We both fell asleep and woke several hours later, hungry once more. First for each other. And then for food. I made us scrambled eggs with cheese and toasted slices of bread, and Jacob made coffee. While we ate, he asked me not to leave but to stay with him for the night. I said I would. After we finished our supper, Jacob went back to sleep, and I went into the parlor, looking over his bookshelf to find something to read and entertain myself with.
I helped myself to a book called Mr. Justice Raffles by E. W. Hornung. I’d read some of the author’s short stories a few years before, when a fellow reporter at the World had reviewed them, and remembered finding them easygoing and clever. Perfect for that evening.
Raffles was a “gentleman thief,” as he referred to himself. A rakish, charming, and cunning man who never seemed to get caught—or get caught for long. There was something Sherlock Holmesian about Raffles, which was no surprise, because Hornung was Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law. When the first Raffles story had been published, there was a lot of talk in the newsroom about the family connection. There was also quite a bit of speculation that Raffles and his sidekick were patterned after Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. At the time, that hadn’t held much meaning for me, but now it did.
As I read Raffles’s first escapade and recognized the homosexual theme between Raffles and his younger friend Bunny Manders, I couldn’t help but think about my father and the letter I’d read from Uncle Percy. I so wished that my father had confided in me and wondered, not for the first time, how unhappy he had been and how difficult a time of it he’d had being married to my mother. He was such an accomplished, generous, and creative man, who always seemed to enjoy life—food, beautiful things, the store he’d created, reveling in his grandchildren and my writing. Yet there was an entire other side to him that I’d never seen. Worse, never sensed. How perceptive could I have been not to be aware of it? What kind of reporter did that make me?
And with that question, the old doubts came back. I’d broken the cardinal rule of getting involved with my story about Charlotte and trying to swoop in like Lady Bountiful and help her. No, more than help her—save her, change her circumstances. It wasn’t up to me to change the world. But to report on it so that the proper authorities could change it. So that popular opinion would change it. Just thinking about Charlotte, my back twinged. My forever reminder of the little girl I’d loved and lost.
And yet here I was again, involved with Jacob while chasing a story. Except he wasn’t the subject of the story, I thought. And then I almost laughed out loud at the pathetic way I was trying to justify my actions.
I returned to the book, read another chapter. How very charming this character Raffles was. My father had been charming. Charisma hides quite a bit of darkness in people. My mother, for instance, was beautiful, accomplished, determined, and smart. But she wasn’t charming. Perhaps charm was really just another kind of lie. A way to put on a false front to hide the reality underneath. Jacob was charming, too. Did he use charm to hide his broken, tragic past? Or something else?
I put the book down. Thinking about Jacob’s past made me think about his secrets and the fancy leather box that he’d closed and locked without explanation earlier that day.
I rose and wandered into his workshop. I stood on the threshold, where I told myself not to go. To resist the temptation of snooping. I turned, retreated to the bedroom. I would get back into bed and go to sleep beside Jacob. But that wasn’t what I wanted to do.
Jacob’s jacket was hanging on the silent butler where he’d left it. I quietly lifted it and walked out of the bedroom with it on my arm. I shut the door behind me and walked down the hall and into the kitchen, where I hung the jacket on the back of a chair at the table in the corner where we’d eaten.
Yes, it appeared natural there. As if he’d taken it off and slung it around the chair back. If he came out now and looked at it, he probably wouldn’t even remember that he had worn it into the bedroom and taken it off there.
Even as I sat down in that chair, I was telling myself I couldn’t do what I was contemplating. Everything about it was wrong. I would be betraying a man who had done nothing but help me. Who cared for me. Whose bed I had sat beside for days and nights.
I wasn’t going to give in. I couldn’t intrude on his life this way. And yet I wanted to know. I had to know. I could no longer trust that what I saw was all that was there, and without searching, I would never discover Jacob’s secrets.
But that wasn’t the way to get them. Or was it?
I took a breath and then reached into the jacket pocket and pulled out the key that I’d seen him hide when I’d walked into the room. Inspecting it, I thought it resembled the one I’d found in my father’s pocket. The coincidence unnerved me.
Holding it tightly in my hand, so tightly that it cut into the fleshy part of my palm, I got up and left the kitchen.
For the second time in less than a half hour, I stood in the doorway to his workshop. And then I stepped over the threshold and walked toward the worktable. Everything was put away so neatly. The shelves behind the table were filled with tools of various sizes. While I had no idea what all of them were for, I recognized files and pliers and metal cutters. To the right of the table was a tall, narrow cabinet with double doors.
I tried them. They were unlocked.
Inside were four shelves on the right. The top was filled with a vast assortment of rough-hewn, nearly translucent rocks in various shades of blue, green, and red. Some were uncolored. Most were the size of my fist. Some were more polished than others. I picked one up, held it to the light, and wondered if it was in fact glass, not a rock at all. But I couldn’t tell.
The next three shelves were full of beakers and Bunsen burners and other scientific equipment. I wondered why a jeweler would need items like that. The bottom shelf was stuffed with sketch pads. I sat on the floor and picked out one of them at random. Inside, I found drawings of faceted stones, all meticulously rendered in pencil and watercolors. I put it back and noticed an old journal. I pulled it out and opened it to find pages of notes and formulas written in an unrecognizable script. It took me a few seconds to realize it was Cyrillic. The pages were dog-eared and often stained. The leather cover was well worn, with a tiny tear in the bottom right.
I put the journal and sketch pads back. On the left side of the cabinet was only one shelf, and on it sat the leather box that Jacob had closed so suddenly when I’d walked in on him. I put the key in the lock, turned it, and heard the small but distinct click I’d heard before.
I lifted the lid.
Inside were three rows of five compartments each, all lined in midnight-blue velvet. I sucked in my breath. Five of the fifteen compartments were filled with glittering diamonds.
One by one, I took them out, examining each. It was like holding magic in my hands. They were droplets of frozen light. Even with my untrained eye, I knew the chest contained extremely valuable treasure.
All the stones were larger than average but none as big as the Hope. Three were pure white. One was an emerald cut, two others were round. A fourth was pink and pear-shaped. The last was square. I held it up to the lamp and sent rainbows dancing on the wall as I turned the stone this way and that.
I had done quite a bit of research so far for the Cartier story, and all the facts I had gathered about diamonds were top of mind. But they were all just scientific explanations of how the earth’s pressure had formed the gems over millennia. One of the articles I’d read posed the question, if glass were more precious than diamonds, would we revere glass and eschew diamonds? A crystal chandelier cast the same rainbows on the wall, after all. Was our obsession with gems simply about supply and demand? Or was it something more elemental?
“Vera?”
I turned. Jacob stood by the door, looking at the cabinet with an expression that was half horror, half anger.
“What are you doing?” he asked in a tone I’d never heard from him.
“I… I was curious.”
“And that’s enough of a reason for you to take it upon yourself to break into my personal effects?”
“I’m sorry.”
Jacob strode over to me, took the diamond I was holding out of my hands, and put it back in the box. He slammed the cover shut.
“What the hell are you doing? For real, Vera. No lies.”
I couldn’t tell him the truth. Not yet, not like that.
“I was curious.”
“And so you went searching in my things?”
I shrugged. “I probably shouldn’t have, but why are you reacting like this?” I asked, hoping I could shift the conversation.
“That is of no concern to you.”
I spread my arms out. “Jacob, what’s going on? You don’t just have a studio here but a whole laboratory. And a box of what look like priceless diamonds.”
His face was a mask. He looked like the jeweler I had first met in Cartier’s shop. Removed and distant, simply doing a job politely and with reserve. “I am thankful to you for staying with me at the hospital and for bringing me home and bringing in food. But I’m fine now. I think you should go.”
“Not until I understand.”
“Actually no. Now. There’s nothing I wish you to understand.”
“Won’t you explain?”
“No, I won’t.”
I knew he didn’t owe me an explanation, but that didn’t stop me from wanting one.
“Are these your diamonds?”
“Please leave.”
“And this equipment and the formulas? What do you do with them?”
He laughed sardonically. “This isn’t a court of law, Miss Garland.”
“Miss Garland, is it now? My, how formally you address your lovers once they get near your secrets.”
Jacob’s face remained impassive. I knew I’d made a terrible mistake invading the privacy of this very private man, but I couldn’t bear the idea of him keeping secrets from me.
“My father had had secrets… you need to understand…” I tried to explain.
“That’s irrelevant.”
He sat down on the couch, looking as if all the fight had gone out of him, and put his head in his hands. I walked over and sat down next to him, surprised he allowed it.
“Oh, God, Vera,” he said. “I wish you hadn’t looked. I wish you had just stayed in bed with me. But now that you have…”
“What’s wrong? What did I see?”
“I’ve managed for a long time without having to explain myself to anyone. And that’s how I prefer it,” he said, not really giving me an answer.
“That can’t work with us.”
He shook his head. “There is no us.”
“Because I saw all this, or because you never let anyone in?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because I’m resourceful and smart, and I can see from your things and the way the apartment is that you don’t have guests. And because you are thirty-three with no wife. And because Mr. Cartier didn’t know a single person to ask the nurses to notify about the accident. And there were no notes on your doorstep asking if you were all right or why you’d missed this dinner or that play. And because of the haunted look in your eyes that I see when you think I’m not looking.”
He was silent for a moment.
“There are reasons I can’t be with anyone. Why I don’t have a wife.”
“An illness?” I asked, not imagining what it might be.
“Nothing like that.”
“What, then?”
“Can’t it just be that I enjoy my solitude? That I do not wish for responsibilities? Maybe I want to stay open to moving around. If I had a wife in London, I couldn’t have come here.”
“Actually, you could have. You could have just brought her.”
“Yes, but that might have made her unhappy. People have roots and families and friends, and not everyone wants to just pick up and move.”
He was talking about someone specific.
“Did you have a girlfriend who wouldn’t leave London?”
He laughed cruelly. “No, but I saw my father try to get my mother to move. It would have saved all our lives, but she was determined to stay in the town where she had been born. Where her family lived.”
“And so because your mother was stubborn, you have sworn off all relationships?”
“I like my life.”
He sounded so definitive that I felt sad.
“So are you going to have to kill me to silence me so I don’t tell anyone about your stash of stones?” I joked, trying to lighten the moment.
“I might,” he said.
I knew he was joking as well, but his voice didn’t have the rakish tone it usually did.
“I am sorry,” I said.
He nodded. “I know. And—” He broke off.
“What is it?”
“It’s the damnedest thing,” he said. “I actually want to tell you. And I’ve never wanted to tell a soul before.”
“You can trust me,” I said. But could he? I thought. What if he told me something that would make a better story?
“If you want to hear my secret, you have to give up one of yours.”
“A bargain?”
“A trade.”
I hesitated. There was one I should share. He deserved to know who I really was. Except telling him would ruin any chance I had of accomplishing what I was so determined to do. And then I realized there was another secret that only one other person in this world knew about. Another lover, no less.
“All right,” I said. I would tell him the secret of my heart.
“You go first,” he said.
“Years ago, I thought I was in love. I got pregnant, and I had an abortion.”
It had been eight years. That little baby would have already been in school. But there was no baby. There was no child of mine and Maximilian Ritter’s. And that was all right. It was as it should be. There was, instead, a career. But it still pained me to say the words. I’d never uttered them out loud before.
“I’m sorry,” Jacob said in a low, compassionate voice. “Was the scoundrel already married?”
“Not at all.” That was someone else, I thought but didn’t say. “He wanted to marry me.”
“But?”
“He tricked me into getting pregnant so he could marry me and collect an inheritance. And that’s not the worst part. He had help tricking me. From my own mother.”
“What do you mean?”
I told him the story.
He took my hand. “You must hate her,” he said.
“For a while, I did, violently. I couldn’t look at her. Or speak to her. For months. My father didn’t know about the abortion, but he knew something was terribly wrong. I admitted only that she had interfered in my relationship in an extremely intrusive way. Eventually, my father helped me realize that she still was my mother.” I shrugged. “And that she was acting out of her own warped desire to do the right thing. We have a problem in our family—doing the wrong thing but thinking it is for the right reason.”
“We? You do it, too?”
I nodded, about to say something else, but that would have been too telling.
“Now your turn,” I said to him.
“The diamonds in the case were stolen.” He said it the way he might have said the milk had gone bad or that he needed to buy new towels.
“You stole them?”
“Four of them. One I traded to get back.”
“What do you mean, ‘get back’?”
“I told you my father and his father before him and his father before him were jewelers. And diamond dealers. Our family legacy was the stones they kept for themselves. Only the best of the best passed down from one generation to the next. The first stone in the collection was purchased in the 1700s. By the time my father inherited it, the collection was incalculably rare and valuable. But we didn’t treasure it simply for its monetary worth. The stones were our heritage. Woven into our family stories. There were legends about the tragedies and triumphs that befell our ancestors in their quest for acquisitions. Each diamond meant something to us. Every one was a symbol of our family’s commitment to the generations to come. The diamonds were part of us. I can’t explain it better than that. And when the thugs came and killed my father and stole the stones, it was as if they stole my whole family. As if every one of my ancestors died all over again.”
Jacob fell silent. I sensed he was not finished but that he needed a moment before he moved on.
“Our family heritage was gone in a mad, wild minute. They murdered my father, and they stole our soul. Hundreds of years of hard work and honesty and fairness meant nothing.”
“I don’t know what to say. That’s horrible. But…” I pointed to the diamonds. “How did you get these, and if they were yours, why did you say they were stolen?”
“When it first happened, I was too shocked and then too sad to do anything but mourn. But in time, I became angry. About a year later, I was working in London at Mappin and Webb. One day, a client came in with a ring she needed reset. The diamond was so much like one that had belonged to my father that I was startled. She asked me how long it would take to repair, but I hadn’t heard her. She had to ask again and was angry at me for that. She shopped there often, so everyone endured her, but she was a difficult woman, married to a wealthy, miserable member of Parliament, a well-known anti-Semite, who stood for everything I hated.
“I took the ring into the workroom and sat there, taking it apart, seething. Of course, there was no way to know absolutely, but I was certain this was one of ours. I knew each facet and nuance and color and shape of every one of the fifty diamond treasures my family owned. I had no doubt. I hadn’t thought about it before, but of course, whoever had taken them from my father would eventually sell them, and they’d start showing up on the market. I wanted that stone the way I never had wanted anything before.”
“And so you just took it?”
“I couldn’t just take it.”
“What did you do?”
“First, I did some research into the history of the ring and found out when it had been made and where the diamond had been originally purchased. It all matched up to being part of my family’s property.”
“And then?”
“I got busy making a paste copy of the stone using my grandfather’s formula. He’d taught me how. Not for nefarious reasons, but often we used it to create less expensive pieces. Or for clients who wanted copies of their own pieces to wear while they kept the real ones safe. And then there were the women my grandfather told me we always had to help, because they often had nowhere else to turn. Women who were so desperate they needed to sell their real jewels behind their husbands’ backs in order to build a nest egg so they could run away.”
There was a faraway look in his eye.
“What is it?”
“A story I’ll tell you another time about my grandfather and one of those women.” He resumed his explanation. “So I used the paste in our client’s new setting, and I kept the diamond.”
“You actually switched the stone?”
He nodded.
“No one knew?”
“No one knew.”
“You got all of these that way?” I asked.
“All but one, which, as I said, I traded. When I left Russia as a boy, my father gave me a cache of diamonds to bring to England. In case I ever needed money, I could sell them. My father wasn’t prescient, but he was wise. There had been problems for Jews in Russia before. He knew there would be again. The diamonds were my insurance. I never needed them, and their value increased over the years. I traded three of them for the pink diamond in the chest.”
I sat there, stunned.
“So all five were from your family’s collection?”
“As far as I can tell, yes. I’ve come across others that looked right at first, but when I researched them, their provenance didn’t match up. I made up some rules along the way as well. I would only take a stone from someone who could afford to have it taken, and even if it was a stone that I thought belonged to us, I would never take one from a philanthropist who puts more good into the world than he takes out.”
“How could you learn all that?”
“I read the papers, studied the society columns, read the scandal sheets.”
I wondered if he read Silk, Satin and Scandals.
“I have other rules as well. No matter how certain I am that a stone belongs to us, I only allow myself one stone a year. I don’t want to get discovered and lose my job.”
“So other than the stone you traded for, you have been doing this for four years?”
“For twelve years. But I only found these five stones.”
“So you are a…” It had never occurred to me, and I couldn’t say the word.
He knew what I was going to say and said it for me. “A thief? Yes, I am.”
“What if you get caught?”
“How?”
“One of the women could go to sell her stone, and another jeweler could tell her it was paste.”
“Then she’d blame the jeweler she bought it from.”
“Who would in turn blame you.”
“Why me, specifically? How would the jeweler know when the switch had happened? How could the jeweler know the woman hadn’t had it switched herself and was trying to pull a scam?” He shrugged. “I suppose, of course, it is possible, but remember, I always do my homework. None of our clients was in a financial situation where they would need to sell their jewels.”
“That could always change.”
“But in the future.”
“So you take it upon yourself to be judge and jury and decide certain people deserve to have some of their riches taken from them.”
“I suppose if you want to look at it that way, then yes, I do.”
“Because what happened to you was unfair?”
“Not just to me. What happened to our people was unfair. The massacre was unfair. What happened to my grandfather, my father, and my mother was unfair. And not just unfair but criminal, tragic, horrific…”
I was sitting on a story that my fingers itched to write. An absolute scandal that had occurred in the most exclusive jewelry stores in the world, in Cartier’s in New York and Mappin & Webb and Boodles in London. How many stores had he worked for in the last dozen years? Jacob Asher was a scoundrel. And if I wrote up his story, Oxley could blackmail Cartier with it—and Cartier would pay, wouldn’t he? My mind was working too fast.
But I didn’t want a story that Cartier would pay Oxley to keep quiet. That wouldn’t accomplish my goal. Damn, this wasn’t the story I needed. Cartier had to be willing to take the story public.
But there was another way to use this. I could get Jacob to create a paste copy of the Hope for my aunt Carrie and then somehow use that to get a story about the stone being fake, letting Mr. Cartier in on it.
There was only one problem. A problem I’d encountered before. Last time, it was a little girl I had fallen in love with. This time, it was a thief.