Thomas crossed to the desk and opened it. The contents were undisturbed. He thought back to that defining moment with Matthew the previous autumn when he’d remembered his mother’s voice telling him about the secret drawer in the desk in London. He’d gone into the drawing room and opened that desk almost as an afterthought. All that time searching in the basement and on the computer and then upstairs in his father’s bedroom before he stopped on the first-floor landing and remembered his mother calling him: “Come here, Tom… There’s something I want to show you… It’s a secret.”
He’d pressed the knobs on the bottom drawers gently just like she’d shown him until the recess opened and he found the locket. He remembered it alclass="underline" holding it up, opening it, showing it to Matthew, moving across the room to the doorway and seeing Greta on the stairs with that crazy look in her eyes.
Thomas shook himself, banishing Greta and the locket from his mind. They could wait until tomorrow. Greta’s fat barrister would no doubt have plenty of questions to ask about his visit to the house in London.
Thomas returned his attention to his mother’s desk. There was no secret drawer here. Just letters and papers neatly filed into the pigeonholes or tied up in rubber bands. On the top was an unfinished letter to a garden center in London ordering a rose with an extravagant Latin name. It was dated May 31, 1999: the day of his mother’s death.
Thomas hardly knew what he was looking for as he unpacked the papers onto the floor so that he soon became a human island in a sea of documents. In the end he found it in the bottom drawer: the letter folded round a small black jewelry box. Thomas knew what would be inside the box before he opened it, but the perfection of the dark blue stone still shocked him. The sapphire glowed in his hand, drawing his eyes down into its dark mysterious interior like a magnet.
Why had his mother not put it in the safe with her other jewels? Perhaps the paper might provide a clue. It was folded four ways, and Thomas opened it carefully. The once white vellum writing paper had turned yellow with age, and for a moment Thomas was filled with a superstitious fear that the black ink would disappear in the sunlight or that the paper would crumble to dust in his hands.
It was indeed a letter, written under the heading “The House of the Four Winds” and dated November 28, 1946. It was signed “Daddy,” but Thomas soon realized that the writer was his great-grandfather, Sir Stephen Sackville, whose portrait hung downstairs in the drawing room. Sir Stephen had lived the longest of the modern Sackvilles, and the portrait had been painted in honor of his eightieth birthday. He would have been fifty-eight when he wrote this letter to his daughter, and she would have just turned twenty-one.
My dear Sarah,
You asked me to tell you a little about the Sultan’s sapphire, as the jewel that I gave you for your twenty-first birthday is called. It does indeed come from India, where it was owned by a nawab in one of the wild northwestern provinces near the Afghan frontier. I know nothing of the Sultan that once owned the jewel and nothing of how the nawab came into possession of it. The sapphire was, however, famous throughout northern India for its perfection, and I had long been curious to see it when chance brought me into contact with its owner. The dark glow of the jewel is in my opinion quite extraordinary. I have never seen one the like of it, and you know me for a keen collector of precious stones.
Thomas looked up from the dry words to the portrait of his young grandmother with the sapphire on her finger put there by her father. Wearing the ring had made Thomas’s mother feel close to her own mother, but the jewel he held in his hand now felt foreign and dangerous. This heirloom passing down the generations had brought no luck to the Sackvilles who had owned it.
Thomas turned back to the letter:
I had been posted to the northwestern frontier and found clear evidence that the local nawab had been conspiring against the British. There was no alternative but to act quickly and decisively, and I led a small troop against the nawab’s palace, as he called his rather ugly fortified house. He was mortally wounded in the short skirmish that followed and I had in fact taken him to be dead when I entered his quarters and found the famous sapphire. The old rascal had, however, more life in him than I thought and followed me into his private rooms. He had an ornamental dagger in his hand, but I am relieved to say that he lacked the strength to throw it very far. The effort was too much for him and he died soon after, although not before he had seen the sapphire in my hand. His last words were to curse me and all my descendants, but I paid this no attention. Some might say that I should not have taken the jewel, but I have always thought that I had a right to it, having risked my life to deal with its owner’s treachery.
I also draw a sense of justification from the four years of hard service to my King and country in the trenches of Flanders that followed my return from India. I certainly have no doubt that the Sultan’s sapphire sits better on your beautiful finger, my dear, than it would in the back of some dusty case in the British Museum.
You should therefore feel no qualms that the jewel is rightfully mine to give and yours to receive and the sapphire’s romantic history should make you value it more and not less.
I asked Cartier in London to set the jewel in a golden ring, and I hope that you will agree that they have made excellent work of the commission. Our family’s name is engraved on the inside, and I hope that the ring will become a Sackville heirloom.
Thomas read the letter two more times, and each time he was more struck by the self-justifying tone of the writer. The document was not the romantic history that it purported to be but rather an unsuccessful attempt to defend actions that clearly still troubled his great-grandfather more than thirty years after they had occurred. It was surely significant that Sir Stephen let slip in the first paragraph that he already knew about the sapphire before he met its owner. Was the nawab’s alleged treachery just a pretext for murdering him and stealing the jewel? If so, setting the sapphire in a golden ring did not change what had happened.
Thomas walked over to one of the high windows that looked down toward the sea and held the ring up to the sunlight. Sure enough, SACKVILLE was engraved on the inside in flowing script, but the engraving did not make the sapphire the property of Thomas’s family. Murder and theft did not create property rights, whatever old Sir Stephen might say to the contrary.
The killing of the nawab on the other side of the world almost a hundred years before and his mother’s death on the landing outside became connected in Thomas’s mind. He felt as if there were a purpose behind his discovery of the jewel and the letter. It was as if they had been left there by his mother for him to find. The great blue stone was a test. He saw that now. It was for him to choose what to do with it.
Thomas tried to imagine the scene described by his great-grandfather in his letter. For some reason he thought of the nawab as a handsome young man dressed in a crimson tasseled jacket and white baggy trousers, perhaps because that was what the sultan of Baghdad was wearing in Thomas’s old copy of The Arabian Nights, given to him by his mother for his seventh birthday. The nawab had dark, almost olive skin, and his hair was concealed under the folds of a turban. There was a yellow canary in the palace that sang while the nawab ate Indian delicacies served by girls with long black hair and high breasts. Outside there was a fountain of stone dolphins where foaming silver water splashed down onto the marble paving stones of the nawab’s courtyard.
Into this scene of lazy luxury painted by Thomas’s imagination burst a younger, crueller version of the man who smiled down so benevolently from his portrait in the drawing room downstairs.
Sir Stephen was no knight then. He was plain Stephen Sackville, three years out from England, with a fortune to make and a pair of black revolvers in his pockets to secure it with. This Stephen Sackville was a young man consumed with a lust for jewels. He had listened greedily to all the travelers’ tales until his attention narrowed and became focused on the sultan’s sapphire, the gem that contained all the mystery of the subcontinent within its deep, dark blue interior. Stephen Sackville could not rest until he had made it his own.