The Property of a Gentleman: One House. Many secrets. Page 8

  He nodded. ‘Pride – yes, the most difficult quality to deal in.’ Then he added: ‘What do you handle mostly – pictures?’

  I wondered if he said it to keep polite conversation going, or if he wanted to know how expert I might be in something that would be of particular importance here and now. ‘Ceramics. It was my decision. I stayed on the Front Counter until an opening came in the ceramics department. My father wrote from Mexico to Vanessa and offered to pay for me to go and study art history in Italy for a few years, but I was already hooked on bits of Meissen and Chelsea and tin-glazed earthenware. It must have disappointed him – but he never said anything. What I’d really like to do is Oriental ceramics, but that’s very specialist, and there was no place for me in that department. I suppose everyone who gets interested in ceramics ends up by going back to the Oriental things – and if they’re really hooked, I suppose they’ll spend their lives searching for Attic vases. Oh ... I’m sorry ...’

  He inclined his head, as if what I had been saying had absorbed him, which I doubted. He had his own style of good manners. ‘Sorry? ... why?’

  ‘I’m talking shop. Once you get touched by the mania you’re apt to run on, forgetting that other people aren’t as crazy about the subject as yourself. Gerald thinks it’s the worst form of bad manners. Fishing, he says ... trying to smell out if someone has something they might be persuaded to put up for sale.’

  He laughed aloud, a spontaneously genuine sound that caused Gerald and the Condesa to raise their heads, and I could see a faint flush on the Condesa’s pale olive skin. She didn’t much like me, I thought, and it made me feel better about my own burst of jealousy of her.

  ‘Gerald, your protégée here has just told me she’s been fishing, and that you wouldn’t approve. Shall we make her fishing worth while, Gerald? Do you think she’d like to see La Española?’

  Gerald leaned forward. ‘It is here, then?’

  ‘Of course. Where else would it be? It will stay here now as long as it exists or the house exists. Of course I won’t be alive when it happens, but I wonder if the curse will finally leave La Española when this house tumbles before the bulldozers, or gives up to the weather.’

  Gerald was controlling his excitement, but I knew him well enough to know it was there. ‘I would very much like to see it myself, Robert. You surely know, don’t you, that the Gemological Institute of America has it listed as “present whereabouts unknown, but believed still to be in the possession of the Birkett family”.’

  ‘The Birketts don’t possess it – they’re possessed by it.’

  The Condesa gestured impatiently. ‘Roberto, you make too much of this silly superstition. If you were determined, it could be sold tomorrow. Many people would prefer to have La Española in the bank than money.’ She slipped the embroidery frame into its bag. ‘Come then, show Mr Stanton. If it is never to leave this house, it may be his only chance.’ She got to her feet, and Gerald rose also. She had neatly cut me out by making this showing of what they all called La Española for Gerald’s benefit and pleasure, not for mine. But it was my arm Askew took as he headed towards the door.

  He led us to the fourth room of those which opened directly off the great hall, opposite the dining-room. There were wide passages between the rooms probably leading to the other square bays of the house, but no lights burned there, and they seemed dusty and disused. The room we came to was panelled like the rest, in a severe, beautiful, linenfold. One wall had had shelves built against it at a later date, and most of this was filled with thick boxes – not books – bound in identical red leather, with dates stamped in gold that had dulled with the years; they probably were estate records, I thought, and household papers filed there for convenience. And then at some date in this century the binding had stopped and ordinary box files, the inexpensive kind found in any stationer’s shop, filled the lower shelves. There were two desks in the room – a large carved one whose handsome bowed-legged chair had its back to the fireplace, and another, close by one of the red-curtained windows, a humbler, roll-topped one, rather battered, as if it had once served a school-room. It had a swivel chair whose cushion was torn and shedding its stuffing. The big desk had only a blotter on its leather surface, an unused blotter. What went on at the roll-top no one could tell; it was closed.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Askew said. He left us and hurried off across the hall to open a green-baize door under the staircase, revealing what seemed to be a service passage. ‘Tolson, are you there, Tolson?’ We heard their voices, and a minute later Askew was back with us. All the dogs had made the short journey with us, and they all crowded into the room as Askew came back. I had a brief glimpse of Tolson’s figure in the passage; I thought there was disapproval in the stare he gave to us, then he gave a kind of shrug, and turned back.

  The room was lighted only by a single lamp on the big desk; the coals of a dying fire glowed in the grate. ‘This is really Tolson’s room,’ Askew said. ‘He does most of his work here.’ He nodded towards the telephone on an oak stool beside the roll-top desk. While he spoke his hand was feeling for a known spot at the side of the carved mantel; then he went and touched another place in the panelling itself.

  ‘Such elementary precautions,’ he said, ‘but Tolson insists on them. I had to have him turn the alarm system off.’ He had opened a small door cut in the panelling itself, its dimensions fitted exactly to a natural division of the panel, so that no unnatural line showed. ‘My father had this little cubbyhole made after La Española became too famous and troublesome.’ He fumbled again within the cavity, and a light came on, showing a velvet-lined interior behind a thick glass screen. Wordlessly, the three of us watching moved closer.

  It was a blue-white stone, roughly octahedral in shape, about an inch and a half, at its widest part. It was touched at four points by simple cage grips, and strung on a gold chain of medium weight. It seemed as if only its natural planes had been polished, and the stone itself relatively uncut, and yet with only these large surfaces revealed, the refraction of light from its heart, the inner facets, was of extraordinary brilliance. It seemed too awesomely big to be a gemstone. There was something almost crude and stunning in its size, and yet it lay there so quietly, so innocently on its black velvet cushion. Askew swung open the glass screen, and gently lifted the cushion out. Even with that simple movement the light sprang from it as if it were a living flame. He lifted the massive thing on its chain and swung it gently.

  ‘La Española – the Spanish Woman,’ he said softly. He watched it himself as if moved in its pendulum swing. ‘Oddly, it was the serving-boy who had been in Spain with the second Earl who gave it its name. He spoke Spanish rather badly. When the Countess came to Thirlbeck from Philip’s court she and the jewel which came as part of her dowry were called the same thing. How crude and barbaric she must have thought the manners of this household.’

  Gerald leaned closer. ‘May I ...?’ He gestured, and Askew slipped the gold chain over his hand. Gerald took the velvet cushion and carried both to the desk where the light fell directly upon it.

  ‘I wondered if I would ever see it again,’ he mused, turning the great stone in his fingers. ‘I remember the time in the Thirties when your father sent it to Hardy’s for auction and there were no buyers.’

  ‘Yes – and there were lines of unemployed outside on the day of the sale protesting about rich earls with diamonds to play with while they were hungry.’

  ‘You were fighting in Spain then,’ Gerald said, without ever looking away from the stone.

  ‘I was, but I still heard about it – not from my father, of course. He was right to try to get rid of it, but it wasn’t the time to sell, and the reputation of the wretched thing went before it. So “believed still to be in the possession of the Birketts” is all too true!’

  ‘Yes, but that same book on diamonds from the Gemological Institute is studded with entries of famous stones which give their history and simply end “present whereabouts unknown”, or �
��the such and such bank deny knowledge of the stone”.’ All the time he spoke he was bent over the gem, turning it, moving it in his fingers, apparently fascinated, as I was, by the uncountable rays of light thrown back from its great heart. ‘You might have taken it somewhere and had it cut into small stones and disposed of. None of the buyers of the stones would have known they were buying part of the reputation of La Española.’ He glanced up enquiringly at Askew. ‘Somewhere about two hundred carats it runs to, doesn’t it?’

  ‘The last jeweller who examined it gave it a few more – but significantly he admired, sighed, and shook his head. He made no offer. That was after the Terpolini affair. That really was the kiss of death. There had been stories before, but only stories. After two attempts to steal it went wrong, the underworld began to believe the stories, and they’ll probably make no more attempts until the next generation comes along to laugh at the superstition. With the Terpolini affair the publicity was enormous. After fifteen years people still remember. So that entry “believed still to be in the possession of the Birkett family” is right because there’s been no chance to make it otherwise. Here it lies, in its primitive little cave, uninsured, because I can’t afford the insurance, guarded by nothing more than a few electric wires and alarms, with a small emergency generator to use in the event of a power failure. No one to guard it except Tolson and the dogs. It would be absurdly easy to steal, except that no one wants to touch it. No one will touch it.’

  ‘Why not ?’ I asked.

  Askew looked at me. ‘Ah, yes – fifteen years would be too long for you. What does a child care about diamonds? You see … the story still circulates that a curse was put upon this stone. Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? No one really believes in curses, do they? And yet no one has come near it in fifteen years.’

  ‘Two hundred carats,’ Gerald mused. ‘Worth ... well, with a stone of this quality, blue-white, flawless ... at about four or five thousand pounds a carat. There’s a million pounds, and its value rising every day as money devalues. Properly cut, it could make two or three big gems, and a lot of smaller ones. Could actually be worth much more, even with the carats lost in the cutting. And no one wants to steal it, much less buy it.’

  ‘That’s about it, Gerald.’ Now Askew touched it, his long fingers tentative, slightly reluctant in the movement. ‘So here she lies, poor neglected, lonely little bitch. She was meant to shine on the neck or hand of a beautiful woman, and here she lies, closed in her dark little tomb, unseen, unloved. La Española ... the Spanish Woman. She brought it to the Birketts, and it seems she means to keep it for ever.’

  ‘How so?’ I was now spellbound by the sight of the gem, feeling it a living thing, almost.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘was intended as a portion of her dowry, the Spanish Woman’s. A dowry assembled in a hurry for her by Philip the Second, because her family could not provide one. He wanted to send her to her English husband with something substantial as evidence of good faith. The rest – the money – was to follow. It had just come into his possession, and he had it polished just a little, and mounted virtually in its rough state. That, of course, makes it more valuable now. An antique cut, and the inevitable loss of parts of the stone would have brought down its size and shape. As it is, it’s ready for all that a modern cutter can take from it. Well, it might have been her dowry, intended for her husband and his family, but she never let it go – the little Spanish girl. About seventeen, they think she was when she came here. Old enough for those times, I suppose. Then Elizabeth’s men took her husband away, and beheaded him, and she was alone, except for the child she carried. She was in mortal danger, and she must have known it.’

  His voice now had taken on the tone it had had upstairs as he had gazed out over the silvered tarn, a distant tone as if he repeated the tale he had gone over many times in his mind, a part of him. ‘The story goes that each day in calm weather she would have the serving boy who had been her husband’s favourite row her on the tarn. He must have grown attached to her, though I suppose they could exchange few enough words. They say she wore the jewel always, a kind of talisman because it had come from the hands of Philip, whom I suppose must have already seemed a saint to her. They say she waited endlessly for word from him – instructions as to what she must do, where she must go. She would have married anyone he had commanded – but I can’t help thinking she must have, more than anything, longed to be summoned back to Spain. So far as we know, Philip sent no word. She just waited – waited for her child to be born, and waited to know if it would be a boy, and therefore Earl of Askew, displacing her Protestant brother-in-law. The brother-in-law, another Robert Birkett by name, evidently intended that the child should never be born, and the mother should not survive, to marry another Catholic nobleman in the North, and join two important families. They say ... well, who really knows how it happened, because no one ever wrote it down, and almost four centuries is a long time for a story to twist upon itself.’

  It was odd, how detached he sounded, as if he weren’t speaking of his own family. ‘They say, though, that he waited for a calm, but misty day – October. The tarn can be totally visible one minute, totally obscured the next. When she was out on the lake he rowed after her, taking a younger brother with him. The Spanish Woman was not to have a chance to survive, nor the boy with her. She was almost back at the landing stage, here at the shallows at this end near the house when the two boats came together. No one precisely knows what happened, of course. They must first have beaten the boy from the boat, and clubbed him so that he drowned. And then they turned on the Spanish Woman. The story goes that they could hear her cries from the mist, but no one could see what was happening. They wanted the jewel, of course. They couldn’t let her drown and the jewel go with her. She must have struggled fiercely, but the thing was finally taken from her neck. We aren’t certain that this is the original chain, so God knows how brutally they might have treated her to get it. The stories must have varied. You know ... fog distorts sounds so much, and most of the serving people were hugging the kitchen fire that day. But there were gardeners about, and shepherds and herdsmen. The sound had to have reached them. And someone whispered afterwards that he had heard the Spanish Woman’s voice, as if she knew she was finished, without hope for her life or her child’s. And then she shouted what sounded to them like the motto of the Birketts – probably she reverted to Latin, the only language she had in common with anyone in this country. I would think she had mouthed it to herself many times after she was married and sent to England. It’s as wild and aggressive a motto as any untamed Border Lord would wish. The gentler manners and ways were for those in the South then – ’

  ‘The motto?’ I asked.

  ‘“Caveat Raptor” – roughly, “Who Seizes, Beware”. Perhaps she interpreted it as “who takes ...” Did she mean the jewel, her life, the life of her child? Did she even say it? The Earl and his brother said nothing. They swore they were riding towards the other end of the tarn. They heard cries, they said – nothing more. The boat had overturned, and the two had been drowned. But her body was never recovered, and they had the jewel. The new Earl simply said she had not worn it that day. No one believed that part of it, but they began to believe that the boy had not been drowned at all. He survived, a living witness, and perhaps the origin of the stories that began to fly about.’

  Askew shrugged. ‘One wonders if this part of it isn’t pure fantasy. They say the boy was hunted, but never found. His family was put off the estate, forced to seek work in Carlisle, where most of them starved. The story fattened, though, and more began to attach to a curse on the jewel, especially when the Earl broke his neck after a drunken tumble on the stairs. He had been, they said, displaying the jewel to one of Elizabeth’s council members who was riding through from Scotland. By this time the jewel itself was being talked about as La Española, and they were trying to forget the Spanish Woman herself.’

  Askew leaned back against the desk. ‘They didn’t succee
d in burying her, did they? Here we are, still talking about her. The story goes that the lad who had been with her in the boat that day lived still in this valley as a fugitive, raiding the Earl’s cattle and sheep, and waiting for the day of vengeance. He didn’t have it. After the Earl’s death, his brother, the fourth Earl, died peacefully in his bed, but not before this house had been raided and the jewel, along with anything else portable – sheep, cattle, plate – and the young women – had been taken by Borderers. It was the last time the Borderers ever came this way. The odd thing was that the leader of the raid never got beyond the limit of this valley. When they were through the worst part of Brantwick, and the way out seemed easy, his horse stumbled and rolled on him. There seemed no reason for it. He was left there alone to die, and none of his raiding party would touch the jewel. There was blood from his pierced lungs on La Española when it came back to Thirlbeck.’

  Now I could make myself touch it on its velvet cushion. Somehow I had expected it to feel warm, as if it had just left the throat of the Spanish Woman, or the hand of the Borderer. ‘Could they really have left something like this with a dying man?’

  ‘So they say. They must have begun to feel pretty frightened of it, and no one really wanted it back at Thirlbeck. They had begun to believe the motto, and the curse ... and the Spanish Woman, whom they wanted to forget, was a permanent legend. In their memories, she never died. Perhaps it was the boy who was with her, or perhaps it was just someone, still a Catholic, who wished her passage to be marked, because she had no grave in consecrated ground. A stone marker appeared by the tarn, with some crude letters on it. As many times as the Earl removed it, it reappeared – it, or another like it. He began to see that he could not lay the ghost, and so he left her monument alone, to let the grass grow up around it, and the winds wipe out its legend. And La Española stayed on. They say that in her old age, Elizabeth herself was offered the jewel by the fourth Earl, as some sort of bribe for favour – you remember she had a passion for jewels. But this one she refused. The family history has it that there were several attempts on it over the years – nothing very serious, and none successful. This is a remote valley. Travel by road was difficult and slow – too slow for thieves. Until the First World War help was easy to come by, and cheap. There were plenty to guard it, in a haphazard sort of way. There was a serious attempt on it in the Twenties, but the thieves took the way out of the valley that you came in by today. At the worst bend, where the road cuts through the birch copse, they went out of control. The car crashed and burned, and they with it. The diamond, of course, survived. Tolson says to this day there are a few scraps of rusted metal with the bracken growing through it, which are the remains of the car. After that, my father lodged it in a safe deposit vault in Manchester. It was there three years before there was an attempt, by tunnelling, on the vaults. Someone from this house must have given them information, because no one but my father was supposed to know where it was. And they were selective. The security guard was thought to be involved, but that was never proved, because he died with them. It was something about the tunnel – what they hadn’t reckoned on was meeting part of the old Roman Wall, which no one knew was there. It collapsed on them on the way out. They had been through a few strong boxes besides ours, but La Española was by far the most valuable part of the haul. It came out covered with dirt, and shining just as ever.’