with bright borders and lines of carrots, peas and parsley in neat rows, imagining what it would be like to tend a large plot of her own instead of the few clumps of parsley and sage and the climbing beans that clung desperately to the fence.

Gertie paused to study a bush studded with creamy roses scrambling up a drainpipe, standing on her toes to reach the flowers with their faces opened up to the sun. She plucked at the petals as if she were trying to work out how all the pieces overlapped, and Essie marvelled at her sister’s insatiable curiosity. What would become of this open-faced child as she became a young woman?

Essie glanced down at her hand holding the bucket and winced at her filthy nails and protruding veins. Gertie’s hands, though filthy, were still fine and unscarred. They were the hands of an artist. Hands made for turning the pages of books.

Last week, Essie had met with Father McGuire at the vestry without her mother’s knowledge. The priest had given her short shrift and repeated the headmaster Mr Morton’s decree: there would be no allowance made to keep the three Murphy girls in school.

‘We simply have no more funds available. It’s been a difficult year for us all. Imagine if the church made this exception for every child in the parish,’ Father McGuire said at his desk as he tucked into a thick cut of steak covered with mushrooms and pillowed on a pile of creamy mashed potato. Essie’s stomach growled with hunger as she tried to ignore the peppery, buttery scent. The priest didn’t even look up as he dismissed her from his office with a fork.

Essie had left