The Lost Jewels

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The Lost Jewels Page 1

by Kirsty Manning




  Dedication

  For Henry, who showed me London anew.

  Stay curious, adventurous, and true.

  Epigraph

  Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

  John Keats

  “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Dr. Kate Kirby

  Chapter 2: Kate

  Chapter 3: Esther Murphy

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5: Kate

  The Diamond Rough

  Chapter 6: Kate

  Chapter 7: Kate

  Chapter 8: Kate

  Chapter 9: Essie

  Chapter 10: Kate

  Chapter 11: Essie

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13: Kate

  The Bazaar

  Chapter 14: Essie

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17: Kate

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  The Ship

  Chapter 20: Essie

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22: Kate

  The Goldsmith

  Chapter 23: Essie

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25: Kate

  Chapter 26: Kate

  The Champlevé Ring

  Chapter 27: Essie

  The Great Fire

  Chapter 28: Kate

  Chapter 29: Essie

  Chapter 30: Kate

  Chapter 31: Essie

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33: Kate

  Chapter 34: Essie

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue: Kate

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Also by Kirsty Manning

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  LONDON, 1666

  The smoke was so thick she had to draw her apron across her mouth. Her long braids were singed black from falling firedrops. They’d need to be chopped off; Mama would be furious. But she had made a promise to Papa—she had to see it through, even though the roar of flames raced through the narrow cobblestone streets.

  No one would be missing her yet. Mama would be passing under London Bridge in the longboat with the baby, both wrapped in heavy woolen blankets to protect them from the embers raining down. The girl had begged, then pushed mother and baby into the overcrowded boat as barrels of oil and tallow exploded behind her, promising she would jump in the next boat behind.

  “Think of the baby. Papa would—”

  Her words had been whipped away by the searing easterly, and the boat was swallowed by the haze as it left the dock. Onshore was chaos as families unloaded trunks and leather buckets filled with their most precious goods. Horses snorted with terror and threw their heads back. Hooves clanged against cobblestones. The beasts’ ears were pinned back with fear.

  The girl was grateful her mama and little Samuel were gone.

  Safe.

  The flustered captain had braced his leg against the timber wharf to steady the boat. He’d held out a hand to the girl, but she’d stepped backward into the smoke and shower of embers, turned on her heels and ran.

  She’d kept running uphill—away from the Thames—until she could make out the line of St. Paul’s steeple, tall and gray against the orange sky. The cathedral’s stones exploded like gunpowder as she fought her way through the panicking crowds streaming toward the river.

  Her steps slowed now as she trod carefully, looking down to avoid the rivulets of lead and shit flowing over the cobbles. She put a hand out to feel her way along the walls. Her fingers trailed across rough timber beams as her boots crunched over broken glass.

  The girl had lived and played in these streets and lanes all her life, and she counted them as she passed. Ironmonger, King, Honey, Milk, Wood, Butter . . . then Foster Lane.

  Almost home.

  The two buildings flanking hers were engulfed in red flames. Men with rolled-up sleeves were trying to douse the fire with paltry buckets of water. The fire hissed and roared up the walls and across the wooden shingles, as if laughing at the people below.

  “Get away—”

  “It’s too late—”

  “—dray to Blackfriars—”

  “—St. Paul’s is afire—”

  It was too late to turn back. Not when she was so close to home.

  Not when she’d promised Papa . . .

  The frenzied chimes of St. Mary-le-Bow’s church drew her closer, and she inched through the thick smoke. When she felt the familiar wrought-iron number beside her front door, she threw herself against the door and forced it open.

  As horses cantered past and people scrambled to climb onto carts headed for the docks or beyond the city walls, nobody paid any attention as the girl slipped inside number thirty-two.

  Her chest was burning, as if with each breath she was drawing the fire deep into her lungs. Tears formed, but she wiped them away with her filthy sleeve. Now was not the time for self-pity.

  Instead, she fell to her knees and crawled over the blue Persian carpet in the entry hall and into the tiny room beyond—Papa’s special workshop.

  Quick as a lark, she removed the key tied to a ribbon around her neck. She kept it tucked under her clothes whenever he was away on one of his trips, like a talisman to sing him home.

  The firestorm surged. Heat poured in through the smashed windows and the open front door. The thunk of timber beams and collapsing houses surrounded her. The shingles atop her own roof started to smolder and whistle. Time was running out.

  The girl unlocked the door and hurried down the narrow stairs.

  Stepping into the chilly cellar she felt a moment’s relief; it was so calm, so quiet, after the tumult of the streets.

  She squatted to find the telltale bump in the dirt. It was their secret, and she had to retrieve it; she knew Papa would understand. She’d promised him she would look after Mama and little Samuel, but the coins hastily wrapped in Mama’s shawl wouldn’t last long. She mumbled a quick prayer, then seized the shovel stowed in the corner and started to dig.

  Chapter 1

  Dr. Kate Kirby

  BOSTON, PRESENT DAY

  Luxury-magazine editor Jane Rivers had been the one to offer Kate the trip to London for the Cheapside story.

  The call had come when Kate was sitting at her desk in the library of her unrenovated Boston brownstone, sipping hot chocolate sprinkled with cinnamon and shivering under a gray woolen blanket with a heater blasting at her feet. Technically, her parents still owned the house—it had been in the family for four generations—but no one wanted to live with the drafts and the damp, musty smells of yesteryear.

  No one except Kate.

  The study was her favorite room—and the only one she’d sealed and finished. It was grand, but comfortable, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining three walls, her great-grandfather’s desk, and a peacock-blue sofa that Kate slept on far more often than she cared to admit.

  On the wall opposite her desk was a framed bill of sale for the first steamer her great-grandparents had bought back in 1915: the SS Esther Rose, named for her great-grandmother Essie. On the desk itself sat a framed photograph of her glorious four-year-old niece, Emma, squeezing her King Charles spaniel, Mercutio—terrible name for a dog, but Molly had insisted. (Kate’s sister had very strong feelings about secondary characters in Shakespeare’s plays.) Beside the photo was a journal Kate had begun four years before. She didn’t write in the journal anymore; she hadn’t, in fact,
after the first nine months. But she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away either, or to put it in a box with other keepsakes from that year.

  Now this call. “Can you be in London next Monday for a huge investigative feature? We’d need you there for at least a week, I think. I realize it’s short notice . . .” Jane’s voice was all East Coast vowels and courtesy, but there was a hint of a plea.

  “What’s the job?”

  “It’s the Cheapside jewels.”

  Kate’s skin started to tingle. “Finally! Who’d you bribe?”

  “I promised the cover and both gatefolds in exchange for the exclusive. We want to cover this before Time, Vogue, or Vanity Fair get to it. The Museum of London just finished recataloging and some restoration of the jewels last week. It will be the final chance to access this collection before the museum relocates to West Smithfield in a year or so. Advertisers are already bidding. De Beers, Cartier . . . the whole lot.” She paused, delicately it seemed. “There’s, ah, a ton of interest and cash this side of the Atlantic—our competitors will be livid. The CEO and chairman are tripping over themselves—they’re sure this series will bring people back to the print magazine. Gemstones look so much better in print than on-screen.”

  It was true. A beautifully lit photo printed on good-quality stock was the next best thing to actually touching the jewels. But the method of reproduction was only a secondary concern for Kate. It was the story itself that compelled her; the urge to deep-dive into history and pluck something original from all the facts that had been overlooked—or forgotten.

  “Now, I’m about to go into a meeting, so is it a yes or no?” pushed Jane. “I have a big budget, and I don’t need to tell you how rare that is these days. But for this series I’ve been authorized to cover any travel required.”

  “You mean in addition to London?”

  “Well, I take it the jewels didn’t start their life there. So diamond mines, for a start.”

  “I get it,” said Kate. “I could really cover some ground.”

  Jane chuckled. “Thought you’d appreciate that.”

  “Thanks. And thank you for thinking of me.”

  There was an awkward pause.

  “Well, the suits upstairs were actually pushing for the Smithsonian’s Jocelyn Cassidy, but the Museum of London weren’t keen on that idea . . . and I understand you know the museum’s current director, Professor Wright, from Oxford?”

  “Of course.”

  “She tells me your research in this area is unparalleled. And the last piece you did for me—on Bulgari—was excellent. It was an unusual angle, but I liked that. It was quirky.”

  “The artistic director would only agree to be interviewed over lunch. Ridiculously long lunches. It was actually my duty to eat pasta and drink a carafe of Chianti every day for a week.”

  “Can’t promise food this time, I’m afraid! Just priceless jewels. So, what do you say? We need to move quickly on this.”

  Priceless jewels . . . and the Museum of London, Kate thought to herself. “I have a few things on my plate at the moment,” she hedged. “Let me take a look at my calendar and call you back.” They finished the call, with Jane promising to forward what information she had on the collection.

  Kate leaned back in her chair and gathered her curls into a ponytail, tugged the blanket tighter around her shoulders, and sipped the rest of her cocoa as she compiled a mental list of things that would have to be done before she left for London. There was an insurance report due in the next two weeks for her Swiss client. Scattered across her desk was a series of photos of some archival pieces Cartier was planning to show in Paris during Fashion Week. Underneath that was the synopsis for her postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, due next month. Right at the bottom was a brown envelope stamped with a silver fern containing her divorce papers. She needed to sign the papers for Jonathan’s lawyer, then move on. Everything had been settled—everything except her heart. Kate sighed and reached for the envelope, then withdrew her hand. Later, she promised.

  Instead, she picked up the synopsis, screwing up her nose at the number of red annotations, each representing an error she needed to fix. After a moment, her eyes were drawn to some fine black-ink sketches she had stored in archival glassine envelopes to protect from air and dust until she moved them back into her filing cabinet.

  The first was of two little girls with their heads together, laughing. They wore identical dresses and aprons, and they both had messy braids tumbling over their shoulders. The second sketch was of a cockerel standing proud, and the third was an exquisite jumble of roses, rings, necklaces, oranges, and grapes, all overlapping so there was hardly any white space on the page. On the flip side was some kind of herbal recipe written with a childlike scrawl:

  2 spoons honey

  pinch of thyme leaves

  ground peppercorns

  squeeze of lemon (fresh)

  (Add to boiling tea, or water)

  The last sketch was of a brooch, or perhaps a button, shaped like a rose. Gemstones were studded at the center and along the petals. Kate had no idea what kind of stones they were—without color there was no way to tell—but the design was similar to images of Elizabethan buttons she’d come across while doing research for her doctorate. Buttons that were in the Museum of London . . .

  She turned over the first envelope and admired the lines of sinewy limbs and loose braids. Both girls had dimples and dark hair—like Essie, Kate, and all the Kirby kin. Would Noah have grown up with these same dimples pressed into chubby cheeks? Her bones ached for the baby boy who’d never drawn breath. She pressed away tears with her palms and studied the little girls.

  Kate had found the drawings among Essie’s private papers in the filing cabinets she’d inherited with the brownstone. Her parents had dismissed these sketches as little more than Essie’s private doodles. After all, they were scratched across neat columns—as if hastily written in a bookkeeping ledger; Essie had insisted on doing the bookkeeping for the fledgling shipping company she had started with her husband. Her parents had thought they should be discarded, but Kate couldn’t bear to part with them. She liked to imagine her youthful great-grandmother doodling in the margins in a quiet moment, wild curls wrestled behind her ears, a cup of steaming Irish breakfast tea beside her as she looked out across the busy shipyards.

  Hearing the ping of an incoming email, Kate put down the sketches and clicked her computer screen on. The email was from Jane and, as promised, there were a number of attachments. Kate opened them one by one, scrolling through a series of newspaper clippings from 1914 heralding the launch of a jewelry exhibition at the newly minted Museum of London.

  ANTIQUE JEWELRY ON DISPLAY AT THE LONDON MUSEUM

  Secret Hoard of Elizabethan or Jacobean Jewels Added to Priceless Collections

  MYSTERIOUS JEWELRY HOARD

  Romance at Every Turn at London’s Museum

  SECRET UNEARTHED

  London’s Buried Treasures

  TREASURE TROVE IN CENTER OF LONDON

  Workmen’s Extraordinary Discovery

  She scanned the clippings, noting descriptions of the media frenzy and the crush of the crowds at the museum. She picked up her phone and called her editor.

  “Hello, Jane. I’m looking at the articles about the 1914 exhibition now. Thanks for sending these through.”

  “Good! You can see details about the discovery were vague.”

  “Weren’t the jewels found in 1912? I wonder why it took two years for the collection to be announced to the public.”

  “Who knows? I’m hoping you can find something new there.”

  Kate sat back in her chair and scrolled through the clippings once again, almost forgetting she was on the phone until she heard Jane ask, “So will you go to London? I need to know now . . .”

  “Oh!” The chance to research the provenance of the mysterious Cheapside jewels was certainly tempting, and—she glanced once more at her great-grandmother’s sketch of the brooch or b
utton—perhaps she might have an opportunity to do a little personal research on the side. “Okay,” she said. “I’m in.”

  “Great.” Jane sounded relieved. “Professor Wright will be available to brief you and the photographer on Monday at nine a.m. Does that work for you?”

  “Sure, thanks.” Kate was about to ask who the photographer was, when Jane cut her off.

  “Monday it is then—nine o’clock at the Museum of London. Email me your passport details, and I’ll have my assistant book your flight and a hotel near the museum. Choose a handful of key pieces. Go tight. I want origins. You have a month to file.”

  “But, Jane, nobody knows the origins of—”

  “Exactly. I want you to uncover the stories nobody else has.”

  Chapter 2

  Kate

  LONDON, PRESENT DAY

  Why would someone bury a bucket of precious jewels and gemstones and never return?

  It was all Kate could think about as she scrawled her signature on pages of disclaimers and security forms at the research desk of the Museum of London.

  “Dr. Kirby, we expect you to wear this lanyard at all times,” the receptionist informed her with the crisp efficiency of a prison warden. “This gives you access to our viewing room—accompanied by security guards, of course—for today only, after which the jewels will be returned to our storage vault. Does that give you enough time?”

  “I hope so. If not, will you let me take them home?”

  The receptionist chose to ignore Kate’s lame attempt at a joke. “You’ll have to take that up with the director. Take the service stairs down to the basement, please. Professor Wright is waiting for you.”

  “What about the photographer?” Kate asked.

  “Your colleague will be joining you shortly. We are just trying to find somewhere to put his . . . gear.”

  The young woman tapped her pen on the desk in apparent irritation, but couldn’t completely hide the whisper of a grin. Kate sighed. She knew instantly who the photographer assigned to this story was—she’d seen this look a hundred times.

  “Mr. Brown?” The receptionist waved a security guard over. “Please escort Dr. Kirby downstairs.”

 

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