‘Perhaps there were no stones in this button,’ said Kate, ‘but she might have seen one with the gemstones in place.’ She slipped the other envelope from her notebook and handed it to Bella. ‘This sketch was also among Essie’s papers.’
Bella studied the image. ‘It’s identical. Except for these stones.’ She tapped the drawing. ‘What does it mean? Where did this pendant come from?’
‘I don’t know. But apart from the missing gemstones, it’s identical to a collection of buttons I saw at the Museum of London today.’ ‘The same? That could mean …’
They sat in silence, both looking from the drawing to the button in Kate’s hand. Kate tried to push away the whispered thought: liable to prosecution. Essie’s family had been poor. Was it such a stretch to imagine she might have kept something precious that she stumbled across at work or found in the street—or that had been dug up, by someone she knew, from a cellar near Cheapside? Or stolen it? And, if so, who was the rightful owner now?
For the insurance report for her Swiss client, Kate had been tracing the origin of a medieval skull ring over the last few months, a memento mori, distinguished by the engraved words NOSCE TE IPSUM. Know thyself. The ring had featured in a 1574 oil painting of a Flemish gentleman before being sold on to a Jewish collector in Holland. The paper trail had stopped abruptly in 1940. Her client looked embarrassed at the suggestion he had come by this ring illegally when it was sold by an unscrupulous Nazi soldier to his dealer. Kate recommended in her report that her client start the process of repatriation. It belonged—in her opinion and perhaps under international law—with the family of the Jewish collector who was the last known rightful owner.
As if she could read Kate’s thoughts, Bella said, ‘So who’s the rightful owner of Gertie’s gold button? Where’d it come from?’
‘Honestly? I don’t know. Maybe the answer does lie with the Cheapside collection. But there would have been hundreds of almost-identical ones worn by wealthy merchants and their wives throughout Elizabethan London. We have no proof.’
Bella, perhaps sensing Kate’s hesitation, went back to the manila folder from which she’d taken the family tree and pulled out a sepia photo of a gaunt woman leaning against a spinning wheel. She was dressed in a thick woollen skirt, an apron and worn boots. ‘This is Clementine Murphy. Our Irish great-great-grandmother.’
‘She looks like such a frail old woman. It was criminal how hard they made them work.’
Bella’s face clouded over. ‘Clementine was just over forty in this photo.’
Kate felt like she’d just been slapped. She peered at the photo of Clementine Murphy. ‘That’s just five years older than I am now.’
‘Be grateful you weren’t born to the lower classes in Edwardian times, if that’s what a booming economy, free education and “Rule Britannia” looked like … I can’t imagine what it must have been like to watch your babies die.’
As soon as she said it, Bella flushed a deep red and covered her face with both hands for a moment before removing them and looking Kate squarely in the eye.
Her look made Kate nauseous. She tugged at the curl sitting over her eyebrow and smoothed it behind her ear. She knew what would follow and her head scrambled to find some words. A new topic. Anything to stave off the conversation to come.
But it was too late.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Bella softly, her voice cracking with empathy as she reached out and put her hand over Kate’s, covering the button. ‘There’s no grief like the loss of a child.’
All the grief and guilt that had been bundled together and buried for four years was suddenly uncovered and exposed. Kate thought of her baby’s tiny pale face poking out from the swaddling, his head crowned with a mass of thick dark curls—her curls, Essie’s curls. She recalled his heavenly newborn smell. Purple lips. Eyes that never opened.
The left side of Kate’s torso started to ache. She had lain a whole night on this side in her hospital bed, clutching her newborn, pressing him close as if she could spirit some life into him.
Jonathan had sat in a chair in the corner, head between his knees, unable to speak. All his years of medical training had borne down on him, like a glacier of guilt. Kate knew she should have said something that night to console him, to assure him that none of this was his fault. To show how much she cherished him. But how could she? All her words had fled.
The midwife had understood. She had said nothing, yet sat beside Kate for hours with a hand on her shoulder as Kate shivered and shuddered until there were no more tears. Her simple gesture had kept Kate yoked to humanity on that blackest of nights.
Somehow, Kate now forced herself to lift her face to bask in the sun’s last rays, forced herself to breathe in, to inhale the heady scent of summer. After a moment, she opened her eyes and blinked back her tears.
It was a routine she’d perfected in the last four years. Blinking away her tears, pushing her sadness back into the bottle and screwing on the lid. Her grief would strike, with crippling force, in unexpected places. It was like being struck over the head and knocked out when you were merely strolling down the street. At other times, it felt like the gentle undertow of the ocean dragging her under. Her doctors and therapists said the grief would become tolerable with time. They said she had to move on her with her life. That she mustn’t blame herself.
But how to move on when so much had been lost?
How to be a mother with no child?
She thought of Essie. Perhaps Essie hadn’t talked much of life in London because she too had been carrying some sadness. Why rake over all that pain and stir it up? It was hard enough just to wade through an ordinary day.
Kate swallowed to clear her throat, but still no words would come. She thought of the journal buried deep in her bag. She carried it everywhere, yet rarely opened it. She didn’t need to. The carefree person who had bought that diary to record her thoughts on pregnancy was a ghost. So, too, were the black-and-white shadows of the ultrasound images she had pasted on its pages for safekeeping.
‘It’s okay,’ said Bella, her warm hand still resting on Kate’s.
Kate looked at the hand covering her own, and thought of Jonathan squeezing this same hand to console her when they had no words left, only tears or silence. He’d squeezed her hand again as he’d handed back the keys to the Louisburg Square house when he left for New Zealand, their marriage broken beyond repair.
Bella met Kate’s eyes and Kate managed a weak smile.
‘I’m so sorry you lost Noah.’
And there it was. Their Noah. Their precious baby boy.
A waiter approached and ushered them to another table for dinner. Once they’d ordered, Bella asked softly, ‘Have you spoken to Molly lately?’
‘We’ve texted.’
‘She’s worried about you. Thinks you’re holding her at arm’s length.’
‘What? That’s ridiculous. I’ve just been travelling so much … the projects just keep coming.’
‘That’s what worries her. And me, to be honest. I mean, none of us are immune from being workaholics.’ She took a sip of her wine. ‘But are you working because you love it or because you don’t want to sit still? Because both can be true. And as far as I can tell you haven’t stopped travelling since Jonathan left.’