I don’t want tea,” he said in a thin, reedy voice. “Whiskey.” When O’Sullivan brought it, Mr. Dupree downed it in a single gulp before replacing it on the silver salver with a quivering hand. Celia noticed his nails were cracked and ingrained with dirt. He looked at her with rheumy, bloodshot eyes. “I’ll have that tea now,” he said and Celia nodded at the butler, who reluctantly left the room. He was uneasy about leaving his mistress alone with this menacing vagabond.
Mr. Dupree could have been a hundred years old. His white hair was so thin that his scalp could be seen pink and scabby beneath it. His skin was sheer and mottled with age spots, scars and deep, angry lines that could have been the work of a knife. Bitterness had ravaged his lips and anger blazed behind cataracts that blurred his vision and made his eyes water. A nervous twitch had taken possession of one side of his face, snatching the muscles every few minutes and pulling his mouth into an ugly grimace, and he smelled of compacted alcohol and sweat found in men who have slept rough and lived low. The energy he emitted was as sharp and prickly as his gaze, and Celia found herself struggling to conceal her utter aversion to this man who had forced himself into her life like vermin sneaking into the castle by way of the gutter. Yet there was something evasive about the manner in which he held himself, something in the slight stoop of the shoulders and the curve of the spine, that robbed him of his menace and even aroused her pity. Beneath his anger he looked desperate.
“Please take a seat,” she said and her voice was cool and assured; she barely recognized it as her own. She watched him perch uneasily on the edge of the armchair, then took the club fender for herself, in front of the fire. “I want you to know that I have read the letters you sent my father and I don’t believe a word that’s in them. The letters you sent to me I burned without reading them. I find it outrageous that you have the audacity to prey on a grieving family in this way.”
Mr. Dupree pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the inside pocket of his jacket and tapped it against his hand. “How well did you know your father, Mrs. Mayberry?” he asked in a wretched voice, popping a cigarette between his dry lips. Celia thought his accent had traces of a brogue but couldn’t place it.
“I was very close to him,” she replied frostily.
Mr. Dupree shook his head. “I think you’ll find you didn’t know him at all,” he said before bursting into a fit of coughing. “Do you believe in justice?” he asked her when the coughing had passed.
“Just tell me what you want, Mr. Dupree.” Celia was infuriated that this total stranger should assume to know anything about her relationship with her father. She watched him flick his thumb against a cheap lighter and puff on the flame with his cigarette. He put away the lighter and sat back in the armchair, crossing one scrawny leg over the other, revealing threadbare socks, dusty shoes and painfully thin ankles. “Your claims are very farfetched,” she said, wishing he would get up and leave, but he didn’t look as if he was planning on going anywhere for some time. Mr O’Sullivan returned with a tray of tea. He poured Mr. Dupree a cup and handed it to him. The fine bone china looked incongruous in his rough and callused hands.
“Let me start at the beginning, Mrs. Mayberry. Let me tell you about the Digby Deverill I knew.”
Celia sighed with impatience. “All right. Go on.” She had no interest in hearing his story, but as he was intent on blackmailing her, she had no choice but to listen. Mr O’Sullivan poured her a cup of tea, then left them alone, closing the door softly behind him.
Aurelius Dupree exhaled a thick cloud of smoke and narrowed his eyes. In spite of the defiance in his steady gaze the hand that held the cigarette was trembling. “When Digby Deverill arrived in Cape Town in 1885 and came out to Kimberley my elder brother, Tiberius, had already been prospecting for eight years,” he began. “He knew everything there was to know about diamonds. Everything. They called him ‘the Brill’ because he had a nose for brilliants—he could literally smell ’em—and everyone wanted him on their team. He worked for Rhodes and Barnato—all of ’em giants and they paid him well for it. Very well. He called me out to join him and I came on the boat from England, traveled five hundred miles up to Kimberley and learned fast.” He tapped his temple with a gnarled finger. “If you had your wits about you there was always money to be made in the mines.” He grinned and Celia recoiled at the black holes where teeth had once been. “When Digby arrived, Kimberley was a great piece of cheese being eaten by ten thousand mice. Rhodes and Barnato were looking to amalgamate the mines. The place was all used up. There was nothing there for Deverill. He was just a keen boy from a good family but that counted for nothing, only money and diamonds meant a thing then and he had neither. Rhodes and Barnato were as rich as Midas. They were as rich as kings. Yet Digby arrived with his ambition and his optimism and he was a man who believed in himself. I’ve never met a man before or since who had the self-belief that Deverill had. He put up a tent on the edge of the mines, in the dust and the midsummer heat, with the flies—and deprivations that you can’t imagine and I wouldn’t want to tell you, not a refined lady like you, Mrs. Mayberry. You’d never ’ave known that he was a posh boy, thrown out of Eton at seventeen for running a gambling ring and sleeping with the matron or some other boy’s mother, at least that’s what he told me.” He chuckled joylessly, then ejected a round of coughing from lungs full of phlegm. “They say that Lord Salisbury’s son lost a hundred pounds at Deverill’s table. But it wasn’t with the finer class that Digby mixed in Kimberley, but with the roughest of rough diamonds you ever met. Jimmy ‘Mad’ McManus, who’d fought in the Crimean War and disemboweled a man with his own hands, apparently. Frank ‘Stone Heart’ Flint and Joshua Stein, better known as ‘Spleen’—and you don’t want to know how he got that name. He was their equal. He didn’t fear them. If anything, for all his manners and his Eton tricks, these cut-throats feared him. He had the Devil on his side. Ruffians they were but Deverill had one thing none of ’em had: luck. He was lucky at the gambling table, so lucky that he got the name ‘Lucky Deverill’ soon enough, and it stuck—as did his luck.”
Celia thought of her father’s Derby winner—the last of his luck, before it ran out for good. “Go on, Mr. Dupree. What happened then?”
Aurelius Dupree dragged on his cigarette and Celia noticed with disgust the patches on his skin where his fingers had yellowed; he looked as if he was getting jaundice. He blew out a puff of smoke, leaned forward and flicked ash into the glass tray Celia had bought at Asprey on New Bond Street. Then he cleared his fluid-clogged chest in another round of coughing, which made Celia feel quite nauseous. “So, one day, Lucky Deverill is winning at the card table,” he continued. “And Stone Heart Flint has reached the seams of his pockets. All he has left is a plot of useless farmland north of Kimberley. Deverill’s luck is bound to run out at some stage, right? At some stage, certainly, but not then. Not for years! Deverill reveals his winning cards and scoops up the money. And of course, he wins the land—this supposedly useless plot of dust. Now, Tiberius and Deverill had become unlikely friends. Deverill knew nothing of diamonds, but my brother knew everything. The three of us made a pact, a gentlemen’s agreement, if there were diamonds up there we were going to split it two ways. Two ways, equally, you understand, and Deverill agreed. Fifty percent for him, twenty-five each for me and my brother. It was his land but he needed us, you see. He couldn’t do it without us.
“At first we found nothing. The place had been left to ruin, the mine abandoned, it didn’t look like it had anything besides barren land, dust and flies and an old shack where the farmhouse had once stood. Even the well was empty and full of stones. It was a dead old pile of worthless land. But we began to dig in the places that hadn’t been mined. Nothing. Deverill grew despondent and talked of quitting the place altogether, but like I said, Tiberius could smell diamonds and he smelled diamonds in the earth, right there on that supposedly barren plot of land. Deverill went and lay in the shade of the only tree for miles around, put his hat over his face and went to sleep. He wasn’t interested in the land anymore. He was thinking about the next game and his next hussy. But Tiberius and me, we were hard at it. Raking the ground with our bare hands and I was following Tiberius, because he smelled those brilliants like a hound sniffing for a fox. Then he found one, just sitting by the fence, or what was left of the fence. It was sitting on the earth there, like it had just dropped out of the sky. Like I said, Tiberius knew a lot about soil and this was alluvial soil, loose particles of silt and clay, and he came to the conclusion that there had once been water of some sort there and the diamond had been washed downstream and deposited right at the edge of the farm. We shouted to Deverill and he came running. Now he was interested, all right. We climbed to the top of the koppie and dug up there, and, hallelujah, we soon found the rich yellow stuff that told us one thing: diamonds. Our blood was up and even Deverill wasn’t thinking about cards and girls. We were all digging like dogs, the three of us. That ground was ripe with diamonds. Lots of ’em. We couldn’t believe our luck. We set about marking our claim. Deverill went off to register in the name of Deverill Dupree.” At this point Aurelius’s face darkened with a deep and burning regret. He grimaced. “We were so busy digging we barely looked up from the ground as we put our signatures to those papers. We trusted Deverill, you see. Biggest mistake of my life, trusting Lucky Deverill.” He shook his head ruefully and stubbed out his cigarette. “He had the luck of the Devil, though, there’s no disputing that.”
There was a long pause as he knocked back his tea and chewed on the terrible injustice he believed Celia’s father had committed. Celia remained on the fender, immobile, a sick feeling growing in her stomach. Yet she couldn’t stop listening, fascinated and appalled in equal measure. A new world, a new vision of her father was opening up before her like a terrible chasm. “Now Deverill wasn’t just a gambler,” he went on. “He was a womanizer too. No one’s wife was safe when Lucky Deverill was about. Blond and blue-eyed, you’d have thought he’d been conceived by the angels. But the Devil comes in many disguises. While Tiberius and I did all the work Deverill was . . .” He hesitated and flicked his black eyes at Celia. “Well, let’s just say he kept himself busy elsewhere. The only thing he did, while we sweated, was put up a sign that said: A Deverill’s castle is his kingdom. He’d written on a wooden plank in black paint and I never did understand what it meant until I saw this castle right here. We laughed at him then, but we should have known,” he lamented. “We really should have known. We brought our workers, hundreds of Zulus and Xhosas, and Deverill hired his old ruffians as foremen: Stone Heart, Spleen and Mad McManus. They once caught a boy stealing a diamond and beat him to death.
“Well, we needed investment to mine the diamonds, so Deverill went to Sir Sydney Shapiro. Now Shapiro was the agent of the Rothschild family—who owned the Rothschild Bank that funded Cecil Rhodes in the development of the British South Africa Company—and Deverill was sleeping with his wife. She was a looker: fair and innocent, like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But those ones are often the worst sluts of the lot, if you’ll forgive me, Mrs. Mayberry. As for Shapiro, he had a hand in everything, like a great big fat octopus, he was, but he didn’t know his quiet little wife was sneaking into Deverill’s bed. With Shapiro’s money Deverill formed his own company, Deverill & Co. which was owned by Deverill Dupree, but Deverill had tricked us when he registered the company, and given himself fifty-one percent of the share to our forty-nine. So Deverill came to us with an offer to buy us out. At the time five grand each seemed good enough, with the promise of shares. But he formed the World Amalgamated Mining Company, known as WAM, and sold it to De Beers for several millions. There was nothing in the agreement about our shares. Nothing. Deverill moved down to Cape Town and bought himself a mansion, setting himself up as one of the great diamond magnates, and Tiberius saw red. We decided to sue. We wanted our share and we believed we had a very strong case.”
Aurelius Dupree pulled the cigarette packet out of his jacket pocket again and his hand trembled more violently. He flicked his lighter and inhaled sharply, drawing the smoke into his wheezing lungs. When he looked at Celia his eyes were no longer black but cloudy with layers of grief. “But you lost, Mr. Dupree?” Celia asked. She knew that if he had won he wouldn’t be sitting here as a human wreck. She was relieved that this was all it was, a row between diamond prospectors from years ago, one man’s word against that of her beloved father.
“We would have won, I’m sure of it,” Mr. Dupree continued. “We would have won something. Maybe not seven million, but everyone in Kimberley knew we was owed our share.”
“So what happened? Why didn’t you win?”
“That’s where the Devil came in, Mrs. Mayberry,” he said in a voice so quiet and ominous it made Celia shiver. “Digby—”
“If you’re going to talk about my father,” Celia interrupted irritably, “call him Sir Digby.”
“Oh no, Mrs. Mayberry, he’ll never be Sir Digby to me. A devil in the Devil’s pay, maybe, as you will see. Back then, we used to hunt. Every day almost—gazelle, antelope, zebra, elephants and even lions. Yes, even the king of the jungle. While Deverill was in Cape Town in his new palace hobnobbing with Rhodes and Barnato, we was struggling to make ends meet. But one day, we was in the Cape, outside the city. We heard of a man-eating lion from a man called Captain Kleist, a German from German South West Africa. This white hunter invited us to join the posse. It was bad manners to refuse and besides, we needed the diversion. When we arrived with our guns on the edge of the veldt, who did we find but Mad McManus, Spleen and Stone Heart with this German captain, Kleist. I doubt he was ever a real captain, but I won’t digress. Anyway, there was an awkward moment, but they greeted us like old times and we didn’t blame them for Deverill. So we set off into the veldt. It was dawn. Still dark and cool. But soon it grew hot. That heat like tar you can hardly move in. On and on we went. First on horse, then on foot. We saw lions, me and Tiberius, but we never saw that man-eater, if he ever existed. Captain Kleist was in command. He split us into pairs. He chose Tiberius and put me with McManus. The hours passed. Nothing. Mad McManus told me stories of Deverill and his immoral ways; like they say, there’s no honor among thieves. Then just as we were about to give up, it was nearly midday and too hot to continue, there came shots ringing into the air nearby. We ran across the veldt. We called out. Finally we heard Kleist’s voice, shouting for help. We followed it. There we came upon a terrible scene. Tiberius was lying on the earth, but he wasn’t Tiberius no more. He was beyond dead, Mrs. Mayberry. Torn apart, to pieces he was. My brother looked like an impala with his insides ripped out. Looked like the man-eating lion had got ’im, Mrs. Mayberry. Nothing else could have done that and Captain Kleist and Spleen and Stone Heart were already there just looking and saying nothing. There were no words. Nothing to say. I asked Kleist what had happened. He was with him, after all. But Kleist told me they had split up and he had left my brother alone. He claimed to have fired at the lion but it was too late.” Mr. Dupree’s voice trailed off and he dabbed his damp forehead with his hanky.
“A most unfortunate accident,” said Celia.
“And so I thought for a while,” replied Dupree. “‘A tragedy’ Captain Kleist called it and all the others testified to an accident. But I took the body back to camp and washed it myself. I saw what I wasn’t meant to see, Mrs. Mayberry. I saw a bullet hole in his chest, hidden among the wounds, which maybe weren’t even the work of a lion’s jaws but of a dagger. Perhaps my brother hadn’t been killed by lions, but by man, and those men were your father’s henchmen. Suddenly I knew who was behind it.” He narrowed his eyes and glared across the room at Celia, who sat rigidly on the fender, her tea cold in the cup. “I told the police and they made their arrest. But it wasn’t Deverill they arrested; it was me.”
“Why on earth would they think that you had murdered your own brother?” Celia asked. “You weren’t even with him on the hunt.”
“No, and that’s what I told the police. But Captain Kleist claimed I was with him, and McManus, Stone Heart and Spleen all agreed with him. They said it was just me and Tiberius out there so I was the only one who could have killed him. It was a setup, Mrs. Mayberry. Deverill wanted us out of the way and he got what he wanted, as he always did.”
“But surely there has to be a motive for killing someone?”
“Oh, don’t you worry, Mrs. Mayberry, Deverill went to great lengths to find one. He dug around and discovered that we were both in love with the same girl in our hometown of Hove. We both wanted to marry her, it’s true, and it was causing a rift between us, but I’d never have killed my brother for her. Some woman testified to having heard me threatening to murder him if he married her, but if I did, it was in the heat of an argument—and that was it. I thought I was done for; I thought the judge would put on the black crêpe and hang me. But there wasn’t enough proof to hang me. I was charged with conspiracy to murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. While I rotted in a South African jail, forgotten, Deverill made many a fortune. But it was built on the blood of my innocent brother.” Celia put down her teacup. Aurelius Dupree stubbed out his cigarette and he did not light another. “Now I’m out, I’ve come for my share,” he said, looking at her steadily.
“Or what? You’ll sell your story to some dirty rag and sully my father’s reputation? He’s dead, Mr. Dupree.”
“Dead men still have reputations and families live off them. I only want what is mine and I will have my share,” he said in a quiet voice. “Your father can’t give me back my life, but he can make my last years as comfortable as possible. He owes me twenty grand, Mrs. Mayberry. That’ll see me out. Not greedy, me. Just want some comfort before I’m gone.”
Celia stood up. “I think I have heard enough fiction for one day.” She walked over to the door and opened it. “O’Sullivan, please will you show Mr. Dupree out.” Mr. O’Sullivan appeared in the hall, much to Celia’s relief. “Mr. Dupree is just leaving,” she said in a weak voice. When she turned back into the room Mr. Dupree was right beside her. She gave a small jump as he stood so close she could smell the tobacco on his breath.
“He didn’t pull the trigger, Mrs. Mayberry, but he paid the piper. He should have hanged. I will be back,” he said. “I will be back to claim what is mine.”