After the Armistice Ball

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Authors: Catriona McPherson
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
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back in his lawn chair, laughing at something Daisy was saying, and wondered at Cara’s easy admission of her indifference. I could quite see that she would want to be off despite it, though, since things must be unbearably frosty between her and her parents. They ought to have been grateful really; she might so easily not have told them. At the very least it had been brave of her to come clean.
    ‘You mustn’t berate yourself, Cara dear,’ I said, wondering if I was yet old enough to pull off this kind of wise condescension, and fearing that I was. ‘You are a good girl, you know, to tell your mother. You mustn’t fret about it. And whatever spot you have got yourself in, everything will be different after you are married.’
    ‘What?’ said Cara, turning towards me and blinking, clearly having drifted off and making me wonder if maybe her feelings for Alec were less impeccably modern than she had implied. ‘Oh yes, I’m a good little girl,’ she said. ‘I always have been, you know. I do exactly as I’m told every time and it brings me nothing but joy.’ I grimaced, pained to hear such world-weariness in one so young.
    Mrs Duffy and Clemence came out as we arrived at the tea table and in the fuss of arranging chairs, cushions and parasols, a few whispered words were exchanged.
    ‘What have you been asking Cara?’ Lena demanded. ‘Much better for you to come to me.’
    I was startled. Was it quite settled in her mind then that I had undertaken to do her bidding? I supposed it was.
    ‘Why, nothing,’ I said, my startled look backing my words nicely. ‘We were chatting about dresses and flowers, actually. But I do need to speak to you, certainly. Certainly I do.’
    ‘Come when we are home again,’ she hissed. ‘Come for luncheon next week.’
    A few more of the men began to drift back from the river as tea got under way, and there was much protestation from the ladies, who affected to be outraged by the mud and fish scales clinging to their husbands’ clothes and shrieked at the trout tails peeping from basket lids. Daisy, as I might have predicted, was stony-faced; she has always loathed the sight of women flirting in public with their own husbands. Alec and Cara were no help, chatting quietly to each other and ignoring everyone else; Mrs Duffy and Clemence were as thick as ever, sitting close together with identical expressions of pursed disapproval on their mouths, and I’m ashamed to admit I was very poor value too, for I sat utterly silent, brooding.
    What was the hold Lena believed she had over the Esslemonts, for it could not be the lame tale she had concocted about the theft? Why on earth did Cara want to sell the jewels? And how could she? Were they not her father’s? And were not all the signs that they were intended for her sister in the end? I was heartily sick of the things already and the trouble they caused. Was there any chance that they would simply turn up again? If not, how would one set about trying to track them down? In the favourite parlour game of my childhood – what was it called? – there was a set of enamel tiles to be passed around, what, who, why, where, when and how, and it did make things a great deal easier to –
    Suddenly there it was. When. The little wisp I had been swiping at was in my grasp at last. It was simply this: if the pastes were good enough to fool everyone but an expert and if what Cara had said about the jeweller’s discretion were true, then how could her mother possibly know that the jewels had not already been stolen, by the time of the Armistice Anniversary Ball? Had Mrs Duffy had a valuation done on them just then? One that she trusted? If not, it seemed to me, the switch might have been made at any time at all. It might have been years ago. I wondered if this simple point had occurred to no one but me. What a coup if it had not.
    I must pump the Duffys for more details. I might even hint at a softening of Silas’s resolve to worm my way

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