The King's Diamond

by Will Whitaker

  But it would have to be done. At the moment the diamond was wild, fickle, teasing, even cruel. Cutting would tame it. The diamond would learn what at present it did not know: how to be faithful. It would shine out with constancy, not just for those with the patience and the skill to coax it into catching that gleam of light. How I wanted that diamond. I looked up again at the nobleman.

  ‘I am presuming that you are offering me this diamond for sale.’

  De’ Bardi started, as if stirred from a trance. ‘Sale! Yes. Yes. Indeed … if you will tell me how much it is worth?’

  The smooth, native polish of the stone’s faces sent pale shivers of light darting across the cloth. It was a different creature entirely from the four table-cut stones I had bought from Messer Aaron in the Ghetto four days earlier, though at the time I had been well pleased with myself. I picked it up, turned it again, and nodded, forcing myself to appraise it coolly. The stone had absolute nobility. It had none of the common defects of a diamond. It did not incline to yellowness, or blackness. There was no sign of greasiness on its surface, nor of the common inclusions that could mar its clarity: the flecks of brimstone, or those impurities known as the ice, the salt, the plumbago; no clouds, no shadowing at all. A well-cut diamond of a good colour was reckoned at forty to sixty Venetian ducats the carat; flawed, or otherwise marred, it might only be ten to thirty. If the cutting went well, I could be left with a flawless stone of twenty carats’ weight. Multiplying this by the stone’s worth per carat, and then by its weight again, according to the usual formula, gave a value of twenty thousand ducats: almost ten times the capital of my venture. It made my palms sweat to think of it. But then again, what if it shattered?

  I glanced up at him. ‘It is uncommon. I will give you a thousand ducats.’ It was far more than I had ever offered before for a gem.

  ‘A thousand?’ He tore his eyes from the stone and looked up at me. I could see the doubt and indecision in his face. Plainly he was imagining what my gold might mean to him: relief from debt, perhaps, or from the surly looks of unpaid servants; or a temporary return to the life of honour and ease he once had known.

  ‘Is it enough?’ I asked. You see the madness this stone had already driven me to: I was haggling on the old man’s behalf, upping the price before he had even spoken.

  ‘It is enough,’ he said. ‘Enough for my needs, which are pressing, God knows. But this stone …’ His eyes rested unblinking on the diamond. ‘In a hundred years,’ he murmured, ‘when our family perhaps has recovered its fortunes, my heirs should have this stone. This one single thing to remember me for.’ His face creased, and he began to weep.

  I said gently, ‘But will the stone still be with your heirs, in a hundred years?’

  He looked up, wavering. ‘If I sell you it, who will cut it?’

  ‘I will find the man. Trust me: I will find him.’

  All the time I had my eye on the diamond. Its lustre tantalised me. The secrets it hid were deeper even than those of my emerald of Persia. The stone breathed with confidence in its own beauty and power. It was a stone for those who command in the world; a stone for a king; a stone to reflect a kingly passion that is so much stronger than the loves of ordinary men because there is no power on earth to restrain it, not fear, nor law, nor shame. I turned the stone again. I was considering what I could do with it, what thickets of gold I might weave round it, what nymphs, simple and delicate, I could have carved in relief, poised to step inside its cool waters.

  Suddenly de’ Bardi darted forward and put his hand on the diamond.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I cannot. It is the last treasure of my house. I cannot part with it.’

  He took the diamond from my hands, dropped it back in its pouch and stood up. I jumped to my feet. I could not conceive he could now deny me.

  ‘But, most noble sir, if we said twelve hundred ducats?’

  Again he paused. I set my purse down on the table and loosened its strings. There were only some two hundred ducats left inside. That was ill luck: I felt certain that a sufficient pile of gold would cast an enchantment on him to outweigh that of the diamond.

  ‘Martin,’ I called. ‘Quickly! Run to the Fuggers’ agent at the German Fontego and change me another bill.’

  I began to reach inside my doublet for the casket where I kept my bills of exchange as well as my jewels. The nobleman put a hand on my arm.

  ‘No. Truly. I see how wrong I was now. My heirs will have it. They must. But, sir, I have taken such pleasure in our meeting. Will you not sit with me? Take a little more wine, perhaps look a while longer upon the stone?’

  One of his servants hovered behind with the jug. I was beaten: but I did not have to take it with humility. I snatched up my purse, and, with a quick bow, walked straight out of the room. Martin came running after me down the stairs. ‘Master! Perhaps if we stayed and drank with him?’

  I turned on him.

  ‘No! Did you not see his face? We have lost it.’ I walked out into the cramped street and began walking fast for home. Where had I slipped up? Did my mistake lie in being the first to mention money? Or in giving him time to think, while the stone bewitched me? Or in my use of that word, ‘uncommon’? Never flatter the goods before you buy: so said Morgan Wolf. But that was a meanness, to my mind, when in the presence of beauty. For a moment, I had been a hair’s breadth from having it: the finest diamond I would ever see in my life. I stopped in the middle of the Campo di San Silvestro and looked around. A cold wind whipped up from the Grand Canal. A light drizzle was beginning. As Martin caught me up I said to him, ‘Pack our things. We are leaving Venice.’ He stared at me. I turned and crossed the square to the fencing school, to let out some of my frustration with my rapier.

  Even so, it was a hard matter to make myself go. After six months here I almost counted myself a Venetian. I was a different being from the bedraggled London apprentice who had trudged the Rialto back in August. I had learnt to bow and murmur with the Venetian’s incomparable deference, ‘Schiavo su’: Sir, I am your slave. Or, as the nobles shorten it, ‘S’ciao’ or simply ‘Ciao’. I had made grand acquaintances: not only Giacomo da Crema, but older and more substantial men. The senator Ludovico Falier, whose ancestor was the only doge to lose his head for treason; Alvise Pasqualino, one of the procurators of Saint Mark; and the little-loved Imperial ambassador, the Spanish grandee Alonso Sanchez. From all these men I had bought the odd stone. I had sold to some of them too: and so I had made a tidy profit during these months, in addition to filling my casket.

  On my last night above the little stone bridge I brought the four ladies flasks of musk and lengths of vermilion and lemon-coloured silk that I had bought from a Turk just in from Damascus. Angelica sat and sniffed the musk, while Armida and Dardania wound their silks round them with cries of delight. They had cost me dear, these four. But I would miss them. Ippolita pressed herself against my arm.

  ‘But you cannot leave, with the Carnival so near? There will be masquing, and plays in the streets, and bull races, and balls.’

  The temptation was strong to obey her. The pull of the pure, cool, easy Scythian stone was upon me again. But I knew how it would end. If I stayed much longer, I would turn all Venetian. I would lose myself. My trade and my ambitions would cease to matter, and I would become another Giacomo da Crema, sinking slowly under the weight of Venice’s delights. Better to leave now, while the pleasures were still sweet. That night our love-making was of the simpler, gentler kind. Afterwards I lay on my back, thinking. Ippolita stirred in the crook of my arm. She whispered, ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Surely.’

  She sighed. ‘There is a marchese who is mad for love of me,’ she whispered again. ‘He will give me a palazzo, on the Grand Canal.’

  ‘I have no doubt of it.’

  She reached beneath her pillow and handed me something. It was a book, bound in yellow leather.

  ‘Here. The Canzoniere of Petrarch. Read his verses. They will be the last touch to t
urn you into a courtier. And some woman will love you all the more for it.’

  I smiled, and lay for a long time with her in my arms. When the distant bell of Saint Mark’s struck three, I leant over and kissed Ippolita on the cheek, waking her from a light sleep. Then I parted the silk canopy of the bed, got dressed and walked down the stairs.

  At the street door, Martin was waiting for me. I had never asked what he did while I was employed upstairs; I now saw that he had made a conquest of his own. A young girl of about sixteen turned from him in tears and darted back inside one of the rooms. I put my hand on his shoulder and together we stepped out into the lane. Martin lifted our trunk. In my casket I had a fresh sheaf of bills of exchange, drawn on the Bank of Saint George in Genoa. As dawn rose we set off across the lagoon, rowed by our friends the water-carriers. Behind us floated Venice, her domes and towers soon swallowed in a soft, white mist.

  PART 3

  Chrysoprase: the Lantern in the Darkness

  Love,

  That from the right path led them off

  To labyrinths and wandering ways;

  And all the good that ever they had done

  Was in that moment ugly and defiled.

  LUDOVICO ARIOSTO, ORLANDO FURIOSO

  9

  On a grey, drizzling morning towards the end of January 1527, the great ship Speranza turned between the star forts at the mouth of the Tiber and began to make her way upriver towards Ostia, the port of Rome. A chill breeze was blowing in off the sea. I reached up to touch the gold medal pinned to the brim of my hat below the ostrich feathers, to check it was safe. It was entirely on account of that medal that I had embarked on this latest voyage. Martin glanced up at it uneasily. I suspected he would gladly have thrown the thing in the sea.

  Six days earlier, I had still been walking the back streets of Genoa, looking in every goldsmith’s shop I could find. The city’s wealth was recovering after the Emperor’s troops had sacked Genoa five years before. In the shops there were diamonds of India and opals and emeralds in plenty. As I toured the counters, Martin whistled at what we saw, and tugged my arm. ‘Master! This one? Or what about that sapphire?’ His eye for gems was improving: I had to grant him that. But I was no longer in the market for stones. I was looking at the gold bracelets, enamelled and chiselled, at the brooches, the intaglios, the bronze reliefs. I was on the hunt for my craftsman, the man who would be worthy to set my stones in gold.

  At the end of each day I trudged back through the lanes to the Angel Inn behind the Arsenal in a worsening temper. Soon it would be the Carnival: Shrovetide, as we call it in England. It was a year since I stood at the tiltyard at Greenwich and saw the marks of the King’s passion. Far too much time had passed already. Soon, if I could not find a craftsman to please me, I would have to take my stones home, naked and unmounted, and hand them over to Christian Breakespere or Morgan Wolf. Night after night as I lay awake I tried to convince myself that this was the right course. They would do a good enough job; the stones would still shine through. But I doubted such stones as my dark emerald or those opals had ever been seen in London. I pictured old Breakespere shaking his head over the emerald, at a loss, making a guess which angle to favour as the route into its secrets, and putting it to the polishing-wheel. I imagined the stone with its light trapped and dulled, its mysteries hidden forever. But then again, my vain search here in Genoa meant yet more delay: and lost time might ruin my prospects just as surely as common workmanship. To my surprise, I found myself unfolding my problems to Martin. His advice to me was plain.

  ‘Please, master, go home. I beg you.’

  ‘That’s what my mother wants, isn’t it?’

  He looked down awkwardly at his feet. ‘It’s true. She meant me to get you home as soon as possible. Never mind if you lost the money. She told me you were just a child, and the lost gold would shock you into sense.’ He stirred uneasily. ‘And I believed her.’

  So there it was, out in the open at last. I bit my teeth together in anger as I thought of the Widow. To Martin I said, ‘And what do you think now?’

  He glanced up. ‘I think you are going to prove her very much mistaken. But please, master! Only if we turn back at once. Soon it will be spring, and the armies will be back on the move. Even for you there’s a limit to luck.’

  I said nothing. Every night I fought both sides of this battle, and every night I vowed myself to just one more day’s search. Tomorrow, I repeated: tomorrow might just be the day.

  There came a morning when I was walking the streets behind the fish market, up above the Mole where the rope-makers worked. I had passed through this district some four or five times before. But this time I noticed a shop I had not seen on my previous visits, nested in behind a silk-maker’s. In its window were silver chalices and platters, pattens and pyxes for the Mass: nothing to tempt me. But out of duty I stepped inside. Martin followed me, and we split up to go sniffing along the shelves in our usual manner. At the back of the shop was a tray of medals, gold discs about three inches across, of the kind noblemen like to wear in their hats. I glanced along the tray. Most of them were fussy things, crowded compositions of saints clutching the emblems of their martyrdom, or the usual groups of Muses, Victories and Cupids. Then my eye stopped. I was looking at a Virgin and Child. The design was deeply incised, simple and bold. The mother had her eyes cast down with a look that was both sad and tender, as if she had a full awareness of the Holy Infant’s destiny. The child himself gazed straight out of the medal with a look of calm certainty. It was alive: there is no other word for it. My heart began to beat fast. I glanced up at the shopman.

  ‘Who made this? You?’

  The goldsmith smiled and shook his head. He was honest; or he knew how different this medal was from the rest of his stock, and how impossible it would be to deceive me.

  ‘No. I bought this from a churchman. An envoy from the Pope who was caught short of funds.’

  I was turning the thing over in wonder in my hands. The positions of the figures’ limbs and the draperies of their clothes were so full of motion and life that you would think the pair caught in some instant of change, and about to break out into fresh movement: the child’s arm would carry on swinging down, the mother’s fingers clench. Even the back was beautifully finished, with the fastening done as a looping rope of gold that looked as if it should be slack as the real thing, but in fact was solid.

  ‘But can you tell me who made it?’

  ‘I was told it was a very young man, who has just opened a studio of his own. A man named Cellini. Benvenuto Cellini, in Rome.’

  I frowned. ‘Rome!’ It was far, much too far.

  Martin caught my eye, and started to move to the door. ‘Too bad, master. Let’s go.’

  I still held the medal in my hand.

  ‘How much?’

  The shopman detected, perhaps, my keenness. ‘Eighty ducats.’

  I did not argue. I ordered Martin to count out the money, and pinned the medal in my hat. From that moment, the medal began to work its enchantment on me. Prudence spoke against it, and for two days I wavered. But I knew that Virgin and Child would reproach me forever if I turned for home now.

  And so here I was, springing down the ladder of the Speranza to be first ashore at Ostia. My spirits were high. I had been to Ostia before, on ventures with Mr William, when the Rose had coasted from Genoa down as far as Naples. But I had never travelled those extra thirteen miles inland to Rome. Martin and I left the Fieschi brothers and the rest loading up their silks and velvets on to packhorses, and with a couple of hired horses and a guide we set off.

  The road crossed a desolate marsh, filled with pools, reeds and the cries of herons. For a time we rode along an ancient causeway, but this soon turned to ruin, and we struggled along by the side of its broken arches until these too ran out. The rain had been falling steadily, and in places our guide had to range about over the flooded ground before he could be sure where the road ran. Martin grumbled and cursed contin
ually. ‘We might be over the border in Savoy now. Or crossing into France. All this journey just in search of one man?’ I rode on in a worsening temper. Repeatedly I touched the medal in my hat.

  After two hours or so the road began to rise up out of the marshes. Before us stretched the Campagna, a vast, empty plain with here and there a small farm or a ruin perched on a hill. Long-horned cattle and goats wandered across it. It was a dismal sight, with the rain blowing continually and the mountains dim in the distance. But before us, sprawling in a vast circuit of walls and towers, was the city. Rome. I took my hat off and shouted, and attempted to spur my horse to more speed. Martin looked sourly at me, the rain dripping from his cap. We reached the walls, and there I saw as massive a city gate as you could find anywhere in the world. Its two round towers bore ranks of cannon ports, with more over the narrow gateway itself. It was wise for the Pope to keep his city so well protected. The Kingdom of Naples belonged to the Emperor, and its frontier was only forty miles away to the south-east. As we passed inside the gate, I swept my hat off to the captain of the guards, and he replied with a bow full of satisfying deference. Very different, this, from my arrival in Venice six months before, an insignificant boy fresh from the Thames. I rode inside the city of the Popes with all the pride of a conqueror.

  But once through the gate I looked round in astonishment. Here was no city at all, but only more emptiness: the same pastures and orchards we had been crossing for miles, with yet more ruins, the odd small farm, a lonely monastery. Left and right, enclosing these vast tracts of ground, the city walls stretched in an arc. A quarter of a mile ahead, beyond a small rocky hill, we at last approached the beginnings of a city, mean houses climbing among the ruins, and hints of larger palazzi beyond. And so here was Rome: shrunken and weak within the walls of the ancient city of the emperors, like a crumpled old man going about in the clothes that had fitted him in his youth. Martin darted me a look, as if to say, ‘Do you expect to find a goldsmith in a place like this?’