Free The Lost Sapphire by Belinda Murrell Page B

rifled through the drawer, she felt something cold and sharp that was hidden right at the very back. Pulling it out, she saw it was a key with an ornate bow, hanging from a purple velvet ribbon. Violet looked at it for a moment then returned it to the back of the drawer. It was only as she was picking up her pile of paper and pens that she wondered which door the key might open. A memory stirred from long ago.
    Could it be the missing key to the tower? Violet wondered. She picked the key up again and weighed it in the palm of her hand.
    On the ground floor, the square tower held a small guest powder room, but above that were a further two rooms, one on top of the other, accessible from the first floor of the house. These rooms had been locked up for years. Violet suddenly had an overwhelming urge to see if this key would fit that lock.
    Back upstairs, she checked around carefully. The servants had cleaned all the bedrooms in the morning and were now occupied in the servants’ quarters. Violet crept towards the locked tower door, her heart thudding.
    She glanced around once more to check that no-one was around, then pushed the key in the lock and turned. For a moment the lock refused to budge, sticky with lack of use. Then it gave suddenly, turning with a loud creak. Violet pushed open the door and went inside, still holding her breath.
    Violet quickly closed the door behind her and leaned against it. She was in a small square room with windows on three sides, looking out over the treetops. To her right, a narrow spiral staircase led up to the room on the third level of the tower. Violet looked around, her throat tight.
    This had been her mother’s study. Did she imagine it, or did it still smell, warm and familiar, of her mother’s floral perfume? No, the air smelled merely of hot, stale air.
    The tower room was simply furnished with a white painted writing desk and chair, and a duck-egg blue velvet armchair by the western window, next to a side table piled with books. A tall bookcase was against the wall on her left. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust.
    On her mother’s desk was a collection of photographs in tarnished silver frames. Violet walked over slowly, as if in a dream. There was a formal portrait taken on the front steps of Riversleigh. Violet, Imogen, her father and mother – and the two boys. Tears sprang to Violet’s eyes. It was her family, before the war that changed everything.
    There were old photographs that Mamma had taken of Violet’s brothers, Lawrence and Archie, dressed inknickerbockers, riding hobby horses in the garden. Imogen and Violet were dressed in white pinafores over their cotton dresses, playing with Romeo as a wrinkly, spotted puppy.
    Beside these were framed portraits of the two boys – Lawrence at eighteen years old and Archie at seventeen, dressed in their Australian Imperial Forces uniforms, just before they were sent to the Western Front in France. The two boys had run off together to enlist, with Archie convincing the recruitment officers that he was old enough. The first that their desperately worried parents had known of it was when the photographs arrived in the mail with their farewell letters.
    Their faces looked so young, so serious. The boys had disembarked just a few short months before the war ended. Later, the newspaper stories said that the battle for the town of Villers-Bretonneux had been a crucial turning point in the war. It had certainly been a crucial turning point in Violet’s life – in a matter of weeks she lost two brothers and a mother. And her grief-stricken father had never been the same again.
    Violet sank down to the dusty rug. Hot, thick tears flowed as the memories rose up – memories she had tried to suppress. How could her world be ripped apart so savagely? How could she lose nearly everything she held most dear? Violet wept as though her heart was breaking all over again. She imagined it glued