He now came to the request which caused so much dismay to Clorinda Morrissey. He phrased it politely, but there was no mistaking the firmness of his resolve.

I truly hope you will agree to what I suggest, he wrote, which is that the ruby necklace – which fell into your possession after our mother passed away, but which is an heirloom and therefore the property of all the family and not yours alone – now be sold and the profits divided up between us. I believe this will enable me to pay for Maire’s operation and probably to save her life. Do not refuse me, Clorinda. Your letters, I am glad to note, relate a new prosperity you have found in Bath and so I assume that you – unlike myself, who have seen no rise in my wages for so long a time – have no pressing need of money. In the necklace, I think, resides the one and only hope for my suffering daughter and I am sure you would not betray me by keeping for yourself something precious which belongs to us all.

At the time when she’d sold the necklace and, at a stroke, changed her life, Mrs Morrissey had given scant thought to its status as an heirloom. The word had been mentioned in her mother’s will, yet it was also clear – and had been acknowledged by Michael – that the ruby necklace would fall into Clorinda’s possession, in the expectation that the thing would reside where it had always resided, in some place of permanent concealment.

Had she, perhaps, felt more affection for Maire and her sister, she might have paused more thoughtfully before extracting it from its dark hiding place (an ancient tea caddy) and bringing it sparkling into the light. But the truth was that while Aisling struck her as being a sorrowful, unhappy child, for whom she felt some occasional pity, she found Maire very irritating: a dull and stupid-seeming girl, with all her thinking so constrained by Roman Catholic dogma that Clorinda had sometimes commented adversely to herself on Maire’s ‘faculties of comprehension’ and was now disposed to tell her brother tartly that his eldest daughter’s condition was ‘not at all new’.

The knowledge that, as their aunt, she ought to have loved these children, but could not seem to manage it, did nothing to ameliorate the moral dilemma Clorinda now found herself in. She recognised that she had acted selfishly by taking all the profits from the sale of the rubies for herself, but she had then worked as hard as she had ever worked in her life to establish her tea room, now patronised by so many in Bath that tables had to be reserved in advance. More than this, Clorinda had been able to give work to two more helpers, Agatha and Bessie, thus bringing alteration to lives which were badly in need of it.

Surely, all this militated in favour of her high-handed decision to exchange a family heirloom for hard currency? In her mind, Clorinda still told herself that she had done nothing wrong – or at least not completely wrong; she had simply chosen a better life than the one she would have had. Who was in a position to say that she was not entitled to choose this? No one. And it had not really occurred to her that one day, within her lifetime, Michael might ask what had become of the rubies. Yet she saw now that she could not possibly let her niece die. Telling Michael that she had sold the necklace was going to be difficult enough and might bring forth from him a storm of rage and a sermon upon selfishness and materialism. This she could endure. What she felt was unendurable was that she should become the author of a tragedy in the Morrissey family.