Chapter 2
Two
DARCY
The next morning I drove south with no plan beyond salt air and distance.
London thinned out behind me as the rain came and went. The sky lowered as I reached the coast, gray folding into gray, and by the time Hastings appeared, I could almost breathe without tasting smoke.
Almost.
A banner flapped outside the seafront pavilion.
Antique Fair Today.
I parked, because I had nowhere else to be and needed to keep moving. For the first time in months, I walked into something without worrying whether I could get myself back out.
Inside, the fair smelled like mothballs, rain-damp wool, and tea. I should have turned around the moment I saw the first velvet-covered table sagging under silver fish knives, mourning brooches, chipped porcelain shepherdesses, and enough tarnished candlesticks to light half of Sussex.
Instead, I bought a paper cup of tea strong enough to strip paint, tucked my hands into the pockets of my waxed jacket, and let the flow of people carry me deeper into the maze.
The fair had taken over the seafront pavilion, a long glass-fronted building looking out toward the Channel, where gray water rolled under a gray sky and the gulls screamed as if they were plotting something.
Inside, the dealers had crowded their stalls together until the aisles narrowed into proper hazards, though I doubted anyone else in the building was mentally noting the blocked exits, the frayed extension leads, the wobbly stack of framed oil paintings, and the one brass lamp positioned exactly where an elderly man with a walking stick would take it down like a bowling pin.
I couldn’t turn it off. Not even on my day off. Not even eight months after the warehouse fire, when everyone at the station had started using those soft, careful voices around me.
How are you holding up?
Fine.
You know you can talk about Brian.
I know.
You don’t have to be all right.
I’m aware.
The trouble with grief was that everyone wanted you to do it their way. Cry in the right places. Accept the casseroles. Sit in a circle and say what hurt.
I’d done all of it. I’d nodded and thanked people and thrown away three lasagnas, because Brian had hated lasagna. So I’d driven four hours from London to Hastings with no plan beyond salt air, distance, and not having to look at his empty locker for three whole blessed days.
A dealer in a tweed jacket gave me a hopeful smile as I slowed near a table of military buttons and cracked leather-bound books.
“Looking for anything in particular?”
“Just browsing.”
The great lie of antique fairs. Everyone was just browsing, right up until they found the thing they’d apparently been missing since birth.
He looked so disappointed that I picked up a silver-plated toast rack and pretended to admire it. I’d never understood toast racks. The bread just stood there at attention going cold, which seemed both bossy and unkind.
Brian would have said it was peak England, turning toast into architecture. The thought of him landed sharp under my ribs.
I set the toast rack down before I bought the thing out of pure sentiment and moved on through the pavilion.
Outside, the wind rattled the windows. A gull pecked at something on the promenade, looking personally offended by its meager lunch. The light had gone thin and silvery while I’d browsed, slipping in and out between the clouds and glinting off the glass cases.
The last booth was tucked behind one of the pillars, half in shadow and half hidden by a hanging tapestry that smelled strongly of dust and mildew. Most people walked right past it without slowing.
I nearly did the same.
Then something winked at me from a tray near the back.
One flash of blackened silver beneath a clutter of old buckles and bent spoons.
The woman behind the table didn’t look up. She was older, though not in a frail way. Her silver hair was pinned at the nape of her neck, her back was straight, and her hands moved through the objects as though she knew exactly where every odd little thing belonged.
She wore a dark green coat, a wool scarf the color of wet stone, and several heavy gold rings.
“Careful,” she said.
I froze with my fingers hovering over the tray. “Sorry. I wasn’t going to pocket anything.”
“Never said you were.”
I cocked my head at her. “Then careful of what?”
At that, she looked up.
Her eyes were pale blue, sharp and assessing. The sort of eyes that weighed you up and filed you away before you’d finished saying hello.
“The thing that calls back,” she said.
I laughed, because that seemed like what the moment required, but it came out thin. “That’s a different sales technique.”
“I’m not selling.”
“Then this is a very confusing business model.”
The corner of her mouth twitched, though it never quite turned into a smile.
I should have walked away. Truly, I should have.
I’d been told all my life that I had too much curiosity and not enough respect for strange situations, which was rich coming from a family that once kept a Christmas pudding for four years because nobody wanted to be the one to ask if it had gone off.
But the object in the tray caught the light again, and I leaned in for a better look.
A brooch. Round and nearly the size of my palm, with fierce interlaced beasts biting their own tails around the rim. The silver had gone almost black in the grooves, but where the tarnish had worn thin, the metal gleamed like moonlight on a knife blade.
Garnets, or glass made to look like garnets, sat in little settings at the center, dark red and watchful. The pin on the back was corroded and the hinge bent, and still the piece looked as though it had been made to outlast kings and fires and fools and everything else besides.
“That’s extraordinary,” I said.
“Aye.”
It reminded me of something I’d seen on the telly a while back. “Is it Saxon?”
“Some would say so.”
“That’s either very mysterious or you’re not sure.”
“Both can be true.”
“You should put that on the label. Very catchy.”
This time she did smile, and for one peculiar moment the noisy fair seemed to hush around us.
Somewhere behind me as if from far away, a man haggled over a porcelain dog. A child whined for chips. The sea wind pressed against the windows, and I could hear my blood beating in my ears.
“What’s the provenance?” I asked, pleased I’d picked up and remembered a few bits from all those antiques shows.
“Lost. Found. Lost again.”
“That’s not provenance. That’s a riddle.”
“And yet you haven’t walked away.”
Annoying woman. Accurate, but annoying. I held out my hand before I could overthink it. “May I?”
“No.”
I pulled my hand back. “Right. Sorry.”
She sighed as if I’d somehow failed a test by being polite, reached into her coat pocket, and drew out a small key tied with blue thread.
She unlocked the glass-topped case beneath the tray. I hadn’t even noticed it was locked. Then she lifted the brooch out with both hands.
I would have sworn the whole room leaned toward it.
“Hold it only if you mean to,” she said.
That should have done it. Sent me straight for the nearest exit, past the hazard lamp and the toast architecture and back out to my car, where I could eat service-station crisps for dinner and congratulate myself on not being the sort of woman who accepted cursed jewelry from cryptic strangers.
Instead, I held out my palm. The brooch settled into my hand, cold and far heavier than it looked.
Every hair on my arms stood up. For a second, nothing happened at all.
“See?” I said, though my voice wavered. “Completely normal.”
The old woman’s gaze softened.
“No, love. Nothing about you is.”
The center stone flared. Not bright. Not like lightning. More like an ember waking beneath ash.
Pain shot through my palm, and I gasped and tried to drop the brooch, but my fingers had curled around it as though my hand had locked tight around the piece.
The pavilion blurred. Tables smeared into ribbons of brown and gold. Voices stretched and slowed and tangled together until the world sounded underwater, and the smell of mothballs vanished beneath salt and smoke and something bitter that caught at the back of my throat.
My training kicked in. Breathe. Assess. Identify hazards. Move to safety.
“Let go,” I whispered to it.
The old woman was still there, though farther away now, blurred behind a veil of white light.
Her mouth moved and I only caught two words.
“Find him.”
“Who?”
The floor disappeared. I had just enough time to think, with ridiculous clarity, that Brian would have laughed himself sick.
Done in by haunted jewelry after refusing to buy a silver toast rack.
Then the world snapped. Cold water slapped me across the face as I came up coughing, choking on salt and sand, clawing at a beach that was doing its level best to get into my mouth, my nose, my hair, and every seam of my clothing.
Waves dragged at my boots. My jeans were soaked through, my waxed jacket weighed a ton, and my teeth clicked together hard enough to make my jaw ache.
For a moment, I simply lay there on the wet sand beneath a low iron sky and concentrated on being alive.
Alive was good. Alive with sand in my bra was less good, but manageable.
I pushed myself up on shaking arms. My palms stung. The left one bore a round red mark where the brooch had rested, like a burn or a brand.
The brooch was gone. I stared at my empty hand then at the sand.
“No.”
I searched the wet ground around me, pushing aside pebbles and tangles of weed. I checked beneath my knees, inside the folds of my jacket, and finally every pocket I had, because apparently I’d reached the bargaining stage of whatever nervous breakdown this was.
Nothing.
“Oh, absolutely not.”
The thing had thrown me into the sea, branded my hand, and vanished. Even cursed jewelry ought to have the decency to stay around for the explanation.
I checked my pockets again. Still nothing.
“Fine,” I muttered.
The wind hit me full in the face, sharp with salt and smoke. Not city smoke, not petrol or plastic. Not the chemical stink of a warehouse fire.