The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  Daniel turned back to his brother. The wetness on Salman’s right forearm was the dog’s blood, not his own. It was dark and already thickening. Not arterial blood, Daniel thought, which would be brighter, fresher from the heart. This was vein blood from the eye and brain, the fluids running back up the man’s sinews. There were no bite marks on Salman himself, none that he could see. Only the long, shallow wounds of the claws.

  Salman laughed in his arms. ‘Surely the dog was a royalist.’

  ‘You weren’t bitten?’

  Salman’s eyes struggled to focus past Daniel. ‘I don’t know, I don’t – Is that Jane? Oh, Jane.’

  Daniel felt her beside him. He moved back as Limpus took his brother’s arm. Her voice was soft. He couldn’t see her face as she passed him.

  ‘This morning I thought you were a jeweller. Now you look like a butcher.’

  ‘Forgive me, Jane. I killed Fell. I never meant to–’

  ‘Damn you both.’ Her head arched round, and Daniel saw the hardness of her face. In the blue-white skin, the veins standing out above her black eyes. ‘I want you out by the morrow.’

  ‘Mrs Limpus?’ Etcher’s weak voice called out again. ‘Was the dog diseased, now?’

  ‘I’d be pleased if you left us, Thomas Etcher.’

  The crowd moved and murmured. The publican bowed his head to put his hat back on. ‘I’m sorry to intrude where I’m not wanted. The worst I can say of myself is that I sent my boy for you, Mrs Limpus. Sent him next doors, where anyone should know you could be found. Would you not like him to fetch Doctor Leverton? I might know where he is also. Leastways till closing time.’

  She let go of Salman abruptly. He staggered as she walked across the yard. Not towards the gate, where the crowd was already breaking away, but towards the body in the dirt. Daniel watched her stop beside it. With the toe of her boot she nudged the deadweight. When she was sure it was no longer alive she bent down, her skirts trailing in the dust, then knelt and lifted the dog’s head into her lap. Daniel saw her lips move beside it. Whispering.

  He looked away, ashamed of himself or of his brother. The crowd at the gate was almost gone. Now he could see other faces beyond that of Etcher. Strangers and neighbours. Sarah Theed the baker and Carey the nightman. The scavenger’s face was half-frowning, half-smiling as he turned.

  They took Salman inside. Fellow still lay out in the yard. When Doctor Leverton arrived Jane left the three of them alone, and when Daniel looked out again at dusk the body of the dog was gone. He never asked Jane what she did with it, not then or later; but as he watched the doctor working he imagined it. Jane digging in the allotment’s soft earth. Or the nightman working for her, Limpus waiting beside him. Daniel’s eyes were never as good as Salman’s. He couldn’t have done the fine work of a jeweller, and he never saw the way horizons disappear below one another as a ship leaves land in clear weather. All Daniel could do was to imagine. His thoughts were how he saw the world. He always kept them to himself.

  Leverton was a small man with ancient stained breeches and artist’s fingers. He walked stooping across the yard to the dead dog and looked at its teeth and eye, lifting the gums and lid as if he were buying a horse. He was already going through his tools as he came inside. The saw, brace and liniments.

  ‘No disease there, Mister Daniel. Not a bit. It’s miasma you need to worry about. Foul air, sir. Here of all places.’

  He cleaned Salman’s shoulders with water from the pump, extracted yard dirt and hairs from the wounds with a pair of iron forceps. Dressed them with lint and alcohol, muttered about the laudability of pus and suppuration, and left a roll of bandages and a bill for nine shillings and two pence.

  ‘I always advise Brighton. Plenty of exercise and no miasmata, that’s my prescription. Leave London, sir, if you can. May I ask where you and your brother hail from?’

  ‘Baghdad.’

  ‘Ah? That should be far enough.’

  After he had gone the brothers sat together in the darkening room. Daniel by the casement, the chair pulled beside it. To the west and south-west London filled the river valley. He could see roads and illuminated squares. Jerry-boat lights moving on the Thames. For miles, the city lay spread out like cut stone on a jeweller’s cloth.

  Salman got up and went to the lamp. In the gloom before he lit it his bound shoulders were a spectral white. Then the wick caught and he stepped back. Daniel watched the flame play across his face. He looked calm now. From the hallway came the sound of someone coming in. Steps on the bare staircase. Daniel kept his voice quiet.

  ‘You had no cause to kill it.’

  Salman turned round. Face moving into the shadow of his skull. ‘It would have killed me if it could. Cause enough.’

  He thought of the crowd at the gate. The publican and the scavenger. Not too near, not too far. ‘We have to leave.’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘You didn’t hear her?’

  Salman shook his head. He turned away and sat down by the lapidary’s wheel. Ready for work. ‘Then we must go.’

  ‘We take what we can from here, stock and fittings. Find somewhere else to live and trade.’

  ‘Aye.’ He sighed, rubbed his forehead with one hand. Scrubbing at the skin. ‘Right. I must say something to Jane now, eh. Something at least.’

  He knocked against the wheel as he got up. Daniel watched him reach out and catch it before it fell, quick in the uneven light, clumsy with shame. He sat with his head down as Salman went out to the hallway. His footsteps on the stairs. His voice calling, whispering. Jane. Jane.

  Daniel rose and took the pipe and tobacco from the mantelpiece. He filled the pipe, lit a match from the lamp, started the pipe, and went with it out into the yard. On the steps he leaned back against the door, closing it behind him.

  The smoke caught his eyes and he closed them. From Rotherhithe came the echo of construction sites, carpenters still at work under artificial illumination. From Limehouse came the rattle of dockside cranes. Nearer, the sounds of the crowd around Etcher’s pub. From the house behind his back he could hear almost nothing.

  The pipe went out. He took a silver matchbox from his waistcoat pocket. The sulphur flare lit his calm face. He waited for quiet, until the nothing was less than nothing. Then he finished the pipe and went inside.

  He woke late, alone, with a taste in his mouth as if he had been running. The previous day only came back to him piecemeal as he was pulling on his clothes. It felt unreal, the smooth rapidity of events. Inexplicably he was reminded of the sound of ice, shelving into deep water.

  He went to the window. Fellow’s chain lay in its corner. There was no sign of blood. As he picked up the shop keys Daniel wondered if Jane had swept the yard during the night. Erasing the violence of the day before. Barefoot, he walked through into the showroom, leaving the connecting door wide to allow the daylight in. The blinds were down. Yawning, he went to open them.

  He felt a cold impact underfoot and stepped back instinctively. On the floor was a scattering of broken glass. A piece the size and shape of a playing card had been caught flat under his heel, cracking again without breaking his skin. The blinds in front of him moved with the slight force of a breeze, and Daniel reached across and pulled them back. The shop door was ajar. Only a wedge of glass at its foot had stopped it opening wide. Two of the lights had been broken inwards, and the top and bottom bolts were drawn back. They were a long way from the broken panes, the bolts. Daniel wouldn’t think of that until a little later.

  He turned back into the shop. Quicker now, waking up fast, he raised the counter, stepped behind it and knelt down. The drawers and cupboard space were all unlocked. Everything had been emptied out or taken. As if the searchers had not even known what they wanted, account books or sealing wax. The metal box of jewels was gone.

  He groaned and hauled himself up. As he ran back into the house, stumbling with the need not to stumble, he recalled the East Indiaman again. It came to him out of nothing, the
way dreams sometimes do. The creak of hammocks. The sensation that everything was being stolen from him.

  He went up the stairs without stopping, calling out his brother’s name. At the landing were two doors, a narrower staircase curving upwards, the walls stained with damp and dereliction. Daniel turned the corner and went on up. At the top was a single door and he knocked, hard, then knocked again. When no one answered he opened it and stepped in.

  The richness of it struck him. Light fell across an oak commode and dresser, a delftware jug and basin, an ormolu clock quietly dividing time on the mantelpiece. Faint, the smell of urine from the commode, waiting for morning. Salman still lay huddled asleep. Beside him Jane was already sitting upright, her eyes waiting on the door. She said nothing. She didn’t cover herself.

  She was beautiful. Her nakedness stopped Daniel. It shamed him, as if he had come on something he had never been meant to see. His brother’s woman. Her breasts were firm above the slight round of her belly. The aureoles of her nipples were dark and enlarged, as if by childbirth. He looked up again and realised that Limpus was smiling at him. Only with her eyes. Her mouth was hard and sly. He watched her eyes and remembered the bolts.

  He walked across the room and shook his brother awake. ‘Tigris, get up.’ He spoke fast, in Judeo-Arabic. ‘We have been robbed.’ Salman rolled over and stared up at him. Daniel stepped back as his brother struggled out of the bed-clothes. Around his shoulders the bandages were stained the colour of rust where his wounds had bled during the night. Behind his bent back, Daniel watched Jane Limpus straighten the sheets. Brush them clean.

  ‘Robbed. Robbed, the bastard sons of English bitches. By whom, did you see them? What have they taken?’

  ‘The stock and takings. I saw nothing.’

  ‘But the jewels, ‘Phrates. What about the jewels?’

  Daniel shook his head again, not understanding. Salman leaned towards him. ‘For God’s sake. The jewels from the jar.’

  ‘I was sleeping in the same room–’

  ‘You didn’t look?’ Already Salman was backing out of the door, down the stairs. They reached the workroom together. Salman pushed the table away from the fireplace and crouched, still naked, prying at the loose board beside the hearth. When it came away he lay down, reaching his arm into the cavity under the floor.

  He grinned humourlessly. The bundle of turban cloth came up soiled with earth and a grey silk of cobwebs. Daniel knelt down beside him as Salman untied the three jewels, the cabochon, table cut and the writing point. Against the stained cotton they were more beautiful than he remembered, the surfaces perfectly reflective. As if they had grown or changed, underground.

  The light changed against them. Daniel looked over his shoulder. Jane was leant in the doorway, a thick house gown of old chenille pulled around her. Her eyes on the jewels. She was smiling again, but again the expression looked incomplete to Daniel. The shut mouth too hard and thin against the teeth.

  He reached out and covered the stones. She looked up at him, surprised, and her smile twisted open. ‘Am I intruding, Mister Levy? Seeing what I should not? Don’t worry about your stones. I’ve no interest in them nor their owners. I’ve had my fill of the pair of you.’

  ‘We’ll be gone soon enough.’ Daniel picked up the bundle. He was aware of Salman rising beside him, and he remembered the attack. The violence in his brother, and him unable to hold it back.

  ‘You will.’ She tightened the cord around her waist. ‘I have errands to run this morning. You’ll be gone when I return.’

  ‘The police, Jane–’

  She turned on Salman. Her voice stayed mild. ‘Police? The peelers don’t come out here if they can help it, and the City’s men not at all. There’s no one round here but friends of mine. And they’re no friends of yours.’ Mild, milder. ‘If I was you I’d go while I had the chance.’

  He stood hunched. ‘Is this what you wanted? I don’t – No, I will not hear it. But what is it you wanted of me, Jane?’

  She laughed. Salman remembered the sound from his dreams. ‘I lay with you for the pleasure of it. You’re a jeweller, you should know pleasure.’

  ‘I know that your life is pleasureless. You have a cold heart, Jane. Carey.’ He took a step towards her. “The scavenger, is that it?’

  Their voices had risen, choking, as if they were drowning on one another. Jane shook her head. Not to answer Salman, Daniel saw, but with a narrow-eyed, suspicious amazement. As if Salman had hurt her, reached her, belatedly, in the way she had least expected. Her voice a whisper as she stepped back. ‘He’ll scavenge you, should I give him the word. I’ll bid you farewell now.’

  Salman watched her. He stood at the window of the workroom, waiting for her to be gone. Daniel packing behind him, dismantling the wheel. Molten metal had left patterns on the table. Brands in the shape of figures, rivers, maps. It was two hours before Limpus came down, dressed and booted. She went out and walked to the next house on Hardwick Place without looking back. Salman pressed his face close to the window as she passed beyond the yards, the colours of her clothes and skin flickering between the fence pickets. His breath flared on the glass and receded.

  ‘Now we have nothing, ‘Phrates.’ He whispered. Behind him, his brother’s voice.

  ‘We have one another.’

  ‘Aye.’ A broken echo. ‘We have the jewels.’

  It was May when they left Hardwick Place. A hot month in a hot summer, and London was never made for heat. It was a place built in the image of rain, the grey-carpeted halls and façades of ashlar stone designed for a climate of short daylight and late thaws. Now white mould grew in heavy furnishings like a temperate variant of frost.

  May, 1837. Even the rain was warm. Daniel and Salman walked through it with the sweat itching in their trimmed beards and dark clothes. They still had the stones. Salman carried them. He could feel them in the pockets of his worn frock coat. For days and weeks he thought of nothing else, while Daniel worked for them both. Not Jane or her pleasure, the Crown of England or the itch of the wounds in his shoulders. Only the marshlander’s jewels. It seemed to him that the more he lost the more he loved them, his three stones, precious as wishes.

  * * *

  There are four of us on the Underground train. Opposite me sit two women in work suits and, beside them, a man with a can of Tennant’s Super. The man is singing verbal graffiti. The women are pretending to be asleep. I’m looking for a man called Mr Three Diamonds.

  ‘You must remember this.

  A piss is just a pish, a shite is just a shite.

  The funandmental things apply,

  As time goes by.

  ‘Ah. Now then, fuck it. Have you any change, love? The inspector’s stole my ticket.’

  I give him two pounds. It stops him singing. Money itself has never interested me; or if so, only insofar as it takes me where I need to go. Still, when I feel in my pockets I find I have almost nothing left. Ten pounds sterling, forty US dollars, and the last ruby in its makeshift bulse. London bribery becomes more expensive every year. I get off the Tube at Farringdon and walk up a couple of blocks to Hatton Garden, with its shabby rows of gem wholesalers and second-hand jewellers, grilleworked windows full of stolen loveheart chains and solitaire wedding rings.

  The shops are still shut, the pavements sluiced down overnight to clean away the swill from Leather Lane market. I find an open café and think of Mr Three Diamonds while my tea turns cold in its styrofoam cup.

  It feels as if he’s following me. I know this is an illusion. No one in my footsteps now was buying the Three Brethren eighty-nine years ago in East London. I keep meeting the name, but only because we have both been looking for the same thing, nine decades apart. Two lives turning on one point. If anything, I’m the one following Three Diamonds. He found the Brethren. The closest I’ve come is to have met a man who once touched it.

  At nine I give the physical remains of the tea back to the boy who made it and walk up to the Holborn end of Hatton Gard
en. There are fewer pawnbrokers here, less of a sense that whatever you buy is someone’s mother’s Sunday best. In a concrete shopping mall on the far side of the street is Holt’s the gem wholesalers. I ring the bell and go inside.

  Little has changed in the years since I came here last. The jewel shop is unnaturally bright, as if the nylon carpet and glass displays have been worked over with static dusters and gemmologists’ loupes. The room is walled with illuminated showcases, like the aquaria at FishWorld. In each lit tank are rows of stones. Backlit pipes of tourmaline, each shaft fading from pink to green. The broken pots and heads of geodes with their internal linings of crystal. From its recess above the tanks a security camera turns to follow me. Behind the glass-topped counter, the shopkeeper watches me with the same economical stare. When she speaks, her voice is raised a fraction more than it needs to be. ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’

  ‘Actually, I’m here to sell.’

  ‘Oh right, fine.’ She has dark eyes, full lips, an expressive face toughened to articulate nothing. She wears no jewellery. Her hair a handsome mass of frizz. I give her the ruby and wait, killing time while she takes it away to the back rooms for the lapidary’s evaluation. In the middle of the nylon carpet is a free-standing vivarium of lapidary exotica. I peer in at the centrepiece, a scale model of the Albert Manorial built of nothing but precious stone. A faux neo-Gothic monstrosity of malachite and porphyry and sard.

  The jeweller who wears no jewellery comes back. Puts the ruby on the counter with both hands. ‘Well, it’s a good stone.’ There is an edge of surprise to her voice, half-hidden. ‘Very good. Better than we normally take without a ready buyer, in fact. Is it Burmese? With the political situation, we try not to buy–’

  ‘Sri Lankan.’ I pick up my bag. ‘If you’re not interested I’ll take it somewhere else.’