#scribbler-spot

He shook his head. “No word. And I was speaking to Inspector Bucket just the other day. If he had any information, he would have told me.”

“I thought not.” She received it with her usual calm, but her face - her whole manner - was suffused with a deep, abiding sadness. It was always the same, when the subject of conversation turned to Arthur. Of all the hurts she had suffered, those were the ones that still ran the deepest, and Jaggers knew all too well what bitter self-reproaches she still put herself through when her spirits were low, the conviction that all that had happened must have been her fault. Despite her sadness, however, there was no sign of these reproaches tonight, and he looked at her curiously.

“Strange,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about them all day. Arthur, my mother and father, even my stepmother. I found this today.”

She crossed to the chimney-piece, and took up a small jewel-box that had been left there. Carrying it carefully, she returned to where she had been sitting before, beside him on the couch, and opened it to reveal a delicate silver necklace inside.

He recognised it at once. It was the necklace she had worn on her wedding day, and during every day of her long seclusion. He hadn’t seen it since her recovery, and the sight of it now sent a less than agreeable jolt through him.

Amelia gave him a faint smile. “I haven’t worn it since I took off the wedding dress. For a long time just seeing it distressed me, so I put it away in a drawer in my dressing-table and tried to forget about it. But it was my mother’s, and I couldn’t bear for it to be forever spoiled for me. I have so little of her already.” She lifted it from the box and held it out to him with a very earnest look. “Would you?”

He nodded. He could appreciate a symbolic gesture as well as she. “Of course.”

She turned away, the better to let him put it about her neck and fasten the clasp at the back. As she turned back, she raised her hand to the pendant, and her face warmed with pleasure. “There. Better already.”

He smiled back, helpless to do anything else. Every day, Amelia Havisham faced down her demons. He merely turned his back on his, or tried to sluice them off.

“They would both be proud of you, Amelia, if they could see you now.”

She smiled, luminous, and her fingers continued to play with the pendant of the necklace. As she did so, however, a thought seemed to occur to her, and her face sobered. “Do you really have nothing at all of your own family, Jaggers?”

“We never had much use for heirlooms in Clerkenwell. Anything of any value usually ended up at the pawnbroker’s, or being carried off by the bailiffs. My father had a watch that was supposedly worth something, but the surgeon at the Fleet claimed it as a fee.”

“How awful!”

He shrugged. “I let him have it. I wanted nothing of his, by the end.”

It was remarkable how quickly the old anger rose up again, no matter how carefully he battened it down within himself. The old anger, and the old shame.

“He could hardly help being a debtor,” said Amelia.

“No,” he allowed, “but he could help the rest of it. When he died, it was mostly a relief. An end to all that selfishness, the begging-letters, the insistence that he was the most ill-used of us all. When he died, my first thought was that the danger was past now, and there was no chance that he could ever drag me back down with him, after I had at last made a respectable living for myself. That was my first thought.”

Here, quickly, he caught himself. Amelia knew most of his history by now, but he had never revealed so much of his feelings at that time, even to her. He knew they did him no credit, and he found himself reluctant to meet her eye now. Filial devotion was a virtue that had always come easily to her; she’d had a father worthy of it, after all. He remembered how she had cared for Mr. Havisham during his final illness, sending for doctors and pharmacists, sitting with him every moment that she could spare, talking with him, reading to him, cherishing every second they had left together. How she had held his hand all through that last long night, even after Dr. Losberne had declared it was all over. Compared to hers, his was a very sorry demonstration: all those long, grim hours sitting in silence at that bedside in the prison hospital, for the sole reason that it seemed requisite that someone must be there, and since what was left of the family was scattered, he was the only one of them there to do it.

Coolly, he said, “I suppose you think that heartless of me.”

But her reply, very soft when it came, was, “No. No. Josiah…”

Now he did look at her, her face full of inexpressible sadness, her eyes bright with tears. And at the sight of her, the cold anger within him thawed, as it always did.

“Don’t cry for me, Amelia. I made my choices, and I’ve learned to live with them.”

She shook her head, and her chin assumed its most stubborn set, even as the first of those threatening tears spilled over and ran down her cheek. “I will,” she retorted, and rummaged for her pocket-handkerchief. “I always thought - even before I really knew you - that there was something lonely about you. At least I have good memories to hold onto, but you…”

Yet again, he found himself marvelling at Amelia Havisham: not only her courage, but also her generosity of spirit, her astonishing capacity for love. His past had hardened him, his profession had made him guarded and suspicious. He had built so many walls about his heart over the years, but she could bring them down with a word. Despite his best efforts, she had found in him something to love.

Taking her hand, he leaned in and kissed her cheek, his lips catching the salt of that first tear.