It was a music box, tarnished cylinder and splitting blue silk lining, and after a whirring second it plucked out a tune: “Greensleeves,” rusty and sweet. Rafe put a hand over the clockwork mouse, which was still fizzing halfheartedly. There was a long silence, just the crackle of the fire, while we listened.
“Beautiful,” Daniel said softly, closing the box, when the tune ended. “That’s beautiful. Next Christmas…”
“Can I have this in my room, to send me to sleep?” I asked. “Till Christmas?”
“Now you need lullabies?” Abby asked, but she was grinning at me. “Course you can.”
“I’m glad we didn’t find it before,” Justin said. “This must be valuable; they’d only have made us sell it, towards the taxes.”
“Not that valuable,” Rafe said, taking the box from me and examining it. “Basic ones like this go for about a hundred quid-a lot less in this condition. My grandmother used to collect them. Dozens of them, on every surface, just waiting to fall off and smash and send her into a fit if you walked too hard.”
“Knock it off,” Abby said, kicking his ankle-no pasts-but she didn’t sound seriously upset. For some reason, maybe just the mysterious alchemy you get among friends, all the tension of the last few days seemed to have vanished; we were happy together again, shoulders touching, Justin tugging down Abby’s sweater where it had slid up her back. “Sooner or later, though, we could find something valuable, in all this mess.”
“What would you do with the money?” Rafe asked, reaching for the biscuits. “A few grand, say.” In that second I heard Sam’s voice, close against my ear: That house is full of old bits and bobs, if there was something valuable in there…
“Get an Aga stove,” Abby said promptly. “The ones that heat the whole house. Warmth and a cooker that doesn’t crumble into lumps of rust if you look at it funny. Two birds, one stone.”
“You wild woman,” Justin said. “What about designer dresses and weekends in Monte Carlo?”
“I’d settle for no more frozen toes.”
Maybe she was supposed to give him something, I had said, and that’s what went wrong: she changed her mind… I realized I had my hand pressed down on the music box as if someone was trying to take it away. “I’d get the roof redone, I think,” Daniel said. “It shouldn’t disintegrate for another few years, but it would be nice not to wait that long.”
“You?” Rafe asked, giving him a sideways grin and winding the clockwork mouse again. “I’d have thought you’d never sell the thing, whatever it was; just frame it and hang it on the wall. Family history over filthy lucre.”
Daniel shook his head and held out a hand to me for his coffee mug-I had been dipping my biscuit in it. “What matters is the house,” he said, taking a sip and passing the mug back to me. “All the other things are just icing, really; I’m fond of them, but I’d sell them all in a heartbeat if we needed the money for roofing bills or something like that. The house carries enough history all by itself; and after all, we’re making our own, every day.”
“What would you do with it, Lex?” Abby asked.
That right there was, of course, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, the one that was banging at the inside of my head like a tiny vicious hammer. Sam and Frank hadn’t followed up on the antique-deal-gone-wrong idea because, basically, nothing pointed that way. Death duties had cleared the good stuff out of the house, Lexie hadn’t been linked to any antique dealers or fences, and nothing had said she needed money; until now.
She had had eighty-eight quid in her bank account-barely enough to get her out of Ireland, never mind get her started anywhere else-and only a couple of months before the baby started showing, the father started noticing and it was too late. Last time she had sold her car; this time, she had had nothing to sell.
It’s amazing how cheaply you can ditch your life and get a new one, if you don’t ask for much and you’re willing to do any work that’s going. After Operation Vestal I spent a lot of predawn time online, checking hostel prices and job ads in various languages and doing the maths. There are plenty of cities where you can get a crap flat for three hundred quid a month, or a hostel bed for a tenner a night; figure in your flight, and enough cash to feed you for a few weeks while you answer ads for bar staff or sandwich makers or tour guides, and you’re talking a brand-new life for the price of a secondhand car. I had two grand saved up: more than enough.
And Lexie knew all that better than I did; she had done it before. She wouldn’t have needed to find a lost Rembrandt in the back of her wardrobe. All she would have needed was the right little trinket-a good bit of jewelry, a rare piece of porcelain, I’ve heard of teddy bears going for hundreds-and the right buyer; and the willingness to sell bits of this house, out from under the others.
She had run off in Chad’s car, but I would have been willing to swear on just about anything that that was different. This had been her home.
