Weeping woman with cameo and pearls

Tom Sayer was a salvage man. In February he went out past the skerries after a chest the Kittiwake had dropped in the storm, and the sea kept him, and the chest with him. Ottilie wore her wedding pearls every day after that, the string his mother had sold the family silver to keep, and she wept without any fuss, the way rain runs off a slate roof. The salt got into her collar and the pearls went grey at the clasp, and she never once wiped them clean.

The fishwives said the pearls grew warm when she cried. Nobody believed it until Peg Ruddock borrowed the string for the harvest dance and came home at dawn with her hair half down, swearing the carved face in the frame had turned to look at her. Ottilie only nodded and said the shell was old, and that old things are fond of company.

Ottilie died the winter the herring failed. Her neighbours found the mantel bare, the cameo gone, and on the back step a single pearl, still damp, as though someone had only just set it down. They say the tide has brought one up every February since, and if you hold it to your ear on a still night you can hear a man laughing at a joke he never finished.