Free The Murder of Mary Russell by Laurie R. King

(though she was) perched awkwardly on the edge of a bench amidst the unfamiliar bulk of a crinoline, her hair swept up and ringletted beneath a bonnet; clearly a young girl attempting to look older than she was. She sat a short distance away from a busy jewellery shop, shoulders hunched and head down, either fascinated by some small object in her hands, or fighting tears. People passed her by, as oblivious of her as she was of them, until a courting couple approached, hand on arm at a primly decorous distance.
    When they were ten feet from Clarissa, she glanced up. The girl stopped, pulled from her springtime euphoria by those big, dark, brimming eyes. Her beau would have pressed on, perhaps even more briskly having spotted the tears, but his young lady’s arm—and her concern—anchored him in place.
    “What is the matter, dear?” the girl exclaimed.
    Clarissa hastened to dash away the tears with a childish hand. “Oh nothing, it’s nothing at all, not that you can help with. But thank you,” she added politely, blinking a clear, wide-eyed signal of distress.
    The pretty girl lowered herself to the bench with the automatic swing of hips that betrayed a recent abandonment of steel hoops in favour of horsehair bustle. She reached out a gloved hand for Clarissa’s bare one, somehow catching one of her glove’s tiny buttons in the object Clarissa was holding.
    “Oh!” Clarissa grabbed for it, working its satin cord free. When she had succeeded, her two hands held it out for a moment. All three young people studied the small, black velvet draw-string bag, until, with a cry of loss, Clarissa’s head bent down to cover it, her shoulders heaving.
    The story soon came out: a dangerously ill mother, a father honourably dead, a family so reduced in circumstances that all Clarissa had to sell was the ring left by her beloved grandmother.
    “Nanna—that’s what we called her,” Clarissa said with a brave smile. “Nanna wore it all her life. When Granddad bought it, the ring cost a year’s pay. She always used to tell us the story, of how he came to her father with the ring and a solemn vow: that he would love her even when all the diamonds of the earth…” She had to choke out the next words over a sob. “When diamonds had crumbled to dust. And he did. They were
so
in love, like newlyweds even when they were old and grey. They died within days of each other, both in their nineties, and left me the ring. It’s worth hundreds. If I sell it, I can save my mother’s life. But…”
    Her voice trailed off into her hands.
    The young woman’s arm went around Clarissa’s shoulders, she bent close to hear the words. “What? Oh child, what is the problem?”
    Clarissa sat upright, taking a sharp, steadying breath. “I thought perhaps Mr Barnaby—the jeweller—would buy it, since he’s the one who told Mama it was worth two hundred guineas. But it seems he has plenty of the new diamonds just now—coming out of South Africa? And people want a
new
ring, instead of one with seventy years of love behind it. I need the money today, if—” Another sob, bravely stifled. “If Mother is to have her operation. I shall have to tell her doctor that she must come home, for a time. Until I can find someone who wants it.”
    Clarissa raised her hand, and the sun caught fire on her ring finger: the cluster of many diamonds set into rose-coloured gold sparkled, it danced, it threw the sun about as her hand turned this way and that.
    Then the dazzle winked out like the death of promise as she slipped the ring back inside its pouch, prompting a faint protest from the girl at Clarissa’s side.
    The girl looked up at her beau. He eyed the small velvet bag uneasily. The silence grew electric—
    To be broken from an unexpected direction.
    A small man with hunched shoulders, worn tweeds, and a jeweller’s loupe in his hand paused beside the trio.
    “Hello, young lady. I am really terribly sorry we couldn’t convince Mr Barnaby to