“I wonder what it could be that mattered so much to her,” she said. “Should I open it now, do you think?”

“Of course. You know we’re both dying of suspense.” Her grandmother laughed.

Caroline eased off the lid. Inside were two leather-bound books and a jewellery case. She opened the latter, her heart beating fast. She swallowed back the “Oh,” realizing how rude it would be to show disappointment. Inside the jewellery case was an old-fashioned ring with a row of small diamonds, a string of glass beads, and three keys. Two were old, almost antique-looking keys—a brass key topped by the figure of what looked like a winged lion, a large iron key so formidable that it looked as if it might unlock the door to a dungeon and then a small silver key, such as might open any kind of cabinet or box.

“What on earth?” Granny sounded as surprised as she was. “Keys? Where did she get keys?”

“You don’t recognize any of them?”

“Certainly not. I’ve no idea what she’d want with a lot of old keys. She wasn’t the type of person who collected things. I’ve always thought of her as a minimalist. And a realist. Unsentimental.”

“And the ring and beads?” Caroline asked. “Were they her favourites?”

“I’ve never seen her wear them. She had a brooch from our mother she liked to wear. But apart from that, she didn’t go in for much jewellery, did she?”

Caroline had already put the keys aside and was lifting out the two books. She opened the first and saw inscribed inside the cover Juliet Browning. Begun May 1928.

“Oh, it’s a sketchbook,” she said. “Sketches. So that’s what Aunt Lettie was talking about. She wanted me to have the sketches. I didn’t know that Aunt Lettie used to sketch.”

“She was very keen on it at one time,” Granny said. “She went to art school, you know. They thought she showed promise.”

Caroline looked up in surprise. “Art school? She never mentioned it.”

Granny shook her head. “No, she never talked about her life. Of course, she had to abandon her studies when our father lost his money and died. I remember how disappointed she was about that. She managed to get a job teaching art at a nearby girls’ school. Well, someone had to provide for our mother and me. I was six years younger, still in school.”

Caroline was turning pages in the book. “She was quite good, wasn’t she? Oh, and look—these sketches are of Venice, aren’t they? There’s a gondola, and St Mark’s. Venice—that’s what I think she was trying to say just before she died. Something about Venice. I never knew she had travelled.”

“Our aunt Hortensia took her to Italy as a present for her eighteenth birthday,” Granny said. “I was always a bit resentful about that, because by the time my eighteenth birthday came around we had no money. Aunt Hortensia had let my father manage her money, too, so she lost everything, of course.” She looked up and made eye contact with Caroline. “I never went to a posh boarding school like Lettie. It was a local convent for me. And no European jaunts. In fact the first time I went abroad was to India with your grandfather, right after we married.”