Page 154 of One More Christmas at the Castle
I saw her grandfather glance quickly at her again. ‘I expect you can find it.’
Simon, who seemed impervious to any tensions in the room, said, ‘I’d like a better look at it in good light, too.’
Without another word, Sophie scraped back her chair and left the room, though I noticed her dart a suspicious look at me as she passed.
‘Pity I haven’t got a magnifying glass with me,’ Simon said regretfully.
‘There’s one in Asa’s desk – I’ll fetch it,’ said Xan, suiting the action to the words, and I made to leave the room too until Mrs Powys’s voice stopped me in my tracks.
‘I think you should stay in the room for the present, Dido,’ she said. ‘We might need you.’
‘Me too?’ asked Henry eagerly, and I saw him wink at Dom, who was looking intrigued again.
Those of the party who had been stolidly continuing with their breakfast now appeared to get a faint inkling that something was happening and looked up as one, rather like a herd of cows disturbed from their grazing.
‘I suppose you might as well stay, Henry. I expect you already know all about it,’ said Mrs Powys.
‘Idon’t,’ said Dom.
‘Well, you soon will,’ said Mrs Powys, and I began to suspect she was going to bring it all out into the open in front of everyone, then and there.
I began to feel anxious. What if I’d been mistaken and it wasn’t the same ring at all?
Sophie returned, wearing a guarded expression on her pretty face and held the ring out to Mrs Powys, who took it and examined it closely.
‘A Roman stone in a Victorian setting, did you say, Simon?’
Xan handed her the magnifying glass and she peered through it, then passed both ring and glass to Simon.
‘You’re the expert,’ she said.
Sophie had sunk back down in her chair next to him and he asked her if she had any provenance for the stone.
‘Provenance?’ she said blankly.
‘I mean, do you have any idea where it was originally found?’
‘No, I bought it from an antique shop and they didn’t tell me anything,’ she said, reaching out a red-clawed hand for her coffee cup.
‘That’s a shame,’ he said regretfully, ‘but so often the way with these small objects.’
‘Oh, I think we might be able to give it a little morerecentprovenance,’ Mrs Powys put in blandly. ‘Nancy, pass Simon those photographs and the description, so he can compare them.’
I heard Sophie gasp and her coffee cup suddenly tilted, sending a brown stream over the white cloth. She put it down again and it rattled in the saucer.
Nancy gave her friend a rather reproachful look, but then silently pushed the papers across the table and Simon picked them up and examined them, curiously.
‘This looks like the same ring! Where did these come from?’
‘Dido remembered that a ring just like Sophie’s had gone missing some years ago, from the house of a friend she was staying with. It belonged to the friend’s mother and she still had these details in her insurance file, so Dido got her to email them across. Apparently,’ she added, ‘Sophie was a frequent visitor to the house at the time.’
She put no particular emphasis on this, but Sophie snapped, with a venomous glare at me: ‘So what? Are you by any chance insinuating that I took it, just because I have a similar one?’
‘Now, now, Sophie,’ began Mr Makepeace. ‘There’s no need for that kind of wild talk. No one is accusing you of anything!’
‘Actually,’ said Simon, who had been quietly comparing the details on the printouts with Sophie’s ring, ‘the hallmark and maker’s mark are identical. There’s no doubt itisthe same ring.’
‘Really? Well, that’s quite a coincidence, because as I told you, I bought it from an antique shop,’ Sophie said defiantly. ‘Dido probably stole it and sold it on,’ she added spitefully.
