The Pearl Thief

by Fiona McIntosh

  She gave a soft sigh as she looked down into Bury Street, already moving with people at first light with a street sweeper and a couple of pedestrians hurrying in opposing directions. They were featureless huddles of clothes insulating their owners against the icy feel of the morning.

  ‘Past three weeks now,’ she calculated in whispered French, her mind reaching to Paris and the realisation that she’d be heading back to France soon. She nodded, guilty at feeling torn because she was enjoying this London sabbatical and all its challenges, especially using the local language. ‘Maybe they’ll extend it,’ she murmured, this time in English, liking how it rolled easily off her tongue. Her late father would be proud if he could hear her using the languages he’d insisted she master.

  ‘French, because there’s none more beautiful; English, because there’s none more relevant; and German, because there’s none more practical right now,’ he’d counselled back in 1934 when she was seven. ‘But always be proud of your Czech and Hebrew … because that’s who you are,’ he’d added, tweaking her nose playfully.

  Severine had shaken her thoughts free and focused on her life now – it never helped to rekindle even the good childhood memories for too long. Did she really want to stay longer in London? Live here? She was prepared to entertain the notion. To remain in England … permanently? It would require organisation to sell up in France, set up a proper home; maybe a bedsit in the city and a cottage in the countryside … York, perhaps, which she liked so much …

  She’d bathed and considered wearing her favourite trapeze dress – a copy of Yves Saint Laurent’s daring silhouette that had not just taken away the collective breath of French designers but had sent a tremor through fashion houses worldwide. She could remember her own sigh of pleasure at seeing the clean, stark lines that appealed so strongly to her tidy mind and neat ways. The ‘young Turk’ who’d taken the helm at the death of her design hero, Yves Saint Laurent, had borrowed from the master’s design and inspired her to claim a style of her own. She realised that breakthrough design had opened the door to the baby-doll dresses that so many modern Londoners today embraced as their own invention. ‘But it was all French.’ She smiled to herself as she said it. ‘Perhaps I should have gone into fashion,’ she added. She knew it was eccentric to talk aloud when no one else was present, but put it down to years of self-inflicted loneliness.

  Rather than think on the reason why she had chosen antique jewellery as a specialty, she distracted herself by rifling through her small wardrobe of outfits. Each of them had been saved for diligently because she preferred the sharply reliable cut of the more expensive designers and was prepared to have fewer options as a result.

  Severine reached for a two-piece dress that she hadn’t worn yet in London because it hadn’t warmed up enough for ballet-length sleeves, but the frost would pass quickly and she’d have her coat. Memories of the Thames freezing over during the winter just gone were still fresh in people’s minds, but the thaw was well and truly past. There had been photos of children playing on the ice covering the great river in all the British newspapers, which had been picked up and run in Paris too. It had happened on the Seine in years gone. Right now, it was time to think only spring, she decided. Severine pulled the Parisian-designed mid-grey double-knit skirt over her slim hips, which the unfussy outfit enhanced. The simple round-necked top had elbow-length sleeves and her only adornment was a silk scarf in deep marine that she didn’t deliberately choose in order to set off the colour of her eyes, but glancing at her reflection critically, she accepted it did just that.

  No rings on slender fingers, no brooch at her collarbone, not even a watch around her narrow wrist did she adorn herself further with. But she liked lipstick for a kiss of colour. Now in her mid-thirties, Severine Kassel had admitted to this same mirror that she didn’t consider herself young enough for the ingénu look of hip London and its pale-faced, pastel-lipped youth. While a sweep of vermilion was close to being mandatory for a Parisian, she chose instead a duskier cousin and dragged it carefully across her bottom lip first. ‘Moroccan Rose is perfect,’ she said, pouting at her reflection to admire the choice. ‘Très bon,’ she admitted to her image staring back and attended to her top lip with even more care to get the line of colour exact.

  Severine rarely ate breakfast and today was no exception. A cup of coffee filled her belly mostly for its warmth and particularly because she enjoyed the ritual of brewing that allowed her to recreate the smell of Paris in London. While she could never embrace the fascination that the British had for tea, she knew how important it was to sip the beverage with colleagues for purely social reasons. Every problem was solved over a pot of tea, it seemed. But here, in Bury Street, the top floor smelled of darkly toasted beans where the acidic notes had been roasted out to leave the signature bittersweet note of Costa Rica percolating on a tiny stove.

  Despite its intensity, Severine took her coffee black, short, unsweetened, and standing up at the small kitchen counter. She swallowed her morning caffeine in no more than three sips, just as she would if she were calling into a French café on the way to her office at the Louvre.

  She pulled on coat and gloves, ignoring a hat, in favour of a thick extra scarf, before picking up her glossy, dark tan crocodile leather handbag that she’d bought a decade earlier in the flea markets north of Paris. It reminded her strongly of the one her mother had carried for special occasions just before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. She briefly wondered who carried that exquisitely structured design of polished reptile skin now – it would be worth plenty – and immediately sifted the dangerous thought away. She hung the gleaming bag she helplessly admired on her elbow and with a single final glance at the mirror, she departed her flat.

  Severine left Bury Street almost to the minute each working morning. Neighbours she wouldn’t be around long enough to learn names for would lift a hand in welcome and she would return the gesture with a smile.

  ‘I could set my watch by you, miss,’ the local pub owner said with an appreciative wink. He and his lads were restocking their cellar for another day as she approached the corner into Great Russell Street.

  ‘Morning, miss,’ his three helpers chorused, lifting caps.

  They never could get their tongues around ‘mademoiselle’, although she’d tried to teach them. ‘Morning, handsome boys.’

  One put his hand on his heart as if swooning; another gave her a cheeky whistle. ‘Will you come dancin’ wiv me tonight, miss?’

  Their elder flicked his cap at the lad. ‘Cheeky blighter! Watch your manners around a lady, Billy.’

  She threw a careless grin over her shoulder, aware the daring one was young enough to be her son, and waved as her heels clicked her away across the damp London pavement towards what had been in the eighteenth century a grand mansion purchased from the Montagu family by a body of trustees. Mid-century that house had been reinvented as the British Museum through an act of Parliament to which King George II gave his formal assent in order to house the tens of thousands of objects, books, manuscripts, drawings and specimens that formed the cabinet of curiosities assembled by Hans Sloane and bequeathed to the nation. By the turn of that century explorers from Captain James Cook to collectors of antiquities donated or sold their collections until the museum began to bulge with everything from gems and coins to the famous colossal marble foot of an Apollo. And still it had grown, as Victorian and Edwardian archaeologists and collectors had plundered the ancients from Greece to Egypt through the Ottoman Empire.

  Severine stood at the grand gates and considered the vast expansion that had occurred over the decades with new buildings, new floors and new acquisitions from all over the world. The war had meant enormous disruption at the Louvre, which was more about theft than destruction. It was a shadow, though, in comparison to the scale of reorganisation and cunning of the chiefs at the British Museum. She’d listened with no little wonder at her colleagues’ descriptions of shifting priceless antiquities to secure b
asements around London, to an old quarry in Wales, to tube stations like Aldwych, where – she couldn’t help her delight at hearing – the famous Elgin marbles from the ancient Parthenon frieze had been stored for the duration of the war. According to her older colleagues, they’d begun their ambitious arrangements for the dispersal of important pieces as early as 1934. Transfixed, she’d listened to how various people involved with the nation’s treasures had gauged the dangers of war ahead and had begun stockpiling packing cases five years before the first shot was fired.

  ‘Oh yes, indeed, when the order came in the summer of 1939 from the Home Office, dispersal was fast and efficient,’ Mr Partridge had explained, enjoying her interest. ‘Material of first importance left directly after dawn on the following day and roughly one hundred tons of material was packed and despatched within a fortnight, including all prints and drawings.’

  She’d given a brief but audible low whistle at hearing this. ‘What about the larger sculptures?’

  ‘They required equally heavy sandbagging, and those of global importance, such as the Elgin marbles, were given special treatment and removal at great expense and effort,’ he’d assured her.

  For all their quirkiness, she liked the British people enormously, especially for their determined preservation of history. She had been enchanted to learn about Sir John Forsdyke, former director and principal librarian, who was the mastermind behind the evacuation. According to colleagues, he possessed an eccentric personality, walking around the museum through the war years wearing a tin helmet with Director stencilled on it, and was one of the main architects behind what became known as the ‘suicide exhibition’. This contained duplicate antiquities, models, casts and various reproductions mounted in various galleries.

  ‘It served the dual purpose,’ the eldest librarian had explained to her in the tearoom, ‘of giving education and entertainment for wartime visitors but could serve as a sacrifice to the perils of war.’ If that were not astonishing enough, Severine learned that the first of six high explosive bombs fell on the museum roof on 18 September 1940. It passed through the Prints and Drawings study room, its floor and four other concrete floors below that to land unexploded in a basement. And in further irony, a second, smaller bomb had arrived, miraculously passing through the hole created by its predecessor, to land harmlessly on the mezzanine.

  The third unfortunately ripped through the King’s Library – now the Room of Enlightenment – to destroy one hundred and fifty or so precious volumes. A fourth shed its oil outside the copper sheathing of the room and the emptied Duveen Gallery was hit by a small bomb that damaged its architecture but no artefacts. The newspaper library was all but destroyed with a further bomb and lost its thirty thousand volumes of nineteenth-century British provincial newspapers.

  The old man with a rheumy gaze and an egg stain on his tie had sighed. ‘Luck ran out in May 1941. Incendiaries rained down and the fires burnt uncontrollably, racing through so many of the display rooms, and the suicide exhibition fulfilled its destiny.’ He had given Severine a smile of resignation and she could feel his sorrow as she watched him limp away, back to one of the library rooms, presuming he would have been one of those quirky, diligent staff who had been instrumental in the preservation of the antiquities.

  Now that all the precious artefacts were returned and the museum had begun the long restoration from damage sustained during the Blitz, specialists had been called in to help, particularly those, like her, with expertise in Jewry.

  She recalled the day the senior team at the Louvre had spoken to her of this.

  ‘Your heritage is precious; the world is relying on survivors to help with art and all manner of items stolen from the Jewish people during the war.’

  ‘How does London know about my knowledge in antiques?’

  ‘My fault,’ an older colleague had admitted with a smile of soft apology. ‘I told them provenance is your area of expertise.’ He’d stepped closer and squeezed her hand as tenderly as her father had in years gone by. ‘We’re still emerging from the darkest of times and commerce is on everyone’s minds, my dear Severine. You know as well as any how the market has been flooded with fakes alongside genuine articles.’ She had nodded as he’d wanted her to. ‘Our friends at the British Museum are equally determined not to acquire stolen pieces. We have agreed to lend your expertise.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘A short secondment. Six weeks, maybe. Just help where you can; it’s a start. Help with the curation of some of the jewellery in particular, but give an opinion on the backlog of Jewish items they’ve either acquired formally or that have somehow come into their sphere.’

  ‘Whatever you can do is a boon, Sev,’ a younger male colleague had encouraged her. ‘We’re proud to offer such expertise out of the Louvre. Your weekends would be free to visit the city of York you enjoy so much.’ He’d winked.

  She’d smiled and nodded. She couldn’t deny it was a genuine opportunity for her. And it was true: she did love York for so many reasons, not least for the city’s addictive history. But, more importantly, she might even get to Durham and spend time around the university, for one or two weekends. That sealed it.

  ‘I’ve said you could be there at the beginning of April.’

  She sighed now at the British Museum gates. There had been trepidation about coming to London and now here she was feeling sentimental about leaving this great city after such a short time.

  ‘Missing home?’ said a voice she knew.

  She smiled. ‘Morning, Catherine.’

  ‘Gosh, I love the way you say my name. Growing up I thought it was so common. Every fourth girl in my class was Kathy or Kate, or spelled with a C like my version, but you make it sound exotic and regal.’

  Severine fell in step with a dismissive grin … if only Catherine knew her truth.

  ‘No, really. You do know you could read out the museum’s guidebook to most of the men who work here and they’d think you were making love to them.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Well, you are the mysterious French expert that everyone’s lost their marbles for. To be honest, I think half the women are in love with you too.’

  Severine laughed. ‘And the other half?’

  ‘Hate you to bits.’ Catherine grinned, adopting a catty tone. ‘That figure! That coiffed hair! That simmering gaze! That accent. The aloofness – so bloody French and rude!’

  Severine cut a glance of dismay. ‘Really?’ It didn’t bother her to be a mystery or indeed even to be disliked for her distant manner, but she needed no hostility in her life.

  ‘Of course!’ ‘Well, I can’t help that you’re all peasants,’ she said with a light sarcasm intended to amuse.

  Her friend tipped back her head to enjoy the laughter. Severine had to shoosh her, for the sound of her amusement echoed loudly around the museum’s courtyard. Catherine, a few years younger than Severine, was one of the bright women she’d met and might even call a friend. She was also helplessly pretty in all the non-artificial ways that counted; she needed no make-up to improve on a flawless complexion and was apple-cheeked, had hair the colour of summer straw and a donkey laugh that was hilarious.

  ‘So, are you missing home?’

  Prague? Always, she thought to herself before she replied. ‘I was just thinking that I was going to miss London a lot more than I imagined I could,’ she admitted.

  Catherine laid a friendly hand on her arm. ‘Oh, good. Not much to miss about France, then?’ she said with a cheeky grin.

  Severine reached for a lighthearted response. ‘Not the clothes, not the food, not its beauty, not its bakeries and patisseries, not its perfume … no.’

  Catherine was clearly enjoying the soft sarcasm, grinning as they wound their way around the forecourt to one side of the museum.

  ‘I do miss my walks through the Paris Tuileries and the Luxembourg Gardens, though. They’re easier than having to walk to Regent’s Park for my exercise.’

 
‘Well, Severine,’ Catherine said, still unable after all her practice to pronounce her companion’s name in the correct way. ‘Oh, blimey, I have to learn to say that properly before you leave us. It’s a beautiful name and I’m buggering it up.’

  ‘I don’t mind, honestly.’ Severine smiled. What she really wanted to say was, It’s not my real name, so I don’t care.

  2

  They entered the grand building through a side entrance for staff, kissed each other farewell and moved to their respective working areas. Catherine was part of the Duveen Gallery restoration team, so Severine didn’t expect to see her friend until that evening when she’d reluctantly agreed to have a drink at the nearby pub. She headed for the museum’s Reading Room, the most beloved of spaces in the museum. It sat in its centre, a grand construction of iron and glass that had taken her breath away the first time she had entered the chamber. It was Catherine who had accompanied her, delivering her to Mr Partridge who would show her around.