“What’s wrong?” asked Kate, concerned.
“I’m editing the photos I took before I met you in London—from a diamond mine I visited in Ghana.”
Kate recalled his gaunt face and rumpled clothes when they’d met at the museum. She’d dismissed it as jetlag mixed with a touch of laziness. She’d never thought to ask where Marcus had flown in from. The surfboard must have been intended for this holiday with Olivia.
She got up from the table and moved around behind him to look at the screen.
A little boy in bare feet and ragged clothing stared boldly at the camera, droplets of water gathered on his face and chest. “He can’t be more than four,” she gasped. She thought of Emma safely curled up on a Persian rug at home, no doubt demolishing a Lego car Molly had painstakingly put together.
“This boy’s one of the lucky ones.”
Marcus clicked to the next image and Kate was reminded of all those images of soldiers sinking into muddy trenches in the First World War. Men were covered in clay, bent over knee-deep and elbow-deep at the bottom of a pit. Women too, some with babies strapped to their backs. Even children were hard at work, yellow mud coating their skin.
In the next frame, a group of young men dressed in orange high-visibility vests kneeled on a concrete pad in prayer, surrounded by red desert.
Marcus kept clicking through his photo folder as he said, “I’ll pitch it to National Geographic. But wait—I haven’t finished!”
He continued to click through photos, telling Kate the stories behind the pictures he’d taken in gem mines around the world. A man dangling from a rope inside a cave in Colombia with just a headlamp and a pick, eyes bloodshot and inflamed from black dust as he chipped for emeralds. Another pushing a wheelbarrow through snow six thousand feet up in the Karakoram mountain range in northern Pakistan.
“This dude’s hoping for some rubies, quartz, or aquamarine. Maybe a bit of topaz.”
The last image was of a man in a turquoise sea, with a net wrapped around his neck and a wooden peg fastened to his nose.
“Pearl diver,” said Kate.
Marcus sighed and closed his computer. Kate placed her hands on his shoulders to steady herself, images whirring in her head. They both remained still, soothed by the rhythm of the waves lapping at the sand.
Then Marcus reached up to place his hands on hers. After a few moments he began to stroke them with his thumbs. The only sound was the waves and their breath.
Her impulse was to leave. To go back to her suite and try to sleep, try to forget these images. To forget Marcus.
She should pull her hands away, go back to her room, and close the door.
But Marcus had not just touched her hands: his warmth had stirred her heart.
Kate thought of the Colombian boy with ebony eyes and green emerald roughs in his hands. The delight in his face that made her heart sing. A mother cradling her child inside a filthy trench, eyes locked on the baby’s face, its tiny hand clutched in hers.
Pockets of love and hope. Marcus managed to find moments that transcended their horrific circumstances.
Kate thought back to that museum basement in London and mentally traced a line of people and gemstones that started deep underground and atop mountains, carried on ship’s decks over many seas. She thought of the work-roughened hands that shaped rings and cut diamonds—to celebrate love and commemorate loss. She thought of black forget-me-nots and pansies intertwined on a tiny diamond ring.
“I’m sorry.” Kate withdrew her hands. She was truly sorry for the injustices that were happening around the globe, that had happened throughout time. Sorry for the little Ghanaian boy and the Colombian boy, for Essie and the secret Kate suspected kept her great-grandmother from returning to London, and also for herself.
She was sorry, too, for Marcus’s obvious heartbreak. Kate looked at the shadows under Marcus’s eyes and understood that he carried his own layers of grief—his regret and mistakes—under that smooth golden skin and sunny demeanor. What were the words he’d used? Light and shade.
Kate studied Marcus’s strong shoulders and the line of his back. She admired his strength, his purpose. He captured on camera the trivial, the beautiful, and the cruel, yet still carried hope and generosity in his bones. He dived into the messy tangle of life, wasn’t content to study it at arm’s length.
To think that she’d once thought of him as frivolous. She’d been so wrong about Marcus.
Kate lifted her hand and ran it through his curls. He held her hand against his cheek, before swiveling to face her, a question in the tilt of his head.
Kate’s heart fluttered, then beat harder. Somewhere, a shutter slammed closed against a window as the breeze picked up.
In the ensuing quiet, she looked at him with her own questions, brushing away the gnawing doubt, whispering that she didn’t deserve this moment of bliss. Does Marcus feel the same way? Is this just for now, or . . .
He had an almost-adult daughter, she reminded herself. Who lived in Sydney.
But something stronger tugged at her. There was a stirring in her stomach, then lower. She wanted to push her sorrow to one side and embrace this moment. To press against Marcus and run her hands down his back, over his scar. Desire flooded her veins and she realized it was insane to fight it. She needed to connect . . .
Kate leaned down and kissed Marcus. His lips were soft and tasted a little of coconut. When she pulled away, he grabbed the back of her head and gently pulled her back down for a longer, hungrier kiss.
Slowly, maintaining eye contact, Marcus stood. Then together they walked into her room, which was dark other than the flickering of a candle that must have been lit when the staff entered to perform the turndown service.
Without a word, they moved straight to the bed and stretched out across the sheets.
Marcus pressed against her and the beating of his heart in his chest matched the beat of her own. His breath was a little louder now, deeper. Kate felt any hesitation slip away as she drew the spices into her lungs and reached for him.
He shifted his weight so that Kate now lay tucked beside him, running her hand under his T-shirt. As she pulled it off, she traced her fingers over the scar on his shoulder.
“How?” She kissed it.
“I slipped on a mountain pass in Pakistan and gouged my shoulder open on a rock. They had to medevac me out and I had surgery in Islamabad.” He smiled slightly, embarrassed. “I know it looks like I was a marine or something, but I was no hero. The guide in front was carrying the equivalent of his own body weight with all my camera gear, and the one behind had all the food. I just had my camera slung around my neck and slipped on some pebbles when I leaned over to tie my shoelaces. The poor guys had to carry me down the mountain between them as well as all the gear.”
She slowly kissed the scar and breathed in his sweat. As she breathed out, she said, “Maybe we shouldn’t. Liv—”
“—is fast asleep in her room on the other side of the hotel. I banned Netflix. Opening her physics workbook seemed to induce severe jetlag.”
He kissed her neck and then her shoulder, and began to kiss his way down her shirtfront. He started to unbutton it, then stopped midway and looked up, amused. “Any more questions?”
Kate had millions. Most significant of all: Was this a good idea? But instead she bit her bottom lip and arched her back, and any doubt rolled away with the rhythm of the sea.
Chapter 18
Over the coming days, Kate, Marcus, and Liv settled easily into a holiday and work routine. Their trip up to the mines in the mountains was scheduled for their last day in Sri Lanka. Kate was surprised at how much she craved the companionship. How great it felt to laugh, eat, and move with people she cared about by her side.
Sophie was right: it felt good to let the light stream in.
Each morning started with a surf at sunrise. “Didn’t know you surfed,” Marcus said with a laugh as Kate joined him on the beach with a board she’d rented from the hotel.
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“College in California. Surfing was basically my major!” she’d replied as they ran out into the shallows and plunged into the waves.
After a surf came yoga by the pool. Marcus was underwhelmed at the prospect, but after some cajoling from Liv decided it was easier to join in than to resist. For Kate, it was nonnegotiable. Since Noah died, her morning exercise—even if it was just a lazy stroll around her Louisburg block—was as crucial as breathing. It was Molly who’d downloaded the YogaDay app onto her phone. “Fifteen minutes. I promise it’ll help.” Though it pained her to admit, it had turned out that decent amounts of sleep, exercise, and nutritious food—not her original diet of buckets of chocolate, peanut butter toast, and chardonnay (who knew?)—helped to allay the grief and anger that knocked around in her chest.
And it turned out that sex helped too.
For the first time in years, Kate found herself grinning like a giddy schoolgirl at the thought of a man. She yearned to be touched. Whenever she and Marcus were together, even if it was just working at the desk, her skin felt like it was on fire.
This was unexpected. Molly had set her up on a couple of dates last year—one with a scatterbrained violinist, and another with a recently divorced partner in her law firm—but Kate had known pretty much after the first glass of champagne that they were not for her.
She had not expected to feel the steam train of lust that accompanied the delicate first moments of a relationship ever again.
She paused. Was that what this was? A relationship?
Marcus sat beside Liv, squeezing lime juice over cheeks of fresh mango. “Here, I saved you some food. Liv was about to eat all the pancakes.”
“Dad!”
“I’ll just have one, Liv, promise.” She winked.
“Trust me—once you’ve tried them, you’ll want them all!”
Kate sat down and helped herself to a crunchy hopper—a light pancake that looked like fried pressed spaghetti but tasted like rice. She topped it with freshly shredded coconut mixed into a sambal with chili, tamarind, and onion. The savory dishes were accompanied by a colorful platter of fresh jackfruit, mango, and Kate’s favorite, the sweet-and-sour rambutan.
Two espressos were delivered, and the smell of fresh coffee made her smile. For the past few days Marcus had been casually attentive. He’d noticed that she preferred her coffee short and black, that she liked to take her white tea with a drop of cold water so it didn’t burn her tongue while she worked. He offered advice as she worked on her Cheapside piece and sought her advice on some of the watch and pomander images. They’d always had an easy banter as colleagues, and she was pleased that, rather than it being awkward when it came to her choice of images, it was a delight to share the work with someone who cared as much as she did.
After breakfast, Marcus took a chopper into the mountains, while Liv drank green smoothies and ate glutinous acai bowls between study and swims. Kate worked on the memento mori project for her Swiss client, and continued writing the Cheapside article.
In the evening, they went for a long walk along the beach and admired the lit-up Galle Fort, then headed back to the hotel before the evening winds whipped sand and sea mist into their faces.
After their walk, Liv excused herself to go study. “Time to hit the books. Can’t wait until this year is done.”
“Do you think she knows?” asked Kate on the third night, as they sprawled naked under white cotton sheets in her room.
“Knows what?” Marcus teased as he ran a finger down her thigh.
Kate propped herself up on her elbow. “I’m serious.”
He reached up and kissed her forehead. “I’m sure she’s onto us. She’s just turned eighteen—she’s pretty much a grown-up.”
Kate must have looked as embarrassed as she felt, because Marcus went on, “Look, she’s concentrating on her final exams, then her gap year. She’s not that interested in what her old dad is getting up to. Besides, she likes you.”
Then he leaned over and kissed her while tracing the curve of her hip, before clenching her tight. Kate couldn’t get enough of his strong arms around her body or the taste of his salty skin.
Afterward, as they lay sweating in a tangle of sheets, they shared random snippets of their lives back home. Marcus described his hikes into Western Australia’s Kimberley Ranges, where the red dust settled into every crevice of your body and backpack, and the best vantage point from which to take in the New Year’s Eve fireworks on Sydney Harbour. Kate told him about her autumn walks through Boston and her love of Essie’s Louisburg house, creaky with history—how one of her favorite places in the world was Essie’s sunny buttercup-yellow kitchen with matching curtains, always filled with baking smells.
Inevitably, as always, their talk turned to the Cheapside story.
“That first day, you had a drawing of a button that matched the ones in the Cheapside cache. What’s the connection?”
“I’m not sure.” Kate tried to match Marcus’s carefree tone. “I found it with my great-grandmother’s papers. She was originally from London. And it turns out my cousin Bella wears the same button on a chain around her neck. The one in the sketch has jewels, though, and Bella’s doesn’t.”
“Now that’s a story. Are you going to include it?”
“Not until I have evidence. My great-grandmother didn’t speak much about her childhood. Her family were poor Irish immigrants. I asked her once when I was eighteen . . .” Kate shrugged. “I asked her why she never went back to London, but she wouldn’t tell me. I still have no idea . . .” She now understood that Essie had probably kept her complex feelings—particularly hurt, loss, and disappointment—bundled up and tucked deep inside her heart. She pushed the image of the envelope with the silver fern lying on her desk at home from her mind.
“Mostly Essie just talked about everyday stuff—fish on Fridays, collecting coal pieces from train tracks, the suffragette protests. Kids playing soccer down cobbled lanes.”
“She sounds like a storyteller. Must run in the family.”
“Maybe. I prefer to stick to jewelry. More tangible.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know . . .” She half pulled a pillow over her head in frustration. “I mean, what if Essie—or someone close to her—stole the jewels? How else would a poor family come by Bella’s button?”
If her great-grandmother was a thief, Kate wasn’t sure if she could write about it. Should she? Her great-grandmother had created a great legacy in Boston, championed many worthy causes. Why ruin Essie’s reputation?
Kate winced. “I’m not sure that’s a story I want to tell.”
Marcus pulled the pillow from between them as he leaned on one elbow. “Well, you don’t have to decide now. There’re so many gray areas.”
“Marcus, I’m preparing a report for a collector demanding that a ring be repatriated to the Dutch Jewish family it belonged to before they fled the Nazis in 1940. If I don’t fess up, that would make me a total hypocrite as a historian. Bella’s button belongs with the others at the museum.”
“Not . . . exactly.”
“Why?”
“Well, for starters, none of the jewelry in the collection was owned by the Museum of London. The museum didn’t even exist in the 1600s.”
“Sure, but—”
“So who buried the collection? I mean we don’t know who owned the jewels, right? Also, how did your relatives stumble across these pieces hundreds of years later?”
“Essie had an older brother, Freddie. He was a navvy—a construction laborer—who died on a worksite near Cheapside. It’s possible he saw the jewels when they were recovered in 1912 . . . or found some.” Kate couldn’t quite bring herself to say, or stole some. But from the expression on Marcus’s face, he understood.
Kate continued, “Essie used to tell us a fairy tale about a big box of treasure being pulled out of the ground—pouches of pearls, handfuls of gold chains, and rings for every finger and toe. It was guard
ed by a man with eyes the color of emeralds. He cast a spell on her.”
“What kind of spell?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Sounds like a typical Irish fairy tale to me.”
“This was different.”
“She transferred it to her life in London. So, was this mystery man a leprechaun? Leprechauns are known for making mischief. Did she capture him?”
Kate eyed him and gently pushed his shoulder. “I’m serious!”
Marcus brushed a strand of hair from her face and said, “Kate, folktales are made up. But at their heart they’re stories about the messy business of being human. Rage, jealousy . . . lust.” He ran a finger across her stomach.
Kate and Marcus stared at each other and the only sound came from the blades of the fan beating overhead. All those years behind the lens had taught him where to focus.
“Now, about Bella’s gold button . . . one sister had the drawing in Boston, the other sister kept the button in London. Both match the buttons in the museum. Surely the button must be the key to what you’re looking for?” Marcus said.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “But I’m worried it’s somehow tied up with the reason Essie left London and never returned.”
“Perhaps you’d better answer that first.”
Marcus had a point. She needed to widen her parameters.
Kate rolled over to grab her glass of water from the bedside table and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror lit up by the moon. Her face was scattered with freckles—no doubt brought out by the tropical sun. Her curls were a knotty jumble from humidity and salt water. But her face looked softer, more relaxed. Gone was her tightly clenched jaw. Grief and guilt would always be a part of Kate, tucked deep within like organs. But as the moon highlighted her crooked nose and slightly sunburned cheeks, she recognized something quieter, something happier . . .
Beyond the Sparkle: Behind the Scenes at the Museum of London (draft)
BY DR. KATE KIRBY
The Lost Jewels Page 15