The Diamond Hunter Read online

  Even Reggie had laughed. ‘Now you see what I’ve been raising all these years. Clementine is my rock, aren’t you, darling?’

  Will had watched Reggie’s niece lean down and kiss the top of her uncle’s head.

  ‘We’re inseparable,’ she confirmed. She looked back at Will. ‘Because he doesn’t suffocate me.’ It felt like a warning, but as quick as it had come she changed the subject. ‘As I mentioned, we call this the Vase Room, Mr Axford, although perhaps you’ve guessed that?’ she said, a smile reaching those unusually coloured eyes. He was startled by the feeling that his heart had decided to pause ever so briefly and then, as if realising it had missed its rhythm, it gave a powerful thump against his ribcage.

  ‘Er . . . yes, I think I had made that leap,’ he replied, feeling oddly warm as he looked around at the collection of vases on a high shelf that travelled the circumference of the room.

  ‘My grandmother liked the colour green, apparently,’ Clementine continued, the understatement making him smile. The vases were of various hues, although Will noted that none matched the colour of Clementine’s eyes.

  Her voice dragged his thoughts back to the present and the courtyard where they had paused. ‘Would you care to join me in a tour, Mr Axford?’ Reggie had already limped out of sight.

  ‘Only if you promise to call me Will,’ he replied.

  She gave a gesture that was a cross between a curtsey and a bow and he could tell she liked the laugh it provoked from him.

  ‘It’s down this way, Will.’

  He’d fallen in step with her, moving in front to carefully pick his way down over the moss-covered slabs.

  ‘All of these misshapen stones are from the property. My grandfather selected them all and laid them himself.’

  ‘That’s impressive.’

  ‘I have no recollection of him, which is a pity.’

  He paused. ‘Look at all of this, Clementine – one can tell your grandfather had a unique approach to life.’

  She stood higher than him on the steps and half sighed, half smiled. ‘Yes, I like that he was so unafraid to be himself at a time when everyone else conformed so tightly to social expectations.’

  ‘Not just in his time. I think we still do.’

  ‘You might,’ she quipped.

  ‘Too much of your grandfather in you?’

  ‘Perhaps. My mother certainly didn’t conform.’

  To Will’s eye it looked like the moss was winning the battle on the stepping stones. He offered his arm.

  She pushed gently past him, politely ignoring the assistance. ‘This bit’s tricky and very slippery. Let me lead.’

  All he knew about Louisa Grant was that she had been a delicate beauty who ran away to Africa with a penniless engineer . . . or so the story went. He wasn’t as interested as the gossipmongers who fed on this sort of information. ‘When did your uncle hurt his leg?’

  ‘A few days ago. He was coming down here to cut some roses for my room. He slipped, twisted his knee awkwardly. I’m hoping he won’t be using the walking stick for too long.’

  Reggie cast aside the walking stick with disgust as soon as he rounded the corner out of sight, tucking it under his arm and losing the limp in an instant. What a nuisance this ruse was! He’d dreamed up the cunning way to fling Clementine together with Will in the hope that nature would take its course. Reggie had become convinced the young pair were equal in mind and that both would recognise the fact after a single day together. He had extremely high hopes that his trick might influence the forming of a relationship.

  He hurried to the bay window in the dining room and looked down over the stepping stones. Reggie watched Clementine push politely past Will to lead the way. Typical! Ah, well, it’s early days, he reassured himself.

  Time for a chat with Jane, the cook, to see how the various dishes for their meal were coming along. He thought the picnic-style luncheon was especially inspired. And surely a walk around the heavenly grounds of Woodingdene would push the pair into the right frame of mind for love?

  Love. He genuinely wanted Clementine to know romantic love, something he’d denied himself since contracting syphilis. He blamed his mother, as he did for most of his failings. She’d urged him to lose his virginity.

  ‘No man wants to still have that heavy burden. Get rid of it,’ she’d encouraged him, waving her hand as though it were a mere trifle.

  The early-developed fourteen-year-old had found it confronting to have his virginity dismissed as a weight to be rid of . . . but then his mother had never been one for subtlety. In fact, it was she who had organised for him to give up his ‘treasure’, as she began calling it to taunt him, arranging for one of her friends to take care of the riddance.

  Soon enough, a middle-aged woman with a trim body and voluptuous breasts had terrified him one weekend visit to his mother’s new London home – courtesy of Henry Grant – by entering his room with nothing more than a translucent gown and an equally clear intention.

  ‘Don’t worry, your mother has paid for this. Let me guide you into manhood,’ she whispered in a smoky voice he found irresistible.

  Nancy was the name of his gift, and Nancy had given him her own gift known as Ricord’s chancre – a single lesion that appeared on his most private of parts one month to the day after his fifteenth birthday. It was neither painful nor large and it disappeared a few weeks later, leaving as its only trace a tiny silvery scar. In his naivety he was too embarrassed to mention it to anyone, and when it left him he felt only relief and release.

  It was during his summer school break that Reggie noticed a rash on his hands and feet. The discolouration was light, not painful, and was gone by the time he headed back to school. Once again, he did not mention it to his mother because she had decided to remain in France, so he lived alone with his anxiety until the strange sores and discolouration on his palms and soles had passed.

  It was only because of a chance meeting with Nancy’s closest friend, who called at the London apartment to let his mother know that Nancy had passed away, that he learned she’d died from complications of what they called the ‘French disease’.

  ‘Warn your mother,’ the friend advised.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘In case any of her clients have had relations with Nancy.’

  ‘Why?’ he repeated, his throat tightening as though his body knew before his mind would accept it.

  ‘Because they’ve also likely caught the great pox! If they’ve got the sore or the rash, they’ll need to take the mercury very quickly.’

  That was his curse. Seventeen by now and diseased. And he vowed that day that he would never lie down with anyone again. He would not do to another what had been done to him.

  Reggie Grant sighed at the window and realised he hadn’t taken his calomel today. Reggie preferred to use the brand name rather than call the drug mercurous chloride. It sounded somehow more elegant to his ailment, latent though it was now. How long it would remain so, he couldn’t know. But for the time being no one knew anything of his permanent companion. It had prevented any meaningful relationships, and he was ever careful around Clementine, concerned despite his thorough research that she might somehow contract the disease from a simple goodnight kiss, or a sneeze or a cough. He had been assured by one of the most respected physicians in the country that this was of no concern. The disease was his alone, it seemed, to live with and to die with when it decided to take him. For now, he would swallow his pills and rub on his mercury lotions and ensure that when the madness found him, Clementine would remember him as the man she loved as much as, if not more than, her own father.

  He glanced down once more to see Clementine loosely clasp Will Axford’s offered elbow. He knew where she was headed and nodded to himself: it was probably the most romantic of all Woodingdene’s many landscaped and incredibly beautiful gardens. It was a place where love had once developed between her parents and hopefully would again.

  17

  Clementine led Will
onto to the footbridge that spanned the small but fast-flowing stream cutting through the valley overlooked by Woodingdene.

  ‘My father finished building this just before we left England.’

  She watched him place his large hands on the wire rail. ‘It’s so elegant,’ he declared. He shook his head, clearly impressed. ‘It’s like spun sugar it’s so light.’

  This pleased her inordinately, although she couldn’t explain why it meant so much coming from her guest. ‘Thank you. Memories of my father come in fleeting spurts but what I know of this bridge I have learned from others.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to bore you, Will.’

  ‘No chance of that. I like listening to you speak.’

  She wasn’t ready for such directness but in truth she liked it. Clementine gave him a smile that was neither shy nor flirtatious but she left him in no doubt that she was enjoying his company. ‘Beneath us runs this brook, which is known as a burn in this part of the world. Most people think the bridge is iron, but it’s made of steel. I think it may have been the first of its kind in the country. I like to think so, anyway.’ She grinned. ‘In his time it was all about iron lacework and the like. Using steel means it’s lighter and that’s how he was able to get this almost fairylike construction, as though it just sits in the air, as you beautifully noted. My father claimed that the airy structure and the delicate parapets symbolised my mother.’ She pointed and he leaned in to follow her line of sight. ‘If you look over there, you will see initials cleverly picked out in the metal.’ She waited for him to make it out.

  ‘I see L and I see J.’

  She nodded, satisfied. ‘You only properly see it when it’s pointed out, otherwise it appears as a pretty piece of decoration.’

  ‘I see a C too, if I’m not mistaken. Is that for you?’

  Clementine smiled. ‘I had just been born. Everyone was so happy, my grandmother said. The whole family was in love with each other because of my arrival.’ Her tone sounded ironic.

  ‘Because the Grant family had an heir?’

  ‘Another one, anyway,’ she said in reply. ‘Everyone hated my father, you see. He didn’t fit their idea of who Louisa Grant should marry. But I admire my parents hugely for not bowing to the pressure. I gather the feelings of goodwill at the time of my birth were simply about the next generation. It thrilled my grandfather, or so the story goes, and so he didn’t mind paying for the bridge, which was good news given that my father was about to ask my mother to leave England with him. You know the rest, I imagine – defiant, proud, dashing . . . both of them.’

  ‘James Knight sounds like a dreamer.’

  ‘Yes, I think you’re right. I believe he was deeply romantic. Apart from the initials, he made sure the main span of the footbridge was 64 feet.’

  ‘Should that mean something to me?’

  She shook her head, amused. ‘No, only to two people. Eighteen sixty-four was the year my father came to Northumberland. He met my mother when he knocked on the door of Woodingdene seeking work.’ She continued, moving her hand beneath the railing. ‘Three main spandrels – one for him, one for my mother, one for me. He personally planted pale pink rose bushes to cover the half-height brick piers so whenever my mother crossed her footbridge, she would not only enjoy the fragrance of roses through spring and summer, but the bridge would look like it sat on nothing but air and festoons of beautiful flowers.’

  ‘Heavens! How does any man follow that?’

  She laughed aloud. ‘I know. It’s just so sad he died a penniless, pitiful man. He deserved better, I’m sure.’

  ‘You don’t remember him well?’

  ‘I have solid flashes of memory. I remember his voice, especially with that delicious Scottish brogue of his. I know we used to talk about the stars and I recall a silly rhyme he made up; I can still picture riding his shoulders and the scenery I watched from that vantage. I know what he smelled like as he shaved, after a day of work, after a night of drinking,’ she said more solemnly. ‘I know I loved him and he loved me – that feeling can’t be dismissed.’ She shook her head, frowning. ‘It was so long ago. Shall we go on to the temperate ferneries?’

  ‘By all means, but tell me more about Africa.’

  She led him off the footbridge and he followed in a wake of a perfume. He was used to women smelling of roses, violets, musk and ambergris – predictable fragrances for wealthy women. But Clementine, perhaps the wealthiest woman under thirty he knew, trailed a fragrance that spoke of warm spice and wood with just a hint of lemon.

  He had to mention it. ‘I think your perfume smells of Africa,’ he said, feeling ridiculous the moment it was out.

  ‘Have you been to Africa, Will?’ she asked over her shoulder.

  ‘No, I . . . I mean, it’s how I think it would smell.’ Her uncle had warned him and here he was acting like a fool in her presence.

  ‘I actually remember the smell clearly. My world in Africa started smelling of linen dried nearly crisp in the sun, of earth as old as time being dug over and its dust crawling into every corner of my life, of my mother who . . . her perfume was . . . oh my gosh, I’ve just had a flash in my mind of what the bottle looked like.’ She drew a bell shape in the air. ‘And it looked like raindrops were clinging to its clear glass. A green label, as I recall . . .’ She sounded excited.

  ‘Go on,’ he urged.

  She closed her eyes and seemed to inhale, silently, and he knew in that moment he could watch her like this all day long . . . every day.

  ‘She smelled of orange, lemon and lime . . . and something herbal. Rosemary, perhaps? Those early childhood memories come in unpredictable flashes like this. The, er . . . ferneries are this way.’

  He was pleased when she easily took his elbow and they walked companionably. ‘What else do you recall?’

  ‘Well, the smells changed after my mother’s death. All that comes strongly to me from then is sweat, whisky, beer, cigarettes, dirty laundry, stews and the smell of leather boxing gloves.’

  He gave her a perplexed look and she laughed.

  ‘I can smell the hot tin of the iron walls that made up the shanty we lived in. We lived alongside another man . . . although he tended to live outside the shanty. Only one foot was clad in a boot. The other was bare. And his skin was black.’

  Will stopped walking, shocked. ‘An African?’

  She nodded. ‘Shiny, like the engine of a new locomotive.’ They faced one another and she gave him a smile that seemed to enter him and warm him. ‘His name is . . . was . . . Zenzele. But we called him Joseph One-Shoe. Everyone in New Rush knew him by that name. Oh, Will, I loved Joseph as much as I loved my father. By the end . . .’ She stopped and shook her head.

  He encouraged her to finish.

  ‘I was going to say that by the time Daddy died, Joseph was my father, to all intents. He took care of all my needs; he told me about life as a Zulu warrior – the woman he loved, the village he’d left, about the skies, their gods and healers – and I taught him how to do sums, his ABC, some writing. He was my best friend in the world.’

  There was that whimsical expression of hers, and Will’s throat felt so tight that he had to keep his breathing shallow. He wanted to kiss her. What a stupid, boyish, unprofessional thought. ‘Er . . . you speak about Joseph One-Shoe in the past tense?’

  ‘Because he’s dead, sadly, or so I learned. I don’t cry any more – I gave all my tears for my parents and Joseph.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he admitted.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel awkward. No one can hurt me any more, is what I meant . . . Here we are,’ she said, waving a proud hand. ‘My grandfather collected these specimens.’

  He let her show him around the massive boulders where common and exotic ferns grew, spreading their fronds as if in invitation.

  ‘We have so many flower specimens that we’re in touch with Kew Gardens. My grandfather’s rare heathers are protected now,�
�� she remarked at his sigh of pleasure.

  ‘I saw them. The carriage ride from the station felt like I was arriving at one of the great parks of London.’

  ‘They called my grandfather a magician. When it comes to the house at Woodingdene Estate, I think he built his dream castle. I know people have criticised him for his eclectic taste, but the purists be damned. You can’t look at Woodingdene and not be filled with helpless pleasure, can you?’

  They stepped back to regard the splendid mansion atop the hill.

  ‘No, Clementine. I must say the view from here pleases my soul.’

  She looked up from where she stood, at his shoulder – no taller – and understood that his stare had been focused entirely on her.

  ‘Er . . . my grandmother once told me that he wanted everything about Woodingdene to defy what people expect. He created two lakes that look as though they’ve always been in this valley. He even created a glen with a brook that teems with fish. He demanded that at every turn a beautiful picture was framed for the onlooker.’

  ‘Amazing,’ Will murmured. ‘You must never lose this, then,’ he said, before he could stop himself.

  Clementine blinked long lashes that he could swear were tipped with gold. ‘Lose it?’ Her expression was all query. ‘Why might I lose it?’

  He shook his head, unable to find the right excuse. ‘Just a figure of speech.’

  ‘It’s more than that, Will. I’m an orphan and my family’s collective spirit seems to run in Woodingdene’s streams, play in its grounds, rest in its valley. I love my ancestors, and here at Woodingdene it’s as if they have their arms around me and nothing frightens me. I need to preserve Woodingdene and its land for posterity – for my children, for more Grants to come.’

  ‘Have you plans to marry?’ he asked in an arch tone, to keep their conversation light.

  ‘I do, of course I do.’ She laughed. ‘But I have to find him first.’

  Clementine began walking and again he followed her, finding himself in a glass-roofed colonnade, surrounded by fragrant flowers.