The Borrowed Mourning Brooch
The bunting had gone up crooked, as it always did when Derek Finch was in charge of the ladder. Agnes Peel stood at the entrance to Hadley Compton’s annual summer fete, holding a paper cup of lukewarm tea and watching the triangles of faded fabric sag between the chestnut trees. The air smelled of cut grass and fried onions from the sausage stall, and somewhere behind her a child was hammering a rubber duck repeatedly against the rim of the hook-a-duck pool.
Agnes was not watching the bunting, not really. She was watching Greta Holloway.
Greta had arrived in the village nine months ago, shortly after the death of her husband, Edmund. She had spoken often about Edmund in the weeks following her arrival: his kindness, his failing heart, his wishes for a quiet burial in his home county of Shropshire. She had spoken, on one particular occasion over shortbread in Agnes’s kitchen, about the brooch.
“He gave it to me on our wedding day,” Greta had said, holding her teacup in both hands. “Seed pearls, set in silver. I had it buried with him. It felt right.”
Agnes remembered the exact way Greta had pressed her lips together after saying it.
Now Greta stood by the jam stall wearing that brooch. Seed pearls, set in silver, pinned precisely at the collarbone of a navy cardigan.
Agnes took a slow sip of tea.
She did not hurry. She browsed the tombola, bought a pot of gooseberry preserve, admired the vicar’s wife’s Victoria sponge from a respectful distance. It was only when Greta moved toward the book stall, alone, that Agnes followed.
“What a lovely brooch,” Agnes said pleasantly, appearing at Greta’s elbow. “Is it new?”
Greta’s hand went to it immediately. A small, quick movement, like a bird flinching.
“It was my mother’s,” she said. “I had it out of a drawer. I’d forgotten I had it.”
“Of course,” said Agnes. “Seed pearls, aren’t they? I have something similar.”
She watched Greta turn a paperback over in her hands without reading the back.
Agnes spent the remainder of the afternoon in conversation with various neighbours, eating a triangle of quiche she didn’t particularly want, and thinking. By four o’clock, when the tombola barrel had been packed away and the sausage stall was down to its last three, she had reached a conclusion that required one further piece of information.
She found it through Dorothy Fenn, who had lived in Hadley Compton for sixty-three years and considered herself the unofficial curator of all local knowledge.
“Edmund Holloway,” Agnes said, settling beside her on the bench near the cricket pavilion. “Did anyone here know him, before Greta came?”
Dorothy stirred her tea. “No one. She came alone. Said he’d been buried up in Shropshire, no service down here.” She paused. “Funny thing. Her solicitor came to visit two months back. Clive Parrish saw him arrive. A young man with a briefcase, very serious looking. Clive thought it was about the cottage, but Greta told me afterwards it was just paperwork. Estate matters.”
“Estate matters,” Agnes repeated.
That evening she made two telephone calls. The first was to the General Register Office inquiry line, which told her nothing she could act upon, but confirmed a great deal she already suspected. The second was to her nephew, who worked in probate law in Bristol.
“If a person were to claim a spouse had died,” Agnes asked him, after the usual pleasantries, “but no death had in fact been registered in the relevant county, how long before someone might notice?”
There was a pause. “That would depend on whether anyone was looking,” he said.
Agnes thanked him and rang off.
The following morning she walked to the village post office, which also served as the closest thing Hadley Compton had to a centre of civic gravity. She spoke to Constable Rowe, who was buying stamps and who had learned, through four years of Agnes’s acquaintance, to put his stamps away and listen when she arrived wearing her good coat.
She laid it out simply. The brooch Greta had buried with a husband she described in the past tense. The solicitor and his briefcase. The absence of a registered death. The estate that required managing. The brooch, worn in public, then claimed to be her mother’s, then hastily dismissed.
“If Edmund Holloway is alive,” Agnes said, “and Greta is collecting on policies or property transfers made in the assumption of his death, then someone ought to make a telephone call to Shropshire.”
Constable Rowe made the telephone call to Shropshire.
Edmund Holloway was alive. He was living in a rented cottage outside Ludlow, under a different name, apparently under the impression that the financial arrangements were temporary and the plan had been Greta’s alone. That was a matter for the courts to decide.
Agnes walked home through the village in the early evening light, past the chestnut trees where the bunting still sagged between the branches. Derek Finch had not come back to straighten it. He never did.
She stopped beneath it and looked up. One triangle had come loose at the corner and fluttered softly in the warm air, not quite attached, not quite free.
She thought of seed pearls, set in silver, and a woman pressing her lips together over a cup of tea.
Then she walked home and put the kettle on.
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