The King's Diamond

by Will Whitaker

I paused. Could he be lying? It was true, Matteo was a bull of a man, well able to hoist that rope single-handed, while John was sparely built, like myself. Again, suspicion of my old friend gnawed at me. But surely John’s rivalry would not go so far?

  John and I supported Hannah between us. She was weak with exhaustion; thankfully the blood on her gown, it seemed, was not hers but Matteo’s. Grace and Susan followed. John guided us down a winding stair and out of the corner bastion into a small courtyard. Before us rose the great drum tower itself. Through a door at its base we entered a vaulted passage lined by massive stone blocks. John led us on, up a ramp which climbed steeply, winding its way deep into the stone. I truly felt that I was in a tomb: for the entire Castle was no more than an ancient mausoleum, the conception of an emperor who had wished to be buried like a pharoah in his pyramid. Up and up the walkway turned. Torches burned in the walls. We passed an airshaft, down which shots and voices echoed from far above. At length the ramp ended abruptly in a fresh ascent which cut in a straight line through the Castle’s heart, over the burial chamber itself, which it crossed by means of a soaring drawbridge guarded by sentries. Here, and in the grain silos and even the dungeon cells let into the Castle’s walls, huddled the poor Romans who had managed to press inside before the portcullis fell. Women and children, many of them; babies’ cries resounded up and down the passages and shafts. This ramp led us to stairs, which turned and at last brought us up to daylight.

  We emerged into a long courtyard filled with activity. Along one side stretched an armoury, from which men were carrying casks of powder and cannonballs. From here stairs led up to a curving line of battlements where cannon fired at intervals, pounding against the city. On the other side of the courtyard rose the rectangular tower at the centre of the drum, and, high at its top, the Papal banner of the crossed keys. Little knots of priests stood about, watching. I turned anxiously to Hannah. She smiled faintly. John disappeared through a doorway in the tower, and came out with a liveried chamberlain, who offered to take the Cages to the place where noble ladies were lodged. ‘You will find Martin with Benvenuto,’ John added. ‘At the top: at the Angel. Up to the battlements, and then keep climbing. As for myself, I am overdue with His Holiness.’

  I clasped John’s hand, and with a pang saw Hannah led away through the door. But we were safe: I feared nothing now. I took a turn or two around the courtyard, breathing the fresh, good air which blew on a light north wind from the mountains, sweeping away the fogs and the stink of death that hung everywhere down in the city. I ran up to the ramparts, then turned and entered the tower. Inside was a labyrinth of rooms, curtained off into makeshift quarters for cardinals and nobles. Tortuous stairways led me higher and higher, until I came out on the topmost terrace, the Angel, as it was called, though the great marble statue of the Archangel Michael that had stood here, raising its bronze sword over the city in protection, had been shattered by lightning some years back.

  In the clearing mist I could see far out over the river, the city, and the plain and mountains beyond. The roar of gunfire was tremendous. There were five cannon here, two of them massive demiculverins some thirteen feet long, and three of the smaller falconets, about as long as a man, mounted so they could swivel. The shot stood in little pyramids, and men ran round fetching powder, measuring it out with ladles and then, with the aid of brass funnels, pouring it into the chambers of the guns. Between them strode Cellini, his eyes on fire, roaring at the men, then aiming the guns himself and putting the fire to the fuse. Martin was with him, and Alessandro too. As another report shook the stone beneath my feet I came up behind them. They turned and saw me. Their faces showed disbelief, then the astonishment of catching sight of a ghost, and then delight. I ran forward and embraced them.

  ‘Master! We had you marked as a dead man, sure.’

  I smiled, enjoying their amazement to the full. ‘I simply went to fetch my jewels.’

  ‘And you have them?’ Cellini asked.

  I patted my chest.

  ‘Well, you have the luck of the very Devil. But that luck might yet be about to run out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Later,’ said Cellini. ‘We have work to do.’

  He sent a boy down to fetch food, and I sat against a pile of cannonballs, exhausted, savouring the fresh bread, cheese and wine while Cellini worked the guns. Harquebus shots whisked over our heads, and heavier fire too. The enemy had brought up cannon from the Borgo, and from time to time a ball crashed into the walls beneath us.

  At nightfall Benvenuto led me at last to a small chamber right by the Angel which he shared with Martin. I felt weak, and still elated with my escape. I laid before them my hoard: the finished jewels and the unset stones; and I tossed across to Cellini his own property, the sheets of gold, the gems, the coin. He raised his eyes in appreciation.

  ‘This is more than I ever thought to see again. My thanks. But all these fine things may not remain ours for long.’

  I felt a sinking in my stomach. I had an inkling then of our situation. We were besieged. The castle was full of the helpless: many hungry mouths but few fighters. I remembered those soldiers who had run out from the gate in the moments before the portcullis fell, and snatched what food they could from the nearby houses. It was proof enough that the Castle was ill-provided. After all, no one had conceived that Rome could ever fall. How many fighting men were here? A few hundred? A thousand at most, against thirty thousand outside.

  ‘I see you are beginning to understand,’ said Cellini. ‘The Abbot of Najera has been here, commissioner-general of the Imperial army, treating with the Pope for terms. But His Holiness cannot make up his mind. The pen is in his hand to sign the surrender, and then your friend John, out on his spying trips, brings in a fresh rumour that the Venetians are only two days away, and His Holiness lays down the pen and begs for a little longer to decide. Some days he is all blood and thunder: he will see Rome consumed in fire before he gives in to the godless, he says. And when he has finished here, he will go and smite the Florentines. Oh yes, haven’t you heard? They’ve had another revolution, thrown out his relatives and burnt His Holiness in effigy. Other days he weeps, and says he will be the last of the line of the Popes, and it is God’s judgement on us all for our sins, and for his own folly in particular. And who is to contradict him?’

  ‘The Venetians are always two days away,’ Martin put in gloomily. ‘Yet they never come.’

  ‘Why should they?’ said Benvenuto. ‘Pope Clement has always betrayed them. Put away your jewels. Do not count on them as safe quite yet.’

  ‘Only make sure you stay alive,’ I told him. ‘I shall call on you to finish your work one day.’

  It was the eighteenth of May. For twelve days I had lived in the inferno of Rome. I raged to think all my cunning and luck might yet be in vain. That night I slept in a welter of nightmare. Early next morning I went looking for Hannah. I found the Cages in a corner of one of the antechambers at the foot of the tower. Hannah lay in a pallet bed, with Grace and Susan sitting at her side. She had colour in her face again. Over one eye I saw the cut she had got from the wood splinter in the attic. Cleaned of blood, it did not look threatening.

  ‘She is recovering well,’ said Susan.

  I crouched down and took Hannah’s hand, and for some time I merely gazed on her without speaking.

  ‘Stephen went ahead,’ Grace commented. ‘He was only to have been gone a moment. And then we came here. It is so great a pity Stephen is not with us. It would have been a perfect time to advance his business with His Holiness.’

  I glanced at her sharply. I longed to question her; for all my guessing and wondering, I had still not seen to the heart of Stephen’s business.

  ‘She remembers nothing,’ Susan whispered to me. ‘Those twelve days have gone.’

  ‘If only he escaped the hands of the soldiers,’ Grace resumed. ‘If he got safe to Ostia.’

  She was growing more lucid. I said, ‘There is a good ch
ance of that.’

  Grace put her hand on my arm in thanks.

  ‘Dear Mr Richard,’ Hannah murmured. ‘We owe both you and John so very much.’

  I felt a twinge of displeasure. I had not come through all those dangers to be a mere sharer in the glory with John. But how could I deny he had saved us? What was more, he had saved me, when he might easily have found an excuse not to. But then, how much stronger his position was now, the generous saviour of us all. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if he had been to see her. But that would have been to betray my jealousy and spur Hannah to yet more teasing. She smiled back up at me with a glint of mischief, as if understanding all I thought.

  The days went by. In the week since I had joined the besieged I had become a soldier: I spent my hours with Cellini at the Angel. I mixed and measured the powder, I rammed the wooden tampions down the gun muzzles and carried the shot, the five-inch balls for the demiculverins and the two-inch for the falconets, and I ran the guns forward ready for firing. Cellini was the captain, and he took to gunnery with as much zeal as goldsmith work. He sighted each gun and fired, picking off the Imperials as they worked digging trenches around the Castle. Often a cardinal or two stood behind us in their red capes and birettas, watching our guns and murmuring a blessing when one of them scored a hit. Sometimes there were nobles with them. I bowed to those I knew: Gregorio Casale, old Cardinal Campeggio, Cardinal Cesi. They returned my courtesies with sad smiles. No one had believed it could come to this. From up here you could see the whole city: the smoking ruins of the palazzi, the streets clogged with the dead, and troops swarming everywhere in their hungry bands.

  One morning Pope Clement himself appeared on the terrace. His face, with its heavily lidded eyes, was crumpled and haggard. He wore a ragged growth of beard: from the first day of the siege he had refused to shave, in mourning for the Holy City. As he passed by, Benvenuto threw himself down on his knees.

  ‘I beg absolution, Holy Father, for the many men I have killed in defence of the Church.’

  The Pope bent over him and made the sign of the cross in the air, pardoning him at the same time for however many more Spanish and Germans he might send to Hell. I wished I could have begged the like forgiveness. But I had killed for more personal motives: for my gems and for love. Still the jewels sat in my casket, the diamond as yet uncut. And perhaps they would not remain mine for long.

  Down below, the system of trenches and cannon ringing the Castle was almost complete. John continued to slip out, passing invisibly between the two sides, weaving over the river and back again, up to the Papal palace where the Prince of Orange and the other Imperial generals held their councils of war. The danger of it amused him vastly; but he told me that before long even his own secret sallies would become impossible. ‘The trenches are one thing,’ he told me. ‘But we should be more afraid of the mines.’ The thought chilled me: that the enemy might even now be tunnelling beneath the Castle, and could at any moment bring us down with gunpowder.

  The Imperials were sure of victory. The Germans paraded about in looted vestments from the cardinals’ palaces, and sat down to a mock conclave in front of the trenches. At the end they sprang up, shouting, ‘Luther is pope! Luther is pope!’ And indeed, anything seemed possible. There were whispers in the Castle that Clement would be taken away to Spain, a prisoner, and poisoned there. The cardinals, scattered across Europe, would never see Rome again. They might meet in little conclaves, electing petty anti-popes, one in France, one in Germany, one in Spain. Martin Luther might truly become the strongest voice in Christendom. Many put the blame on Cardinal Pucci, whose ruthless extortions, men said, had driven Germany into Luther’s arms. But Pucci blamed Cardinal Salviati, who had advised Clement to ally with France, and Salviati blamed the generals, in particular Renzo da Ceri. Renzo himself walked about the terraces upright and silent, as if to say: ‘None of this is my fault. I wash my hands of it.’ Every night I helped Benvenuto to light three beacons at the Angel, and we fired off three cannonades: the signal to the Duke of Urbino that we had not surrendered.

  Some days I walked with Hannah in the garden that occupied a tiny courtyard beside the Papal apartments. Vines crept up over the battlements, and lemon trees basked beside the furnaces for the Pope’s private steam bath. It was a little fantasy, this garden: a pretence that we were still living the life of three weeks before. We seldom spoke. I thought of the jewels that hung round my neck and the greed for fame that had kept me in Rome past the moment of safety; and Mr Stephen’s mysterious business, that had condemned Hannah likewise. In a simpler world we might have escaped.

  As the end of May approached, the Castle’s first case of the plague was reported among the poorer folk, hiding down in the dungeons. Bread was growing scarce. The Duke of Urbino was close: eight miles off, some said. But he had no provisions, and he lost deserters every day to the Imperials. One night, just after Cellini and I had fired the signal guns, one of the Pope’s chamberlains stepped into our chamber. This was a Frenchman known as Cavalierino; Clement used him for all his most secret affairs. There were two soldiers with him. He told Benvenuto he must come with him at once. I watched him go with anxiety. The Castle had become a nest of whispers and accusations. Cellini was outspoken; his enemies, it seemed, had succeeded in turning the Pope against him. I spent a restless night with Martin. We sat and listened to the flapping of the great banner in the wind above us, and the occasional crack of gunfire, and played at cards. To lose Benvenuto knocked away a good deal of my remaining hope.

  It was some hours past midnight when the door opened again and Benvenuto came in. His face was pale and drained. Behind him came Cavalierino and the same two soldiers, each carrying an enormous sack, which they deposited on the floor with a heavy clink. Then Cavalierino gave Cellini a sombre nod, and withdrew. Cellini threw himself down in a chair.

  ‘What a night’s work! But it is nothing to what’s before us.’

  He reached for the closest sack and tipped it out on the floor. From it poured a shimmering flood of gold: cups and plates, pyxes, chalices, pectorals. From among them something rolled out and came to rest at my feet. I stooped down and picked up a hollow dome of gold, set round with three coronets and topped with a tall cross. Figures in relief chased one another round its three bands: saints, martyrs, angels. Above them were figured the three persons of the Trinity. It was the Tiara itself: the Pope’s triple crown. I felt my palms begin to sweat, and my hands tremble. I held it out to Cellini, who turned it lovingly in his hands.

  ‘Caradosso crafted that,’ he said. ‘Old Arseface himself. Pope Julius paid two hundred thousand ducats for it. And I have just spent half the night destroying it.’

  I saw the sockets all round it that once would have held gems. The other objects were the same: one chalice alone must have carried a thousand stones.

  ‘The wonders I have seen tonight,’ sighed Benvenuto. ‘The rubies of Pegu, the Golconda diamonds, the verdant emeralds. All, all gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Sewed into His Holiness’s clothing,’ said Benvenuto, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘From his drawers on outwards. The man is a walking jewel mine. But don’t dare tell a soul.’

  ‘No, I swear it. But what about the gold?’

  ‘There begins the labour. We are to melt it: cast it into the fire and render it into formless bricks.’ He sighed again. I sat down, stunned. For the first time I plainly foresaw our defeat. Pope Clement was preparing himself for capture: no one would search His Holiness’s clothing for gems. But I would not be so lucky. Cellini lay down to sleep, while I lay until dawn, fuming with anger.

  The next day Benvenuto began building his furnace. Men brought in bricks, and he worked round the little hearth in our chamber, building it up into a pyramid. At its heart he improvised a grate made out of shovel handles. That night he lit a fire of charcoal in it and placed a clean ash-pan underneath. Then he took out the gold. Medals, brooches, rings; all he threw straight on to the coal
, and in a few minutes a stream of brilliant liquid gold began to flow out from underneath. It was a sight to sicken any man who saw it. It seemed to me then that the whole world I had grown up with, the world of jewelled prelates, princes and kings, was passing away. And what would come instead? Outlaw bands, ascetic pastors, republics. They would have no use for my jewels. Cellini lifted a brooch a couple of inches across and turned it in his hands. Around empty gem-sockets were figures of God the Father, and tumbling Raphaelesque angels.

  ‘I made that,’ commented Cellini. ‘Pope Clement loved it; it was what first brought me to his notice. Well, in better times he may ask me to make it again.’ He tossed it on the fire. My anger suddenly swelled and burst out.

  ‘So Clement is beaten,’ I said. ‘Well, I am not. Benvenuto: we have gold. I ask you now to finish your work.’

  He turned to me in surprise. ‘You are that sure of yourself?’

  ‘I have to be. I still have bills of exchange. Will His Holiness sell me a few ounces of his gold?’

  ‘I have no doubt I could arrange that with Cavalierino,’ said Cellini. ‘Yours is the risk.’

  I pulled the casket from beneath my clothes. My hands were trembling as I opened the lock and once more took out the diamond of the Old Rock.

  ‘You can do it? You can cut my diamond?’

  Cellini waved his hand. ‘I can cut it as well here as anywhere. There are goldsmiths’ tools in the small workshop below us, adjoining the treasury of the Apostolic Camera. You forget Sant’ Angelo is a treasure-house, as well as a fortress and a prison.’ He took the diamond and smiled. ‘Well, it is a piece of noble madness. We shall do it.’

  As the gold trickled down through the fire and congealed in a glimmering pool below, Benvenuto turned the diamond in his hands. He had Martin bring up the tools he needed: the lapidary’s wheel, a small bench, the slender goldsmith’s anvil, the hammers, files, chisels, pastes. For a long time he studied the diamond. He was finding out the entrances to its beauty, the lines of approach. Its dull, rippling surface glinted as the few openings into its heart caught the light, and the flaw deep inside shimmered.