JEWELS: Christobel Kent
blackmail or coercion, but at the very best, they mean love, and they mean trust. Trust that the thing handed on will be loved and understood by she who receives it, in the same measure as it was prized by she who gave. And when that thing is a jewel…
Beginning my first job thirty seven years ago, homeless, motherless and penniless, I was taken under the wing of a wonderful woman (and literary agent) called Ilsa Yardley. Ilsa, born the daughter of a Viennese corsetier in 1928, had herself been orphaned aged four or five and sent, before the Kinderstransport but in the shadow of impending fascism, alone across Europe to live with an unloving aunt in West Hampstead. She sought and found a substitute parent, (as motherless children so often do, and as I did in her) in a marvellously loving, generous Danish woman called Elsa, for whom she went to au pair when the war was over.
And Elsa gave Ilsa – among many other lovely pieces of jewellery bestowed at scrupulously regular intervals – a fabulous, heavy silver bracelet from Georg Jenson. Impeccably art deco in its styling, shaped in big bold overlapping fishscales and ingeniously fastened with a hook and screw, it is a beautiful showstopper of a piece, heavy as a manacle. And when I told Ilsa I was getting married myself it arrived by the next post wrapped in a piece of green suede, and I wore it on my wedding day, in Venice.
It wasn’t the only piece of jewellery Ilsa gave me. Almost every day I wear a lovely eighteenth century cameo ring she plucked from a drawer and put on my finger mid-conversation, because I’d admired one our friend Diana Athill was wearing, and when Ilsa died seven years ago I wore everything she’d given me at once, to her funeral. But I name that bracelet here, because it was given to her in the same spirit as she handed it to me, the spirit of trust, of unconditional generosity, of the secret sisterhood of those unmoored from home and country, and of love.
He promised, until death do us part.
When bossy, loving, sensible Kate dies suddenly, her little sister Rose dutifully returns from a carefree life abroad to help Kate's widower and the two children Rose has never met. But she is unsettled to see no trace of her warm-hearted sister in the remote, dilapidated house, nor in Kate's cold, distant partner, Evan.
After stumbling across a message that only her sister could have left for her, Rose's unease around the circumstances of Kate's death turns to open suspicion, but she knows better than to ask the grieving widower for answers.
Determined to discover the truth of her sister's terrible last days, Rose has no choice but to keep looking. Eventually, she senses, the dark house will give up its secrets. But she is not prepared to admit that whoever threatened Kate's life might now be coming after her...
Praise for Christobel Kent and her novels:
'A highly superior slice of domestic noir' Mail on Sunday
'Spooky, gripping and affecting' Louise Doughty, author of Apple Tree Yard
'Echoes of Christie and du Maurier' Sunday Times
'Beautifully tense' Clare Mackintosh, author of I Let You Go
'Gorgeous evocative writing' Erin Kelly, author of He Said She Said
The Widower will be published in May 2021. You can preorder and find out more about Christobel's books here.
Christobel Kent was born in London and educated at Cambridge. She has lived variously in Essex, London and Italy. Her childhood included several years spent on a Thames sailing barge in Maldon, Essex with her father, stepmother, three siblings and four step-siblings, which provided inspiration for the setting of her recent novel The Crooked House. She now lives in both Cambridge and Florence with her husband and five children. You can follow her on Instagram @theamoriststylesiren
