Padlock, wings and roses on the abdomen

The box you asked about came up from the cellar this morning, and I have spent the afternoon with it on the cloakroom counter. Forty-one keys rattle about inside, one for every coat hook we ever lost track of, and beneath them sits a brass padlock nobody has claimed since the Coronation. Mrs Ashdown says it hung from the back stair rail, where the dancers used to lock their good shoes away before the band struck up.

The lock is handsome, I'll grant you. Someone with a steady hand scratched a pair of feathered wings either side of the shackle, and a little roses at the base, the sort the florist next door used to paint on her hatboxes. The keyhole has a lip worn smooth by thumbs, and I can only think of one pair of thumbs that would have worn it so.

Vera, Mrs Ashdown tells me, sang here every Saturday in the year the Palais had its chandeliers re-hung. She locked her shoes in that padlock and wore the key on a ribbon round her wrist, and she was never once seen without it. The last night the band played, she went up to the stair, turned the key, and walked home in her stockinged feet. She never came back for the shoes, or the lock.

So the key is in the box, and I have not tried it. I thought you ought to be the one to turn it, seeing as you were the only one who ever asked me where things went.

Yours sincerely, Edith