The pendant fell silent.

‘Then what happened?’ I demanded. My heart was beating strangely fast. ‘Did she go to him and confront him and his wife, denounce how he had taken her fortune, demand the return of her emerald?’

In a trembling whisper, the pendant confided, ‘No.’

‘Why?’ Pain hushed my voice. I recalled my grandmother’s resigned eyes and feared I already knew the answer.

‘I do not know. I will never understand it. Her friends urged her to confront him, to bring a complaint against them. When she spoke with them, she was strong. But whenever she was alone and set pen to paper, she lost her resolve. Weeping, she would confess to me that she loved him still. She would spin tales that he had been drugged or was bewitched by the woman. Her hands would shake and she would wonder aloud what she herself lacked, what was wrong with her that the Jamaillian woman could steal Howarth from her. Never, ever did she see him for the scoundrel and the cheat that he was. I could not make her see that the man she loved had never existed; that she persisted in loving an idealized image of Howarth, that the real man was worthy only of her contempt. She would sit down, pen in hand, to denounce him. But always, her accusing letters somehow changed into pleas to him to come back to her. The worst was the night that she went by darkness to his door. She sought entry there, like a beggar, pleading with a servant to let her in so she might speak privately with the master of the house. The servant turned her aside with disdain, and she, Aubretia Lantis of the Bingtown Traders, crept away weeping and shamed. I think that night broke her. The next evening she packed the few possessions that remained her own, and we left Bingtown, walking away in the dimness while her friends were at dinner. She did not even bid them goodbye. She felt she had lost all standing with them and could never be seen as anything but a fool.’