by Tobias Hill
The light crept down the walls above them. Across the rooftops Daniel could see hoardings for medicines and transports: Be Bonny In Brighton! 4/- Weekdays γ/6 Weekends. A municipal clockface. It was five to seven. He wanted to ask his brother to check the stones, but Salman was still talking. Murmuring in their old language, his voice frail and dry in the evening heat.
‘Nothing has changed. It could be God’s will, of course. We are bad Jews, eh. Without a congregation, without a sabbath, eating the unclean food of the English. Or should we have tried harder, do you think? I think not. Should we have gone east? Sometimes I wonder if we went the wrong way. It worries me. Do you think we should have gone east, ‘Phrates?’
‘It is time.’ He spoke gently. His face was turned towards Salman’s, so that he saw the expression when the younger man opened his eyes. He looked at the city below them wildly, as if he recognised nothing. It only lasted a second. Salman blinked it away like sleep. He stood up, brushing off his frock coat, smiling down.
‘Well! Shall we go and make our fortunes?’
Creed Lane smelt of horse-shit and cabbages, old muck fermenting in the sun. The rear doors of the Ludgate Hill businesses all looked the same. On the back ramp of Rich’s Bakery, a man rooting for stale bread directed Daniel and Salman the wrong way for a halfpenny. It took ten minutes to find the jeweller’s entrance, the steps cluttered with oyster shells and a broken-backed invalid chair.
Salman knocked. There was the sound of a deadbolt unlocking before the door opened. In its crack stood the man who had sent them away that morning: a dab of snuff on the moustache, hair smarmed back with Macassar oil. Daniel took off his hat. ‘Our pardons, sir, but we came this morning. We have jewels–’
‘You’re early.’ The door slammed. From inside came the mingled sound of shouting and the clang of metal. When George Fox came out again he kicked the broken chair off the steps with an absent-minded viciousness and nodded towards the brothers. ‘All right, in you come. Have a care for your heads. Do you have names?’
They ducked inside. The workshop was dark after the open air. Daniel stumbled, his eyes too slow to adjust. ‘Levy, sir. We are brothers.’
‘Levy? Christ almighty. You keep that to yourselves, now. Look lively, this way.’
On the workbench sat a basin of gilt, vines winding through its handles. Salman assessed it as he passed. Only the material was extravagant: the work itself was mundane. From beyond and around the basin, the smiths watched him back. They were young men, with thick hands and faces. Salman knew their odour. The sour Englishness of it, milk fat and cold meat, although in the workshop he could smell nothing except the sweet fumes of jeweller’s rouge and molten metal.
These are men who have set diamonds, he thought, and worked gold. Seeing them, in the flesh, he found it hard to believe. He imagined what it would be like, to work ounces of gold, plates of gilt. The most obedient of metals, holding its shape like stone, soft to the sculptor’s knife like clay. Not breaking like iron, or becoming soggy as hot copper. In gold, he thought, I could make wonderful things.
‘This way. Directly, if you please.’ A corridor, wooden stairs, a passage. At the last door of eight Fox knocked once. When there was no answer he turned away, waiting. This close, Salman realised how short the jeweller was. Only his musculature made him seem tall. Salman bent his head to speak.
‘Sir? Is there something the matter with our name?’
The jeweller licked his lips and laughed. ‘Levy?’ Even with the workshop noise echoing around them, he kept his voice down. ‘You want to know what’s the matter with Levy? I’ll tell you. There was a robbery here, twenty or so years ago now. Twenty-two thousand pounds of rubies, diamonds and pearls. The robbers switched them under our noses for a box of coal and threepence-halfpenny. Wrapped in flannel.’ He knocked at the door again. Turned back. ‘Levy was the name of the first thief. Bloom was his partner. Jews, mind. Levy was the one we got. Got him in France, good and proper. Sitting up in bed, reading at midnight. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, it was. I know because I kept it. They hanged him in good time. Do you read, sir?’
‘A little…’
‘Oh, you should.’ Fox stared up at him, eyes wet as the sweat around them. ‘All books have jewels. Steal into them, Mister Levy, like they were goldmines. You won’t be hanged for that.’ His voice rose as he turned away. ‘Mister Rundell? The Jewish gentlemen are here to see you.’
‘Come.’
It was a large room. Nothing else about it felt as generous. By the narrow fireplace stood a desk and a safe, shop fittings, functional as a butcher’s goods. Above the desk hung a portrait of a man with a face like a blade. Below him sat an older figure. They looked alike, thought Daniel. Relatives, certainly. Variations on a theme. He tried to imagine what it was.
‘Sit.’ They sat. The man at the desk was writing with a quill. The shank of it was stained with age, black at the nib, yellow at the tip. The man didn’t look up until he had finished. It took some time. His eyes swung up, met Daniel’s, and waited for them to move away. ‘You have jewels?’
Daniel cleared his throat. ‘A mêlée of stones, sir, found in our native country–’
‘What are you?’
‘Mister Rundell asks what is your work,’ said Fox.
‘I am trained as a lapidary,’ said Salman.
‘You know which cuts?’
‘All plain cuts, also the step, table, and brilliant, the double brilliant and the scissors. I can work metals also, either hot or cold. My brother Daniel is our shopman.’
‘The double brilliant, eh? Show me the stones.’ Edmund stood up. In front of him, the Jews rose from their seats. Behind them Fox stayed where he was. To himself Edmund could admit that he was glad to have the shopman there. The Jews were dark-skinned, he saw. The shorter one brought out a ball of rags from his soiled coat. It looked like something peeled away from a wound. Edmund tapped the desk between them. ‘Here. Put them here.’
Salman unwrapped the stones. They sat on the leather of the desk, catching the light in their curves and planes. Almost imperceptibly, the four men leaned closer. Edmund took a loupe from his pocket and went to work.
He was a jeweller by trade. He was good at what he did. In the first few seconds Edmund Rundell saw the diamond he knew it for what it was. His face didn’t change with the knowledge. But then that was also a part of his trade.
He concentrated on the other stones, making himself wait. The sapphire first. Sixty or more carats of grey-blue corundum. A fine stone, excellent. Fit for a crown, although large sapphires were not so unusual: not impossibly rare, like great rubies. Edmund put it down and picked up the balas. Under the gaslight it was rose-red, violet-red, the colour uneven. It caught the illumination too slightly to be corundum. It didn’t heat light, like a true ruby. Warmed and cooled, Edmund knew it would change colour, altering through blues and shades of transparency and back to red. Balas spinel, a chameleon of a mineral.
He made himself wait. He picked at the three stones with his fingers, the uncut nails clicking, flicking away what he meant to disregard. And when he lifted up the Heart of Three Brothers and held it briefly to the loupe, he showed no astonishment. Later, alone, he would weigh its thirty carats and scream thinly with delight at the great Writing Diamond.
When he was finished he put the loupe back in his pocket and sat down. The Jews stood waiting. Edmund imagined that he could smell them. They had a bitter, dry odour. Alien. He bent forward.
‘Well. You are too modest about the quality of your wares, gentlemen. This is no mêlée.’
‘Sir.’ Salman moved forward, one step. Speaking for them both. ‘We only mean to sell–’
‘Are there more where these came from? No? But you work in the trade. Perhaps you know what you have here? This is a balas ruby.’ He picked up the gems. Carefully now. Neither his mind nor body wandering. ‘Indeed. And this is a very fine sapphire. And this, too, is a perfectly nice spinel. I like them all, Mister …�
��
‘Levy, sir,’ said Salman.
‘Levy.’ Edmund raised his face. Met the foreigner’s eyes. Looked away, back down at the paper, the quill he had kept for its cheapness. ‘I like them, Mister Levy. Now. These stones, naturally, will need to be recut in a proper English manner. We may lose as much as half their weight in the process. Notwithstanding that, I would be pleased to offer you five hundred pounds for the set. What do you say?’
There was a movement between the Jews. Edmund glanced up. The shorter man turned back to him. ‘Beg pardon, sir. We only meant to show two. Only the ruby and the sapphire are for sale–’
‘Two? Nonsense.’ He didn’t stand up. Didn’t push too hard. ‘No, you came here to offer me these stones, and I like them. I shall take three or none at all.’ Edmund waited. Not for himself, he knew what he was doing. Only to give the Jews time. To let them stew. He could feel the portrait behind him. Philip, overseeing them all. He wondered if the old man would have done things as he was doing.
A polishing wheel started up next door and he raised his voice, drowning it out. ‘Indeed, our only problem here is financing. No doubt you’ve heard that we have the Commission for the coronation. Such stock doesn’t come cheap. The upshot is we have little ready money. I can give you five hundred pounds a twelvemonth from today, but if you desire quick cash, I can only find – what could I find, Mister Fox?’
‘Only two hundred pounds, Mister Rundell.’
‘Oh, well. Two hundred and twenty, sirs, if we scraped about. Now then, I have a second proposition, and it is this. I am sensible that you may need finances. We shall advance you fifty pounds today, and the balance of five hundred in a twelvemonth. Moreover, and to show good faith, for this next year we might find you both employment here. Apprentice wages for now, with every possibility of promotion. God knows, with the Commission we’ll need your help.’
He smiled, all teeth. Still seated, the stones between his outstretched arms, the two hands poised as knife and fork. A gourmet smiling at rich pleasures. Waiting for something, some grace. ‘Now. What do you say, gentlemen?’
Three stones for two lives. Daniel and Salman moved from Shoreditch into the attic rooms at Ludgate Hill. They began on wages of twenty pounds a year, Salman in the Dean Street workshops, Daniel as a shopman.
George Fox apprenticed them. All things in the trade, he even befriended them. Daniel believed it. It was never as true as he wished. Fox ate with them, at least. It was more than anyone else in England had done. Most nights they stopped at the King Lud, Salman joining them later, the opium that had sustained him all day leaving him dull. Daniel would watch the old man and his brother, leery and lamplit Drinking until the head could forget the body’s tiredness.
‘Will you not drink with us, Daniel?’
‘Kind of you.’ He shook his head.
‘Well and so. You are hard workers, I’ll give you that. Slog your tripes off, the pair of you.’
‘We do as we are asked.’
‘And so you have what you want. Eh, Salman?’
‘Aye.’
‘Aye. And you, Daniel.’ He veered back. ‘The quiet one. Mister Stillwaters. What is it you want?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? You lie. Look around. London is thousands on thousands, all wanting something. It is a human condition. Want loves want. It grows and breeds. Why should you be any different?’
Daniel shook his head. I want nothing, he almost said, and did not. Knowing neither of them would understand. That both would think wanting nothing was no want at all.
‘You have jewels, Daniel. Gold soft as ladies’ cunnies in your hands. And tomorrow you shall want more. I’ll wager my drink on it.’ George raised his ale. ‘Halloo, a toast! To those druggists of diamonds –’ he bent across the table, almost on top of it now, reddened as a roast of meat ‘–apothecaries of artifice, Levy and Levy, no less, of London. Goldsmiths to the Crown.’
He apprenticed them. He made something of them. Fox worked the brothers like so much raw stuff, and he got what he wanted out of them in the end. If he liked them and they him, well and good. George Fox always made a point of being liked.
He let them into secrets. Small confidentialities, cheap bait. Interest on a larger return. Opening shop, Fox told the brothers the story of Victoria’s Ropes: the legendary Hanover pearls, which belonged by rights to her uncle Ernst. How he’d slept with his sister and killed his servant, and was suing the Queen for the whole of the pearls. How Victoria had got them from Pope Clement the Seventh, whose niece was Catherine of Medici, whose daughter-in-law was Mary Queen of Scots, whose executioner was Queen Elizabeth of the hard eyes, whose nephew was James the First, whose daughter was Elizabeth of the beautiful pearl earrings, whose son-in-law was George the First, whose son was George the Second, whose grandson was George the Third, whose son was William the Fourth whose head was pointed like a cokeynut, may he rest in piss, whose niece was our dear little German Queen. How she couldn’t be queen of Hanover for they were barbarians and will have no queens, there were only knaves and kings in their games. And so the pearls were his by law.
‘But I reckon the Queen deserves them myself. I hope she passes those ropes along to Rundell’s, and we’ll break them up and set them here and there like coins under cups at a fair, and the uncle no more able to spot them than the piles roped around his arse.’
He had a wide face, street-hard. George Fox told them of Paul Storr, the great goldsmith who had made Rundell’s reputation, and who had stood the Old Vinegar for over ten years – and how when he left, the company lost its greatest treasure. One night he let the brothers into the safe room to see the three empty crown frames the Queen had given as part payment. To Salman they looked ugly. Rings of sockets waiting for stones.
He told them about the company’s private sale of Victoria’s diamonds to pay off her family’s debts. The gems big as peach stones, given to her mother’s mother by an Indian prince, the Nabob of Arcot. ‘Go on, ask me who they was sold to.’
‘Who?’
‘I can’t tell you!’ Fox laughed in asthmatic ahs, as if in pain. ‘That’s a whole other secret, that is. You’d have to be here years for me to tell you that.’
He told them everything and nothing. Not that he’d watched them cheated out of their stones, three jewels, good for a crowning. He never mentioned the Young Vinegar’s fairground sharpness. He never thought of himself as a good or a bad man, nothing so simple. He was only ordinary. He minded his business, and his business was that of Edmund Rundell. Over the blur of the lapidary’s wheel, he watched Salman and imagined him broken.
‘D’you trust me, boy? Don’t be a fool. How long have you known me? Trust no one. Anyone who knows how to love a jewel knows how to cheat a man to get it. And if you understand that, then I have said too much to you already.’
The Heart of Three Brothers passed on, from Levy to Rundell. It was already four hundred and thirty years old. It looked newer than that in Edmund’s hands. It looked untouched and elemental. Brighter than water. Simpler than water. Fresher than fresh.
Salman dreamed of it. In his dream the stone returned to him from Edmund. He was never sure how he had regained it, by theft or purchase, or whether the stone had found its own way back. While he slept, this did not seem an impossibility.
It lay cool in his fist. He would open his fingers, loving it with his eyes, and it was only then that he would notice some change. A new flaw where there had been none, a certain shape. Salman would turn it in his palms and see that it was an egg. He wondered how he had never seen it before. The shell was cool and lucid as snakeskin.
He would bend closer and the dream would end, always. Nothing ever opened. He never saw what was inside.
He opened his eyes to the sound of church bells. For a moment he had no sense of place, the noise outside and the pallet under him meaning nothing. Then he blinked and the world came back.
Daniel slept beside him. One of his arms was flung out,
as if he was asking for something or offering it. Salman got up without waking him. The dream of the jewel still hung uneasily in his mind and he pushed it away.
He went to the casement. The tincture bottle and spoon were on the sill where he had left them at midnight. He measured out ten drops and drank them off. Repeated the dose. Through the alcohol came the bitter, acrid warmth of the Turkey opium. He waited, feeling it work out through his nerves. Waking him out of himself.
The window was latched open. London was beginning to move in the light. The smog was thin today and he could see for miles. He had heard it said there were a million people here, a thousand thousand lives. All needing what they did not have. And although Salman no longer had what he wanted most of all, he felt, for a dizzying moment, as if he had everything.
This is the house with twenty doors, he thought. The house with many doors. There was stone dust on his hands, a silt of precious things worked into his skin. Levy and Levy, he thought. Goldsmiths to the Crown. Today there is nothing I would change. Today and tomorrow and tomorrow. Not even if I could.
5
The Love of Stones
The flight is cheap and it feels it. The aeroplane smells of shrimp and dried bananas, as if it has been reassigned from cargo duties. The wings shudder in air pockets over the Baltic. I lie back and shut my eyes and think of anywhere but England.
At six o’clock London time the sun sets across Russia, but in the small hours it is already rising again. Porthole light studs the cabin walls. Time flies at thirty thousand feet. Once the in-flight film ends and the lights go down and there is less by which to keep track, I can imagine years streaming past outside. Thin and cold as cirrus.
It is an illusion, of course. Relativity is not so visible. All the same I keep my eyes on the window, the dark outside, the day beginning. Time interests me. I’m in for the long haul, after all.
