The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  ‘Why not? It is only a jar.’

  ‘We would be better to wait.’

  ‘For what?’

  And Daniel said nothing, only shrugged and stepped back. Not stopping his brother, then or later. Not asking himself, yet, if he could. He watched Salman set the cleaver flat against the vessel. There was an excitement in his eyes, and also something darker, prefigured. Daniel could see it faintly, like the shadows of cataracts.

  Avidity. It was that he stepped back from. Not Salman, who righted the vessel, steadied it, and split it open.

  * * *

  I picture the Brethren. Not the shoulder-knot of Burgundy, but the stones which gave the jewel its name. Spinels from Persian Badakshân, on the banks of the Shignân. Three stones as big as wishes.

  In some paintings they are almost black, or it may be that the pigment of the paint itself has darkened over centuries. In others they are thick red, like a bottle-depth of Burgundy. They stand out as flat blocks of colour. Their numerical arrangement holds the eye. It is unusual in jewellery to have three equal stones with none predominant. Three is an uneasy number. It suggests cabals, talismans, trinities.

  I can see them with my eyes shut. Their plaques are held by hooks and wishbones of gold. They reflect the light without catching it. They stain it red and violet.

  The table cut is a simple way of working precious stone. I think of it as more primitive than the cabochon, because it echoes the natural facets of a crystal in a way that a dome does not. It is effective because it has a minimum of artifice. It is all the Brethren rubies need, because they are beautiful in themselves. There are people who say the beauty of jewels arises from their rarity, as if the sky or the sea becomes ugly or mundane with familiarity Some things are intrinsically beautiful. When the balases lay on the lapidary’s bench like raw meat waiting to be cut, they were already desirable. Go further. When they were still underground, the aluminium oxide reacting with the rogue atom of magnesium, they were already precious. It took five hundred, a thousand years for them to grow. I imagine them underfoot. The soulless lives of stones. It takes a long time to make the perfect jewel.

  I follow the trail of the balas rubies. They changed hands quickly, in a way the complete knot rarely did. I have traced the possessors as well as I can, because sometimes great stones return to the places they have been. From this distance of time, the desire involved in the transactions is lost. There is an illusion of loathing in the way the stones are passed so rapidly from hand to hand, as if they were somehow dangerous; though no part of the Three Brethren has been cursed, not at any time I am aware of. Among old jewels it is unusual in its curselessness.

  After the death of the last great Mogul emperor, the balases are invisible for more than half a century. It is 1762 before I find their owner again, and then only as he is in the act of giving them away. His name is Mohammed Ali Khan. His title is Nawab of Arcot, Nabob of the East India Company of England, Sovereign of the Carnatic.

  He wraps the Brethren stones in grey silk. He is sending them to England as a gift. A small gift, a gesture from one king to another. He sits in a long room, verandahs facing east and west, but without servants. The palace is quiet, and he is arranging the jewels himself. They are more than he can afford to give. More than he has ever been able to afford.

  There is a line of sweat where his turban presses against his forehead. It is dark by the time he has finished his chore. Mohammed Ali Khan unwinds his headcloth. For the first time he notices that his hair is going white. There are thick strands among the darker curls, tough as the hair of a dead man.

  He stops, hands raised to his head, listening. There are people speaking English outside the door, creditors from the Company, and he turns away, closing his eyes. From beyond the verandahs comes the wordless sound of the sea. He listens to it until the voices are all gone.

  Mohammed reminds me of Charles the Bold of Burgundy. As human beings they are not alike, but there are similarities in the way they dealt with power. I look at images of the last Valois duke, and know that if I reached out to touch him he would flinch away from my hand. Whereas Mohammed would take it. He would press my fingers against his protuberant, sensual lips. He is a man who lived for the sensation of touch. His skin has been polished smooth by lovers.

  He is a warm man, and Charles was cold. But they were alike because they had the same weakness. They were both men obsessed with the appearance of strength, even at the expense of the strength itself. Mohammed loved the physical weight of power, the weapons and the Mogul jewels. In paintings, his hands are always full. He wears bracers of pearls around his biceps and daggers in his sash. A diamond medallion around his neck and a scimitar in each fist. In one painting by Willison his sword hand rests on a long footman’s sabre: A steel spike curves up from the inversed hilt. Mohammed’s fingers curve gently around it.

  Charles wore jewelled hats and steel. The Nawab of Arcot dressed in feathers and silk. There is the portrait of Mohammed in white, an apparition on a blood-red carpet. Mohammed in cream, a pearly king in curly slippers. The one and only truly original Mohammed, up to his neck in rich thick pink.

  He wrapped himself in silks as if he was the jewel. He saw himself as part of India’s new royalty. Not a puppet ruler, but an ally and equal of the kings of England. The East India Company thought of him differently. In the letters of the Army of Acquisition, Mohammed is discussed as a client or an employee. An expendable commodity. A temp.

  It was the Company that put Mohammed where he was, and the Company that finished him. In 1751 the succession of Arcot had been divided. The French had backed the more legitimate candidate, and so the English – by choice as well as necessity – had supported the more energetic usurper. Mohammed gained his throne with the help of East India Company bayonets, and from that beginning he was up to his neck in more than pink silk. The Company men were all around him, stifling him with their suggestions and propositions, their ends and means.

  The last Valois duke had ruled a state with the riches to support him. Mohammed did not. Arcot was a coastal province, a long stretch of land south of the Krishna river. It had been torn by centuries of fighting between the Muslims and Marâthâs, the French and the English, the French and the Muslims, and it could not afford its new Nawab. When Arcot couldn’t buy Mohammed what he needed, he turned to the Company.

  They gave him what he wanted. They lent him silver and soldiers, as the occasion demanded. Their interest rates began at a competitive thirty-six per cent, moving down to twenty per cent as their client’s resources ran thin.

  Half a century before the Europeans really got their hooks into Asia, Mohammed was a victim of foreign debt. As the interest on his loans remained unpaid, the sums involved became fantastically great. They dominated the correspondences of the East India Company for years. Faced with bankruptcy, Mohammed tried to bribe the Council of Madras with Arcot silver rupees. When that didn’t work, he sent outspoken complaints to George the Third. The young king sent back small gifts and cordial assurances. High hopes but no help. The two men never met. They were worlds apart.

  The letters Mohammed sent to George are in the Oriental Rooms of the British Library. They are still contained in the Nawab’s mailbag. It is made of pink silk. It is tied shut with gold tinsel.

  In the paintings – and there are many – he always looks amused, tolerant. He is almost smiling, almost not smiling. It is the expression of a boxer posing at a photo call. Whatever his sensualities or weaknesses, Mohammed was not a gentle man. In politics and war he was as vicious as the English who supported him. If he had not been capable of violence, he would not have survived. Mohammed once had an enemy decapitated, his head tied to war camels, dragged four times around his city walls, placed in a box and sent to the Imperial court for the Emperor’s pleasure. In the studios of his painters he is a Prince Naseem. The truly original Mohammed Ali. Swords out, gloves up.

  He died old and powerless, but in the clothes of a king. He had everyth
ing he wanted. By then he had already sent the Brethren stones away. A small gift between equals, from one king to another. A box of jewels sent with four ambassadors on the Company ship Valentine.

  Mohammed’s presents were so superb that when they reached Buckingham Palace, the King of the first British Empire was almost offended by their opulence. Queen Charlotte liked them better, and she wore them for the rest of her life. The jewels lit up her fine, broad features, echoes of her mulatto ancestry. She gained more from Mohammed’s hopeless gesture than the Nawab ever did. His packages of silk contained diamonds the size of apricot stones, ropes of riverine pearls, and three old balases: A trio of the most spectacular flat almandine rubies, matched one for the next in the superiority of their weight and water.

  The Brethren stones had returned to the rulers of Europe. When Charlotte died, Mohammed’s gifts passed to her daughter, Mary Louise Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. A generation later, Mary Louise left them to her own daughter. She was born in 1819, and her name was Victoria Alexandrina Guelph. Her mother called her Drina. She was never amused by the nickname. Even as a child, she signed herself Victoria.

  Queen Victoria was less than five feet tall. Her eyes were fish-like, protuberant, china-blue. There was a stoniness in the way they settled on the world. When she was lost in thought Victoria had a habit of gaping, like a carp.

  Her upper lip was slightly deformed. Her voice was startlingly beautiful, bell-sweet. Her character was hard and clear. She always got what she wanted.

  There is a miniature of her, aged eight, by Plant, in which she herself is a miniature. A porcelain doll, with a brooch portrait on her satin dress. A hall-of-mirrors of smallnesses. She did not grow up certain of any power. There were many claims to the throne of England. It was years before people began to see Victoria as queen-in-waiting.

  She spent her childhood locked away in the crumbling gilt rooms and stale safety of Kensington Palace. It was like being trapped inside a wedding cake. Victoria Guelph grew up to be meticulously honest: but she was also possessive. Avid as only the once poor and suddenly rich can be.

  She lived at the heart of the biggest empire the world has known. It was a place of incomparable wealth. It was a time whose poverty was distinguished from that of the Middle Ages only by its veneer of coal dust. The life-expectancy of the working class was twenty-two. People remember Victoria Guelph as a popular queen, but she was as hated as any ruler. By the time of Albert’s death and her retirement from public life in 1861, Victoria had survived three assassination attempts. The third was by John Bean, a hunchbacked boy, who raised a gun to the royal carriage in the Mall. His escape was followed by the arrest and rounding up of every hunchback in London. Victoria’s England was a place and time of extreme richness and brutality.

  The East India Company and its imitators brought her jewels like the heads of the vanquished. From India, the Army of Acquisition brought Victoria the Koh-i-Nur and the Timur Ruby – the jewels that Aurungzeb had once shown to the merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier. From Ceylon, she received the three-hundred-and-thirteen-carat cat’s-eye of Kandy, which remains the largest stone of its kind on the surface of the earth. Victoria was sent the Great Cross of the South from Australia – a monstrous, naturally fused mass of nine pearls; and black opals from Oceania, which she distributed to her family and friends, like sweeties.

  She loved stones, and rubies above all else. She always got what she loved. Albert’s wedding present to her was a suite of opals and diamonds to his own design. By 1855 she was wearing so many rings on every fat finger she could hardly hold a knife and fork. Over her life, she spent £158,887 on gems at Garrard’s alone.

  She was a little woman, with cold eyes and a sweet voice. A cold, sweet woman. I am not interested in her personally. What draws me to her is that she remade the Three Brethren. I would like to know how she did that. Three hundred years after Bloody Mary and Elizabeth wore the knot on their breasts, Victoria did the same. She inherited the rubies. The pearls she came to possess along with the throne, and those set in the crown today bear no relation to the original Queen Elizabeth’s Earrings in either colouration or quality. These trails had come together again. Which leaves only one stone to follow, and that is the diamond.

  There is almost no trail. I have nearly no story to tell. The diamond lost by the Prince of Herrings was found by the Queen of England, but the way it travelled is invisible, like a brilliant dropped into water. For a long time, when I began to look for the Brethren, I believed the old diamond had been burned in the far north of Holland, or broken and cut into anonymous stones. I have spent five years finding its one reference, buried in the fading copperplate scrawl of a goldsmith’s assistant.

  The question I ask myself now is not whether the diamond survived. It isn’t where Victoria acquired the stone, although that would be interesting and, perhaps, useful to know. I wonder sometimes whether the East India Company brought it to her, like a head on a plate, or whether it was another heirloom, like her grandmother’s Indian rubies.

  I have followed the jewel through four hundred and forty years and across two continents. It isn’t enough. It means nothing, because Victoria Guelph is the last owner of the Brethren I can trace. After her, the jewel is never seen again. The question I ask myself is not who brought the Brethren to Queen Victoria, but who stole it from her.

  In 1842 an autobiography was published by George Fox. It was an account of Fox’s career as a jeweller and shopman. George had spent his life working for the Crown Goldsmiths, Rundell and Bridge’s. Rundell’s was the most successful jewellers of its time, but in the decade Victoria assumed the throne that time had already passed. Under the shadow of St Paul’s, the shop on Ludgate Hill became quieter every season. It closed down the year Fox wrote his exposé.

  Fox’s account is a piece of Victorian street literature, eccentrically written, mildly scandalous, veering between painstaking factual precision with regard to stones and a degree of poetic licence in its dealings with people. The original is bound in leather the colour of verdigris with marbled endpapers. It smells of tar.

  The company’s founder was Philip Rundell. ‘He was a first-rate judge of the quality of diamonds and jewels of every kind,’ Fox wrote.

  No man nor lady ever felt more strongly that love of stones that led Mr Rundell to make such a noise in the world and to amass such riches. It might well be said no plain man nor lady, since of all our customers it was only Her Most Gentle Majesty the young Queen which showed a hunger for good stones like that of Mr Rundell. Indeed, this coming together of like minds might be seen in Her Majesty’s commissions to Rundell’s successors, which were for the most private and precious jewels, and which continued to arrive until the last days of the company. It was Rundell’s that set the plain stone picked from a Scotch beach by Prince Albert, to be worn at the fair and ample bosom of his Queen, and Rundell’s that made the brooches of sapphire and diamond to Her Majesty’s own design for the Royal Wedding. And moreover, it was Rundell’s who worked the finest and most romantic ornament worn in private by Her Majesty, and since wickedly stolen. This was a triangle of simple gold set with great espinela rubies and pearls good in parts. And at the centre of this work was a most superb and ancient jewel, cut to a point, in the style of what is known in the Trade as a Writing Diamond.

  * * *

  The jar split open. It broke with the crock of an animal skull in the butcher’s souk. It lay between the brothers like an accident.

  Salman had brought the cleaver down so heavily that it had struck through the pottery into the kitchen table, the square front tip of the blade adding its scar to the wood. Now he tugged it loose, set it flat beside him, and leant forwards.

  The earthenware had broken inwards, thick halves filling with their own fragments. Before he noticed anything else, Salman saw that there were two fingerprints in the fired clay. They were thin, smudged where the potter had reached the wet mouth upwards from its own interior.

  He ben
t to look at the paired impressions. The air was furred with the reek of animal rot. He stepped back from its poisonous intensity and dry-retched, once, twice. He wiped his mouth with his hand and cursed in Arabic. ‘That dog Ibrahim. This is no gift. It smells like shit from a plague pit.’

  ‘Stale air.’ Daniel picked up the cleaver. ‘Nothing more.’ With its dark edge, he nudged apart the jar’s broken halves.

  ‘We should burn it.’

  His voice was soft, the breathing shallow. ‘If you wanted to be so cautious, you shouldn’t have tried to chop the table in half.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘You should have read the inscription. A plague on all fat Jewish brothers, it might say. Too late for you.’

  ‘I told you to shut up.’ The water jar stood under the kitchen window. Salman went over to it and splashed his hands and mouth, rubbing moisture into the back of his neck. He felt edgy, and he wondered if there was a desert storm coming. Sunlight fell through the shutters and patterned his skin.

  ‘You know what I think? I think Mehmet was never allowed back. The marshlanders killed him as soon as I was gone. And now the curs are trying to kill us. This is their idea of revenge.’ There were aloes in tall pots beside him, old and overgrown. Rachel kept them indoors for their sap, smoothing it on her cooking burns. In return she fed the succulents leftover water, blood, fish and bone. There was little to spare but they didn’t need much. The plants poked at Salman’s legs and he slapped them away angrily, like dogs.

  Daniel ignored him. Between the mouth and the base of the jar lay a rubble of pottery and decayed wrappings. Silk, muslin, fur. The layers of cloth and skins disintegrated as he touched them. A handful of stones had rolled together at their centre, like eggs in a nest.

  There were half a dozen, all smooth with facets or curves. To Daniel they looked worked. He knew very little about stones. He saw that one had been shattered, by Salman’s knife or the tumbling of the pebbles themselves. The chips and grains of it winked. They were green as the cells in the flesh of a lime.