Chapter 7: Her Grandmother's Brooch

Lowry House has forty-one steps from the gate to the front door.

I had counted them every morning for three years, coming home from night shifts.

I had never noticed that I was counting.

That evening I counted them again.

A patrol officer walked on my left and Hattie on my right, and I carried a stack of empty boxes.

"Civil standby," the officer said at the door. "Mrs. Kinsale collects her belongings, and nobody touches anybody. Understood?"

The housekeeper's assistant, a girl of nineteen in a gray uniform, opened it.

She looked at me and then at the floor.

"Mrs. Lowry is in the front hall," she said.

Constance was.

She stood at the foot of the grand staircase in a charcoal dress, with her silver hair set and her hands folded.

On the lapel of the dress was a garnet brooch shaped like a sprig of wheat.

I stopped on the marble.

My grandmother had worn that brooch every Sunday of my childhood.

She had pinned it onto my wedding dress with her own two hands, three weeks before she died.

It had lived in a velvet pouch in the top drawer of my dressing table.

"That's mine," I said.

"This?" Constance touched it with two fingers.

"Warner thought I should look after it while you were unwell."

"Family valuables are best kept in family hands."

"It's from my grandmother."

"And now it's in the Lowrys' care."

The girl in gray stood very still beside the door.

Two maids on the landing had stopped with their feather dusters raised.

An old man in an apron was in the dining room doorway, holding a silver tray.

I put my boxes down on the marble.

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