The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  The passing time the while.

  Mister Levy, back from the palace! he had said, two days after the accident. Are you recovered from the spectacle of the Queen? And Salman had said nothing. Nothing to him, then or since. As if he knew it was nothing or everything, and knew what everything could be, and how far it could take them beyond words.

  My business done and over,

  I hastened back again,

  Like an expecting lover,

  To view it once again.

  He was working on the crown, George saw. Most of it was still unfinished, all sockets and bones. Only the lowest tier was complete. The patterns of flowers and leaves lost in an excess of brilliants.

  He thought of the jewel he had made, working alone, at night. The Three Brethren, Rundell called it. It had been lovely in ways a crown could never be. Its great stones coming together like features into a face. Finding their own balance, as if they had been waiting for one another. I have no reason to feel guilt, he thought. No one should be guilty for having made something so beautiful.

  But this delight was stifled,

  As it began to dawn,

  I found my Casket rifled,

  And all my Treasure gone,

  And all my Treasure gone.

  ‘Very good, William. Very good.’ He reached for his beer, swigged the warm alcohol, coughed it back. When he was settled again he began to pedal, leaning into it. Seeing the stone and nothing else. The wheel quickening.

  The workshop closed at ten. Salman walked away down Haymarket, turning east towards the river. It was a light evening, dank with the smell of summer rain. On the ferries, the watermen and their women were already hanging bunting. It felt as if the city had taken a holiday.

  June had been the month of coronation madness. At Rundell’s, tiara sales had risen tenfold. Outside the Ludgate Hill showrooms, crowds had waited in the rain to see the glass maquette exhibited. Bakeries were doing good business in New Imperial State cakes, rum-soaked and marzipanned. For weeks the Queen’s route had been lined with models of the crown. My crown, Salman thought. At night they shone, gas flares muttering in the wind.

  He followed the river eastwards, unsure whether he was turning home yet, or walking for the sake of it. In the last months he had done this almost every night. It took the place of sleeping. He walked like a man who no longer trusted his dreams. Tonight he felt calm, but often when he did without sleep he found himself thinking of other states of mind. His head gnawing at itself. The city echoed his fear in ways which seemed to him a kind of proof.

  In April, coming through Green Park, he had found a dead monkey under the trees, its belly cut open. Between overturned caravans, the performers of two circuses had been fighting over the prime coronation ground. Two peelers had gone past with a clown between them, his face twisted up with rage.

  A week later, the moon had been eclipsed. A cast of shadow had closed over it as Salman watched from Wapping Stairs. A lighterman had shouted that the Queen was to blame. His voice high, wild with moonlight. When she was crowned, he had said, London would sink into the sea. And then always, every night, there was the sense of being followed. The stories of Spring Heel’d Jack, sold at the newsstands in ten parts. Salman put it out of his mind. Instead he thought of the Queen, taking off her rings. The diamond. Coronation Day.

  The light was going. At Blackfriars, children were combing the mud under the crumbling sewer mouth. Salman turned up Bridge Street, past its handsome crescent. There were more street children around Ludgate Circus, crowding the slow traffic. It made Salman hungry to look at them. He tried to remember the last time he had eaten. The King Lud was still open, and Salman crossed between the carts of coalmen, feeling for his purse.

  ‘Mister – please, Mister …’ The children were following him. One of them pulled at his arm, a girl. He shook her off. At the pavement she reached for him again, and he felt the anger boil up out of nothing. His head drowned out in its busy flood.

  ‘I said whore yourself elsewhere!’ He pushed her away, the wind snatching at his voice. The girl staggered back towards the traffic.

  ‘Mister Levy–’

  It was Martha. Her eyes wide in her dark head. A horse snickered and sidestepped around her, the coalman shouting down unintelligibilities.

  ‘Martha! I am–’ He stepped towards her. His heart running on without him. ‘Oh, forgive me …’

  She came back with her head down. Salman realised he was sweating. He wiped his mouth dry, smelling his own acrid tang. ‘Martha, I’m sorry. I was somewhere else, my mind was on other business. Are you hurt?’

  She shook her head, mournful.

  ‘Did you come to see my brother?’

  ‘Nay.’ Her voice was small. He leaned down to catch it. ‘I need to ask you something.’

  ‘To–? Of course, then. Of course. Will you eat with me? I was about to have supper. Are you hungry, Martha?’

  He sat in the booth and watched her eat. Uncomfortable with the guilt that made him want to make up to her. She used no cutlery, holding the chop delicately, eating round the bone. Too quickly, Salman saw, getting it down while she had the chance. She had bought clothes for herself in the last few weeks, a worn camlet coat over her dress. It made her look older, as if she was growing too quickly into the wheeze of her voice.

  He tried to remember the last time he had looked at anyone properly. Taking the care to see them, as he took care of stones. He wondered if he was changing, and if so, what he was becoming.

  ‘There.’ He cleared his throat, his voice still gruffer than he intended it. ‘I feel better for that. You too. No doubt.’ She ignored him, busy with the last meat and fat. ‘How are your lessons with my brother now?’

  She looked round, as if Daniel might be there. ‘I can read better. The other Mister Levy is showing us how to write.’

  ‘You have a head for letters. Better than mine.’

  She smiled so quickly the expression was gone before he could respond. ‘He says you’ll be leaving. After the crow-nation.’

  ‘Coronation, Martha.’

  ‘Is it true then?’

  ‘We are owed money, it’ll come to us this summer. We’ll put it into a business of our own.’

  She bared her teeth, dug between them, worked out a tassel of meat. Observing him. ‘Will you be jewellers like Rundell’s?’

  ‘Better than them. Bigger, once we pick up steam.’

  She nodded as though she believed it. ‘Then I can work for you. I can come along.’

  ‘Work? Aye, well.’ Salman sat back. Uncomfortable, as if his ambition had been overtaken, suddenly, by another. Already the child was talking again.

  ‘Do you have jewels enough?’

  ‘Jewels!’ His glass was almost empty. He drank off the ale. ‘We have a way to go before summer, Martha. The details are not so settled.’

  She stood and began to button her coat. Wrists stick-thin under the bulk of clothes. Salman put down his glass. ‘You’re leaving?’

  She glanced up at the bar, then surreptitiously reached for the meat bone. Tucked it into her pocket. Salman stood up.

  ‘I’ll walk you home–’

  ‘I can make do for myself.’

  He stopped at the conviction in her voice. Again it seemed too old in the child, the mind prematurely aged. ‘Well. Then I will see you for the coronation, if not before.’

  She watched him. ‘There’ll be fireworks. The other Mister Levy said so.’

  ‘And the other Mister Levy is always right. Goodnight, then, Martha.’

  ‘Night to you.’ He followed her to the doorway. It had begun to rain again, steady as a fog. Martha walked out into it, southwards down Bridge Street towards the river. Small and framed and certain, it seemed to Salman, as if she belonged out there.

  ‘Goodnight.’ He said it again, to himself. Under his breath, like a resolution he had no faith in. Only when Martha was already out of sight did he wonder what she had meant to ask.

  It was
eleven by the King Lud clock. He went back inside, ordered spirit, drank alone until closing time.

  *

  Thursday, the last in June. The night was short and it suited him. By first light there were figures in the street, stragglers from the country in damp walking clothes, locals in umbrellas and best. Two gypsies outside Ryder’s with a hot wine stall already lit. Salman dressed at the attic window, watching them shelter from the rain. Ready to make a killing on Coronation Day.

  A report echoed off the rooftops, then a second, deeper. Behind him his brother shifted in his sleep. Salman went back to the pallet bed. gat, the straw pricking through its sacking. Daniel slept with his mouth open, as if he was listening to something. Over his hollow breath Salman could hear the watch tick on the pinewood table.

  He reached out. Laid his hand against Daniel’s cheek. The hooked profile, which Judit had said was like their father’s. The sayer and the said already dead, and only this man left, his gentleness, his want for nothing. Complete, somehow, in himself. Salman narrowed his eyes, leaning closer, as if he might learn that secret even this late, or keep what he saw for good. As if seeing alone could do either of those things.

  ‘Daniel.’

  He woke at the sound of his name. Alert, pupils retracting. ‘I heard thunder.’

  ‘Guns in the streets. Artillery in Green Park.’ He talked quietly, as if something were still sleeping in the faint light. Daniel sat up against the distempered wall. He had grown thinner, Salman thought. Gaunt under the eyes. Paying the child what they could not afford.

  ‘A little early for the revolution. Eh?’

  Salman lifted the watch by its chain. ‘A quarter before four.’

  ‘Martha will be here soon, then. George has promised to allow her in today, on account of the occasion. A small coup there.’ Daniel put his hand out for his watch. Wound it tight, gauging Salman over it. ‘You haven’t slept.’

  ‘Like the dead.’

  ‘God help us, then. We shall be overrun.’

  They sat quiet for a moment. At ease, as if they were unchanged after all. Transit and disillusion stripped away to an old fraternity, ‘Phrates and Tigris, the river brothers, a balance of opposites. Then Daniel put the watch down, leant forward. ‘We should be proud. Today at least.’

  ‘Then you will have to be proud for us both.’

  ‘I always thought this was what you wanted.’ He sighed, seeing his thoughts through. ‘Today the Queen will wear our crown. Our sapphire. A million will see it and remember. The imperial sapphire as our emblem of trade. Think of that.’

  ‘I think of it all the time,’ Salman said gently. ‘As you sleep easy’ There was a foetid flavour in his mouth, like an aftertaste of opium. His throat clicked. ‘I think of the jewels she will wear, and those who will see her. And how they will laugh at us down the years. The Jews who were jewed out of their great diamond.’

  He got up and went back to the window. The rain had eased against it. Daniel’s voice followed him. ‘You said you wouldn’t leave for the world.’

  ‘Aye, and here I am.’ A carriage went past. A Derby insignia, the coachman hunched in his oilskins. ‘I meant what I said. They deserve a chance.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Rundell. Fox.’ He listened absently as Daniel dressed. The cuffs and hooks of his foreign clothes. ‘The Young Vinegar and the Old Fox. There is still time for them to make some – reparation.’

  ‘You still believe the diamond was ours.’

  ‘I know the stone.’ He glanced round at Daniel. ‘Better than they do themselves. They might as well tell me that you are no longer my brother.’

  Daniel reached for their umbrella. Opened the attic door, smiling in its skewed shadow. ‘I wouldn’t be worth the lie.’

  Downstairs William and Martha were already waiting, pallid in the half-light. Other smiths stood at the Creed Lane door, shouldering on coats. A kettle stood steaming over a crucible burner. The shop was scrubbed clean. The work worked out of it, like a good kitchen.

  ‘Morning, William, Martha.’ Salman walked over to the child. She was sitting by the benches, drinking tea.

  She peered up at him. ‘You’ve slept too long. The best places are gone. I can sign my name. I have my pencil. If you have paper I’ll sign it for you.’

  ‘Well now. A signature would be–’ He looked past her. William had gone over to Daniel. Had taken his arm; was talking to him, Salman saw, in a hissed undertone. ‘William? What is it, has the coronation been cancelled?’

  They turned to him together. Daniel frowning, as if Bennett had told him something nonsensical: that the Queen had been lost, or the crown pawned. Salman saw, now, that the men at the door were talking with their own quiet intensity. That everybody knew the facts but him. Daniel shook his head. ‘William says the company is to close.’

  ‘The company?’ he said, already knowing. ‘Rundell and Bridge’s?’

  ‘It is only a rumour–’

  William cut him off. ‘I have it on authority, mind. There is a Frenchman – a buyer for the business – and the bulk to be auctioned off. The winding down will begin any day.’ He wiped his face, grimacing. ‘I shall have to find work. Me and forty other bastard jewellers. You excepted, sirs.’

  ‘But we are owed money’ Salman felt the blood running out of his face. ‘There are two months to go on it.’

  ‘So there are. I’d clean forgotten. Well now.’ William leant closer, curiosity getting the better of his own anxiety. Smiling a little, necrophagous. ‘What was the sum?’

  ‘Four hundred and fifty pounds,’ Daniel whispered.

  The Englishman whistled softly. Eyes finding their smile. ‘Christ bleeds for you, I’m sure. If I was you, I’d get hold of Rundell before the old jigger dies himself. They say he only lives because the Devil won’t have him.’

  Daniel looked up. ‘Will he pay us?’

  ‘Aye, if you push him. He’s still about here somewhere. His carriage was late coming round – Salman–’

  He ran, not waiting for Daniel. Past the men at the Creed Lane door, out through the cluttered backstreet. The pavements of Ludgate Hill black as slate with rain as he rounded the corner and saw the barouche at the kerb, already pulling away. Salman ran level with it, calling up at the hammer-cloth, the coachman easing the horses in. A white hand appearing at the window, unhooking the blind. The past repeating itself.

  ‘Mister Rundell, forgive me, I–’ He leant against the dark company livery, out of breath as the window came down.

  ‘Take your hand away, sir!’ the old man barked at him. Salman pulled back instinctively. He doesn’t know me, he thought. After what he has stolen, I mean nothing to him. Absently, he wondered if that increased the crime or lessened it. Above him the jeweller’s face relaxed fractionally. ‘Mister Levy. I hardly recognised you. Please remove your hand. Else I will drag you to Westminster.’

  ‘There is a rumour in the shop. They are saying that Rundell and Bridge’s’ – He felt the violence uncoiling inside him. The street wavered around him, a mirage of London. Out of nothing he found himself remembering the sea, gleaming like something cut open – ‘is to be wound down,’ he finished. Edmund Rundell leant out towards him. As if he might bite.

  ‘Here is one half of the equation. Do I seem wound down to you, Mister Levy?’

  ‘Sir, there is still money owed to us,’ he heard himself saying. ‘For the sapphire in the crown and also – for the other stones.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The jewels of the Babylonian Jews.’ Rundell frowned gravely. ‘You must think yourself hard done by. Eh? The money comes due in August.’ He blinked, autodidactic; remembering the money quicker than the man. ‘Four hundred and fifty pounds, is it not?’

  ‘Sir.’

  The jeweller nodded down to him, hand reaching for the window. ‘Come to my office, you and your brother. Tonight, after the coronation. Late as you like. Good day to you. Driver!’

  ‘Thank you. Mister Rundell, may I say how happy I am –’ h
e felt the sweat break out on his skin ‘– happy that we can come to an agreement. That there can be some reparation between us.’

  He stood in the street as the carriage moved off, hunched over its occupant. Relief washed through him. His shoulders slumped, leaving him smaller, as if something had gone out of him. He realised that reparation had never been a last chance for anyone but himself.

  He turned back towards Creed Lane. Daniel met him at the corner, William and Martha behind him, a diminishing procession of patent black umbrellas. Above them the rain had stopped. Salman reached for his brother, his hand, arm, embracing him tight. Rocking together while Coronation Day echoed around them, its gunshots and trumpets, vendors and fog drums, cannon and children and church bells.

  ‘Can you see, William?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘What is there?’

  ‘A great deal of lice and bad hair. Hold on to your hats.’

  ‘What about the Progress?’

  William leered back at them with difficulty. In five hours they had got as far as the west end of the Strand. Now the crowd had become too thick to move. An early firework spiralled overhead, dim with daylight. ‘Progress is out of the question, I think. Did any of you think to bring a drop of something? Damn.’

  He turned away. Daniel arched round, looking for his brother and the child. Salman waved back, a yard behind him. The air smelt of sweat and gunpowder, rain churning the smoke down over the masses.

  ‘Mister Levy. Mister Levy?’

  There was a tugging at his coat. He looked down, checking for his watch chain. Martha was pressed in beside him. Holding on to him, Daniel saw, tight as a limpet. Close as a child of his own. The crowd jostled against them and he smiled. ‘Martha. Are you still afloat down there?’

  ‘Aye.’ She grinned back. A man pushed between them, florid-faced, waving a hip flask, bellowing names. Flossie? Inie, my heart! Martha narrowed her eyes against his noise. ‘I want to give you something.’

  ‘Now?’ Daniel watched her keeping her ground. In the far distance there was the sound of cheering, disembodied as a rainstorm. The Progress has begun, he thought. Martha shook her head.