remembered with distaste the way Macrae had seemed to take such an unnatural pleasure in Bill’s downfall. Her silence had started to feel like a kind of complicity — a further betrayal of her husband with another of his enemies. But then the sense of accountability made her angry. Bill was the one to blame, she told herself — for the failure of their marriage, for the implosion of his career. He had always been stubborn and difficult to work with — it was why he’d never got promotion, dooming them to life on a financial shoestring. And now she couldn’t allow him to hold her back. Titus offered her a second chance at happiness, and she had to grasp it with both hands before it slipped away.
Over the weekend the long-predicted snow finally began to fall, covering the world in a dazzling white brightness. It was beautiful, especially down by the frozen river in the University Parks, where groups of laughing students were out skating on the ice, their long, coloured scarves trailing behind their shoulders and their breath hanging in the still winter air like smoke. Vanessa watched them from the bench beside Rainbow Bridge, where she’d felt so despondent a few days earlier. Now she felt alive in every pore of her body, and, leaning down, she scooped up a ball of snow into her gloved hand and pressed it to her forehead, enjoying its sudden cold bite. And then she walked back through the avenues of black trees, delighting in the crunch of the thick-textured virgin snow beneath her feet, got into her tiny car that was parked outside the gates, and drove out to Blackwater Hall, following the golden-red glow of the sun as it sank down into the western sky.
She was early, but Titus had already opened the front door and come down the steps by the time she’d turned off the engine. He’d obviously been watching out for her from the drawing room window, and it warmed Vanessa’s heart that he should look forward to her arrival with such anticipation.
He was wearing no hat or coat, and she laughed when she got inside the house, seeing how the snowflakes had settled on his thick hair and beard, making him look like a fashionable Santa Claus dressed in an expensive suit and tie.
‘Come on,’ he said, taking her by the hand and leading her down the corridor to his study. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
‘Something that can’t wait?’ she asked, laughing at his excited impatience.
‘Something that can’t wait,’ he agreed, opening the door.
It was a colour photograph lying face-up on the desk. The surface was otherwise entirely empty except for a telephone and a green-shaded reading lamp near the corner. The silver-framed photograph of Katya that Vanessa had noticed on a previous visit had now disappeared.
Looking down, Vanessa saw that it was a picture of an enormous square cushion-shaped diamond with innumerable facets, all glittering with different shades of white and dark light. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, staggered by the apparent size of the stone.
‘Yes, and extraordinary when you see it in person and know its story,’ said Titus quietly. ‘Because the great diamonds — and this is one of them — each have their own history. What they have in common is that they travel across the world, passing from one lustful hand to another, and that they tend to possess their owners rather than be possessed by them. That is their nature. Perhaps now people understand this and that is why so many of them are locked up in museums.’
‘Like this one?’
‘Yes. It’s in the Louvre. They have it sitting on an electrically controlled black velvet plinth in a case made of bulletproof glass. Below there is a specially made steel vault, and at a flick of a switch it rises into the light in the morning and descends back into the darkness when the museum closes at night. No one has even tried to steal it,’ said Titus with a smile.
‘Does it have a name?’ asked Vanessa.
‘Oh, yes. All the great diamonds have names. This one is the Regent. It was found by a slave worker who dug it out of the Partial mine on the Kistna River in India at the beginning of the eighteenth century,’ said Titus, taking obvious pleasure in the pronunciation of the foreign place-names. ‘The stone’s value was obvious — I mean it was the largest diamond ever found in the world up to then, and the slave was determined to try to keep it for himself, so he cut a gash in his leg and hid the jewel in the bandages he wrapped around the wound. And then, I don’t know how, he managed to escape from the mine and found his way to the coast, where he made a deal with an English sea captain to take him to Madras in return for half the value of the stone when sold. But the captain was greedy and arranged to have the slave thrown overboard, and so, as so often, the diamond’s history began with a murder…’
Osman paused, looking out of the window toward the last golden glow of the sunset as it faded from the sky above the tall black pine trees on the other side of the snow-covered lawn.
‘Go on,’ said Vanessa impatiently. ‘What happened next?’
‘It was bought by Thomas Pitt, the British governor of Fort St George in Madras, and he sent it back to England and had it cut.’
‘Cut?’
‘Yes. Cutting is what changes a diamond, Vanessa: it releases the inner fire. Until there was cutting, the fire was invisible. In the Middle Ages no one understood what lay behind the dull, greasy outside of a rough diamond. The Indians valued the stone for its extraordinary hardness, not its beauty. And then someone somewhere began to use diamonds to cut diamonds, and the fire was released. First there was the rose cut — facets on a flat base like an opening rosebud, and then at the end of the seventeenth century a cutter in Venice invented the brilliant cut, and after that, nothing was the same. This stone, the Regent, was the first great diamond to receive the brilliant cut — fifty-eight facets, thirty-three above the girdle, twenty-five below
…’
‘What’s the girdle?’ asked Vanessa, interrupting.
‘The middle of the stone. Above is the crown, below is the pavilion. And the facets bend the light as it enters and leaves the crystal, reflecting and refracting it so that the diamond dazzles and achieves its full glory. It took two years to cut the Regent, and at the end it was almost flawless. It went from four hundred and ten carats to one hundred and forty and a half, and almost all the cleavage pieces were sold to Peter the Great, the emperor of Russia, but several small rose-cut diamonds remained, and this — this is one of them.’
Pausing for effect, Titus took a small blue velvet box out of his pocket and placed it on the palm of Vanessa’s hand. With trembling fingers she opened it and looked down at the most beautiful bright white diamond ring she’d ever seen.
‘I love you, Vanessa,’ said Titus. ‘And I want you to be my wife. Say you will, please say you will.’
The diamond was like a sparkling magnet drawing Vanessa’s eye down into its liquid depths. It made her giddy, made her want to throw all her anxiety and caution to the wind. It was the promise of a new world, a second chance at life: all she had to do was nod her head and say yes. And so she did.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I will.’
And quickly, before she could change her mind, Titus took the ring from the case and slipped it on her finger. Then, taking Vanessa in his arms, he kissed her long and hard and then held her close to his body, feeling her heart beating against his chest. She leaned her head down against his shoulder, abandoning herself, and Titus stroked her long brown hair and looked over her head toward Cara, his cat, who had been lying curled up in an armchair in the corner of the room throughout the afternoon. The cat gazed up at her master for a moment and then began to purr, seeing the unmistakable expression of triumph dancing in Titus’s bright blue eyes…
‘Why is it called the Regent?’ asked Vanessa later in the evening when they were eating supper by candlelight, sitting side by side at the end of the long dining room table on the other side of the corridor from the study. There had been no sign of Claes or his sister all day.
‘Because in 1717 Thomas Pitt sold the diamond to the Duke of Orleans, the regent of France, and thereafter it became part of the French crown jewels. King Louis XV first wore it in public in March of 1721 to receive the Turkish ambassador, and it was said at the time that it surpassed in beauty and weight all the diamonds that had ever been seen in the West before that date. And afterwards the next king’s wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, had it set in a black velvet hat…’
‘She was guillotined,’ interrupted Vanessa, frowning. ‘Is the diamond cursed? Tell me the truth, Titus. I’ve read about jewels like that.’
‘Well, I don’t think you need to worry, my dear,’ said Titus with a smile. ‘What you’re wearing on your finger is a tiny fragment of the Regent. And besides, I personally think it is a lucky diamond. A hundred years ago the Empress Eugenie wore it set in a diadem to the opera in Paris. On her way, a gang of revolutionaries threw three
