Star Locket

by Natalie Jane Prior

  In memory of John Klokiw

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Dedication

  Family Tree

  Maps

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Praise for Fireworks and Darkness

  Copyright

  Family Tree

  Maps

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the month she turned fifteen, Sally Taverner put her skirts down for the first time, went to the opera, and met her double in the wake of a murder she herself had inadvertently caused. She did not know about the murder until later, of course. If she had, it would have meant nothing to her, for she did not even know the victim by name, and his violent death was overshadowed in the public consideration by another that occurred shortly afterwards. Yet both deaths had been directly caused by Sally’s arrival in Starberg, and, if she had stayed at finishing school in Switzerland as her parents had originally intended, the train of magical destruction which followed in their wake would probably have been averted. Nor did she realise, when she set out for the opera with the legation party on that cold, wet December night, how close she was about to come to being killed herself.

  It had begun when Melhuish, the British Minister in Starberg, sent Sally an invitation to attend the opera along with those for her parents—‘a welcoming present’, he had called it in his letter to her father. The invitation’s arrival had caused a minor crisis. Sally, who had only been in the city two weeks, had sensed from the moment of her arrival that somewhere in the past there was bad blood between Melhuish and her mother, Emily, and that as a result, her mother feared and detested him. She was also aware of the social importance that must be attached to the last night of the opera season, and was thus as fiercely determined to accept his invitation as her mother was that she should decline it.

  ‘You’re not to go,’ said Emily. ‘I shall tell your father to send the ticket back to him with a note. You’re only fourteen: it’s ridiculous.’

  ‘I’m fifteen in two weeks.’

  ‘And you know as well as I do that at home a fifteen-year-old girl wouldn’t be allowed out with an adult party for at least another year and a half.’

  ‘But this is Ostermark, Mama, not England. A lot of girls my age here are engaged or even married. And in America you and Papa took me to the theatre. Why should it be any different now?’

  ‘Because I say it is.’

  At this point Sally’s suspicions coalesced into certainty. Her mother was normally a calm woman and a pliable, if over-protective parent; she had never before moved beyond logic like this. Fortunately, Sally was by upbringing a political animal who understood perfectly the principle of divide and rule. With the unerring instinct of the cosseted only child she now deployed her strongest weapon. She appealed to her father.

  ‘Sally’s right, my dear,’ said Clive, when asked to contribute his opinion. ‘I assure you, it won’t look amiss if she goes.’

  ‘But she’s still in short skirts. And she’ll have to put her hair up. At fourteen! Clive! It’s impossible.’

  ‘Hardly impossible, my dear. If you don’t let her dress appropriately, she’ll look like a fool. And besides, Melhuish has given her a ticket. It would be churlish of us to refuse it.’

  ‘Melhuish,’ said Emily fiercely, confirming Sally’s conviction that the source of the ticket was also the source of her mother’s agitation, ‘is a troublemaker.’

  ‘True enough,’ said Clive. ‘But I’ve only been here eight weeks, and I do have to work with him. Let’s not antagonise him just yet.’

  At this, Emily had with bad grace capitulated, and the order was given for alterations to Sally’s clothes. A pale blue dress she had brought with her from their last posting in Washington was let down to the floor by the cunning insertion of some lace panels and a flounce, and the seamstress, who had come in from the Old City to do the work, went away with several other garments from her wardrobe, a tacit acknowledgement that the rest of the skirts were to come down too. But in the days leading up to the opera party, the matter of Melhuish’s invitation continued to fester. It was not until the actual evening of the performance that Sally belatedly began to realise her family’s return to Starberg had stirred up far more than old grievances.

  The parlour maid had helped her dress, tying her corsets and arranging her hair in a flatteringly adult style that made her look more Ostermarkan than English. After she had left, Sally stood staring at her reflection in the bedroom pier glass. The image was that of a stranger, a delicately boned young woman with soft, honey-coloured hair and neat small features in an oval face; she held a fan in one gloved hand and wore a diamond pendant around her neck. The door opened softly and Sally’s mother came into the room. At that moment, in his official residence on the opposite side of Starberg’s royal park, the Ducal Procurator was sitting down to dinner. He was expected at the opera with a private party and was running late. He had exactly eleven minutes to live.

  ‘What’s that around your neck?’

  Sally put her hand to her neckline and closed her fingers protectively over the pendant. Its sharp edges dug into her palm through her evening glove.

  ‘My diamond pendant. I asked Papa to take it out of the safe for me.’

  ‘Did you ask my permission?’

  ‘I didn’t think I needed to.’

  ‘Then you’re wrong. Take it off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Do you need a reason? Very well. An unmarried girl of your age does not wear diamonds. You haven’t even made your debut yet.’

  ‘But it’s my only decent piece of jewellery. It was left to me…’ A convoluted sequence of bequests had brought the necklace into Sally’s possession, but she had never understood precisely how. Desperation came into her voice. ‘Please, Mama. It’s my first grown-up party. I haven’t anything else to wear except that silly little pinchbeck brooch.’

  Across Starberg, a strange smell was emanating from the procurator’s fireplace. It was acrid, like burned feathers with a touch of sulphur, as if a bird had been trapped in the flue. The procurator’s servants had retired from the room between courses. He reached over to the bell-pull and rang for a footman.

  ‘Sally, please don’t bargain with me.’

  ‘Mama, please. It’s only for tonight. No one will see. Papa can give it back to Mr Melhuish straight after the opera.’

  ‘Melhuish? What do you mean?’

  Sally drew a deep breath. ‘I told you. The necklace was in the legation safe. I had Papa ask Mr Melhuish to take it out for me this morning.’

  There was stony silence. Though Sally did not know it, at that moment, the door of the procurator’s dining room was opening to admit his killer. His death had been inevitable from the moment her necklace had been removed from the legation safe, but she did not know that either; did not know that the fatal outbreak of scarlet fever at her finishing school had been engineered to bring her to Starberg; would not have recognised the stench of magic if she’d been standing on the procurator’s hearthrug. Instead, she stood waiting for her mother to say something about her diamond necklace. When Emily did not, Sally knew without any real sense of victory tha
t she had won.

  They had gone downstairs then to meet the others from the legation party: Melhuish and his nephew, Stephen, the Fakenhams, the Pritchards and Francis Sinclair. The evening had begun, as it would finish, not entirely as Sally had expected.

  In a gloomily lit attic in the Old City a girl sat at a deal table, methodically sorting through some papers. She was working by the light of a single lamp, turned down low, and a fine stream of soot was rising above the lamp’s chimney because the oil in the reservoir was cheap and full of impurities. The papers were bills, and the oldest of them dated back to the girl’s arrival in Starberg not quite four months before. A worn leather purse sat beside them. Its contents might have kept a frugal person in food and firewood for around a fortnight, but they would scarcely have touched the pile of debt represented by the sheaf of paper.

  There was a bill for canvas, pigments and other artists’ supplies, an account from the local apothecary, and a depressing selection of pink pawnbroker’s tickets. Most pressing of all, though there was nothing on paper, was the surprisingly large amount of money for food and lodging owed to an accommodating, but persistent, landlady, to whom the girl’s father, Jonathan Merton, had this afternoon rashly promised payment. The girl, Estella, or Estée as she preferred to be called, made notes on a separate piece of paper as she worked. From time to time she paused to crumple and discard an expired pawnbroker’s ticket; nevertheless, her list of items and dates, and the neat column of figures which accompanied it, grew ominously long before she finished. When she reached the last item in her pile she added up the figures and methodically checked them, twice. There was no error. Her arithmetic, unfortunately, was too good for that.

  A voice sounded from the bed in the other room. ‘Estée.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing. Would you like some coffee? There’s some left over from this morning.’

  A grunt sounded in reply. Estée got up and poked the fire that burned in their small stove. The coffee was dark and muddy from the accumulation of grounds on the bottom of the saucepan, and she knew from past experience that it would be bitter. Jonathan, for all his bulk, had never been discriminating where food and drink were concerned, and she knew he would not mind as long as it edged out the cold for a little while. While she waited for the coffee to warm, Estée tipped something out of a small leather pouch which she produced from her pocket. It was a flat gold pendant in the shape of a many-rayed star, about the size of one of the old five crown pieces that were still circulating in Ostermark despite the fact that its monarchy had become a dukedom three generations before. It was an unusual, if old-fashioned, piece of jewellery, and the gold was extremely heavy. Only sentiment had so far stopped her disposing of it, for the pendant had been given to her by her dead mother. Sentiment, however, did not pay the bills or put food on the table, and Estée, who had loved her mother with an affection she knew to be reciprocated, could not think that Sophia Merton would have wanted her daughter and widower to starve.

  The scum on the surface of the coffee started moving in slow, perceptible circles. Estée took the saucepan off the stove and poured it into a cup, reserving the sludge on the bottom of the pan for next time. Jonathan was still in bed and she could tell he was not going to get up. A familiar pressure built up across her cheekbones and swept down into a wave of depression so strong it was almost akin to hunger. Jonathan had not just changed since her mother’s death. He had almost ceased to function.

  Estée set the coffee beside his bed and kissed him. ‘There you are, Papa. I’m going out, now, for a little while.’ She put her shawls on over her coat, fastening the heaviest one securely around her head. After years abroad, her clothes were totally inadequate to the severity of European winters, and becoming too small besides. But since the first snowfall in November, when she had thought she would die of the cold, she had been learning to endure it, because there was nothing else for it, and because she knew that after Christmas, when the endless winter rain gave way to snow, it would only be worse.

  At the street door she paused in the darkness to listen for the landlady’s approaching footsteps. But her descent had evidently passed unnoticed. She encountered nothing but the usual dank cold, and the smell of stewed cabbage going back through so many generations that it was ingrained in the woodwork and the crumbling plaster. Estée lifted the latch and noiselessly opened the front door. On the stone step she pulled on her wooden overshoes and set off doggedly through the rain and slush.

  Estée moved quickly along the narrow streets, walking close to the central gutter and trying to hurry between the streetlamps. The Old City, the western part of Starberg where she and Jonathan lived, had never recovered from Napoleon’s invasion eighty years before, though some sections around the cathedral and university still clung to a picturesque squalor that appealed to the more romantically minded students. The remaining parts were frankly slums, filled with a revolting stink that was a combination of rubbish and effluent, for there were no proper sewers and the local cesspits frequently overflowed in wet weather. Tonight the smell seemed to follow her even when she left the seediest parts behind. It reminded Estée of London fogs and Guy Fawkes Night, of paint gone off in her father’s palette box, of the stench of fumigant sulphur from the nightmare of their quarantine at Marseilles.

  That was an unhappy memory and Estée forced it out of her head. Eventually the smell faded and she emerged into a better, newer quarter near the river. The pawnshop was in Quay Street, a discreet slip of a building between a perfumerie and a wine merchant. Embarrassed ladies went there, and impoverished gentlemen; the items for sale in its barred window included not only jewellery but swords, telescopes, a fur wrap, and various objets d’art of questionable value. Except for making interest payments, Estée knew it would be the last time she went there. She and Jonathan had no other valuable possessions. When she was reduced to pledging their clothes, she would be forced to go sharply downmarket.

  She pushed open the door. A bell tinkled in the depths of the shop and an assistant looked up, a fairhaired young woman in a neat blue dress and protective cuffs. Estée went straight to her and laid her leather pouch on the counter.

  ‘I would like to know what you can advance me on this, please.’

  The assistant looked her over appraisingly. Estée knew what she must be thinking. Good quality clothes now getting shabby, a girl who was trying to appear older than she really was. A familiar face, which meant she was an established customer. When Estée and Jonathan had first run into difficulties not long after their arrival in Starberg, this pawnshop had been recommended by their landlady as respectable, a dubious enconium which Estée guessed meant that the owners did not openly receive stolen goods or blackmail customers. The young woman tipped the pendant out of the leather pouch and screwed a watchmaker’s glass into her eye.

  ‘It has someone’s name on it.’

  ‘It was my mother’s,’ said Estée. The pendant had indeed been given to her by her mother, though the name was someone else’s, exactly whose, she did not know.

  ‘I meant,’ said the woman, ‘that having a name on it would make it harder for us to sell the pledge. That naturally reduces the amount that we can advance you.’

  She removed the eyeglass and weighed the pendant in her little scales, then took it out to the back room. As she walked away, Estée felt a strange disturbance in the air, like a wake trailing away from her. The wrench of parting with the pendant was worse than she had expected, for it was not a piece of jewellery she had been particularly attached to, or even seen her mother wear. Perhaps it was simply the circumstances of the gift, towards the end of that dreadful sea voyage, when the grip of the tuberculosis had tightened daily; she remembered how Sophia had impressed upon her that she was to look after the pendant and never to sell it. Yet here she was, within months of her death, disobeying her mother’s instructions in spirit if not in fact, for unless the hoped-for funds came t
hrough from England, there was little chance of the pendant ever being redeemed.

  There was muffled conversation in the back room. A moment later the pawnbroker’s assistant reappeared and named a sum. It was less than Estée had hoped for, but like all customers in all pawnshops around the world, she was in no position to argue. She nodded and waited while the familiar ledger was produced. The lid came off the inkwell, the long nib dipped into the darkness, and, upside down, she watched words forming, black on white, in the neat, foreign script that was similar to, yet not like, her mother’s handwriting.

  Gold star-shaped pendant in antique style, inscribed ‘Astrid’—

  The pawnbroker’s assistant stopped writing and looked up as if something had disturbed her. Esté’s heart fluttered.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘I thought I could smell something.’ The woman stood sniffing a moment longer, then shook her head. ‘It must have been the river. Or else it came from the perfume shop next door. The scents there are not always sweet ones.’ She pushed the pledge book across for Estée to sign, wrote out a ticket, then counted out the money from the locked drawer under the counter. Estée put the coins and pink ticket into her purse and tucked it away carefully in an inside pocket.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘We look forward to helping you in the future, ma’am.’ Apparently oblivious to the black humour implicit in this remark, the assistant accompanied Estée to the door and locked the grille behind her.

  For a moment Estée sheltered in the lee of the doorway. It was very cold and raining heavily. Through the window, past the fox-fur and the opera glasses, she could see the woman locking her star pendant away in a safe. Then the light went out and she could see no more. A terrible wave of grief swept over her, for herself and for Jonathan, but most of all for Sophia, whose yearning to come home to the city of her birth had brought this trouble upon them. Had it been possible, at that moment Estée would have called on any power to bring her mother back, to unmake their choices and unpick the past. But Sophia was gone to the one place from which it was impossible to return. She had died in agony and despair, and her death had broken her husband’s spirit and hardened her daughter’s heart.