Page 34 of Meet Me at Christmas
“I was hoping we could bake some Christmas cookies or something,” Stella said to lighten the mood. After all, that was the point of this visit. The last thing she wanted to do was cause Henry more stress.
Mama brightened. “Absolutely. I never turn down a chance to bake.” Her mother nearly danced across the room. “Let’s see what ingredients I’ve got.”
Stella and Henry followed Mama into the kitchen. Henry’s gaze roamed the whitewashed wooden cabinets then moved to the wide island and the basket of onions and potatoes that Mama must have been washing earlier. When they’d first gotten married, Mama didn’t like not having Stella around the house, so she’d asked them over for dinner all the time. Henry used to help prepare it. The new Henry was always observing, and Stella could only imagine how hard he was searching for answers.
“Is any of this ringing a bell at all?” she whispered to him.
He shook his head. “Only from when we were younger, and it’s still fuzzy.”
It seemed as if any minute he was going to make an excuse to leave, and she told herself to stop asking about his memories. If he remembered something, and he wanted to tell her, he’d say so.
“Good,” she said.
He turned to look at her, questioning.
“It’ll be like that brand-new chapter in a book you’ve been waiting to read,” she explained.
His shoulders relaxed a bit, and he offered the tiniest hint of a smile, but then something pulled his attention away. “What’s that?” He walked over to the table. The diamond necklace she’d found was laying there.
“I thought I put that in the safe.”
Mama leaned toward them, a measuring cup in each hand. “I got it out to take another look. The story is so interesting.”
“What’s the story?” Henry asked.
“It’s a necklace I found on the floor at the airport,” Stella replied. “It looks similar to one we saw online.”
“I was reading more about it,” her mom said.
Stella gave Henry a quick rundown of what she’d researched so far about the Hastings family and the stillbirths.
Henry gingerly picked up the piece of jewelry, draping it across his palm. He flipped the small pendant over and squinted at the inscription.
“Can you read what it says?” Stella asked.
“I can’t make it out.” He put it back down on the table.
Mama set the measuring cups on the counter and joined them at the table with her phone. “I wanted to see if I could find anything else on it,” she said. “And I discovered another story.”
“Oh?” Stella offered an empty chair to Henry, then took a seat next to him. “What did it say?”
Mama slid her finger down her phone’s screen until she reached the article. “Here it is. Most of the beginning is the same thing we read earlier, but this part is new.”
“Tell us,” Stella said.
“Well, the diamond was stolen in 1773 by a small-time pirate named of Samuel Morgan, who frequented the trade route between England and the Americas. When the Hastings family were on their yearly voyage at sea, even though they considered it bad luck, the necklace was included among the valuables they took with them.
“In the middle of the night, Samuel Morgan sneaked onto the ship and stole the diamond, along with the Hastings’ other jewels and a huge haul of goods heading to port to be shipped to the colonies. He took a liking to the Christmas Diamond, claiming it for himself and clasping it around his neck. But the moment he wore the stone,hisluck turned. The next day, according to legend, a massive heatwave began, and his men ran out of food at sea, most of their goods spoiling and becoming inedible in the high temperatures. Another boat fired at them, the cannonball hitting the stern of the ship, nearly sinking it, and causing him to divert his voyage to a remote island where he spent months repairing the damage.
“When they finally arrived at the Massachusetts Bay colony, starving and exhausted, nearly half his fleet had caught yellow fever and died. One of his crew had heard the story of the Christmas Diamond and he was certain at that point that the stone was bad luck, so he traded it with a merchant named Charles Worley for all the food the man had. Then he nursed the remainder of his crew back to health and left, never to be heard from again.”
“You don’t think all that bad luck is true, do you?” Henry asked, obviously skeptical.
“I have to wonder,” Mama replied. “Listen to this. It’s thought that the rudimentary repairs to the ship were no match for a summer storm that swept over the Atlantic that year, and the boat sank. What are believed to be remnants of the wreckage were found in 1987 about 1,250 miles from port in the Americas, but the scientific analysis isn’t conclusive.”
“Of course it isn’t conclusive,” Henry said, inspecting the diamond again.
Stella leaned into his view. “You don’t believe the story?”
