The lost Heiress

The Locket

It was Nell who found the locket, three days after Mr. Marsh's visit, tucked into the false bottom of an old sewing box that had belonged, the housekeeper said, to Ruth Pryor herself — left behind, forgotten or abandoned, when the nursemaid had fled Ashcombe Hall the same night she vanished with the child.

"I was looking for thread," Nell explained, breathless, having run the length of the west wing to find Wren in the garden. "The box was in the linen room, no one had opened it in years — and there was a false bottom, Wren, like something out of a novel, and inside it this."

The locket was small, tarnished silver, shaped like a swan with wings folded close. Wren's hands trembled slightly as she opened the clasp. Inside, worked in hair so fine it might have come from an infant's head, was a single word: Rosalind.

"It's a mourning locket," Nell said softly. "Or — not mourning, exactly. A keepsake. Sometimes nurses would take a lock of hair from a child they'd cared for, if they loved the child and thought they might not see them grow." She hesitated. "Ruth Pryor loved you, Wren. Whatever else is true, whatever she did and why — she loved you enough to keep this all those years, and to confess the truth of it on her deathbed rather than let it die with her."

"Then why did she run? If she loved me, why not simply tell my father someone meant to harm me?"

Nell's face was troubled. "Perhaps," she said slowly, "because the person who meant to harm you was someone your father would not have believed capable of it. Someone close enough to the family that an accusation from a nursemaid would have gotten her dismissed, or worse, and left you exactly where you'd been — in danger, with no one left to protect you."

The two women looked at each other in the slanting afternoon light, and neither said Julian's name, though both, Wren understood, were thinking it.

"There's something else." Nell reached into her pocket and withdrew a folded scrap of paper, brittle with age, that had been tucked beneath the locket in the sewing box's false bottom. "I didn't read all of it. I thought you should be the one."

Wren unfolded it with careful fingers. The ink had faded to brown, but the hand was clear enough, cramped and hurried, as though written in fear and haste.

If this is found, know that I did what I did to save the child from her uncle, who came to me in March and told me plainly that the girl stood between him and everything he believed himself owed, and that accidents befall children every day, and that I would be wise to consider my own position in this house before I considered hers. I could not go to the master — he would not have believed his own brother capable of such a thing, and I would have been dismissed for slander, and the child left defenseless. God forgive me if I have done wrong. I could see no other way to keep her safe.

— R.P.

"Her uncle," Wren whispered. "Not Julian's father. My father's brother."

"Lord Ashcombe has a brother?" Nell's eyes had gone wide.

Wren pressed the locket to her palm until the swan's folded wings left a small red mark against her skin, as though her own body were trying, in the only language it had left, to hold onto a woman she would never meet and could never properly thank. She thought of Ruth Pryor running through the dark with a sleeping four-year-old in her arms, choosing terror and exile over the far greater terror of staying silent, and felt something shift in her chest that she would only later recognize as the beginning of grief for a stranger who had, in every way that mattered, been the truest kind of mother to her.

"Had," said a new voice from the garden gate, and both women turned to find Lady Ashcombe standing there, silver-eyed, unreadable, a shawl drawn close against the autumn chill. "Edmund Ashcombe. My husband's younger brother. He died eleven years ago, quite suddenly, of a seizure of the heart — or so we were told at the time." She looked at the paper in Wren's hand with an expression Wren could not name. "I think, Miss Calloway, it is time we spoke plainly, you and I. I think it is time you learned exactly what became of Edmund Ashcombe, and why I have spent seventeen years dreading the day you might be found and brought home to ask these very questions."