Blue gem heart pendant on an arm

There was a jeweller on the Strand called Amos Tremayne who made silver for the captains' wives. He had a stone off a Portuguese wreck, blue as the bay at half five in August, and some dead cutter had faceted it into a heart with a hundred tiny planes. Amos set it in a border of filigree so fine you'd need a lens to count the loops. Every wife in the harbour wanted it. He kept it in the window under a square of green baize and never once let it out of his sight.

One February the Dolly Ann went onto the Ness rocks, and the master's daughter came ashore at dawn with a wet coat and a chain round her neck. She knocked at the shop before the lamps were out. She needed money for the coach to Bristol, she said, and she would sell him the pendant. Amos paid her a fair price, gave her a bowl of broth by the stove, and asked her nothing at all, which was more than anybody else had done for her that winter. He never put the heart back in the window. He put it in his drawer instead.

Eleven years on, a woman walked in with a girl of about nine and set a silver chain on the counter. Same loops, same border, a little worn at the clasp. Amos didn't need to ask whose hands had been at it. He took the stone from the drawer, fixed it to the chain while the kettle sang, and hung it round the child's neck himself. And that, my loves, is why Amos Tremayne never sold the heart. Now the tide's turned, so up you get.