Free Teena Thyme by Jennifer Jane Pope Page B

of the dresser. Perhaps I was searching for more candles, ready to replace the ones I was now burning, perhaps I was just playing the role of lady of the house, I couldn't say now, not after all these years. However, open it I did, it stuck halfway, I tugged harder and suddenly it flew out, the weight tearing it from my grasp and the contents scattering across the floor.
    'Bugger!' I exclaimed, which was hardly Victorian and certainly not ladylike. I stared down at the mess in dismay: old bills, a spectacle case, several pens, some old keys, a penknife, several coiled up pieces of string - all the usual clutter that never quite gets sorted out in that sort of drawer. I placed my wine glass safely out of harm's way and, with some difficulty, bent down to try to clear up the debris.
    And at that point, as I turned my head slightly, I caught the glimmer of something shining, way back there in the gaping hole that the errant drawer had just vacated. Carefully I reached in and, hampered by the fact that I was still wearing the gloves, felt around until my fingers closed on something smooth and round. Gingerly, I withdrew it and found myself looking at what had obviously been the pendant part of a gold locket and chain.
    I straightened up and took it closer to the candelabra. Yes, no mistaking it, it was most certainly gold, for the surface was worn and scratched as only real gold can be. I wondered how many years it had lain back there hidden, trapped on a narrow ledge of batten, hidden from prying eyes by that drawer that nobody ever used for anything of real importance.
    Fumbling awkwardly I managed to slip the catch and the two halves came open in my hands. Two faces greeted me, two pairs of eyes looked up at me.
    'Well, hello there,' I said quietly. 'Nice to meet you both. I'm Teena Thyme, lady of this manor. Now, I wonder who you two are - or were, should I say?'
    I looked at the woman first. She seemed to have been quite pretty, in that slightly full-faced way peculiar to Georgian and early Victorian ladies. Her face was very pale - powder, no doubt - and her elegantly coiffeured hair would almost certainly have been a wig, but her eyes were gentle and I suspected that she must have been a very nice person.
    The man also seemed to radiate a nice aura. He was dark-haired, with quite thin features and a slightly overlong nose, but I could see that he would have been considered handsome in his day. I could just see the high collar of his jacket and the lacy cravat that seemed to have been tied just a fraction too tightly and I had a feeling, looking at the way in which his eyes seemed to twinkle, that he had not really taken his portrait sittings as seriously as the pose suggested he might.
    I closed the locket again and turned it over in my hands a few times. I could make out a definite indentation inside the loop through which the missing chain must have passed and, as I examined it closer, I saw it was an irregular oval shape, rather than the circle one might have expected. Enter Sherlock Teena.
    'Someone yanked this off the chain,' I said to myself. 'Either that, or it got caught up on something and the strain distorted the link before it finally broke.'
    The inscription on the back of the locket was so worn that I almost missed it and at first I thought maybe I was mistaken, that it was just some deeper scratches, but no, when I held it up closer I could definitely make out letters. It was an ornate and very old-fashioned script, I saw, but what did it say?
    'A.I.,' I read. 'Nope, not I,' I corrected myself. 'That's a T. So, A.T., whatever that means.' I blinked and looked closer still, my nose now nearly touching the warm metal surface. 'Eighteenth December, MDCCCXX,' I read. Eighteen-twenty.
    'A.T., eighteenth December eighteen-twenty. A wedding date? Birthday? Well, it was certainly my birthday, though not the eighteen-twenty bit. That was more than a hundred and thirty years out.
    Perhaps, I thought, there might be