‘Well, yes, it seems to.’
‘Ah.’
I might have asked him why he wanted to know, but our situation was already intimate beyond the comfort level, and at any rate there wasn’t time. My cousin broke the surface of the water in a burst of triumph, gasping air.
‘He was right,’ he called up to us. ‘Old François was right. Just look!’ And spreading out his fingers he stretched up his hand, palm upwards, to the light. I saw the glittering before I saw the stones themselves.
‘Mein Gott,’ breathed Christian.
‘Precisely.’
And then for some few minutes we were silent, all of us. I thought of Isabelle – Jim’s mother, François’s sister – standing here that summer evening while her world fell in around her, holding diamonds stained with blood no human hand could wash away. I thought of Hans … where had he been that night, I wondered? Miles away, by then. He’d sought redemption too, in different ways. He had surrendered, left his country, changed his name. Well, it was over now, I thought. Time everyone forgot, forgave, let be. Yom Kippur might have ended with the sunset, but the message of the Jewish holiday remained. People hate too much.
‘There are some coins down there,’ said Harry. ‘Not old ones, but …’
Paul’s wishing coins. ‘Just let them lie,’ I told him.
‘Yes, Mum.’ He grinned. ‘And these as well, I think.’ He tipped his hand to let the diamonds tumble back into the turquoise water. ‘Bad luck to steal things from a holy well. Sainte Radegonde would have my head.’
I watched the flashing glitter of the gems descending. They vanished at the bottom, amid a scattering of what looked like pebbles. How many diamonds had there been? I didn’t want to know. After all, they were nothing more than stones, small bits of stone that someone thought were pretty, and in that illusion lay their value. In the greater scheme of life, I thought, they didn’t matter a damn. Maybe all that mattered was the tangible, however fleeting – friends and family, feelings …
‘Oh, sod it,’ Harry bit out. ‘Damn, I think I broke my finger.’ He’d made his way to the sheer wall of the well and had begun to climb up, using the row of footholds gouged by the well-diggers centuries earlier. He pulled his hand free, flexing it.
He was still several feet below us, and I had to lean to look. ‘It doesn’t look broken.’
‘Well, maybe not, but it might have been. There’s something jammed in here – a block of wood, it feels like.’ Far more gingerly now, he placed his injured fingers back within the recessed foothold just above the surface of the water. ‘Hang on,’ he said, ‘it isn’t wood at all. In fact it feels like … I’ll be damned.’
‘What is it?’ Christian leant down, curious, as Harry finally tugged the object free. I only saw a small dark square the size of Harry’s hand. He passed it up to Christian. ‘You tell me.’
It was filthy dirty, for one thing. My cousin’s hand left black marks on the stone as he swung himself up the few remaining feet to join us on the narrow ledge above the well. Christian had turned the packet over, sniffing. ‘Oil,’ he pronounced. ‘It has been oiled.’
‘Waxed as well.’ Harry pointed to the great untidy splotch of black that held the packet closed. ‘Somebody didn’t want this getting wet.’ He was dripping water himself, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He slicked his hair back, glanced at me. ‘Emily, love, would you toss me my trousers? Thanks.’ He rummaged for his pocket knife and prised the battered blade open. It was rather tricky, since the packet seemed to crumble when he touched it, but at length he’d sliced the wax seal through and gently, oh so gently, coaxed the stiffened edges apart.
The squares of parchment had been folded up so tightly for so long that they were nearly solid lumps, and Harry didn’t try to force them open. He knew better. There were specialists who did that sort of thing. But he did forget his training long enough to turn the parchment in his still-damp fingers, searching for a scrap of writing, anything. ‘Oh, my God,’ he said.
I looked at him, and caught some measure of his own excitement. ‘What?’
‘You ought to know that signature,’ he told me, stretching out his hand towards me. I looked. I blinked, a long blink, looked again. And then I raised my head to stare at him.
I couldn’t even speak.
Neil slid his gaze from me to Harry. ‘What are they?’
‘Letters.’ My cousin’s voice had roughened slightly, as it always did when he became emotional. It echoed back from the still water of the well. ‘Love letters, I expect. Written by a king eight hundred years ago.’
Christian stroked a corner of the crumbling oiled packet. ‘Eight hundred years? Incredible.’
My cousin looked at me. ‘“A treasure beyond price,”’ he quoted, and his eyes grew moist. ‘That’s what the chronicle said Queen Isabelle hid, here at Chinon. Only it wasn’t jewels, or money. Damn, who would have known …?’ He shook his head, his dreamy gaze returning to the crudely-chiselled footholds in the soft, unspeaking stone. And then, as if he’d suddenly remembered Neil and Christian wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what he was talking about, which meant that they were fair game for a classic lecture, Henry Yates Braden, PhD, promptly cleared his throat. ‘You see,’ he began, ‘there was another Isabelle …’