The King's Diamond (33 page)

It was some hours past midnight when the door opened again and Benvenuto came in. His face was pale and drained. Behind him came Cavalierino and the same two soldiers, each carrying an enormous sack, which they deposited on the floor with a heavy clink. Then Cavalierino gave Cellini a sombre nod, and withdrew. Cellini threw himself down in a chair.

‘What a night's work! But it is nothing to what's before us.'

He reached for the closest sack and tipped it out on the floor. From it poured a shimmering flood of gold: cups and plates, pyxes, chalices, pectorals. From among them something rolled out and came to rest at my feet. I stooped down and picked up a hollow dome of gold, set round with three coronets and topped with a tall cross. Figures in relief chased one another round its three bands: saints, martyrs, angels. Above them were figured the three persons of the Trinity. It was the Tiara itself: the Pope's triple crown. I felt my palms begin to sweat, and my hands tremble. I held it out to Cellini, who turned it lovingly in his hands.

‘Caradosso crafted that,' he said. ‘Old Arseface himself. Pope Julius paid two hundred thousand ducats for it. And I have just spent half the night destroying it.'

I saw the sockets all round it that once would have held gems. The other objects were the same: one chalice alone must have carried a thousand stones.

‘The wonders I have seen tonight,' sighed Benvenuto. ‘The rubies of Pegu, the Golconda diamonds, the verdant emeralds. All, all gone.'

‘Gone?'

‘Sewed into His Holiness's clothing,' said Benvenuto, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘From his drawers on outwards. The man is a walking jewel mine. But don't dare tell a soul.'

‘No, I swear it. But what about the gold?'

‘There begins the labour. We are to melt it: cast it into the fire and render it into formless bricks.' He sighed again. I sat down, stunned. For the first time I plainly foresaw our defeat. Pope Clement was
preparing himself for capture: no one would search His Holiness's clothing for gems. But I would not be so lucky. Cellini lay down to sleep, while I lay until dawn, fuming with anger.

The next day Benvenuto began building his furnace. Men brought in bricks, and he worked round the little hearth in our chamber, building it up into a pyramid. At its heart he improvised a grate made out of shovel handles. That night he lit a fire of charcoal in it and placed a clean ash-pan underneath. Then he took out the gold. Medals, brooches, rings; all he threw straight on to the coal, and in a few minutes a stream of brilliant liquid gold began to flow out from underneath. It was a sight to sicken any man who saw it. It seemed to me then that the whole world I had grown up with, the world of jewelled prelates, princes and kings, was passing away. And what would come instead? Outlaw bands, ascetic pastors, republics. They would have no use for my jewels. Cellini lifted a brooch a couple of inches across and turned it in his hands. Around empty gem-sockets were figures of God the Father, and tumbling Raphaelesque angels.

‘I made that,' commented Cellini. ‘Pope Clement loved it; it was what first brought me to his notice. Well, in better times he may ask me to make it again.' He tossed it on the fire. My anger suddenly swelled and burst out.

‘So Clement is beaten,' I said. ‘Well, I am not. Benvenuto: we have gold. I ask you now to finish your work.'

He turned to me in surprise. ‘You are that sure of yourself?'

‘I have to be. I still have bills of exchange. Will His Holiness sell me a few ounces of his gold?'

‘I have no doubt I could arrange that with Cavalierino,' said Cellini. ‘Yours is the risk.'

I pulled the casket from beneath my clothes. My hands were trembling as I opened the lock and once more took out the diamond of the Old Rock.

‘You can do it? You can cut my diamond?'

Cellini waved his hand. ‘I can cut it as well here as anywhere. There are goldsmiths' tools in the small workshop below us, adjoining the treasury of the Apostolic Camera. You forget Sant' Angelo is a treasure-house, as well as a fortress and a prison.' He took the diamond and smiled. ‘Well, it is a piece of noble madness. We shall do it.'

As the gold trickled down through the fire and congealed in a glimmering pool below, Benvenuto turned the diamond in his hands. He had Martin bring up the tools he needed: the lapidary's wheel, a small bench, the slender goldsmith's anvil, the hammers, files, chisels, pastes. For a long time he studied the diamond. He was finding out the entrances to its beauty, the lines of approach. Its dull, rippling surface glinted as the few openings into its heart caught the light, and the flaw deep inside shimmered.

‘There,' he murmured. ‘I have you now. That is your weakness.' He tapped the side of the stone. Never taking his eyes from it, he pinioned it in a vice to keep it firm. Then he took a second diamond, one of those gems of his that I had rescued from the chest. He clenched this in a dop, and using it he scored a narrow line across my diamond. I caught my breath: I could almost feel the diamond's pain. It was a virgin stone no longer. Now there was no turning back. I watched with my heart pounding as he took a fine steel blade and a mallet. The diamond waited for his blow. Cellini paused, frowned, gazed again on the line. He lowered the blade, and with one blow of the mallet struck the stone.

I jumped up with a gasp. On the bench lay glittering shards of powder. But the diamond: the diamond was there, one side struck clean away. Its flaw had gone. There it rested in its nakedness, its cool blue water washing my eyes as I gazed on it, revealed at last, beautiful and pure. It seemed to look up at us in amazement, gratitude, even love. Cellini snatched it and held it to the light.

‘There! By God! Did I not tell you I was the man to do it? Did you ever see such a stone?'

I took it from him. ‘No,' I murmured. ‘I never have.'

Now he set about the faceting. For this he gathered up the powder, and together with oil he made a gritty paste which he spread on the surface of the wheel. This he set spinning with astonishing speed. Then, with intense care, he lowered the diamond over it, mounted on the end of the dop. A few seconds' contact, and he lifted it again, frowned and then continued. Over the following days the principal face, the table, emerged. The diamond acquired a dull, sleepy glow. You might see inside, but the light echoed around against the still rough faces, like in a dream. It seemed as if its bewitchment has been lost. At the next cuts, four sloping facets surrounded the table and the stone began to wake, and cast the light around it. Slowly it advanced, slowly: to what end, I still could not fully imagine.

But Cellini could not work on the diamond for long at a time. After a while he would look up from it, drained but exhilarated, and say, ‘That is enough. The stone is tired.' Then he would stoke the furnace and throw on more treasures, and remove another of the thin, golden bricks from below, glistening, streaked with coal and ash. Sometimes he darted out on to the terrace, even in the middle of the night, and aimed and fired off one of his guns. At other times he turned his mind to the rest of my stones. There were few left, after I put aside those reserved to accompany the diamond in the pierced heart. I had my dark emerald, the greenish cats' eyes that shot out colours almost as various as an opal, and last the two rubies: the one, pale and strange, almost pure white; the other noble, majestic, fiery and deep.

I nudged the stones with my finger. ‘We must be quick.' June had come. I felt time pressing against us. My refuge had become a prison. The Castle would not hold out much longer. But somehow I would leave this place. Yes, and Hannah Cage and my jewels along with me.

‘Quick: yes. Then after all our flights of fancy I think we must come down to something simple. A ring?'

‘Yes. The dark ruby.' It was a stone to heat the blood, to bring love and lust boiling up together. It needed no embellishing. I pushed forward the deep Persian emerald. ‘Let this be a sister to it.'

‘A second ring: so. And your cats' eyes, and the white ruby?'

I prodded them with my fingers. So pale they were; yet powerful. The deceitful snares of virginity. I thought of Bennet's letter, and his description of the King's lady. I pictured her dark eyes, her private smile at the way she had snagged the King and held him fast. ‘Make a truelove knot,' I told Cellini. Coils of gold. The stones caught in them, like flies in a web.'

He lifted his dark brows. ‘Is that your opinion of the lady? What a pity you still do not know her name.'

‘But I do.' I smiled at his surprise. From my casket I took out Bennet's letter, and read out to him in Italian the portion that concerned the mistress. When I had finished Cellini stood up and stretched.

‘Well, my lady Anne Boleyn, if jewels are a proof of constancy, you will have nothing to complain of from your King. And now, my dear Messer Richard, which of the Pope's valuables shall we send to the fire, to fashion the tokens of the English King's love? This?' He lifted up the triple crown itself, and held it over the furnace. The flames flashed on the points of each coronet, and lit up the faces of the saints: Peter with his keys, John astride his eagle, Mark and his winged lion, patron of the Venetians who never came. Then he lowered it into the fire, where it sat in majesty on the coals for many minutes. Finally its shapes blurred and the crown sank, formless, while a stream of gold ran down into the pan below.

Cellini worked fast. The din of the bombardment from the Imperials' new cannon batteries gave him fire, and he leapt from his guns to the furnace to the workbench without rest. In a short time the two rings were ready for their stones, and the truelove was finished. The twists of rope in the knot that bound the cats' eyes and the white ruby were exquisite; and nested among them Benvenuto
crafted a repeating pattern of the letters H and A. The gold heart too was ready for its gems. He set in it jacinths, amethysts, garnets: stones heavy with blood. Just off centre, a space waited for the diamond.

Little by little, the cutting of the diamond of the Old Rock advanced. New facets extended beneath it, enfolding it all round, giving it the infinite reflections and echoes that break the light and send it flashing back up and out. When I held the finished stone in my fingers I saw that it had come at last into its glory. You could see in it the flare of the waterfall mingled with the blaze of fire and the myriad glints of colour that are possessed by no other stone, nor any other created substance on earth. It had thrown off its innocence; but it had acquired something so much greater in its place. It knew how to sparkle with every turn, without pause, yet without a moment's repetition. It darted out citrine, amber, emerald; its waters played in its depths, then resolved themselves into a sudden fire which leapt and shrank back; and then, as I turned it to gaze directly upon its table, it became suddenly a creature of dark mystery, and I saw well-like depths, brooding caverns, night-time seas about whose edges danced always that shifting mockery of flames. Finally Benvenuto set it among the other stones in the heart: a baleful, beautiful thorn.

‘Superb.' On a sudden impulse, I snatched up the heart and ran with it, down the steps past the treasury, and across the courtyard to the chamber occupied by the Cages. I burst in on them. The three women were seated. Grace was reading aloud from a book of verse. It was Ariosto's epic, infinitely long, full of pursuits and escapes almost as fantastic as our own. They looked up. In my excitement I grabbed Hannah by the hand and pulled her outside into the courtyard. From the many doors of the armoury men passed in and out, carrying munitions up to the gun galleries. She was laughing as I dragged her by the sleeve. ‘Why? No, why, what is it?'

‘Not until we are alone.'

I pulled her towards a door in the corner of the courtyard. It was ajar. Inside we were in a small storeroom, among kegs of powder, sacks of fine hail-shot and lengths of brimstone-soaked matchcord for firing cannon. A narrow window looked out towards the Imperials' trenches. In its light, I opened my cupped hands and showed her the heart. Smiling, teased by my secretiveness, she peered forward. The heart flamed, bloodied and passionate. Slicing into it from the side ran the diamond. Its edges leapt with flame, while its principal facet remained a void of mystery. Hannah gazed at it for a long time, and then she looked up at my face. Her eyes had caught the expression of the stone. They flashed, dark and fathomless.

‘Now do you see?' I asked her. ‘Now do you understand?'

She put her hands up to my face. I stepped towards her, took her in my arms and kissed her. Above us the cannons bellowed, and the stonework round us shook. I caressed her hair, her throat, her neck. She slid down beneath me on to a pile of sacks, her arms outstretched. I was pulling at the strings across the front of her dress, running my hand over her shoulders and her breasts. I hurried to see to my own clothing: lifted off my sword belt, unhooked my doublet and pulled up my shirt. Hannah, smiling, helped me. She knelt then, and we kissed still while I pulled over her head her smock. Naked, she waited for me, feet curled under her, smiling, resting on one arm. Her black hair fell over the whiteness of her shoulder. She was entirely at her ease. She breathed with mysterious power, just as surely as she had when first I knew her, smiling down on us from her window, or when I first saw her in Rome, laughing at Susan and the monkey. Like my stone, with the veil removed she only teased me the more. I threw off the last of my clothes and crept alongside her. As our skin touched she rubbed one leg alongside me and put her arms around my neck.

A shot crashed into the castle wall behind us. Dust trickled down from the ceiling and settled on our bodies. Hannah laughed. If we
were to die, we would die. We were strong: we would walk into the dark together. As our ecstasy began, all our moments together fused into one. Hannah lying beneath me, head tipped back, her breasts pressed against me, was Hannah standing on the riverbank in the dark, swinging on her hips, twirling her mask by its string and saying, ‘I know! We shall play cards for it.' She was Hannah in the ruins, Hannah deep underground in the grottoes of the ancients, and in the dark of the attic of the Palazzo del Bene; Hannah who bet on the dwarf Calandrino and won; Hannah who told me there is no pleasure without danger.