The Inheritance of Mrs. Pelham’s Hat
The Tuesday morning after Agnes Pelham’s funeral, Constance Birch sat in her usual window chair at the Copper Kettle tea room and watched the village square through glass still faintly misted from the urn. A sparrow pecked at something between the cobblestones. The war memorial dripped with overnight rain. Nothing moved except the sparrow and, presently, Dorothy Vane, who came out of the post office wearing Agnes’s hat.
Constance recognised it immediately. Black straw, a wide brim, and a jet brooch at the left side that Agnes had bought in Harrogate forty years ago and never once removed from the hat. She had worn it to every funeral in Thorpe Alling since 1987. The brooch caught the thin October light and winked.
Dorothy Vane was Agnes’s niece. She had driven up from Coventry on the Thursday, seen the will read on the Friday, and told anyone who would listen that her aunt had been a difficult woman. She had been at the Copper Kettle herself yesterday afternoon, telling Sylvia Marsh from the flower rota that clearing Larkspur Cottage was going to be an absolute ordeal.
Constance set down her cup of Darjeeling.
She had taught in Thorpe Alling for thirty-one years. She knew how grief arranged itself on a face, and she knew how other things arranged themselves too.
She waited until Dorothy came in for a take-away coffee, then said, quite pleasantly, “That was Agnes’s hat, wasn’t it?”
Dorothy’s hand went to the brim. “She left it to me.”
“Of course.” Constance smiled. “The brooch is very fine. Whitby jet, if I remember correctly.”
“I believe so.” Dorothy paid for her coffee and left without looking back.
Constance folded her paper and put on her coat.
She walked to Larkspur Cottage, a ten-minute route that took her past the churchyard, where Agnes’s flowers were already beginning to bronze at the edges in the cold. She let herself through the lychgate and stopped at the grave, not out of sentiment, though sentiment was present, but because she wanted to think without being observed.
Agnes had been precise about her will. Constance knew this because Agnes herself had mentioned it, more than once, over the years they had shared an allotment boundary and a preference for plain biscuits. She had left the cottage to a housing trust, her savings divided equally between two distant cousins, and her personal effects itemised and attributed individually. Agnes had enjoyed the attribution. It had given her a form of conversation that extended, she liked to say, beyond the grave.
The brooch had gone to the church restoration fund, to be sold at the spring auction.
Constance had been present when Agnes said this to Reverend Harcastle not three months ago, over tea in the vestry.
She knocked at Larkspur Cottage. Dorothy answered in rubber gloves and a look of guarded patience.
“I wonder,” said Constance, stepping into the narrow hallway that smelled of beeswax and something faintly floral, lavender perhaps, or old potpourri dried to a papery dust, “whether you’ve had a chance to locate Agnes’s papers yet. Her solicitor’s details and so forth.”
“Most of it was dealt with on Friday.”
“Yes, but there’s sometimes a supplementary letter. Agnes mentioned one.” There was no supplementary letter, as far as Constance knew, but the word sometimes did a great deal of useful work in a sentence like that.
Dorothy pulled off one rubber glove, then the other. She was a tall woman, and the low ceilings of the cottage made her look constructed for a different building. “She never mentioned a letter to me.”
“She may not have.” Constance allowed a small pause. “She was quite specific, though, about the brooch on the hat. She told Reverend Harcastle it was for the restoration fund.” Another pause, shorter. “He’s rather counting on it, I think. The guttering above the north transept is in a terrible state.”
The room held its breath. The carriage clock on the mantelpiece ticked into the silence, each tick a small, patient footstep.
Dorothy’s jaw moved once, as though she were tasting something she had not expected. She reached up and unpinned the brooch with two careful fingers, and placed it on the little gate-leg table beside the door, amongst a scatter of envelopes and a unused roll of packing tape.
“I must have misread the list,” she said.
“Easy enough to do.” Constance picked up the brooch, which was cool and smooth and heavier than it looked. “I’ll drop it into the Reverend on my way back. Save you the trouble.”
She walked home by way of the churchyard again. The sparrow had gone. The memorial was drying in a thin shaft of afternoon sun that had found its way between the clouds, turning the pale stone briefly warm, as though something underground were breathing.
Constance thought about the hat. It was a very fine hat. Agnes would not have begrudged Dorothy the hat. She had been a woman who understood the value of keeping up appearances, and she would have seen, with perfect clarity, that Dorothy Vane needed a hat like that considerably more than she had ever needed a brooch.
Constance dropped the jet brooch into her coat pocket, where it rested against her knuckle all the way to the vicarage, solid and cool and rightfully belonging to the guttering above the north transept.
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