by Tobias Hill
His voice goes soft. ‘This might interest you. I have had this stone for nearly twenty years. The cut is very old, fifteenth century. It is called the Heart of Three Brothers.’
I pick it up and let it rest in my hand. It feels heavy for its size. Like a bullet, although this is an illusion. Diamond has less weight than metal. Across the desk, the merchant sits quite still.
I close my eyes and concentrate on touch. The stone is too warm to be a diamond. I can feel it now. The thermoconductivity is wrong. A diamond draws heat out of its surroundings, giving nothing back. It is a quality that is characteristic of the jewel. Other stones lack that clear, acquisitive iciness. I think of it as a kind of integrity.
I close the stone in my hand, then open the fist again. Letting it go. ‘This is not the heart I am looking for,’ I say. Carefully, I put the jewel back in its box.
Something vicious rears up in Ismet’s eyes. The young man waits behind us. I see the merchant’s fingers jerk. Then his eyes clear, the desire is gone. He begins to move again, as if he has woken from a trance. He shrugs. ‘What a pity. But you see how it is. I deal in real jewels, Miss Sterne. Not an object that has not been known for centuries. I deal in the rock-solid. You want a heart? I can get you a cock with a good heart on the side. The cock will be so good to you all night, you will forget all about your Brethren. Yes? No? Ah, but you are in a hurry. Rami, let her go. Some other time, some other time.’
They wait smiling while I pick up the rubies. Without looking back I walk down the three flights of stairs to the street. By the time I am halfway down the despair begins to rise up inside me and I push it away.
The air is cool in the shade of the entrance hall. I breathe it in, the smell of dingy offices and men. When I am ready I step out into the heat and noise of Istanbul at noon.
* * *
Love of things, love of power.
I see history through the eyes of the Three Brethren. It is the way a pawnbroker might look at things: as if everything has a value and a price. Sometimes these things can seem the same. When John the Fearless was murdered by the child dauphin in 1419, France gained as little as Burgundy lost. The kingdom acquired some time, the dukedom lost its duke. And dukes are easy to replace. Cheaper than great jewels.
But of course they are not the same, value and price. Death is always extraordinary. I wonder if his wife would have given the Brethren to have John Valois back. I know I would not, writing five hundred and seventy-nine years later. The balance of my desires falls differently. At least, I think, his killing made sense, in a time when death was terrifying in its senselessness. In England, apothecaries prescribed powdered ruby for diseases of the heart. In Dijon, the salt merchants wore emeralds to protect themselves from plague. Pressed pomanders against their mouths, like fists.
An ordinary, extraordinary death. I am trying to see it lovelessly now, only in terms of price. The duke was replaceable. The jewel was not. When John Valois was killed with four strokes of an axe, Burgundy wasn’t left without an heir. The duchy passed to John’s son, Philip, who in time became known as ‘the Good’.
Philip learnt from his father’s death. If he thought of adding to his territory, he kept the idea close to his heart. More than his father or son, he was a patient man. Over the years, the third of the Valois dukes built up Burgundy into the greatest of duchies. Philip made his state a kingdom in waiting, and he did this by doing nothing. While England and France emptied their treasuries to pay for their wars, Philip waited in Dijon. Counting his banked strengths. The rubies and diamonds, wine and salt. The molars of elephants in their roots of gold.
In the year his father died, the young heir had an inventory made of his father’s estate. The document runs to over a hundred pages. Its vellum sheets are still white along the spine, like milk. In the underlit rooms of an archive in Beaune, I transcribe Item XXIII:
A very good and rich clasp, adorned in the middle with a very big and great diamond, pointed, and around this are iii good and big square balass rubies called the iii brethren, set in openwork, and iii very big and fine pearls between the said balasses. On which clasp there hangs a very big and fine pearl shaped like a pear.
A decade later the shoulder-knot is described as ‘My lord’s brooch’, and rests alongside ‘the largest balas-ruby in France’. Philip possessed the Brethren until his death in 1467, when the jewel passed to his own son, Charles the Bold, the Foolhardy, last Valois duke of Burgundy.
Charles had a love of order and a hatred of women. His skin was exceptionally white, like vellum. He modelled himself on Alexander the Great, son of another Philip, conqueror of Badakshân, and like Alexander he left no certain heir when he was killed in battle.
Conrad Stolle, a German parson, once heard Charles the Foolhardy say ‘that there were only three lords in the world, one in Heaven, that is God; one in Hell, that is Lucifer; and one on earth, that will be himself.’
His jeweller, Gerard Loyet, was a great artist – his gold statuette of Charles kneeling with a crystal reliquary is a masterpiece. Loyet reset the Brethren several times, but it always retained its basic form. On one bill, Loyet is paid £14 for ‘an ornament of three great guns arranged in a triangle and adorned with three large balas rubies in lieu of flints, with great flames of gold shooting out all around like the sun’.
For eight years after Philip’s death, the duchy of Burgundy was richer and more powerful than any kingdom in Europe. It encompassed Belgium, Luxembourg and half of Holland to the north, and much of both Switzerland and France. It was a medieval empire stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. Charles dressed the imperial part. He rode a black horse in battle harness, covered with cloth of gold and violet. He wore polished steel armour and a martial cloak, clasped with the Three Brethren.
His jewelled hats were renowned. Panigarola watched Charles on his way to church in April 1475, wearing ‘a black velvet hat with a plume of gold loaded with the largest balas rubies and diamonds and with large pearls, some good ones pendent, and the pearls and gems were so closely packed that one could not see the plume, though the first branch of it was as long as a finger’.
Charles’s obsessions were political power and material wealth. Jewels were the essence of both. He took them everywhere he went – to churches, feasts and battlefields – like talismans. His wealth included twelve gold basins, tapestries of the conquests of Alexander the Great, a sword with a hilt of unicorn horn, birds modelled out of scented Cypriot clay in six silver cages, and a hanging embroidered with a thousand flowers. Aconites and borage, convolvulus and iris and narcissus.
And most of all, he owned stones. By the time of its downfall, Burgundy possessed three of the finest diamonds in the world. The flawless centrepiece of the Brethren called the Heart of Three Brothers. The wine-yellow stone of one hundred and thirty-seven and a half carats known in some centuries as the Tuscan and in others as the Florentine; and a jewel of a hundred and six carats, one half of which became known as the Sancy and which, centuries after the fall of Burgundy, was cut glistening from its hiding place in the stomach of de Sancy’s most faithful servant.
The fall of Burgundy began in 1476. Without warning, with no plot or premonition, the balance of power swung away from the dukedom, and it never came back.
Nothing angered Charles like the rise of the Swiss city states. For years, Basel and Berne had carried on running battles against the greater force of their western enemy. Enraged by their independence, the Duke began to plan outright war. He set out by besieging the castle of Grandson on Lake Neuchâtel. When the few hundred Bernese defenders surrendered they were all drowned, or hanged on the walnut trees by the water’s edge.
Charles was fastidious in his assembly of armies. The knights of Burgundy were well dressed and well drilled, and their spectacle was backed up with all the force money could buy – four-barrelled cannon, English longbowmen, Italian free-lancers. The greatest weakness of Burgundy was Charles himself, whose atrocities and arrogant adv
ances united the Swiss into an army larger and better supplied than that of the Foolhardy Duke.
A few miles from Grandson, the Burgundians met the Swiss forces. The spectacle of the duchy turned out to be greater than its substance. Outnumbered and disorganised, the Burgundians were routed almost before fighting had begun. Retreating in disarray, the Duke left behind all his tents and possessions – bronze guns and Spanish swords, the armour of warhorses with their colander eyes, tapestries of ancient wars, the ducal seals and pennants; and Charles’s chests of jewels. The Sancy, the Tuscan, the Three Brethren.
In the broken tents, a Swiss foot soldier found one of Charles’s famous, ludicrous hats. It was plumed with ostrich feathers and tipped with a ruby spike. But the soldier threw it away, saying he wouldn’t swap it for a good helmet.
The spoils of Grandson were one of the greatest booties in history – comparable to that of Alexander when he defeated the Great King of Persia. It is the only time the life of Charles the Bold really echoed the grandeur of his predecessor.
For a year Charles fought on, losing more disastrously each time. Finally, at Nancy in 1477, the Burgundians were broken, scattered and slaughtered in their thousands. It was days before the body of Charles was found among the dead.
The agreement of the Swiss was to hold the booty in common, and for any profits of sale to be shared among them. But the cities were not rich, the jewels were like nothing they had seen before, and the hands they passed through were very numerous. Stone by stone, the greatest treasures of the Burgunderbeute were lost, stolen and broken up, sold on the black markets of Europe and Asia.
But there is a record of the Three Brethren. In the year Charles the Bold died and for twenty-seven years afterwards, it was held by the Magistrates of Basel and Berne. In 1477 the Bernese had a miniature watercolour made of their booty.
It is the earliest picture of the jewel that survives. In the miniature it is curiously inert, a pendulum weight hung motionless from a plain wooden backing. It is an object of value, not an ornament. Its diamond remains unworn by the common people. The Swiss were merchants, not dukes, after all. They had no desire for crown jewels: only for money. The Three Brethren was put up for sale. It was a generation before anyone could afford to buy it.
* * *
It is a dead-end street where Ismet has his business. A boy hauls black sacks from a kitchen service door, and the smell of rot gets into my mouth and stays on my skin. This isn’t what I’m looking for, I think; and in thinking it I sound like someone else. Someone angrier, my sister or some idea of my mother. Is this what you’re looking for? What are you doing, Katharine?
A woman hangs out washing below the jeweller’s offices. No one stands at the windows above her. It is a long way back to the old town and I walk for the sake of it, putting distance between myself and the man with the gun. Trucks groan on the coastal road. Beyond the traffic are drive-in night-clubs and theme bars. Beyond them, the Sea of Marmara. It feels better to be outside, at least. The air is fresher. I breath in its smell of sewage and oil tar, the human mixed with the inhuman, all of it close and familiar.
I dig for the rubies in my pocket. They are something to believe in, a kind of proof. With the rubies I will always have a chance. They can buy me anything, time or information or a plane across the world, my little brethren, my jewels, carried from Colombo to Istanbul inside the folds of my clothing. I think of all the Ismets I have known, with their imitation stones and their mercantile eyes. If I had asked him, I think he would have quoted me a price for myself.
It is hot today, the humidity rising. On the side streets the shopkeepers sit out, worrying at beads, waiting for business. The costermongers sell lottery cards and pretzel bread. Quiet men, thin, waiting to function. Children play football in an empty lot, shouting in Turkish, in English. Pass, pass. Goal! They remind me of home, the men and boys. Of England’s east coast, and its empty seafront towns. There are lives which could have been mine which are not so different from these. Ordinary working, waiting lives. I think of these things only sometimes; and with regret, less than sometimes. Regret is no help to me. There is little I could let myself go back to now.
It is an old city, Istanbul. You can hear it in its names: Constantinople, Byzantium, Chalcedon, each built over the last, roofs broken down into foundations, subways into tombs. A city of cities, as much as a metropolis of people. Untouched by the Second World War. By the next junction there is a dusty shopfront displaying calligraphy brushes, plastic flowers, a scroll with the characters Ah, Love! written in bold sweeping strokes. Next door is a Mister Donut café. Sixties girl-group music drifts out through the entrance, the Shangri-Las or the Secrets. Plastic décor and plastic music. To myself I can admit that I find it reassuring. The modern world, a relief from the past.
I go in and order coffee and two crullers from one of the women behind the bar. Above the stereo hangs a blue glass eye, small and vacant, a ward against devils. There is an empty table by the door and I sit down and look out. Even in here it is hot. My hair feels longer than I would like it. I tie it up with its own pale braid, feeling the breeze against the back of my neck.
The food comes and I eat it. I’m not hungry but it gives me time to think. I take out my notebooks. The pages are stuffed with flyers for sales and jewellers. There are two auctions this afternoon, twelve lots of lapidaries at the Antik Palace on Spor Road, and a Bazaar of Ottoman Jewels, to be held at the municipal auction rooms in the Covered Market. The Antik Palace lots sound more promising. There are texts concerned with medieval jewels, Oriental and Occidental, nothing I’d bid for. If I go it will be to see who buys. While I remember, I write down the details of the Golden Horn Shipping and Air Corporation. It isn’t much to have, the name of a shipping firm from a soft-porn calendar in the office of a black marketeer. There is never much.
A new track starts up, something old and vinyl-smooth, nothing I recognise. I listen to it while I pay and leave. On the street an old man is selling blackcurrant ice cream from a metal churn. He smiles at me sweetly, like a grandparent. I buy a cone from him and eat it as I walk. The words of the song follow me. They make me think of the Brethren. But then everything does.
Some day, some way, you’ll realise you’ve been blind.
Yes darling, you’re going to need me again,
It’s just a matter of time.
Go on, go on,
Until you reach the end of the line.
But I know you’ll pass my way again.
It’s just a matter of time.
There are two kinds of lapidary. One is a professional, a worker of precious stones. The other is a book, in the same way that a bestiary is a book of animals. At the Antik Palace I walk through the galleries with their Ottoman candlesticks, silver bibelots and meerschaum pipes to buy and take home to Blackburn or Stuttgart. Upstairs the atmosphere is dryer. The sale is already under way, the auctioneer taking bids on the expensive volumes of Leonardus’s Speculum Lapidum and Emmanuel’s Precious Stones of the Jews of Curaçao.
No one is making a killing here. There are too many antiquaries and not enough desire. The main buyer is a money-fat woman, western Turkish rather than Middle Eastern, with a face like Henry the Eighth. The last lot of the day is at four-thirty and I bid against her, gauging her interest. She puts down her hand and frowns at me, as if I have interrupted a private pleasure. For $60 plus export tax I’m left with an obscure study of the Tudor crown jewels. The auctioneer smiles with faint commiseration.
Downstairs the shop is closing. I go out by the back door. The Antik Palace service yard has walls topped with broken glass, brown, green and white, as if the owners are drinking their way to security. The air tastes of soot and on Spor Road my head aches with it, and with the need to drink. There is only the calendar company to visit. Part of me eases at the expectation of failure. The clean break of another dead-end day. I stand at the kerb, waiting for the moment when I find I have given up.
Rush-hour traffic hoot
s at the stoplights. I walk through it to the nearest taxi. The driver’s free hand and cigarette tap rhythms on the door as he waits for green. I give him the address from Ismet’s office and he nods and I get in. He is younger than me, graceful in the shoulders and hips, with a moustache grown too thick to hide bad teeth. We crawl south towards the Karaköy district. Old Galata, the ghetto of merchants.
As we get nearer the docks the streets become quieter. Two gaunt young men sit in rotting armchairs. The car coasts past warehouses and plank-fronted building sites. There are fewer apartment buildings here, fewer windows that might belong to homes. Less care and human brightness. Along the waterfront are thirties administrative buildings. Now they are full of cargo companies, their windows piled with fake Ming vases, chandeliers, glittering arrays of bathroom fittings. The crown jewels of Kemankes Road.
The Golden Horn Shipping and Air Corporation shares a building with two other freight concerns. Across the strait, Asian Istanbul is faded by smog. Ferry horns echo up from the Bosphorus. I pay the taxi driver and cross a small car park to the company entrance.
Conditioned air curtains the doorway. Inside, weeping figs shrivel in the cold. There is a lone receptionist with the hard face of a retired air hostess. Behind her is a portrait of a businessman, all smiles. Two guards wait at the far end of the lobby. Their guns are prominent, machine pistols, the holsters pushed forward around their hips.
‘Yes?’ The receptionist is looking up at me. She doesn’t smile. The portrait smiles for her.
‘Golden Horn Shipping?’
‘Yes.’ She hardly pronounces the ‘y’. The vowel has no sound at all.
‘I have some goods to be shipped.’
‘What goods?’ Her hands and face are tanned a chemical brown, though there is paler flesh on the right wrist and the wedding finger: the colour must be natural. I try to imagine what kind of ring it is that she doesn’t wear.