The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  It was an old fear, and always the same. Salman would imagine that his family had died. Most of it had. What was left was what he clung to with such ferocity. Now, along with the fear, came a wildness. If everyone were dead, he knew other places he could go and live. And so he went.

  He walked to Khadimain. In the bazaar he had never felt alone. There were more people, he thought, than were ever likely to die. On the outskirts were cordial hawkers and a chickpea man with Indian monkeys on chains. He kept going. Past the stalls of fruit, gunbelts, samovars, cagebirds and Korans. The compact crowds of housewives, the licensed circumcisor, the confectioner stirring vats of halqûn, the duck man with marsh birds tied living at his waist.

  His feet were full of anger. They walked by themselves. Salman kept going until he came to the heart of the bazaar, where the costermongers ate kebaps sprinkled with sour-sweet purple sumac, and drank tea under a market roof of spread awnings. He stood until a Levantine woman sat him on a café stool and gave him a paper cone of zahtar. When the food was gone and she was no longer watching, he got up and kept going.

  At the far side of the bazaar, where the ground began to slope towards the river, he came to the stall of Mehmet the lapidary. His legs weren’t walking by themselves any more. He wasn’t crying, although he felt thirsty. There was a bul-bul in a wicker cage. Under its voice, Mehmet was polishing a moonstone. The wheel rocked as he pedalled. His stool was padded with old carpet. The light settled in the stone like milk in a cup.

  Rachel found them there together, an hour later. Not talking. Watching together until the jewel was done. As if the work had been shared between them. By then Salman had seen all he thought he would ever want.

  Mehmet was an old Marsh Arab, his face riddled with smile lines. He cut whatever stones the jewellers brought him, cheap or precious. Moonstones ground down to cabochon domes. Balases faceted in the European style. Grains of diamond and olive oil hissing on leather. After he had found the place Salman went back often. It suited Rachel. If Daniel was out, she would never know where he had gone, but Salman was almost always with Mehmet. His needs were more predictable.

  Once the old man let him stand beside the wheel. When Salman was ready to go, Mehmet pinched a grain of polishing grit off the leather-lined wheel. He held it out to the boy, the light catching in it, a brilliant point of diamond.

  Salman carried it home between his thumbs and presented it to Rachel. Standing beside her, craning to see. Edgy with the possessiveness of a first-time giver, until she wrapped the grain in the cloth of murex and stored it away. A week later, when she looked through the heirlooms again, the diamond chip had disappeared. For days she looked for it while Salman raged at her, the veins standing out in his forehead. A little old man, tottering with righteous anger. When she became angry herself he brought her another present. A green locust’s wing, beautiful as faience. Rachel was careful not to lose it.

  He was unlike his older brother. Salman did what Daniel had never done and fought the boys from the mosques when they called him dhimmi, coming home bright-eyed and bleeding. Salman liked Baghdad with its smells and noise. The deafening silence of the desert scared him, and the sirrusch crept into his dreams on its ruined eagle feet.

  Some days Daniel would go and help Yusuf with the beehives. It was the only time Salman would go into the desert. He enjoyed the sound of the bees. Sometimes there were words in it, he thought. If he closed his eyes it became a kind of muezzin. When he looked again there would be the flight paths of insects passing around him. Daniel holding slats of comb for the honey man.

  Yusuf spoke only an unintelligible desert Arabic. He had the fine-boned, long head of a Beduin, and at nineteen he was married with five children. Daniel liked his quietness. For hours there would be no sound but the murmur of the hives in the sun. In the end Salman wouldn’t be able to stand it and he would walk back home alone, leaving the others to carry the slats of honeycomb, heavy as looms.

  Their house was at the edge of the old city. It was grand, made for a greater family than they had become. Sand wore at the eaves.

  There were two doors. When he was small it had seemed to Daniel as if they led to different homes. The house could alter physically, depending on how you approached it. Everything was changed, from the felt shape of rooms to the patterns in the floor tiles. The valency of the air, the quality of light.

  From the city it felt crowded, filled up with the smells and sounds of people. The doorstep was worn down in a soft curve, like a shape in flesh. Through the window grilles you could hear the street and Khadimain, three blocks away.

  But from the west, the house felt deserted. It was built on a slope, and the rear entrance was a full storey higher, making the building feel smaller. Through the doors light starred the floor tiles in hot constellations. This was Grandmother Judit’s bedroom, where she slept all day. It smelled of bedding and old skin. The windows were blocked with the leaves and veins of vines and sweet pea. If there were voices, they seemed distant. If Daniel closed his eyes to listen, there would be the sound of bees from Yusuf’s hives. Beyond that, the desert.

  Judit was ninety-five years old. She was their mother’s mother, an in-law with nowhere to go, proud to live in the old ben Levy house. When she was awake, she would tell the brothers implausible facts about their own ancestors. Before the plagues came the Levys used to live for hundreds of years, she said. Like Abraham and Noah. Rachel’s mother’s mother Sarah had drunk nothing except rainwater and lived to a hundred and nine (Judit said). On the first day of every month (Judit said) Sarah and her long-suffering husband Hezkel would haul out wooden rain-butts, and on the last day they would heave them in. She had died one morning in 1783, her heart stopping as she was pulling her butt in through the western door.

  In spring the brothers would sit with Judit in the kitchen with its bars of sunlight, stunned with food and fabrications. Sometimes, in flood season, she would describe their rivers to them, the Tigris and Euphrates. The stories of their courses. Making them magnificent, as if their gods might be listening.

  Salman and the Tigris were dark, fast, and dangerous. They always looked old. Salman’s river was that of Baghdad; whereas Daniel’s was that of the desert. It absorbed life. Lost in his thoughts, Daniel was jostled but unharmed. Bullied, sometimes, but still trusting. And the Euphrates was wide, meandering. A continent-sized river, its sandbars shifting like great eels, making shipping impossible. Longer-lived than the Tigris, and where the two rivers met to the south, the Euphrates was the more abundantly green, with white kingfishers ghosting over the water.

  River names. Rachel invented them, but she didn’t use them. In private, she had become disturbed by them. The city was full of beliefs and old, vindictive gods. Rachel herself believed the names had become ominous.

  She watched Daniel from the western door. He was with his brother and Yusuf, carrying home the honeycomb. Even walking he was slow. But there was nothing weak about him. The passivity, Rachel thought, hid or generated some kind of strength, something that might one day even become magnificent itself. Beside it, Salman’s quickness seemed frail.

  She looked away. Once, teasing them with the names she had invented, the words had stopped in her mouth. In the back of her mind, the belief had welled up that Daniel would outlive his younger brother. She never used the river names again.

  The house with two doors. The flight paths of bees. Salman made young. Rachel made living. If Daniel had been told that one day he would remember none of it, he would have laughed out loud with fear.

  At the edge of the desert, two boys were walking. One was taller than the other. One was broader than the other. It is like a riddle. One was holding a slat of honeycomb. One was holding nothing. They were so alike, they could have been brothers. The desert air shimmered around them.

  * * *

  There is a point in time when the story of the Brethren becomes three stories. Another point when the three stories reconverge. Physically, it makes it difficul
t for me to follow. I wish I had three heads and three pairs of eyes to find the jewel. Three spare sisters.

  There are so many places to look. I have a whole world to search. Some nights, when I am alone, I dream that I have failed already because what I am trying to do is impossible: the Brethren is lost for ever. And then I imagine abandoning these notebooks, with all their work. Someone would discover them. The love of the jewel would take them and, who knows, they might find it. I don’t think I could bear that. It would be as if someone had stolen my life.

  Three Brothers, Three Sisters. A year after the Crown Jewels of England were destroyed, the shoulder-knot of Duke John the Fearless changed its name. For six years it was known as Les Trois Soeurs. Simple, muscular and masculine, the Brethren underwent a sex change.

  No one knows why it happened. My theory is that the transformation came about because the jewel itself had been altered. For years, the Stuart kings had replaced old stones or added new ones – table-cut diamonds, hanging stirrups of pearls. The Brethren became a more glittering prize. The structure must have seemed more delicate under the weight of stones. But Charles and Henrietta had also disturbed the simplicity of the jewel. The balanced geometry was gone. The gold spurs were loaded down with glitter. The restored work had the gorgeousness of a Lalique brooch or a Fabergé egg, priceless kitsch. For two decades, the Three Brethren was a jewel in drag.

  It was also the last crown jewel of England. But by circumstances it was exiled from the Commonwealth along with its owner, Queen Henrietta Maria. For years the King’s consort went on trying to sell it. Desperate for guns she hawked it around Europe, a travelling saleswoman in powder and paste. In that time the new wealth on the continent was banked in Holland, and it was in Rotterdam that Henrietta finally managed to rid herself of the knot. She sold it for a fraction of its value, one hundred and four thousand Dutch livres, to a Monsieur Cletstex of the Bank of Lombardy.

  Holland, like England, was a country enriched by the sea. And like Basel and Berne, the Low Cities were centres of capitalist power. Jacob Fugger would have taken personal pride in the rise of Rotterdam, the fortunes made and lost in tulips and spices. Holland was a country, finally, that could afford the Brethren, and inside twelve months the jewel was sold twice, first to William of Amsterdam and then to Andries of Zoutkamp, the Prince of Herrings. Both men were merchants at the height of their powers. Their purchase of the great jewel demonstrated to the whole of Europe, crowned and otherwise, that even a merchant could dress in the diamonds of a king.

  In the painting by Van Dyck, Andries of Zoutkamp has the physique of a self-made man: a worker’s muscle running to fat. He looks pale under well-tailored clothes. His skin has a quality of wetness. Andries had money in fishing and in the Dutch East India Company, but he was also said to have amassed a fortune years earlier, as a privateer. He got where he was by himself, and he never married. Andries was a man who made enemies easily, in the way that others might make friends. Finally, in November 1655 he grew tired of the machinations of city life. He retired to his last great acquisition, a borg manor estate between Zoutkamp and Uithuizen in the far north.

  What remains of the house feels desolate. The walls are surrounded by pollarded trees, avenues of black stumps, Moore sculptures facing across the empty fields and EU greenhouses. The fortified buildings themselves are just gutted ruins. Where brickwork survives it is black, like stone in an industrial city.

  It is the place where Andries’s enemies caught up with him. During his first winter in the north, the merchant’s manor was burnt to the ground. Councillors and militia were sent from Uithuizen and Groningen to determine the cause of the fire, but they were held back for a day by heavy snow. By then, there was nothing left for them to find. The cindered bones of Andries, a woman and child had been recovered by three surviving servants. If there had been scavengers in the ash and snow the investigators never saw them, and the survivors said nothing.

  It is the human loss that matters. A man, woman and child, not the stones; although the diamond could also have burned. I think this despite myself. In a heat of such intensity, the gem can have survived only if it were protected by some other form of carbon. It would have to be contained. In a box, in a pocket, or a hand. Skin and bone would do.

  There is a surviving report of the deaths, written for the Bailiff of Groningen in 1656. The pages are tanned dark as eelskin. They mention the woman and child, who were never identified. They give precise official explanations: The fire at the Zoutkamp borg appears to have been brought about by nothing more than human oversight. Agreement is made that in likelihood, the flames arose by mishap, such as an unattended hearth, bed warmer, or pipe.

  For the records, the Prince of Herrings died smoking in bed. There were other theories. Zoutkamp had been the wrong place for Andries to attempt retirement. The far north of Holland was a place characterised by blunt, physical enmities. For decades, the city of Groningen had tried and failed to dominate the rural borgs around it, and the two sides fought a continual, sullen war across the fenlands and polders. In contemporary accounts of the death, Andries is portrayed as an outsider, meddling in a sectarianism he barely understands. An old man, out of his depth in the backwaters. In Groningen, there were people happy to see Andries gone.

  He had been a wealthy man. Items known to be in his possession included the Van Dyck portrait, of which only studies survive. Seven-tenths of an Ashanti gold mask, cut into sections as pirate booty, ‘Two score potts of thea’, and the Three Brethren – the Three Sisters. According to the investigators, none of his treasures survived the fire.

  I see the scavengers, moving slow and bent. Snow falls into their eyes and hair. Through the thatch tied to their feet, the hot ground burns their soles. Somewhere ahead of them, under the char, a knot of jewels waits to be found. And all around them is the landscape of ruins, the dykes and the mudflats, the dunes of the Rottumeroog sand island which is neither land nor ocean but a world in between, and the icy Wadden Sea.

  One story, three stories. From this point, the history of the Three Brethren is fragmented. Some time after the fire, the burnt shape of the shoulder-knot was discovered. In the hands of scavengers and merchants, the triangle of gems was split up like pirate booty. What had been famous was made anonymous. The gold spurs and bones lose their identity, but the stones themselves have survived. And so there are three trails: of the diamond, the rubies, and the pearls.

  I am beginning with the trail of the pearls. It leads back on itself, as the histories of jewels often do. It returns to England, where the Commonwealth of the New Model Army had lasted barely more than a decade. When he took England from the Cromwells, Charles the Second claimed a Crown which no longer possessed a crown. It was an embarrassment he couldn’t afford in any sense. In 1661 he awarded the dubious honour of Crown Goldsmith to the jeweller Robert Vyner, and opened his account with an entire set of regalia. Vyner was never fully paid for his work, and his appointment ended in his bankruptcy. There is a massive deficit in the accounts, a shortfall of £15,000.

  Still, the crown was remade. As it turned out, the heart of it had never been lost. Old stones were set in the new collets and arches: Saint Edward’s sapphire. The Stuart sapphire. For a decade, the Royalists had been gathering their king’s jewels through the black markets of Europe. Like prosthetic hands, the sockets of the new crown were shaped to the old gems.

  And along with them came the pearls. There were four of them, large and baroque, with a grey lustre. The Brethren pearls were not beautiful, like the rubies or the diamond. They lacked the perfection of stone. They were organic jewels, with the lovely ugliness of living things: the taste of oysters, the smell of sex, the colouring of skin. They had been harvested long before the invention of cultured pearls, which are barely pearls at all but only beads coated with nacre. In terms of rarity and price, they existed in a time closer to that of the Roman general Vitellius, who paid for an entire campaign by selling just one of his wife’s pearl ea
rrings. Three were drilled lengthways and the fourth breadthways. They were not called the pearls of the Three Brethren. Instead they were known as Queen Elizabeth’s Earrings.

  The Elizabeth in the pearls’ name was not the Tudor, with her jewelled skeleton and ermine eyes. This Queen was a Stuart. Elizabeth of Bohemia was the sister of Charles the First. In a painting of 1642 that now rests in the third warehouse of the British National Portrait Gallery (warehouses that are not marked on public maps) she is pictured wearing four large baroque pearls as earrings. Charles had given them to his sister in 1640, when his great knot was reset, its old pearls removed and new stones installed.

  After the end of the Commonwealth, when Oliver Cromwell’s body had been dug up and hung in chains, its head cut from its torso and buried in a secret place, Elizabeth returned to England. She was old and sick, and soon after her nephew Charles took the throne she died. She was buried in London in 1661. The Black Death and the Great Fire passed over her head like flood tides.

  The three oval pearls were set in the English crown with a fourth jewel to match them, and they stayed there for two hundred years. The last Brethren jewel, ‘a very big and fine pearl shaped like a pear,’ was placed in an envelope with the old settings of Elizabeth’s earrings. The envelope was locked away in the treasury of the Tower of London. It remained there for centuries, gathering dust with the frames of empty crowns, the bills of Robert Vyner, and the Knave of Diamond’s list of beautiful things.

  The trail of the rubies is longer and more broken. In an archive in Paris, I copy down the nineteenth item on a list of jewels, auctioned in Constantinople in 1663: Lot nineteen shall be a very fine Balascus, lasque cut in the old fashion, of seventy qirats.

  No seller’s name appears by the stone. But it was bought by a Frenchman. His name was Jean-Baptiste Tavernier. At fifty-eight, he was the greatest European jewel merchant of the century.