The Jewel Read online

  THE JEWEL

  Neil Hegarty

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Neil Hegarty, 2019

  The moral right of Neil Hegarty to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781789541809

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781789541816

  ISBN (E): 9781789541793

  CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  Cover design: Leo Nickolls

  Author photo: Shane McCarthy

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The Jewel

  Tidewrack

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Mica

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Coda

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  For John

  ‘I see how shadow in the painting brims

  With a real shadow...’

  —THOM GUNN, ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’

  Prologue: The Jewel

  London, 1839

  The cloth was of linen. That choice had always been clear. And not white, but rather the colour of cream, of buttermilk, of good Scotch porridge.

  Not white.

  She flinched from the very thought of the harshness, the dishonesty of white. White was bridal, virginal, clean and unsullied, and she was none of those things. White would not do for the task she had in mind.

  The linen, set out for inspection, was ‘tabby-woven’. So they told her, there at the counter of dark mahogany and shining glass that ran impressively the length of the shop. Bolts of cloth lined the walls, in every colour, fabric and texture. It was not a term she had previously heard of or understood. ‘Tabby-woven, madam,’ the assistant said, and his companion – his superior, evidently – nodded approvingly to the right. ‘As strong as linen can be, madam.’ ‘Irish linen,’ the other interjected. ‘The best, madam. Look at the quality,’ he said, and ran a clean, proud hand over the cloth that was both rough and smooth at the same time.

  Tabby-woven, and she thought of a cat purring and stretching in luxury. It was a pleasant term, although of course the words hardly mattered. The fabric was the thing: and it would serve admirably.

  This was a day for adventure, beginning with the railway journey down from Watford: what an adventure, with the din and the steam of the train, and then Euston, with its vast roofs and its great arch. Best to consider the adventure and the glamour of it all, and to ignore the smoke and the coal dust, the coal smuts filling the air, the dirt clinging to the nostrils, and showing up horrifyingly on her handkerchief. Quite enough for one day, without London then to negotiate. The carriages raising a din of hooves and an explosion of dust with every passing; an odour of dirt and smoke and tobacco, and horse ordure to be avoided on Kingsway as she pressed through the crowds, lifting her skirts just a polite little.

  Feeling the sickness, but holding it at bay.

  A pressing London heat. Preserve me from this dirt and this place. But she had a task: so she had understood, waking in bed, feeling her illness anew, examining her skin for fresh sores and redness. Then in the train, then pushing through the crowds on the hot pavement. A something to accomplish, and much to hold at bay, and then directly home.

  ‘It will serve,’ she said now. ‘It will serve, yes, very nicely indeed,’ and both of their faces lifted at this effort of sprightliness on her part. She saw with a pang that they too were tired, for all of their pride in this porridge-coloured piece of linen, these bolts of cloth from across the Empire and across the world, the shining glass and glossy dark wood, and their handsome shop.

  ‘Excellent, madam. It will last you a lifetime. A tablecloth?’ he added, and raised an interested eyebrow.

  ‘No indeed.’ And then, to fend off further questions, ‘I need eighty inches by sixty inches. Unhemmed,’ she added, and then relented and essayed some humour. ‘Not quite a tablecloth, gentlemen. An unhemmed tablecloth would be a very awkward tablecloth,’ she said, and now she took a step back in her mind, and watched them rethink and recalibrate.

  Still well dressed, of course, still a lady – but an eccentric, probably. One of the swarm of eccentric ladies that people today’s London: one reads about them in Blackwell’s. Perhaps this young lady’s plan is to fashion an eccentric something by her own hand, a shawl or a wrap, and parade the item, as eccentric females like to do.

  And, ought eccentric females be permitted to roam London, all alone? Where is her husband? Does he know she is on the loose?

  Well, so be it. It was still good Irish linen, a pretty penny. They could still be pleased with the sale.

  ‘Indeed,’ the first man said.

  ‘No, I am going to paint on it,’ she heard herself say.

  A polite pause, and then, ‘Indeed, madam?’

  She nodded: and now, for the first time today – the deed virtually done, the purchase virtually complete, the journey worth it after all – she felt a small pulse of pleasure and anticipation.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am going to paint on it. It will be my best piece.’

  The men smiled, nodded. They had nothing else to say.

  *

  It will be my best piece.

  The linen was stretched on a frame, now. And it was sized, the glue heated and applied rapidly. It was ready.

  The water and the pigments were ready also, and set out in their neat little dishes. Cinnabar and lead white, azurite, ultramarine, verdigris and smalt; and beautiful, profound malachite.

  She would prepare the distemper, batch by batch. The colours would blaze, if she had anything to do with it, and leap from the cloth, and live and breathe.

  They would never be seen: but this was the very least of her worries.

  This was the very intention.

  Later, much later, days later – for the plan to begin and conclude this painting in less than no time, to execute it in a flash, with one eye on the sands of her life running rapidly, this plan came to nothing, it had to be done correctly, it had to be do
ne with love and pride, how foolish she had been even to think of dashing this piece off in a trice – she could step back, and see this blazing and leaping for herself. The tiny sparks of brilliant white; and the cinnabar and the verdigris: yes, they were intense, they blazed, as though alive. The malachite, at the centre of all, breathed and inhaled and exhaled with life. The distemper, colour by colour, had soaked through the linen, as she had intended it should; the fabric now was heavy and sodden. But it would dry, and it would be rolled away, and she would leave her instructions, to the letter, and they would be carried out when the time came.

  When the time came.

  There was little time left.

  She looked again. Yes: the smooth, dark horse haunch; the jewel embedded in the gleaming pauldron, blazing out, as she had wanted it to; the malachite shining as though lit from within. There it was, placed at the very centre of the piece: and the light welled from it. It was a living thing.

  It would live for ever, it would live when she was dead. It would shine and swell in the darkness.

  She thought again about the men – the kindly, confused men – who had sold her the linen. What would they have said? – and she reframed the conversation in her head.

  Not a tablecloth. On no account.

  I mean to paint on it, in distemper.

  A thin brush, gentlemen, is best with this medium. Many, many layers, quickly applied. The distemper will soak and saturate, and then it will dry, and be complete.

  I mean the colours to sing. Malachite and cinnabar and indigo and azurite: the most beautiful words, the most beautiful colours my means – reasonably ample, gentlemen, I assure you, as ample as I need them to be – can command.

  Distemper, gentlemen: it fades, very rapidly indeed. We have few such pieces alive in the world. But I mean this piece to live for ever, as I will not.

  No, I will not.

  No, you see: I mean to have this piece placed upon me, as a coverlet, when I am in my coffin. Placed carefully, and carefully tucked, and smoothed.

  A shroud? – by no means, gentlemen. I would not care to be wrapped, in such a Biblical way. How primitive that would be. And how confining!

  No: I mean a rug, a covering, a coverlet, to keep me warm and keep me cool for all Eternity. A coverlet, and a painting that will live for ever, through the ages, in the darkness.

  Yes indeed, it has a name. A good name. You will approve, gentlemen, I am certain. Would you like to hear it?

  Very well, then: I shall tell you.

  The name. I shall call it The Jewel.

  Tidewrack

  1

  His was a seedy life.

  Sometimes he told himself so, speaking to the mirror as he shaved in the morning. ‘John, what a seedy life.’ As bald as that, though at least he had the courage to square up to himself.

  Of course, it wasn’t merely seedy, it was thoroughly criminal – and yet it was the seediness that stayed with him, as a slick of oil on his hands, and a grubbiness on his skin.

  The progression had been so straightforward: a career progression, if you cared to use such words. And it paid very nicely. A painter, a counterfeiter, a thief: one grade passing to another grade, up and up or down and down. In a world of relativity, a world without morality, you could go either way. It didn’t really matter.

  A painter.

  ‘Look at them,’ Stella had said, her loved voice filling his memory, passing without effort down the years – low, a touch of huskiness, a golden-tawny velvet voice. ‘Look at those colours. How did you do them?’ She reached out, brushed a fingertip so gently against the linen cloth that hung from its makeshift frame. The linen moved with her touch, airily in the slight breeze from the open window. Its colours glowed: a murky day outside, but they still glowed. He had seen them glow – lit from within, or so it seemed – even more brightly, in yesterday’s weather. The early sunlight, glancing on his memory, glancing for a few minutes on the sill of this north-facing room before moving away again: this cool early sun had lit his colours.

  Now Stella could see and admire for herself.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No. I don’t know.’

  And then a counterfeiter.

  So he named himself, silently. Because what was it, in the end, but counterfeiting? Copying, again and again, a model that worked and that had once been true: eschewing colour for the grime, for the grey and the black that sold. The colour was leached out of his work, now.

  ‘Everything you have,’ said Etienne, looking over his shoulder at the canvases stacked against the studio wall, seeing them – John watched his expression change – converted into tidy bundles of banknotes. ‘Everything, everything.’

  And later. ‘Will you meet with him?’ And ‘him’, and ‘him’: these collectors, always men, who had no idea what they were collecting, who were collecting cash and not art, who wouldn’t know a work of art if it was brought down hard on their skull.

  ‘Sure.’

  How Etienne would smile! He was a boy at heart: a boy who drank to excess, who was in all ways profligate, and who had much more money than sense – but a boy just the same, who liked to run with the glittering crowd.

  ‘He’ll be so pleased,’ Etienne said. It was always ‘he’ and ‘he’ and ‘he’. Women seemed to have more sense.

  John smiled briefly, nodded. He sold and he sold. The collectors swarmed. His fellow artists envied him; and all was well.

  And later: a thief.

  ‘A small job.’ It was nothing much, a small job, a small piece that a collector wanted. ‘A special job, and I’ve been thinking that you might be the man.’ Knowing the ropes, the lie of the land; the clichés flowed like water in a ditch. He knew the galleries, and how they worked; and in his greyness, he blended in. At first, a ‘consultant’, so they named it, to the actual thieves: a regional gallery, threadbare security, the shortcuts advised and made – and the job soon done, for a tidy fee.

  And then another, and another. Soon he could do the job himself.

  In West Berlin, and the halls of the Neue Nationalgalerie packed with students, the air rank and the attendants flurried: how easy, in such a context, to slip the piece of copper off the wall and into his pocket. The rush of adrenalin – like the strongest coffee in the world – and a stroll to the exit, and away into the city.

  The newspapers breathless with the scandal of it all.

  The authorities, screaming blue bloody murder. That had been the best of all: the point being that they couldn’t have it their own way, always – not every single time. And he liked the cash.

  And he was owed.

  ‘You clever man,’ cooed Etienne. ‘You clever, clever man.’

  And it didn’t matter who owned these pieces. This was a corrupt world, and idealism was for mugs. So he told himself – though his seediness would not be gainsaid.

  And now. Next on the list was an Emily Sandborne, in Dublin. ‘You can do that, John, we thought. Man for the job.’

  He held himself very still.

  ‘The Dublin piece. That would be The Jewel.’ It wasn’t a question.

  ‘That’s the one.’ A cheery smile. ‘On linen. Famous, these days. Having a moment. Don’t really see what all the fuss is about. Reminds me of the Shroud of Turin, you know what I mean? But there’s an order on it. No accounting for taste. Are we agreed then, John?’

  A little hesitation, before the colours rose in his mind: he had seen them, in reproductions and in catalogues, and had been staggered. How it would be, to hold this shimmering piece in his hands, for a little while. No: no hesitation. Only the pretence of one.

  ‘That’d be a big job,’ he said. ‘Too big for me.’ But Etienne scoffed at that: the gallery was completing a refurb, their systems would be weak, now was the moment.

  ‘Come on, John.’

  And in the end, the lure of the Emily Sandborne was too much. ‘Agreed.’

  Later, he felt a wash of shame at the
eagerness and nothingness of it all. This would be the last of them: the world had surely paid off its debt to him by now. And besides, somewhere, far away, Stella was still sailing through life – or had been, last he’d heard. What would Stella say, if she could see him now? – an ageing, grey man, with an eye on the cash and a chip on his shoulder, who should have been someone else.

  Yet he felt the excitement, just the same. In his mind’s eye, a pauldron gleamed, black against luminous colour, leaping from the fabric. A horse’s flank gleamed glossy black. A green stone gleamed, an iridescence like a dragonfly’s wings, a lavish beauty of colour: The Jewel. This would be one to touch.

  ‘You’ll do it?’

  He shrugged, nodded.

  ‘Why not.’

  ‘Great stuff. It’ll be worth your while.’

  ‘Yes. Why not.’

  2

  The charcoal dug deep into the paper. The paper was brown, and cheap, wrapping paper but not what his gran called heavy-duty wrapping paper; it had a cheap sheen, and that meant that he would have to work harder. So that was his heavy duty, you might say: to make it stick and stay.

  Dig, dig deep into the paper.

  Dig for victory, his gran would say, telling her stories of the war. Dig to make it last.

  And the charcoal was everywhere. The Nazis were long gone now, but this was something to thank them for. Free charcoal, on nearly every corner. The charcoal scored and burned pictures that were nothing like the city around him, or like the Thames, or like anything at all. He would sit back on his heels, every time, and look at what he had drawn. Dark shapes, and whirls, and swirls. Open mouths, these shapes and gaps might be: were they? Or caves, or coal mines? He didn’t know. And he couldn’t show these drawings to anyone, they would laugh, and so there was no point, after all, in digging for victory, digging to make it last: forget Gran, and he would crumple the cheap brown paper into a ball, and throw it into the road, to join the rest of the rubbish, the sodden newspapers, and brown banana skins, and the paper bags that the traders in the market used for carrots and onions, the ripped rough hessian from the stalls. Up and down the High Street, the rubbish grew and grew, to be cleared away once a week, to come back, growing and growing.