Diamond

A diamond ring is crucial to the plot of the novel I’m working on. This piece is what I would call a playful origin story. It’s rough, it’s incomplete, it may not make the final cut, but it’s a fun read. Enjoy.

Our best guess is that the diamond in question was formed between 1 and 3.5 billion years ago in the earth’s mantle, which is located between 140 and 190 kilometres beneath the earth’s crust. You wouldn’t want to walk it, but there are people crazy enough to attempt these distances on foot, to which you could attach a certain irony, since the story of our diamond also involves insanity as well as other less forgivable behaviours, such as greed, covetousness, betrayal and violence as bad as it gets. On the other hand, this diamond will bring out the best in people, one of whom in particular searches high and low before finding and learning to love his better self. This person may not stop to consider how the stone which is set, in all its magnificence, in the ring he is carrying on a train to Paris was formed, but if he took the time he would learn that all it takes is a combination of carbon minerals, extreme heat (2,200° Fahrenheit) and 725,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. The man on the train likes to assume that he thrives under pressure, but if he did stop to think that his car tyres were inflated to around 30 pounds per square inch, he would stand to one side and allow the diamond to take the plaudits when it comes to stress.

Diamonds also arrive from the skies, packed into meteorites formed by the collision of asteroids and other cosmic occurrences. This would be grist to the mill for any storyteller, but alas these space rocks are generally of lesser quality and would not be used to make a ring as illustrious as the one in our narrative. We won’t bother our Paris-bound traveller with this fact. Nor will we dwell upon synthetic diamonds, since what did humans ever make that defied and defeated the beauty of the natural world? No, our diamond, which was formed deep underground by the combination of carbon and heat and pressure, is one of those that was shot towards the earth’s surface via a kimberlite pipe in a volcanic explosion and there it waited (wherever it landed) to be discovered or not. Our diamond was unaware of its purity; it had no idea how valuable it would be, over and over and over again; and it was unfamiliar with the tradition of giving diamonds to beloveds and betrotheds. Having survived all that heat and pressure, and the explosion, the journey it was about to take, when discovered in the 17th century by a 12 year old boy, somewhere deep into what is now India, would not have scratched the surface of its considerations. Not that anything could scratch its surface.

To call it a mine would imply organisation, structure and, even in an occupation as dangerous as mineral extraction, a degree of safety. But this vast hellhole in India, where our diamond first felt the rays of the sun, had little of the above. Boys and men worked daylight hours (as many as they could manage) in search of the find that would make their owner rich, for the allure and value of the diamond was as strong in those days as it is today. At this mine (we have to call it something) the overseer had an arrangement with the boys and men who scoured the hole with hands and picks. The overseer never spoke of this arrangement, but the miners all knew that larger discoveries should be taken without delay to this man who had another arrangement with a merchant who passed through the region once or twice a year. This merchant had his own arrangement with a clerk at the harbour in _____. The clerk knew several sailors who were familiar with the workings of the black market and who had contacts in the diamond industry on the other side of the world in Amsterdam. One such contact in Amsterdam was employed by a French goldsmith whose lack of scruples had never troubled his clients, amongst whose numbers featured many of the royal families of Europe.

The goldsmith, ever keen to avoid the bidding war that accompanied the arrival of a stone of distinction, was nevertheless happy to pay good money to his Dutch contact who did the same to his sailor who did the same to his clerk and so on until the overseer ended this chain of self-interest by any means necessary. The illiterate 12 year old who had unearthed the stone was never likely to benefit from the fruits of his labour, but on this particular day he got lucky: the diamond was snatched by an impetuous cousin who, knowing the drill, feigned injury to the shift leader and was excused – at his expense – for the day. The cousin dropped the gem at feet of the overseer: his first mistake. What he had forgotten – what he may never have learned, since these things were not written down and would be of no use to an illiterate miner if they had been – was that the arrangement with the overseer (who kicked something back to the shift leader in the event of one of his crew ‘going off sick’) involved the lucky miner smuggling (the diamond would get used to this) his find out of the compound (we can guess how) and delivering it to the home of the overseer under cover of darkness.

When the overseer saw what had been dropped between his feet, he hissed at his exuberant worker. ‘Not here, you fool. Bring it to me tonight.’ This confused the cousin, who had not anticipated the need to smuggle his treasure past the sword-wielding guards who patrolled the compound and performed random and rigorous searches on any man or boy that caught their eyes. Unfortunately for the cousin, the guards also had an arrangement with the overseer (he trusted no one, least of all the miners under his charge) and the overseer made sure that the cousin was subject to a random and rigorous search on his way out of the compound. The cousin never made it back to the hut he shared with his extended family – including the 12 year old who was still smarting when he got home later that day – but the diamond found its way to the overseer, the merchant, the clerk, the sailor, the contact in Amsterdam and finally to a workshop in Moscow owned by a certain French goldsmith who identified a suitably wealthy client – the wealthiest, as it happens – as soon as he laid his hands on it.

In Moscow, the diamond was cut, polished and set in a ring of the finest gold (extracted by a different illiterate miner on another continent, but with the same life chances as his Indian counterpart) and it was in this form that it was spotted, some two hundred or so years later, by Claude Durand, a French emissary (spy) at the Romanov court. Where was it spotted? On a finger belonging to the Grand Duchess Olga Nicolaevna of Russia, the eldest daughter of Nicholas and Alexandra, all of whom were doomed, with the rest of their gilded family, to death by firing squad in Yekaterinburg in July, 1918. At this point the ring goes missing and Durand, who is focussed on saving his own life, is required to serve in the French military in support of the White army as it battles to save Russia from the Reds. Rather than escape the chaos of revolution and civil war, Durand finds himself on Mudyug Island in North West Russia, not far from the Finnish border and as far from the opulent excesses of the Romanovs as one could imagine.

Mudyug is home to a concentration camp built by the British, who are also supporting the Whites in the hope of reciprocal support in their war against the Germans. The camp is the second hellhole of this story, for Durand and his brothers in arms, but especially for the Bolshevik prisoners who are routinely questioned and tortured by British, French and White army officers. Durand does not participate in these activities: he is an observer, a note taker; but since he does nothing to stop the barbarism, what’s the difference? Those whose torture he witnesses, however, see something in his gaze that marks him and this is why, one night, he is shaken from his slumber by a guard who escorts him to a prisoner who has insisted he has information that he will only reveal to the Frenchman. There is no information, but the prisoner, who served in Yekaterinburg and may have been part of that firing squad, has something that may interest the Frenchman who, for his part and which is clear to anyone who spends time in his presence, has no taste for the military life and the hardships of revolution. The prisoner wants to buy his way out of Mudyug with a ring the Frenchman has encountered once before.