The Diamond Hunter Read online

  ‘Then go and get my granddaughter and bring her home! I want Clementine in England, leading the life she was born to.’

  He swallowed.

  ‘You owe them this.’

  ‘But what if he fights me on Clementine?’

  ‘What if he does?’

  He stared at Lilian, his mouth slightly open in shock. Reggie extricated himself from her grip and moved to the fireplace. He desperately wanted to take a swig of the whisky but that might appear weak. He swung around and glared at her as he continued. ‘I expect in all truth that he will say no. That he will not let his child go easily.’

  She waited, as though she’d asked another question. With the blaze of the fire making her pale eyes sparkle, he could swear she was lit by an internal passion he couldn’t touch. It could be the cancer; it could be the devil himself making her back him into this corner. He wanted to please her. He wanted to be head of the household. Reginald Grant, son of Henry Reginald Grant, wanted to take over his father’s empire with the full permission and support of his father’s widow and no longer be that bastard son society spoke about behind their hands.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ he uttered.

  ‘I want you to tell me that no matter what stands in your way, Reggie, you will bring me Clementine before I die.’

  Now he did reach for the glass. He took a slow sip, even paused to let the heavily peated fumes of the Islay liquor rise on his palate with their charcoal hint. It slipped down to his belly with a gentle burn of comfort and calm. He licked his lips and returned a steady gaze to the devil.

  ‘I will bring Clementine home.’

  ‘At any cost?’

  ‘No matter what it takes,’ he replied, surprised by the fervour in his tone.

  Lilian rewarded him with a sighing smile, warmer than the fire to his back; it made him feel as though he had just been compensated for years of being frozen out. Reggie could swear a shiver of satisfaction wove slowly through him, its silk-like thread attaching him firmly into the family tapestry.

  ‘Then I shall drink to you, Reggie Grant, whom I now consider my family, and I shall put all of my faith in you for as long as I have to live. Do not let me down. To you!’

  He raised his glass, caught up in the surprise of how today’s grief had delivered to him such a prize. Bittersweet but uplifting.

  ‘To our family,’ he said and swallowed the contents of the glass, this time tasting iodine from the seaweed that contributed to the flavour of the famous whisky. And for the briefest of moments – a single heartbeat – he felt as lonely in his promise to Lilian as the Hebridean island from which the single malt hailed.

  4

  THE BIG HOLE, KIMBERLEY, CAPE COLONY

  May 1872

  Joseph took something from his pocket. ‘For you, Miss Clementine.’

  She opened her mouth in surprise as her friend handed her a triangular lump of grey stone. It landed in her palm with a satisfying weight. Its edges were defined but not sharp, and hairlike ivory strands seamed through what she knew the miners called ‘blue ground’. But what kept her silent and her mouth still forming an o of pleasure was the cuboid, glassy substance protruding from its middle. Clementine was practised enough now to know that if she walked out into the sunlight, the lump she held would give off a blue-ish hue and its passenger would glimmer a truth that couldn’t be hidden. If they left it in the open, the earth clinging to that glimmering guest would turn a crumbly yellow. She was looking at a diamond about the size of her thumb tip.

  ‘Found today?’ She looked up, her eyes shining and wide.

  Joseph One-Shoe nodded. ‘Your father is very excited. Our first find in two moons. If there’s this one, there’s more.’ He put his finger to his generous lips. ‘Do not speak of it to anyone.’

  She didn’t need to be told. From the earliest age Clementine had understood about the secrecy that surrounded ‘finds’. Her father and Joseph would not want any of the other diggers to get so much as a whiff of this diamond.

  ‘How much?’

  He gave a slight shrug. ‘Maybe three carrots.’

  She giggled. ‘Not ca-rrots. Ca-rats, Joseph.’

  He grinned and she realised he was teasing her.

  ‘Your father tells me they will sparkle just like the stars when they are properly polished. Let’s free our new one.’ She watched Joseph reach for a nearby hammer, never far away in the practical hovel she and her father called home, and leaned in as he easily knocked away the stone that clutched the diamond. She’d been fascinated to learn how the diamonds reached the surface where they dug, and had listened to her father explaining it to Joseph one night. They’d had a very good morning, finding half-a-dozen small, half-carat rough diamonds that they sold the same afternoon to the brokers who had set up their gaudy tents around the Big Hole. Their roughs had sold for a tidy sum that had afforded them rent, food, fresh clothes, at last, and new tools for bigger and better finds. They had certainly felt rich that day. Her father had wandered down the main street before going to the pub and had paid a visit to Blacklaws to buy new boots for Joseph One-Shoe and Clementine. She had proudly pulled on her sturdy new footwear, wincing at the stiffness of the leather but entirely in love with them. They were a deep red, darker than the cheap wine her father sometimes brought home and more colourful than the boots Sarah Carruthers wore to school and boasted were polished each day by their Malay servant. Joseph’s were shiny black.

  ‘You can see your face in them, Joseph,’ her father had remarked as he’d handed them to his friend with a smile.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he’d laughed.

  ‘Oh, come on, Joseph. Wear them,’ Clementine had scolded.

  ‘I do not wish to scuff them. Besides, then you would have to call me Joseph Two-Shoes.’ As she opened her mouth to protest, he had grinned that smile of his – like lightning it came, brightening their world just as suddenly as those electric sketches lit the sky. ‘I will wear at least one of them soon enough.’

  ‘Not one at a time, surely?’ her father had sighed.

  ‘They will last twice as long,’ Joseph had replied, and neither of the Knights could fault that logic.

  Clem watched him now as he returned to the tiny wood stove where he was cooking them a meal.

  It included meat – some antelope, a rare treat for the trio, who lived predominantly on smaller, meaner meats and mostly yam and maize. They also had cassava, but only if Joseph prepared it.

  ‘Never cook this yourself,’ he’d warned James when they’d first found themselves alone with a little girl to raise. ‘It has a poison and can harm if it is not . . .’ He had struggled to find the word.

  ‘Prepared?’ James had offered.

  ‘Not cooked as it must be,’ Joseph had settled on. ‘It is dangerous – can kill. It also makes a bitter drink that makes people . . .’ He’d pretended to stagger to demonstrate the word he couldn’t find.

  James had later discovered from others that there were high levels of cyanide in the plant, which had to be cooked out.

  Over their midday meal Clementine was still handling the new diamond and learned about the blue ground that diamonds were found within.

  ‘What is this stone around the diamond?’ Joseph asked over their shared dish of spiced beans and rice. He’d pointed at the remains of some rock from their day’s find.

  James looked over. ‘The geologists now call it kimberlite. It’s volcanic matter surging from the earth’s mantle. I guess you don’t know what the mantle is?’

  Joseph shook his head with a frown; so did Clementine.

  ‘Hmm, how can I put this simply? It’s where the liquid fire of the earth bubbles away. Have you heard of volcanoes?’

  ‘Yes, Mr James. Miss Clementine has showed me pictures.’

  ‘Ah, good. So, think of the kimberlite like a very small version of a volcano – almost an upside-down one, where its mouth on the earth is wider than where it begins thousands of miles below the surface.’ He
drew the shape in the air with a finger. ‘It’s like an underground funnel, and as the magma – which is molten rock like a thick liquid – rushes to the surface, it drags with it the diamonds, which have crystallised under vast pressure and high temperatures over millions of years.’

  Clementine had watched her father turn wistful.

  ‘Diamonds are amazing. They allow us to glimpse the remotest depths of our planet, perhaps the beginning of our planet, bringing its precious secrets to the surface.’

  ‘Like fallen stars, Daddy,’ she’d remarked through a mouthful of rice.

  ‘Indeed. A perfect metaphor, Clem.’

  ‘What’s a metaphor?’

  ‘It’s a way of describing something by comparing it to something else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like comparing you to a hungry piglet.’

  Her laughter, as explosive as the kimberlite funnel, meant rice had catapulted from her mouth and amused both her favourite men.

  Such moments of helpless entertainment with her father were becoming rarer. They used to be part of her daily nourishment, but now it was noticeable how little time he spent playing with her. It was not that she was too old for the type of chatter and games they had enjoyed when her mother was alive. She was a bit taller, that’s all, as she mentioned to Joseph indignantly. She still wanted her father to play cards with the scruffy pack of Happy Families they’d purchased at Alderslade’s. She’d had to teach Joseph One-Shoe how to play hopscotch because her father was no longer interested in bouncing across the numbers they used to draw in the dirt with a stick, throwing pebbles of kimberlite to play. He no longer made up tall tales about her beloved ragdoll, and his bedtime stories were a pleasure of the past; now she and Joseph would read aloud together from her few books. It was good practice for Joseph but she missed her father’s presence – he would embellish the stories or even act them out for her, putting on different voices and making her laugh. Now his favourite place was the Digger’s Rest, one of the many pubs that had sprung up in the now burgeoning town, no longer just ‘New Rush’, but referred to as Kimberley. His life consisted of digging all day, drinking most evenings and lurching home to drift into unhappy sleep. The last few days had been the worst; he’d eaten sparsely and had already left for a pint before he’d go back to the claim.

  Her father’s attention to her was as brittle now as the blueish earth that had fractured and turned yellow to crumble and leave the rough diamond. It was surprisingly heavy and cold to the touch.

  Clementine held the diamond up to the light to watch it refract, sending a rainbow fire slanting one way and then the next. Her father had assured her that when these stones were properly cut and polished, they could dazzle with colour so beautiful that you’d never tire of looking at them. ‘Maybe three carats – you’re right, Joseph,’ she said, not really knowing but enjoying sounding knowledgeable about its weight. ‘Looks excellent quality,’ she remarked, again in all innocence, now holding it up to her eye and squinting as though wearing a loupe like an old professional. ‘Maybe I’ll be a diamond sorter one day.’

  ‘Why not dream up beautiful jewellery that uses these stones? How many do we have now, Miss Clementine?’

  ‘This one makes twenty-four. Daddy says when we have twice this much we will be nearly rich.’

  He nodded appreciatively, understanding that Clementine had no concept of what ‘rich’ meant. ‘All we need is one big one, and maybe your father will stop.’

  ‘If he stops, I’ll have to go home.’

  He looked at her with the tenderness she loved. ‘If he stops, he might have a chance to be well again, and you can start to live like a proper young lady. That’s more important. Let us bury this one with the rest of our stash.’

  Down in the hole, James Knight toiled feverishly. Joseph One-Shoe had just arrived, saying little, but James could see only accusation in the slightly lowered gaze of his friend. He knew he should have been spending time with his daughter; he hadn’t seen her for days, leaving the caring to Joseph. The women’s gazes of dismay and recrimination he received when he walked into town, thirsty for his night of beer drinking, told him no one approved of his leaving the young African warrior to raise a white girl. Joseph One-Shoe was popular, no doubt, but there was an invisible line and James was sure he’d forced his friend to not only cross it but to leave it far in his dusty wake. He knew Joseph was cautious; the helplessly modest man worked at not drawing any attention to himself. Yet here James was, callously forcing his friend to be mother, father and friend to his little girl. There were times when he believed Clem loved Joseph more than she loved him, and how could he blame her?

  ‘Careful, Knight, you’ll dig through to Australia if you keep going like that!’ quipped one of the Irish diggers from a nearby claim.

  ‘Jealous, Paddy?’

  ‘Maybe I will be when you yell “Eureka!”’

  The town of New Rush only existed because of this massive hole. He now stood nearly 40 feet deep in a smaller hole with walls that he and Joseph had dug. He straightened up briefly to look around, taking the chance to wipe the sweat from his face, as wet as if he’d stood in the rain for too long. Except rain was rare here, and dust had coated that sweat to leave only the palest part of his features revealed: the whites of his eyes; the laughter lines around them, no longer as obvious as they once were; his teeth. His arms were caked with it, his clothes filthy; Louisa would be ashamed of him. He was ashamed of himself.

  It looked like the archaeological digs he’d seen in newspapers, in places like the Levant, searching for tombs filled with treasure and the mummified remains of Egyptians. Except these excavations were not calculated or strategic – they were frenzied. Men had run when the cry went up about the find. Joseph One-Shoe had outrun everyone, of course, and had been among the first to buy a claim, which had already been marked out by the time James and Clementine finally arrived. Joseph had been faced with two broken people who had said little more than a few words between them over the following week. Louisa’s death had delayed them by several days, and emerging into the ‘New Rush’, as it was known, had held no excitement for them.

  James didn’t like to recall that time, had tried to build walls around what he knew was the darkest moment of his life. Now he deliberately shifted his thoughts away from Louisa’s burial and the grief. He had to get his child away from Africa; it was the silent promise he had made over Louisa’s corpse, and he hoped she might somehow know that he would return her daughter to her family in England.

  Their dig was well advanced, now that they’d left the scuffles and fights behind when the claims were first made.

  These months gone every man tried to dig faster than the next. Digs collapsed, toppling into their neighbour’s claim. More dust would explode into the air, filling lungs and dirtying skin. Fights would erupt and the violence could be brutal if the collapse buried a diamond find or, worse, revealed a new one. Collapsed walls that revealed diamonds could result in fatal disputes, as men fought over blurred boundaries. Joseph One-Shoe had chosen their claim well and it was large enough that James could give them a solid set of walls: thick enough that the neighbouring claims were not under threat from their dig and vice versa.

  The Big Hole had widened, deepened. James estimated that it would take a man a full thirty minutes to walk its circumference, perhaps longer. It could even double if this chaos continued, as the men dug even further hoping to strike a new funnel. Since it was no longer possible to travel easily between claims, they were now accessed by a series of crisscrossing ropes and pullies: from above it looked like a game of cat’s cradle being played by a lunatic. There was no order, no plan; the miners all depended on one another’s cooperation, and that potential was tested daily.

  The wires were strung across up to a quarter of a mile in places and could haul buckets of loosened earth up from the lowest depths of the crater, through a complex pulley system up to the edge of the cliff it had formed, to be sifted a
nd sorted. James had to accept that from a crude engineering point of view, Plato’s observation that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ rang true.

  He paused to pull off the red kerchief and wipe his face yet again. The muscles in his thighs pleaded with him to stop and his spine cracked a complaint.

  ‘You go up, Mr James,’ Joseph suggested. ‘I’ll take over digging.’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  ‘I don’t think so. You need water, you need a little rest. You do the sifting. I’m feeling fresh and —’ he rubbed his fingertips in an attempt to make James smile — ‘I think I feel some magic after this morning’s find.’

  James did dredge up a grin. Clementine had been discussing magic with Joseph, whose culture had its own notions of what could happen in worlds beyond the one they lived in. ‘All right, you dig. There’s nothing in what I’ve dug today. Don’t even bother with it.’

  ‘I’ve left a pail of water for you. Miss Clementine has sent some bread and cheese.’

  When had his seven-year-old begun worrying about what he ate? James waved his friend’s concern away and tucked his shirt back into the loose waistband of his trousers. His clothes hung on his hollow frame as emptily as if his shoulders were a washing line.

  ‘You must eat,’ Joseph implored him. His large soulful eyes now regarded him with disappointment.

  ‘I’m doing my best for her, you know,’ James murmured, failing to keep the self-pity out of his voice.

  Joseph One-Shoe heard it. James could see in the way he lowered his gaze that he was trying to hide some measure of disgust. ‘She spends too much time alone.’

  James took a short, angry breath to shoot back a response but Joseph was quicker. ‘I’m not enough. I’m not her father.’

  ‘You act like one.’

  Now the Zulu lifted those dark eyes and James saw anger to match his, although Joseph’s voice remained even. ‘Someone has to take care of her. You are not present enough.’