The Diamond Hunter

by Fiona McIntosh

  ‘I am digging!’

  ‘You will lose her.’

  He shrugged, not meaning to be careless, yet his words betrayed him. ‘I’ve already lost her mother.’

  Tongue held, Joseph simply nodded. After a moment’s pause he said, ‘That’s why Miss Clementine needs you. It won’t matter how many diamonds you find if you lose the love of your child.’

  Joseph was right. He was letting her down with his absent attitude. Worse, he knew that Clementine would be a rich young woman in her own right when she came into her fortune at thirty. He swallowed his frustration that she was already a wealthy little girl. Her mother had left her everything that she owned, and this was on top of the trust set up in her name. Whatever he could earn would never be money that Clementine needed.

  He sighed out his angry breath. ‘All right, Joseph. I will try harder.’

  Joseph’s smile always felt like a balm when it came and it soothed James now.

  He took his time clambering to the surface, kerchief tied around his nose and mouth to keep out the dust. Up here there was so much more noise. Within the walls of his small pit, the noise was his: the sound of his pick hitting the earth to loosen the ground, his coughing, his heavy breathing and groans. The voices of other diggers reached him but he was so lost in his misery, he barely registered them. Out of his pit, the noise of hundreds of men in their endeavour was deafening, making him realise with a new sense of unhappiness that he was part of something huge and almost angry in its atmosphere. Expressions were pinched, mouths grim, words gruff, activity hostile, violent even, as men toiled to get to Africa’s buried treasure before someone else did. No joy whatsoever. And he’d once derived so much pleasure from his work as an engineer, no project more joyful than the bridge he had designed and crafted for his beloved Louisa.

  He bent to cough out the dust along with that memory. It did him no good to let her wander back into his mind. He already felt like he was dying. Maybe that was the answer . . . then they could be reunited. He moved on, lifting himself to the surface. It used to be so easy; now it took him fifteen minutes to haul himself high enough and then pick his way to the edge, having to take long detours around walls that were still erect and strong enough to carry a man’s weight. Soon they’d need some sort of lift apparatus, perhaps. He’d noticed that a lot of the black workers were already being lowered down in large wooden tubs moving like aerialists on tripwires in a circus. His engineer’s mind kicked into gear: an automated lift was surely the future if the Big Hole kept yielding its treasures. Maybe he should design a better haulage system – there might be money in it.

  Money. It dominated his thoughts. When would the Big Hole yield real treasure for him, the sort of treasure that could change his life and give Clem the one she deserved?

  Joseph took off his shirt in preparation for a long afternoon’s toil. He had taken to wearing a hat to keep the sun off his head. The sunlight was so sharp it made his eyes water helplessly and gave him a constant squint. He rolled up his trousers above the rise of his one boot. If not for his single bare foot, he could believe he was becoming a white man in spirit. He spoke their language fluently, could read a few simple words of it too, and he knew that gave him power over his compatriots. Fighting the white man was useless. Knowing his tongue, understanding how his mind worked, made him a different sort of warrior. A clever one who wasn’t about brawn and bravery but about intelligence and diplomacy. As he reached for his pick and shovel, setting his bare foot back to anchor himself, he thought about the intriguing question Clementine had asked him as they shared a bowl of porridge earlier that day.

  ‘What is your future, Joseph?’

  It was not only a daunting question – for her to even think to ask it was unnerving, but he had answered with honesty.

  ‘Not all of the Africans who come here get treated well or have friends as I have.’ He’d let that sink in. ‘I think if they too spoke some English, then their lives could be better. They would find it easier to live alongside the white folk.’

  ‘So . . . what will you do?’

  The idea had been nibbling at him for a few months now. It had found no real purchase until this moment, as an uninhibited child had regarded him with studious interest.

  He had said it aloud. ‘I think I’d find a way to teach my people how to speak English, how to do some simple sums and even how to read: signs, forms, that headline in the newspaper.’

  She had put down her porridge spoon and clapped. ‘Oh, I would love to teach with you.’

  It was typical of Clementine to approve; her expression had been filled with nothing but encouragement and pure pleasure that he had purpose.

  Joseph squinted through the glare of the day and saw James raise a thumb in the far distance; he was ready for Joseph to send up the first bucket. Joseph gave the same gesture back, liking how well it conveyed a universal message in silence, across distance, amid noise and crowds, transcending cultural differences.

  He turned back to his dig and cast a thought to the stars that James and Clementine pondered so often. Bring us fortune today, he directed at Sirius, the brightest of them all, and he swung his pick into the crumbly yellow ground, letting his instrument join all the others in the song of the diamond diggings.

  James had eaten the food that his daughter had packed for him. He wasn’t hungry but guilt was gnawing at his empty belly that she was having to take care of him in this way. He was glad it was a school day and she would be distracted by her letters and sums, although her precocious way made her advanced beyond her peers. She scared James at times with how she greedily devoured new information and she was always hungry to learn. He disliked her teacher, Mrs Carruthers, as much as Clem did, and was not always successful in disguising the disdain he felt in front of his daughter. She seemed to think it was her duty – her right, even – to teach Clementine how to be a little girl. She had no teaching qualifications but had taken on the role with zeal to bring order to the children of what had once been a camp but was now growing up into a town. She was like one of those interfering evangelists. He’d allow grudging respect that someone was looking out for the youngsters, but did it have to be Elmae Carruthers? The bossy, pinch-faced prune of a woman gave the distinct impression that she loathed anyone finding pleasure in skipping, running, laughing aloud, making up stories, talking to a ragdoll – or, indeed, befriending a black man. A lot of the bigoted folks around here – the so-called Christians – found that relationship somehow appalling. The women were worse than the men, he realised; the men approved of Joseph’s prowess in the boxing ring and respected how hard he worked. Frankly, Joseph One-Shoe was hard to dislike – he barely spoke to others, barely raised his gaze, intent on not giving offence.

  ‘Morning, Knight. Is today the day, do you think?’

  James threw down the final bit of crust he’d been chewing and looked up to see the smug grin of Maximilian Granger. He was one of Fleetwood Rawstorne’s now famous party, who had picked up the first diamond at Colesberg Kopje, then an unremarkable hillock.

  The hillock had long disappeared, becoming the ever-widening gash in the ground now known as the Big Hole. The town of New Rush, he reflected, had been born because an old Bantu manservant of Rawstorne’s had found that first diamond gleaming in the clear moonlight. He regarded Maxie, still wearing the distinctive red woolly hat each man in Rawstorne’s group had worn the previous winter so they could be easily picked out among the diggers.

  ‘Maybe you’ll dig up something decent, my friend, and get that little girl of yours into better accommodations. Summer this year will cook you in that tin shack.’

  He nodded, not trusting himself to speak, but Maxie was right. He could hardly deny the logic, although in this moment he wished he possessed Joseph’s powerful right hook. He frowned, wondering why Joseph was taking so long to send up the first bucket.

  ‘Well, I’d better get to it, Granger, if I’m going to find my fortune today.’

  ‘Luck t
o you, Knight. You and your Zulu need it.’

  He let the man move on before shielding his gaze to search for Joseph. He picked him out easily enough, but what was Joseph doing crouched in their claim and not working? The lines of concern deepened on his forehead as he squinted to see better. Joseph looked up, stared back at his friend, kept his gaze steady, earnest.

  What now? James thought, exasperated not just with this moment but with life – with the death it brought and the guilt that ate him from the inside out, with his raging desire for a nip of liquor so early in the day and the relentless heat that felt like his jailer and torturer. And now Joseph One-Shoe had decided to go into some sort of trance! They might as well go dig their own graves now. He gave an exaggerated shrug across the distance that separated them.

  Joseph shook his head once.

  No, he was focused, James realised. In that case, what’s wrong? He stood to show his friend he needed an assurance – an answer of sorts.

  Joseph raised a single finger with caution and beckoned. He looked terrified.

  5

  James blinked and began to move. He wouldn’t run – no, that would draw attention, and he had already worked out that Joseph One-Shoe needed no scrutiny from others. Instead he grabbed a bucket and one of the old sieves from their days at the river diggings, which he tucked under his arm in a deliberately careless manner. James set his hat to a jaunty angle, somehow dredged up a whistle and forced his stride to be purposeful but distracted. He kept surreptitiously glancing across to Joseph, who was yet to shift position. James wondered if a wall was caving in, or perhaps Joseph had hit the ‘blue’ ground where diamonds probably lay but would be impossible to retrieve with only a man’s strength and a pick. It was only from the degraded and weathered blueish ground that they could dig into and make any impression upon it. Was their claim proving to be suddenly useless?

  James walked nimbly; if he and Joseph acted quickly, maybe they could prevent whatever disaster had struck from doing too much damage. He was close now and Joseph had sensed his arrival, turning to encourage him. Joseph’s lips, even from this distance, had lost their usual rosiness and had instead adopted a greyish pallor, looking dry and cracked.

  Don’t hurry, he urged himself. Don’t draw attention.

  ‘G’day, Knight,’ an Australian called up from his pit. It wasn’t nearly as deep as James and Joseph’s but there were three of them working it; they would deepen that claim quickly. He couldn’t imagine how far this man had come to seek his fortune but his back was bent to his toil, and James had never seen the Antipodean fellows anywhere but rotating in their dig or drinking beer at the pub. The three broad-shouldered men, two Australians and one New Zealander, were hard to dislike despite their brashness and lack of manners, which had many of the diggers’ women looking like they had sucked on lemons whenever the men moved through the town, often inebriated.

  ‘Morning, Mr Thompson.’

  ‘Argh, call me Tommo, or it sounds like you’re talking to my old man.’ Tommo lit up. ‘You look like you’re in a hurry, mate?’

  ‘My turn to take over,’ he replied.

  ‘See you for an ale tonight, then?’

  ‘Will do, Tommo.’

  He strode on. He was only a few feet away now and saw that Joseph had sat back against the wall of their dig. He was sipping from a flask, but none of the fear had left his expression.

  Is he ill? James wondered suddenly. That would be just as devastating as if their wall had collapsed, and yet as he rounded the final claims that separated him from their own, the walls appeared to be intact. He let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

  James had constructed a small ladder to easily get in and out of their dig, but now he used only two of its rungs, leaping down the final four, no longer able to contain his anxiety. He approached Joseph, whose expression had not changed.

  ‘Joseph?’ he whispered.

  ‘Mr James. I think we need to look at the wall over here.’

  So, it was the wall! James’s relief that the problem could be fixed was at war with the fresh concern at what this might cost them. Acid rose – it was a new visitor in his life. An ulcer, perhaps? Joseph turned his back on him, crouching in the corner of the furthest point of their claim. James already knew no one was working in the dig that backed onto that corner – they were probably switching shifts – and he’d noticed when he’d clambered onto the ladder that the other dig abutting theirs had only one man working on the far side. The digger had been bent over and busy at his toil. Good.

  James joined Joseph, crouching, frowning. ‘What should I be seeing?’ he remarked, looking at the intact wall.

  Joseph put a finger to his lips. If it was possible, the terror in his face seemed to have deepened. His eyes now looked a depthless charcoal. Joseph used his silence and a frightened gaze to drag James’s attention down to where his large fist was closed. It looked primed and ready to deliver an upper cut that could knock out just about any opponent. But now that fist moved, and James watched the ridges of the Zulu’s knuckles become defined as he straightened out his thick fingers. Everything else about the moment seemed to slow. His lungs felt like tight balloons of anticipation as he watched Joseph turn his hand around and open it like a starfish. There in Joseph’s palm sat a chunk of blue ground, and poking out from that rock was the biggest rough diamond that James had seen – perhaps the biggest that anyone had encountered in this diamond rush. It perched on its unstable surface with great poise, demanding to be admired like a goddess.

  James knew that diamonds in the rough were at their dullest, and still this massive conker glinted with glorious arrogance.

  He trembled. Suddenly everything that had dimmed became too loud, too bright, too raw. His scalp felt as though it were tightening around his skull and his breath came out in a ragged expulsion that could easily have escalated to tears, such was the surge of relief that rode through his body. It was willpower alone that kept his eyes dry.

  James knew he was mirroring Joseph’s anxiety. His legs felt unsteady, collapsing slightly. He instinctively pushed out a hand to steady himself against the dirt wall. A new raft of terrifying problems began to line up before them. The threat of violence and theft loomed. He closed Joseph’s fingers back into a fist.

  But Joseph shook his head and plonked the cool, heavy piece of carbon into James’s palm, clearly wanting no further part in the terrifying find.

  James couldn’t argue with him now. The diamond had to be concealed. He pulled off his kerchief and wrapped the stone as quickly as he could with trembling fingers that didn’t want to help him. He was swallowing the fear, forcing it back, trying to replace it with words.

  ‘We will not talk about this here,’ he ground out.

  Joseph nodded and reached for the pail at his knees that James hadn’t noticed previously. He looked inside and was astonished to see a small galaxy of shimmering stars lying on a bed of crumbled basalt. He stopped counting at thirty diamonds, all of them tiny minions to their queen, which was now in his pocket.

  ‘Cover them with more earth. No one must see,’ he murmured, in such shock he sounded calm yet was frozen.

  Together they forced their limbs to work, scrabbling with small spades to throw blueish dirt over the winking stones until they were no longer visible.

  James sat back against the wall, feeling safe only once the stones were hidden. Joseph had not yet relinquished his terror.

  ‘What now?’ the Zulu asked.

  After expelling a slow breath, James felt the first kick of uncontrolled delight in his belly. He knew it would soon feel like a donkey kick and they needed to get away from this place before the yells of elation became too much for him to contain. This was it! This was his eureka moment. This was the find he had dreamed about when he’d gabbled his excited excuse to Louisa at the Cape Town dock.

  He wanted to shake a fist at the heavens for taking his wife before he could prove to her his worth – that his instincts
had not been wrong. Those instincts had cost Louisa her life, but he could at least make it up to their child. All the hardship, all the heartbreak could be put behind them now that he could afford the life he wanted for them on his own terms, through his success instead of handouts.

  James stood because he couldn’t bear to whimper in the dirt a moment longer. His legs shook but from excitement now; no longer would he hang his head. Brokers would go wild for what he and Joseph had found. In truth, the diamond world would become frenzied at the sight of this stone. He couldn’t accurately calculate in uncut carats – maybe over three hundred. He had to get control of his breathing, which he was sure was now audible. Worse, he could convince himself that the Australians, though several claims over, could hear his heart pounding against his ribs.

  He certainly could.

  6

  THE LITTLE KAROO DESERT, WESTERN CAPE

  May 1872

  Reggie Grant longed for the simplest of pleasures, especially that of a long soak.

  On the relentless ox-wagon journey to this place they called Kimberley, he had little more than a damp flannel as his only means of toileting. Relieving himself behind trees, eating communally for safety as much as company, and sleeping rough with the constant fear of carnivorous and nocturnal animals on the prowl all combined to make him jumpy – hostile, even. He was assured by one of the drivers that he should count his luck that they hadn’t encountered flooded rivers.

  ‘Then you’d have something to complain about,’ he said while they sat around a small fire one evening. It was mild so no one was especially cold but the same driver had insisted they all gather close. ‘Light your own if you wish,’ he suggested. ‘Lions don’t like the flames but they have developed a taste for human flesh.’

  The women in his immediate wagon party gasped, but he swallowed his fear and the revulsion that he was here and so far from home.