The missing brooch

An original fiction passage set in the nineteenth century.

Clara noticed the empty space in the velvet box while the house was being prepared for her aunt’s visit. The missing brooch had been a gift from her aunt, and Clara had promised to wear it at dinner. She searched beneath the bottles on the dressing table, then opened each drawer with increasing haste. Nothing else had been disturbed.

Nell, the new maid, had dusted the room that morning. When Clara questioned her, Nell’s hands tightened around her apron. She said that she had not seen the brooch. Clara thought of the guests who would soon arrive and of her aunt asking why the gift was absent. She told Nell that honesty would cause less trouble than a search of the servants’ rooms. Nell emptied her pockets onto the table: a key, a thimble and a folded handkerchief. Her face had become pale, but she repeated her answer.

Clara’s mother entered before Clara could call for the housekeeper. She listened without interrupting and then asked whether Clara was certain. Clara replied that there was no other reasonable explanation. Her mother looked at the objects on the table. “Certainty should require more than an explanation which suits us,” she said. Clara heard laughter downstairs as the first visitors entered the hall.

While changing for dinner, Clara lifted the cloak she had worn the previous evening. Something caught in its lining and dropped onto the carpet. The brooch lay at her feet, its pin tangled with a loose black thread. For a moment, Clara closed her hand around it. She could fasten it at her collar, join the guests and say later that it had been found. Nobody outside the room need know what she had said to Nell.

Instead, Clara went downstairs without the brooch. She asked Nell to come into the drawing room and admitted, before her mother and aunt, where it had been found. She did not describe the loose thread as an excuse or mention the confusion of the morning. Nell accepted the apology quietly, although she did not meet Clara’s eyes.

Later, Clara returned the brooch to its box. The empty space had been filled, but the room did not appear restored to its former order. On the dressing table, the key, the thimble and the handkerchief remained where Nell had been made to place them.

“Clara’s honest admission, not the recovery of the brooch, is what the passage treats as the real resolution.”

Evaluate how successfully the writer presents this idea. Support your judgement with detailed references to the passage.

You may wish to consider Clara’s accusation, her hesitation after finding the brooch and the effect of the ending.