Poorly lodged at first on Avon Street, at the lower end of the town, where the gutters were choked with refuse, among which dozens of pigs wandered in the daytime and at night lay down to sleep in their own comfortable filth, Clorinda Morrissey began her sojourn in Bath by working as a milliner’s assistant in the cold basement of a shop on Milsom Street. This work was punishing to the hands. Though she kept reminding herself that it afforded her a ‘living’, she soon came to feel that this living resembled nothing so much as a kind of ‘dying’ and it made her furious to think that she’d left Dublin only to find herself suffering from feelings of collapse and decline. She vowed to alter her lot as quickly as possible, before her spirit failed her.

The only article of value she possessed was a ruby necklace. It was an object of some beauty: twenty blood-red stones strung upon a delicate gold thread, with a golden clasp. It had come to Clorinda recently from her dead mother, who, in turn, had had it from her dead mother, and she, in monotonous rotation, from hers. For long and featureless years, this necklace had been passed from one place of safekeeping to another. It had hardly been worn by any of its owners, but rather had taken on the petrified status of an heirloom, kept in a satin-lined box, dipped in methylated spirits once in a while, to clean it and show its brilliance to the air. For long periods of time, it was forgotten completely, as though it didn’t exist at all.

Rumours that the great-grandmother had got it ‘by dishonourable means’ seeped down the generations, but these, if anything, only made each successive inheritor more keen to hang onto it. All of them believed that the ruby necklace would one day ‘find its true purpose’. But what that purpose might be, even if it was speculated upon, was never decided. The necklace remained hidden away in peculiar places: under floorboards, inside a broken long-case clock, in the secret compartment of an empty wall cupboard where bowls of hyacinth bulbs were nurtured through the winter darkness.

Now, however, Clorinda Morrissey, toiling over stiff bonnets and the fabrication of cloth flowers to attach to them, in her cold basement, made a vertiginous decision regarding the ruby necklace. She was going to sell it.

To the voice inside her which protested that she was betraying the status of the necklace as an heirloom, to be passed on to future generations, she replied that she had no children, so there was no ‘future generation’ to pass it on to. To the idea that, by moral right, she should leave it to one of her brother’s girls back in Dublin, she gave scarcely any consideration. These two nieces, Maire and Aisling, meant nothing at all to her. They struck her as dim, morose children, who probably did not even know of the existence of the necklace. And the rubies, she now saw uncommonly clearly, had no value whatsoever to anyone, until or unless that value could be realised. Surely, after all these silent generations had lived and died, it was time for someone to put them to use?