Mary blew on her fingertips, illuminating the barely suppressed smile on her face before she touched the flame to the wick. She blew across her fingers, and a curl of smoke and sulfur floated up to the rafters.
“He may yet die.” Edwina tried to convince herself as much as Mary. “Things go wrong even in hospital. Complications. Infections.” She caught herself pacing the floor and forced herself to sit and take off her muddy boots. And yet her mind still whirled. Had he seen her face? Mary’s? Mortals have terrible night vision. Why on earth hadn’t he died?
“For all we know, he’s laid out in the mortuary already,” Mary offered.
Possibly, thought Edwina. But if not, they’d left a man alive in the world without a memory, one precious enough to him that its aura shone brightest at the moment death nearly took him from the world. It was wrong to wish for a man’s demise, but if Mary was right and the man had already gone stiff with rigor mortis, there was no question his death would make life simpler.
“I’d been so sure,” she said, opening and closing her hands as if they were suddenly foreign to her. “He was cold to the touch. Not a spark of life left to feel.”
“Do you want to see my treasure in the light?”
Mary was her fraternal twin, yet sometimes it felt as though the biological gap between them were years wider than the minutes that had lapsed from one birth to the next. Since childhood, Edwina had been forced to behave almost parentally to a sister with a penchant for games and cunning laughter. Never a care for the consequences, that was her Mary.
“Go on, then.” Edwina undid the laces on the secondhand men’s work boots she used for scavenging the foreshore and slid them off. Later she’d bang them against each other in the alley to get the worst of the mud to fall off. And Mary’s, too, when her sister was too preoccupied with the city to do it herself.
“The colors are even more vivid than I dreamed.” Mary held the gem under the lamplight, biting her lip the way she did when she had a secret to tell but knew she mustn’t.
“’Tis a beauty,” Edwina said. “Look at the way the line of gold shimmers against the blue.” She couldn’t imagine what final thoughts might leave such a mark. She hoped for the man’s sake it didn’t hold the memory of a loved one still roaming the world. She’d always maintained there was something ignoble about a person’s last thoughts not being allowed to travel to their final destination with the rest of the soul. But then Mary’s nature was not some abomination either. Their father had explained such talent was a gift, and so it, too, must have a purpose.
Mary let the orb roll across her palm as she admired her newest bauble before snatching it up in her fist. “Now, let’s see what you found,” she said and nudged her chin.
Edwina emptied her pockets. A handful of brass buttons, a pipe with a carved buffalo’s head for the bowl still black with mud, twopence coins, and the gold ring. She placed the gold under the light so that, even without a proper polish, its value shone.
“Must have been exquisite when the gemstone was in it.” Mary picked up the band and turned the ring around to better see the details under the light. “Old, judging by the handiwork.”
“Maybe even Grandfather Merlin old,” Edwina said. She gave the ring a rub with the corner of her discarded shawl, then handed it back to Mary for further inspection.
“A raised bevel held up the stone.”
Edwina nodded. “Garnet would be my guess.”
Mary’s eye glinted with the shine of mischief. “I could replace it,” she said and reached for a scarlet ribbon from the nightstand. “Make the ring whole again.”
She could. Mary’s unique magic made it possible to render such gemstones nearly out of thin air. But then to ask a price for the ring to match the worth would raise suspicion in their little shop. No, ’twas best to pass the ring off as something more akin to pawnbroker gold and get what they could, minus the misgivings.
Her twin understood without her saying a word, though she gave a little sigh of regret before setting aside the ribbon and retrieving the mahogany jewelry box atop the dresser. The box, which they shared, had three compartments inside, each lined with velvet. Edwina kept a few keepsakes inside the first partition—a pressed flower given to her by a promising young man, which she’d saved between sheets of wax paper, a ruby teardrop earring missing its partner, and a silver thimble that had once belonged to their mother—but the other two compartments were taken up with the shiny orbs Mary collected. Edwina had lost track of how many there were now, but her sister removed them for inspection, all in a row, each and every Sunday evening after their tea. Always comparing and evaluating one against another, trying to determine why one might be more attractive to the eye. Some were dull like storm clouds and others as bright as a peacock feather, but whether that was due to the quality of the person’s memories or some other influence, she had yet to figure it out.