The Black Diamond Read online

  On that visit, I was sure of it. His eyes were on me more than they were on his son. He went through the motions of looking at Bobby’s work, of talking to him, but even as his son babbled on about his pony, those dark-blue eyes rested on me, looking, silent, while an expression close to a smile was on his face. He looked somehow peaceful, which was not at all the way I felt.

  The progress in the nursery was a part of it, but there was more than gratitude in his eyes. There was interest, appreciation of a man for a woman, there was pleasure. But I do not mean to imply anything improper was said or done. He did not flirt, or touch me, or do anything more than look and smile a little, and talk of inconsequential matters. After a while he said, rather reluctantly, “I guess I had better take Bobby out for his lesson now,” as though he were loath to leave.

  “We go Little Mogo now,” Bobby encouraged. The pony was so named not due to any similarity between the two animals, but because Bobby was enchanted with the name.

  The weather was too cold to entice me outside. I had exhausted all the spots I could conceive of as possibly hiding Rosalie’s body, and for pleasure, I preferred the warm indoors. Molly was working on some great secret for Chirstmas, a present for me, which made it necessary now for me to make some racket as I descended the back stairs, so that she could whisk her work under the table. This was her payment for my having helped her with her green suit. When I heard the scuffling sound as I opened the door, I realized I had interrruped her at work, and told Cook I would take my tea to my room that day, as I had some letters to write.

  With an hour of free time and a quiet house, I decided this was my opportunity to return to the attic and investigate the forbidden cartons. I climbed up the stairs to the cold, crowded rooms, passed through them till I had a view of Darby and Joan, still hanging side by side, leering at any comer. I ignored them, and went straight to the cartons. There was a deal of stuff, none of it of the least interest to me—books, maps and papers, as forecast by Molly. Yet Rosalie had found something here to interest her, and Molly too had got her face slapped for peeking. If something of an incriminating sort was here, why did madame not get rid of it? Papers burned easily in one’s grate; more easily than gowns. Whatever it was it was of value to madame. I was curious to notice that many of the books bore the name J. P. Brown, like the one under madame’s feather tick. They were on a variety of subjects, but many of them had one thing in common—Brazil. There was a book of the Portuguese language, another of Brazilian customs and various Indian tribes. Some of them dealt with mining in Brazil, mining for stones, not metal. Curious to discover if I was correct in thinking the pebbles under the tick might be uncut diamonds, I leafed through the volumes till I found in one a section dealing with this. A rough diamond, it said, might be covered with a skin that hid its gleam, and the surface might be pitted. These two conditions certainly existed in the ones I had seen.

  I was, of course, intrigued to know who J. P. Brown might be. Madame’s father was a sort of explorer of foreign lands. How odd that I didn’t know her maiden name. But it must be Brown. The cartons were said to contain her father’s things. On the other hand, she and her father had been in Africa, not Brazil, and there was no mention of Africa anywhere. Campo Grande then must be in Brazil, I thought. Most of the maps were labeled Matto Grosso, Brazil. Mr. Rupert had been in Brazil, hunting for diamonds.... I continued searching. Mr. J. P. Brown was not so obliging as to leave any personal letters to give me a clue as to his relationship to Mrs. Palin.

  There were a few old newspapers slid in along the sides of the box, to act as padding for the contents in their journey.

  They were small newspapers, not of either the large sheets nor the thickness of those I was accustomed to in London. The name of the paper was the Rio Register, from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, but the wording was English. It seemed to be a small weekly paper brought out by and for the convenience of the English population in that country. There was much news of political doings in England, and inside the paper a large social column reporting the births, deaths, marriages, visits and parties of the English folks in Brazil. It was interesting enough that I decided to take them to my room with me. I gathered them all up, six of them, repacked the carton, and went to my room, wondering where I could hide them for safekeeping. Nowhere seemed safe, but in the end I laid them flat under my braided rug, then went to the nursery window to check on Bobby’s progress.

  His father stood in the cold, watching, and shouting instructions. Bobby looked completely at home on his pony; he sat easily and confidently in the saddle. He would be frozen when he came in. I would have Cook prepare us a pot of cocoa. It would be welcome to me as well after my cold stint in the attics. Mr. Palin brought Bobby in through the kitchen, as they were both dusty from the lesson.

  “I have had Cook make us some cocoa, Bobby,” I told him. “We’ll have it in the nursery, to be out of Cook’s way.”

  “A good idea,” Mr. Palin said, taking Bobby to the sink, where they both washed their hands. “Put in another cup of milk, if you please, Cook, and I’ll join them. I’ll have to get my son some riding gloves. He only has mittens, and cannot ride in his bare hands in this weather.”

  “How are the lessons going then?” Cook asked, tipping a generous dollop of milk into the simmering pan.

  “He’s a natural,” the father boasted.

  Bess, who had been ogling Mr. Palin since his entry, hopped to get him a clean towel. She handed it to him with a bold smile, which raised a fury in my breast.

  “I am going to be a racehorse,” Bobby declared, smiling broadly.

  Molly laughed, revealing her gap teeth. I no longer found her smile unattractive. Having come to love her, it was accepted as a part of her now. It was Bess’s pretty face that annoyed me. “You mean a racehorse rider, Bobby,” Molly corrected.

  “A jockey,” Mr. Palin said, tousling his curls.

  “Jockey,” Bobby repeated. “I going to win all the races.” Then with a haughty glance to the stove, he added, “Hurry now, Cook.”

  His father was so pleased with these signs of normal intelligence that he did not correct Bobby’s manners as he should have done. It would be for me to do, in the privacy of the nursery.

  I took the tray and climbed the back stairs, with the master of the house and his son following at my heels. “This is dangerous,” Mr. Palin complained. “A person could fall and break his neck on these dark steps. I wonder why they were enclosed like this.”

  “Why, they are only intended for your servants, sir,” I pointed out as we emerged at the top. “The master is not expected to use them.”

  “And a curtain at the top to make sure no light penetrates! What a foolish arrangement. If Cook left the kitchen door open, and we took down the curtain, there would be a little light from either end.”

  “You’ll have a hard time convincing Cook the draft is worth it,” I pointed out. Drafts were a constant irritation to Cook.

  “Papa go now?” Bobby asked when we reached the nursery.

  “He wants to keep you all to himself,” he said, with some traces of embarrassment, for it was of course a great departure from the norm for the father to take refreshment in the nursery.

  “You stay too,” Bobby said magnanimously, when it was perfectly clear he meant to.

  The furnishings in the nursery were not of the finest. They had seen duty for many decades, I imagine. The table was of deal, the chairs plain and hard, though not uncomfortably so. Mr. Palin sat down, glancing around at the accouterments. “We must spruce this place up a little for you, Miss Bingie,” he said. “Odd how one can become so accustomed to things that he takes them for granted, and never notices they have fallen into disrepair. Mrs. Palin has done some refurbishing belowstairs and in her own chambers, but she does not concern herself much with the nursery.”

  I noticed that, as I had thought, madame had redone her own room. That excess of luxury was the indulgence of a person long deprived. I imagine she had dreamed o
f such a place when she was traveling with her father, staying at second-rate hotels and rooming houses. “We are quite comfortable,” I replied.

  “I suppose your own room is equally spartan,” he went on. “Do you have a fireplace? I must confess I have no memory of what the room is like at all, but I remember my wife had to move Molly a few years ago, as her room was so cold. You can move, change your room, if it is not comfortable.”

  “No, I would rather not change rooms, as mine is so convenient to Bobby,” I pointed out, but my attention was still on a detail of his speech that had nothing to do with rooms. Regina he called, invariably, “Mrs. Palin.” When he harked back to April, he said “my wife.”

  “Let us stoke up this miserable bit of heat at least,” he said, going to the grate in the corner and adding fuel.

  I poured the cocoa, and the three of us sat at the deal table to drink it. “This is very nice, homey,” Mr. Palin remarked, looking to the leaping flames, “like a regular family.”

  He did not seem to observe that the mother of the family was missing, and the nursemaid sitting in her place. The nursemaid was minutely aware of it for all that. “Before too long your son will be able to sit with you at the dining-room table,” I said, feeling remarkably conscious.

  “I notice he is holding his cup like a gentleman already, using the handle. You have been busy with him, behind my back.”

  “I use a knife and fork too,” the child boasted, then went on to speak of Little Mogo.

  We spoke of nothing very significant. In fact, Bobby was the center of attention, showing off a little under the unusual circumstance of having his father present.

  “After waiting four years to hear him speak, I expect I shall spend the next four telling him to be quiet,” he said. When we were finished, he set his cup down, rather reluctantly. “That was a very pleasant party, Bingie. We must do it again soon. But not tomorrow. I shall be away on business.”

  I felt a stab of disappointment, but a more leisurely consideration told me it was for the best. The visits were assuming too much importance in my life. I must put myself at a greater distance from my employer. I must not let his friendship, induced by gratitude, color my perceptions and my work here. He was lonesome with Regina away, and he was interested in Bobby’s progress. That was why he came to the nursery; a spinster’s imagination and her crush on her employer had enlarged the significance of the visits.

  Mr. Palin left, and I read to my charge till dinner was brought up. After I had him in his bed for the night, I went to my room, locked the door, and pulled those newspapers out from under the rug. I went over them from first page to last, stopping to read anything that had to do with diamonds, or Mr. J. P. Brown, whose name cropped up occasionally. There was one report on his excursion to Campo Grande in search of gems. He reported a find of some magnitude, and was trying to drum up financial support for a dig. He had a meeting, at which he showed potential backers some of the rough stones unearthed. A week later he had achieved his goal, collected a considerable sum from half a dozen Englishmen in the city, and gone back to Campo Grande. The next three issues, which I had arranged to read chronologically, made no mention of him. I feared he had faded from the news entirely, but the next issue had a large article exposing J. P. Brown as a fraud. He had taken his backers’ money and fled, but not far enough. At Sao Paulo he was up to the same stunt. By chance someone there had heard of him at Rio, and exposed his scheme. Mr. J. P. Brown was ignominiously tossed into jail. The last issue was several weeks newer than the second last. In the intervening weeks, it seemed Mr. Brown had got out of jail. His death occurred in a town called Sao Carlo. He died of a heart attack, and was survived by his wife, Mildred, and a son, Reginald. The wife was with him at the time of his death; the son was in England.

  My hope that he was Regina’s father was obliterated. Who was he, then, that she had his belongings? The newspapers were four years old; Regina had been at the Park for something between two and three years. How had she got hold of the effects of a man who had died in Brazil, when she had been in Africa at the time? What was the link between them? I was still fretting over this when Molly came to my door. I stuffed the papers back under the rug and let her in.

  She only wanted to know if I was coming down to the kitchen, which I assured her I meant to do in a moment, as soon as I had finished the chapter of my book I was currently reading. All of us girls borrowed the novels from the family library. April, whose name was inscribed in the books, had been a novel lover; she had them all.

  “I’m reading that Jane Eyre you and Mr. Rupert were talking about,” she told me. “It’s awful hard. Maybe I’ll change it for something else. I only got to page ten.”

  I was curious to learn Regina’s maiden name, and used the excuse of having April’s book at my hand to mention it. “The library will have an easier one, I’m sure. Some of those from April Palin’s youth. Look for one with her maiden name. What was it?”

  “Winston was her name.”

  “What was the present Mrs. Palin’s name before she got married, Molly? I never heard anyone mention it.”

  “It was the same—Winston. Their fathers were related, you know.”

  “Ah yes, I think you mentioned that before.” I was not ingenious enough to think of any way a J. P. Brown with a wife and a son could be Regina’s widowed father. “I’ll be right down—give me ten minutes.”

  As soon as she was gone, I took up my taper to return the papers to their carton—just in case. I could not believe they were the important secret, but there was no place to hide them in my room. I got them stored away, and retraced my steps back through the other two rooms of the attic. Perfectly dark they were, except for my single taper. As I traversed the last one; I heard a sharp sound beside me, just to the left, where a trunk was stored. My heart jumped into my throat, thinking someone was there, hiding in the darkness. Incredibly, the slamming sharp sound was followed by footsteps, there where nothing but a small kitten would have room to tread. A door had closed.

  Gathering my courage, I went to the trunk and held my taper high to look behind it. Long, narrow slits of light shone up at me from the floor. Looking more closely, I saw that floorboards had been removed, and pipes installed. This must be where the installation of gas for the lighting below was brought in. I crouched down to peer through the slits, to see what room was beneath. I got a look at Laver, walking across the room. This was either his room or Mr. Palin’s, then. A closer look showed me it was the master bedroom. The corner of a canopied bed was visible. The trunk was positioned in the attic to prevent anyone walking where the planks had been removed. Odd they had not been replaced, but a careless workman was hardly a new phenomenon in the world.

  I had plenty to think about as I descended the steep stairs to the floor below. My thoughts made me forget the precaution of checking the hallway for the sound of steps before opening the door. I nearly hit Bess in the face as I stepped into the hall.

  “What were you doing up there?” she asked, her eyes narrowing in suspicion.

  “Playing with Darby,” I answered, to divert her thoughts from the path of danger.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked bluntly, ignoring my joke entirely.

  “I wasn’t looking for anything in particular.”

  “Don’t forget what happens to girls who snoop into madame’s things, Jane,” she said, staring at me with her bold eyes.

  “I don’t expect madame will slap my face,” I answered with equal boldness.

  “You think he’ll protect you? He won’t. He always knuckles under to her. He’s either infatuated or ...” She stopped and gave her head a nonchalant toss.

  “Or what?”

  “Or afraid of her. Anyway, a slapped face isn’t what I meant. You remember what happened to Rosalie.”

  “I don’t know what happened to her. Do you?”

  “She was dismissed.”

  “For stealing a ring, according to what I have h
eard.”

  “Hmph. That wasn’t the real reason. Madame would be very interested to know you were snooping in the attic. For a small consideration I might forget to tell her....”

  “What is it you have in mind, Bess? I’m sure you are more than familiar with my belongings, from looking through them when I am not around. What is it you fancy?”

  “She asked me to!”

  “Who, madame?”

  “Don’t tell her I told you!” Bess sounded frightened. The shoe was suddenly on the other foot, with me in the position of making demands.

  “What were you looking for?”

  “Just letters, that’s all. She thought Mr. Palin might have written to you. Was afraid you were his girlfriend, I mean.”

  I stared, as though she were a lunatic. “She’s jealous of him, insanely jealous almost. I knew as soon as I saw you it wasn’t that, and didn’t see any harm in obliging her.”

  Bess was eager to get away from me, after having started her questions so boldly. “What are you afraid of?” I asked her. There was fear on her face, a fleeting expression, but strong.

  “Nothing. I don’t know anything. I didn’t see anything. Leave me out of it,” she said angrily, then brushed past me, to run up to her room. The brief interlude left me totally perplexed.

  Chapter Seventeen