The Lost Jewels

by Kirsty Manning

In time, Kate had also started to set herself small goals and take on some assignments. The uncovering of a lost watercolor sketch for a maharaja’s emerald neckpiece in the Cartier archives—each stone measured, scaled, and placed just so. Unscrambling the annotations in the jewelry inventory of Anne of Denmark and working out which pieces had been reset or sold.

  Now, trying to find out how a small gold button had made its way into her family—and if it could indeed be connected to the Cheapside buttons she’d seen at the Museum of London.

  Uncovering history took her deep into tragedies. But sometimes tracing the line of a jewel, the light bouncing off a diamond, showed Kate that, just like jewels, people could be reset and have a different kind of life.

  As if gauging the shift in Kate’s thinking, Bella said, “I’m not sure where this button—or pendant—has come from, but that drawing of yours links us and our great-grandmothers. Your job is to trace heirlooms and origins of precious pieces, but it’s hardly surprising this Cheapside mystery is more than a job for you. I see it all the time in my work. People will do anything to keep their families together. And when they fail, they need to find something to fill their hearts.”

  Bella paused and took another sip of her wine. When she spoke, it was in a voice as soft as cotton wool. “When everything has been lost, families ruined, it’s not uncommon to cling to something that reminds you of happier times.”

  Kate thought of her pregnancy journal, then her sapphire earrings.

  Bella gently took the necklace from Kate and held it up so the button pendant caught the light. “Gertie drew that sketch of the button, I’m sure of it. So she must have seen the button—or one like it—with the jewels intact.”

  Kate sat still, sipping on her wine, pondering the coincidence that these buttons were the same as the ones she’d seen at the museum earlier this week. If Bella’s button was linked to the Cheapside collection, then, as a historian, Kate would be obliged to expose it. After all, she was writing a report for her Swiss client suggesting he repatriate his treasured ring. Bella would have to give up her heirloom, and it would join the other buttons at the museum.

  It was a professional conundrum, but at the heart of it was a far more personal question: Had Essie stolen a button from the Cheapside collection? Was that why her great-grandmother had never returned to London? But Essie spent eighty years in Boston, and surely the chances of being caught had faded. No one was going to arrest an old woman for the theft of a button, were they?

  Chapter 11

  Essie

  LONDON, 1912

  The walk home from school was always slow. Essie dropped her metal bucket to one side of the railway track running alongside their street, then placed a boot on the steel to feel for the familiar rumble of oncoming locomotives. Flora and Maggie joined her, scavenging for pieces of coal to fill the bucket as if they were on a treasure hunt.

  The twins bent low to peer between the sleepers and slipped their small hands underneath to be certain they didn’t miss any chunks that had spilled from the coal car as it roared past. Down near the wharves along the Thames, dear Freddie would be doing the same—collecting sticks and stray bits of wood to keep the old stove and boiler running at home.

  Once the bucket was full of coal, the girls wiped their filthy hands on the grass beside the tracks and started to walk home.

  Essie looked into her bucket, and then thought of the rotting bucket filled with soil and jewelry Danny and Freddie had found over at Cheapside the day before. It was impossible to get the image of the clump of soil dotted with gemstones out of her mind. She’d wanted to stay for a closer look at this treasure, but Mr. Hepplestone had ordered everyone to put down their 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 today 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 color as the days grew 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 marveled 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 dirty, 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 in despair.

  Gertie was about to be consigned to a factory corner, pinning collars to shirts. Her fine hands would become raw and bloody from constant pinpricks.

  Essie would do anything to stop it . . . she was determined to try to conv
ince Ma to let Gertie do the entrance examinations for the school for clever girls Miss Barnes had mentioned. But how?

  * * *

  When they reached home, Essie entered their tiny kitchen and almost tripped on the copper tub they used for bathing. It sat full of dirty water slick with gray suds, cold in front of the unlit boiler. Ma had forgotten to empty it when she’d finally woken and bathed.

  “Girls,” she said over her shoulder to Gertie and the twins as they piled into the kitchen, “can you carry this outside to the lav and tip it out, please?”

  She heard them sigh in unison behind her, but didn’t dare turn to see their disappointed faces as they realized there was no Ma—and no supper—in the kitchen. Instead, she emptied lumps of coal into the boiler and struck a match so she could prepare supper and heat some water. Next, she lit the oil lamps, which bathed the floral wallpaper with warm light, but also highlighted the peeling, moldy corners.

  The spinning wheel sat in the corner of the kitchen, but the balls of wool lay in the basket untouched.

  Essie walked over to the mantelpiece and picked up her late father’s tankard, giving it a shake to check for coins; this was where her mother’s daily spinning takings were deposited.

  It was empty. Ma must have nipped down to the Merry Cobbler on the corner with the navvies and treated herself to a pennyworth of porter. Then kept treating herself until there were no more coins left.

  Essie slipped out the back door to the garden and found her mother lying faceup inside the chicken coop. Ma was cursing and half waving an arm in the air, trying to swat away the half-dozen filthy brown hens perched on her legs and running over her belly. The egg basket was tipped sideways and her dress was splattered with mud.

  Essie sighed and her shoulders sank.

  Returning to the kitchen she found Gertie scribbling away in her notebook when she was supposed to be emptying the tub.

  “Gertie, put that away and run next door and fetch Mrs. Yarwood. Go!” She turned her head so her sister wouldn’t see her tears.

  Essie ran back outside, grabbed her mother under each arm, and dragged her from the coop. It was like lifting a deadweight, and her mother’s head flopped from side to side.

  “Essie, love.” Her mother’s words were slurred. “Sorry. I just came out to collect the eggs and I must have tripped.”

  “Ma . . .” But there was no point being angry—her mother was too far gone to take any notice. Instead, Essie shooed away the chickens that followed them out of the coop. But the stubborn hen nesting in her mother’s wicker basket refused to budge.

  “Off! Out!” Essie said as she tipped the basket to one side to be rid of the hen. She was dismayed to see that only one egg remained unbroken. They must have smashed when her mother tripped. These were the first eggs of the week, and now there’d be no eggs for supper tonight.

  Essie turned back to her mother and noticed that her dress had rucked up to reveal a bloody knee.

  “Does it hurt, Ma?” she asked, kneeling quickly and wiping the wound with her sleeve. “Here, let’s see if we can get you to sit up.”

  Her mother waved an arm in protest but Essie squatted behind her and gently lifted her by the shoulders. Her mother fell back against Essie, hiccupping.

  When her spell had finished, Ma turned and stared at Essie before raising an unsteady hand to tuck a strand of hair behind her daughter’s ear.

  “My Esther—you look so like him, you know,” she slurred in her thick Irish accent.

  “I know, Ma,” said Essie sadly.

  “You’re kind like him too. You could always rely on Conrad. He did the right thing by me. We sailed to London because my parents threw me—”

  “I know, Ma . . . I know,” said Essie as she cradled her mother in her arms as if she were a baby. She brushed her mother’s thick dark hair away from her face and wiped the mud and chicken shit from her left cheek.

  “I miss Pa too,” Essie whispered. “We all do.”

  “Seven bonnie bairns he gave me.”

  Essie sighed. She sometimes wondered about the two little babies that passed away either side of Gertie. Molly with measles, Deidre—Deedee—lost to whooping cough. Both taken before they could walk.

  She looked at the chicken coop in one corner of the yard, the squalid outhouse in the other, and shivered. She could hear Flora coughing in the kitchen. She needed to do something about that, she thought wearily.

  Ma shifted and stroked Essie’s cheek. “You’re almost grown now. Same age as me when I had Freddie. You’ll be wantin’ to find a good husband.”

  Essie started to protest: “Ma!”

  How could she leave home when her mother couldn’t even stand up? Who would care for the girls? No, she’d stay, and she’d work her fingers to the bone if that’s what it took to ensure the girls would grow up to have a better life than this.

  She thought of the women in white, marching by the Monument. She imagined Gertie among them, dreaming, planning . . .

  Her mother grabbed Essie’s chin with surprising force. “I’ll tell you, though, Miss Esther Murphy, there’ll be no trying before they buy for you. You hear me? You’ll not bring shame upon your father’s name. A lass with your pretty face and fine figure—”

  “Ma!” Essie flinched. It was impossible to see how the Murphy name could be sullied any further. Everyone knew Clementine Murphy was a drunk. Even the priest, Father McGuire, had suggested that he make home visits on Sunday afternoons rather than have Clementine bring the family to communion. The last time they went to church, Essie’s mother had tipped the entire contents of the communion cup down her gullet as she kneeled, and the shocked priest had had to wrestle the silverware from her grip.

  “I’ll throw you out, Esther Murphy. The lot o’ you will be in the workhouse as quick as I can blink. If you or any of my girls—”

  Essie was saved from the usual tirade by the appearance of Mrs. Yarwood with Gertie.

  “Well, Gertie. You put the kettle on and then take the little ones to your room. There’s a girl. Essie, let’s get your mother up.”

  Mrs. Yarwood smoothed her skirts and winked at Essie. Her neighbor had no children of her own, yet regularly swept in and took command of their household like she’d been doing it all her life.

  “Clemmie, can you stand? Oh, you’ve hurt your knee? Righto, take my arm. Essie, you grab the other arm. Now, let’s see if we can get you standing.”

  The two women lifted Essie’s mother to her feet, and they helped her limp into the kitchen and sat her on a chair.

  Mrs. Yarwood started to unbutton Ma’s dress, while Ma slapped her hands away. “I’m fine,” she mumbled. “Just tired.”

  “I know,” Mrs. Yarwood said soothingly, not taking a jot of notice as she peeled the filthy layers of underskirts and tunic from Ma’s skinny body.

  Essie ran to and from the tap outside, filling pitchers of water and transferring them to the round copper tub. When the kettle had boiled, she added the hot water and then helped Mrs. Yarwood lift her naked mother into the bath.

  Essie began to sponge her mother, just like she did the twins. As Essie washed the remaining chicken shit from her cheeks, her ma nuzzled into Essie’s hands like a small child. But when Essie looked her ma in the face, there was no hiding the bloodshot eyes and purple rings. Essie would have given anything to wash away her mother’s sorrow and shame.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Yarwood unbraided Clementine’s hair and massaged it with a few drops of sarsaparilla.

  When they were done, Mrs. Yarwood held the dozy Clementine while Essie dried her and slipped a crisp white calico nightie over her head.

  “Let’s get you settled into bed then, Clementine.”

  They walked upstairs with Essie’s mother supported between them. Ma’s brass bed took up the entire room—the only other furniture was Pa’s desk, which stood like a shrine in the far corner. It was all they had left of him. When they’d had to move to the Yarwoods’ garden flat four years ago they had s
old everything except the bed and his desk.

  Mrs. Yarwood helped Essie finish drying Ma’s hair and wind it into a side braid with rags.

  “There, there. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  Essie studied the floral wallpaper and felt her chest tighten.

  Things would be just the same in the morning . . .

  Her mother went straight to sleep, her cheeks rosy, smelling of sarsaparilla, between white pillows and sheets.

  Mrs. Yarwood turned and squeezed Essie’s arm. “You’re doing well, Essie. Your linen is as white as snow, there’s not a scrap of grease in the kitchen. You wash and scrape this place and all that’s in it every night. Clementine . . .” She stalled. Then, after a glance at Essie’s red, raw hands, she pursed her lips. “You’ll be coming over for supper at ours tonight.”

  “But—”

  Mrs. Yarwood raised her hand. “No arguments, now. I have such a big pot of supper cooking, it would take Mr. Yarwood and me weeks to eat it. And he does like different dishes . . . So you see? You’d be doing us both quite the favor.”

  Essie started to cry. Mrs. Yarwood was so kind, and Essie was just so very tired. She wanted to crawl into bed with her mother and sleep. But she thought of the girls and their skinny legs . . .

  “Thank you. I’ll bathe the girls, and we’ll be over.”

  “That’s more like it.” Mrs. Yarwood drew Essie into a hug and rubbed her back. “See you in an hour.”

  Chapter 12

  Essie knocked at the door while the girls stood behind her in fresh dresses with pink cheeks.

  Mrs. Yarwood flung open the door and gathered them all into a big hug. Flora started to cough and their host stepped back and studied the girl, quickly pressing the back of her hand to the child’s forehead. Turning, she checked Maggie’s forehead too before stepping back to let them in.

  “Ladies, I hope you brought your usual appetites. Mr. Yarwood has already had his supper.” She waved them inside and down the hall before shutting the front door.

  The smell of roast beef wafted down the hallway, and they eagerly followed the scent.