London, Tanya and Josef were to discover, was as heartlessly indifferent as any large city; friendless they arrived and friendless they remained – at least until the empty rooms above theirs were taken some weeks after they moved in. Not that their solitary state bothered either of them – on the contrary, each for their own reason welcomed it. For Josef there was the diamond – it filled his mind and his dreams. He held it, studied it, all but talked to it. He would sit for unmoving hours in silence as the days lengthened and pale spring crept almost unnoticed through the strange city streets, the stone held before him, gazing at it as if by sheer concentration he would dissolve the adamantine surface with his eyes and enter the crystalline structure of the gem. Many times he took out his tools – cradled the stone in malleable solder, picked up the stick ready-set with the cutting diamond – called a sharp – that he had brought from Anatov’s workshops in Amsterdam, ready to begin the operation. And each time, slowly, he would lay the tools down again. The time was not right. He had not yet discovered the soul of the stone. So the meditation would begin again.
Tanya, for her part, did not seem to notice their isolation from the world. For the first few days after her hideous experience she had been as if struck deaf and dumb. She had neither spoken nor, apparently, heard a word said to her. She had not eaten, neither had she slept and Josef had been distraught, believing her mind and body finally to have broken. But from the day that they had taken the ship from Amsterdam the child had appeared to improve quite miraculously, her usual sweetly docile nature had reasserted itself, submissively she had allowed herself to be fed, she had begun to acknowledge Josef’s presence, to respond when spoken to. During the whole of the crossing she had refused to go below but had stood at the rail, her wide eyes fixed upon the swelling sea with the first signs of understanding or pleasure that Josef had seen. By the time they were settled in their small but quite comfortable room in the Gray’s Inn Road her improvement was remarkable – she seemed almost to have forgotten her brutalization at the hands of van Heuten. Josef, thankfully, accepted the outward appearance of her healing and indulged his preoccupation with the stone upon which their future depended. His plans were made – the execution lay now within his own hands. At last, one late April afternoon, with watery sunshine breaking through the shower-clouds that had dulled the day, he knew, simply and with no doubt, that the time had come. With steady hands he lit the charcoal fire in the hearth to soften the solder, and dragged the solid table to the light of the window. Whilst waiting for the fire to draw he set up the worn scaithe and the small flywheel, bolting them through holes he had made earlier, ready for the operation of grinding and polishing after the stone had been cut to shape. Then, with the solder softened, he took the diamond and cemented it into his cleaver’s stick. He pulled on his leather gloves and flexed his fingers, knowing how brutishly painful the coming task would be, especially for hands so long unused to it. He pushed a small wooden box to the table’s edge to catch the precious chippings. Tanya, her attention caught by the unusual activity, moved from her corner and stood by his shoulder, watching as he picked up the two sticks, the one set with the sharp for cutting, the other with the stone she had seen Uncle Josef handling so often. The sight was enough to arouse even her passive curiosity.
“What are you doing?” She spoke in Russian.
Josef, his building concentration broken, frowned a little. Then, with an effort, he turned to the child, his voice gentle. “In English,” he said.
Her brow furrowed worriedly, white teeth buried themselves in her soft, childish lip. “What – do—” she stopped.
“What – are – you – doing?” he prompted.
“What – are – you doing?”
Speaking the words simply and clearly in English he showed her, pantomiming the actions. “With this—” he held the sharp stick next to the diamond and mimed a vigorous rubbing action “—I will cut this—” he held up the large stone “—to the right shape. Then—” he pointed to the wheel. “You remember? You’ve seen it before, in Kiev.” He stopped. She watched him, impassively beautiful, apparently unmoved. He could not tell for his life what she understood, what she remembered. He pushed the flywheel gently with his finger. It swung easily, turning the scaithe. “Later – you’ll turn the wheel for me?”
She recognized the questioning tone of voice if not the words, looked at him intently, trying to make sense of what he said. Josef pointed, first at Tanya, then at the wheel. “Tanya – will turn the wheel – for Josef?”
This time she understood. Gravely she nodded. “Turn wheel,” she said.
He turned from her, picked up the two sticks again in his gloved hands. Now was the moment. From the split second that he set one stone against the other he was committed – to success or to failure. Beyond the window pale sunshine washed the old brick walls to gold. A hansom clattered by. A flower-seller called.
Josef willed his weakened, unpractised hands to strength and set the stones together.
The nerve-racking operation took the whole of that day and part of the next, during which time Josef ate little, slept less and spoke hardly at all. The child, tending at the best of times to silence, sensed his need and did not interrupt him except to bring him the simple meals she prepared. She watched from her corner as he cut painfully away the uneven corners of the stone, bruising his fingers to the bone even through the gloves. Then silently she stood and turned the wheel when, at last, the harshly laborious job was done and, with the scaithe primed with diamond dust moistened with olive oil, Josef set himself to the skilled task of grinding and polishing the gem to perfect fire.
By the evening of the second day he knew he had done it. The rain had started again, silently drifting along the busy street beneath the window. Drops chased themselves down the small panes of glass. Josef, tired to exhaustion, held the scintillating gem between his fingers. It was a stone of fine make, no one could deny that, and, as Anatov had said, worth a small fortune. Now he could plan – really plan – for the future.
Firelight glimmered in the brilliant-cut stone, speared dazzling spectrum colours to the eye. Tanya let out a small, almost inaudible breath of wonder.
“Here.” Josef lay the stone on a piece of paper, gestured her closer. She looked at it in awe. Rainbow light danced upon her face. Josef tried not to think of another face, brutal, bloody, lifeless. “What do you see?” he asked in English.
Gamely she tried. “Pretty,” she said. “Pretty light.”
“More than that, child,” Josef said, very softly. “Oh, I see more than that. I see a business. A jewellery shop of great repute and great respectability. I see a home. Comfort. I see security.” The child’s shadowed eyes were uncomprehending. He gathered her to him suddenly, rocked her wearily, finding himself unexpectedly and absurdly close to tears. Faces rose in his tired mind: the faces of the dead. Anna. The children. Alexei. He screwed his eyes up painfully. The past was dead. It had, for sanity’s sake, to remain so. His only hope was to look to the future.
As if to encourage him to do just that, Grace Sutcliff and her mother moved into the rooms upstairs three days later.
They met on the stairs on occasion, passed the time of day politely. Josef liked the plain, rather shy young woman on sight, was attracted to her slow, peaceful smile, her quiet voice. Within a couple of weeks of meeting her and her strong-minded mother he had begun to form the resolution that an alliance would be no bad thing for all concerned. Grace was of impeccably respectable family, good education, sweet temperament and no means at all, her recently dead father having been gulled into investing the family’s money in a fly-by-night money-making venture which had collapsed, leaving him ruined and in debt. However, Mrs Sutcliff, Grace’s mother, was not a woman to allow such misfortune to overwhelm her. She was a person of singularly staunch character, as was her daughter. Josef admired enormously their lack of self-pity, their obstinate determination to keep up appearances no matter how far down in the world they appeared to have slipped. That Grace’s mother saw very quickly in Josef a means to ease the difficulties of their situation he readily accepted – indeed, having already seen those same possibilities himself, he encouraged her to see him so. That Grace was nearly twenty years his junior was no drawback – indeed in both the ladies’ eyes it was a positive advantage. As for Josef – he had a future now and he intended to secure it. He needed a home, and within that home he needed – and very soon would be able to afford – a wife to take care of himself and of Tanya. He courted Grace hardly at all; the delicate negotiations were carried on almost entirely through her mother. This was not, after all, an affair of passion, but a civilized agreement of mutual benefit to all concerned. Nevertheless it pleased him that shy Grace appeared not to be at all averse to the idea. He liked her and he liked her mother. Both of them got on well with Tanya – indeed one of the best aspects of the whole affair was the quiet and unexpected devotion that the child offered to the tranquil Grace almost from the first moment they met. The kiss that Josef bestowed upon his affianced wife’s cool cheek upon the day that Mrs Sutcliff acceded graciously to his request for her daughter’s hand was the first they had ever exchanged. A month later they were married, quietly and with no fuss. On the day before the wedding Josef received the news from Amsterdam that the diamond had been sold for a little under twenty thousand pounds, to the elderly Count Nic Shuvenski as a bride-present for his new and very lovely young Countess.
Grace Rose neither had such a present nor missed it; on the day following the wedding she and Josef were inspecting the premises of a small shop in Hatton Garden, and Grace, with gentle guile, was allowing Josef to believe that in this, as in the recent matter of their wedding, the decision was entirely his.