Chapter 7
I dreamed of the Hope that night.
The diamond rested on a dais in the center of a dark room.
The air was velvet around me as an invisible pull lured me closer, closer.
I grasped it, closed my fingers around the diamond’s solid middle, and a shiver ran over my skin.
At once, a solitary beam of light poured over its dazzling facets, making the stone sparkle like ice in sunlight.
“Gemstones are creatures of the light,” I whispered aloud.
Father’s words. How true his statement was. When light illuminated a stone, it awakened, came alive. Its mineral veins and many faces became a map of its creation.
Something stirred in the dark room around me. I couldn’t see what else—or who else—lurked there, I knew only to run. I clutched the stone to my chest and raced through blurred rooms from something unseen behind me until a strong hand clapped my shoulder and wrenched me backward.
I bolted upright in bed, out of breath, sweat staining my nightgown.
As the remnants of the dream hovered in the air like a fog, a heaviness pressed against my lungs.
I slipped from bed, eager to escape the confines of my room.
Flinging open my bedroom door, I padded barefoot to the workshop, the cool air against my damp nightgown sending a shiver down my spine.
Reaching blindly for the lights, I turned the switches quickly, exhaling deeply as the room flooded with light.
No one waited for me there; no phantom stalked me in the dark.
Exhaling, I reached for my notebook, fumbling as I turned to my notes about the Hope Diamond. Now I knew precisely what it looked like. What it felt like. Its inexorable pull.
Evalyn had laughed gleefully at my discomfort, the way I’d taken her necklace into my hands gingerly, holding it by the diamond-studded chain at first to avoid touching the Hope itself.
* * *
“Darling, it won’t hurt you,” she said with a smile.
I looked up, startled that she read my mind.
“Oh, I know,” I said, biting my lip nervously.
“I don’t believe in curses.” I’d repeated the mantra to myself since I’d first set foot in the McLean household.
And yet as Evalyn presented me with the gemstone, I faltered, touched only the outer rim of cushion diamonds.
“Neither do I,” Evalyn said, pouring us each a sizable finger of whiskey. “Here, whiskey always helps.”
I accepted the drink. I found myself warming to the numbness the whiskey brought as it spread through my limbs.
Evalyn sipped from her highball glass. “I say I don’t believe in bad luck”—her voice dropped—“but if I’m honest, maybe I do, a little.
I’ve always tried to see the Hope as more of a good-luck charm, and I enjoy the way people are as taken with it as I am.
But since we’re sharing secrets”—she met my eyes—“if I look back at the events of the last few years and think about the ways people around me have met with a series of disagreeable incidents, not to mention losing my dear brother, Vinnie, and my poor father to a dreadful illness, I can’t help but allow a tiny sliver of doubt to eke through. ”
She’d lost her brother, too? And her father.
I shivered at the coincidence of what we’d both lost. Three deceased and my father as lost as he could be…
though I hoped that was going to change.
I looked down at the necklace. The Hope shimmered in my hands like a blue eye, watching me with some preternatural sense.
I hesitated an instant, the stories swirling through my mind, but in the end, I was here to do a job.
I dragged my thumb across the surface of the stone.
As another shiver traveled up my spine, I fought the conflicted impulse to both fasten it around my neck and the opposite—to put as much distance between me and the stone as possible.
“I suppose it would be difficult not to doubt occasionally,” I said quietly.
I wondered if Evalyn considered my brother’s death worthy of her list of mishaps, or if she’d considered it at all.
I dared to insert him into the conversation, to steer her in the direction I needed.
“Did my…did my brother clean your necklace regularly?”
“Of course, darling. That was the whole point of hiring him, though he was wonderful to have around, too. He spent time with the girls and with Ned and his friends. Everyone adored him.”
I perked up at the new information. “He spent time with the men, too?”
“Oh, sure. He was a charmer, but he was also great fun. I was sure Julien had become a permanent fixture around here until… Well, you know.”
“The accident.”
She sipped from her glass, but her eyes never left my face. “Well, yes, until that.”
So she’d known about the accident all along, though she’d pretended otherwise.
I flushed at the realization. There was something else she wasn’t telling me, but I also keenly felt the boundary line between us.
I shifted my approach. “So how did you come to own the Hope Diamond?” I asked.
Though I knew who’d sold her the diamond, I wondered if there were details about the gemstone’s provenance—and the curse—that she knew and I didn’t.
I pulled out the jeweler’s loupe, a strong magnifier, that I always kept in my handbag to examine the diamond more closely. If there were inclusions, they were small enough to be undetectable without a more invasive process. “Its water is astounding!”
“Water?” Evalyn said, distracted by my comment. “What does that mean?”
“Clarity or purity of the stone.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, of course. It’s the most perfect blue diamond in the world.
We bought it from Pierre Cartier. Ned and I already knew him because he’d sold us the Star of the East while we were on our honeymoon in Paris, and then a few years later, Pierre opened his store in Manhattan, and we brokered the deal for the Hope Diamond.
” She leaned forward, her eyes glassy from drinking champagne and whiskey all afternoon.
“Mama and my sister pressured me to sell it back, given the rumors. I haven’t told anyone this, but I tried to. Pierre wouldn’t take it back.”
I arched my brow at her. So she believed far more in the curse and bad luck than she was willing to admit, at least publicly.
“Originally Pierre wanted us to buy the Hope Diamond the first time we met, but the setting was old-fashioned at the time, and I didn’t care for it.
Pierre pushed me in his persuasive way, telling me a long, fancy story that’s ludicrous, really, but I’ll admit, it has stayed with me.
” She laughed. “By the looks of it, you’re positively dying to hear it. ”
“How could I resist?”
She smiled. “First, the diamond was stolen from the eye of a statue of a god in India. It was sold to a French gem trader who carried it with him all the way back to France.” She leaned forward again.
“After the gem merchant sold it to the king, he traveled to Russia where he was torn apart by wild dogs.”
Though I’d known the gemstone had come from France, I’d never heard the bit about the wild dogs. A shiver raced over my arms. Evalyn noticed my flinch.
“I know!” she said, gleeful she could unsettle me.
“Gruesome, isn’t it? Louis XIV wore it around his neck, suspended by a ribbon or as a brooch, and eventually his grandson used it as a ceremonial piece for the Order of the Golden Fleece.
Marie Antoinette is also said to have worn it, and we all know what happened to her.
Unfortunately for them, the stone was cursed from the beginning.
A Turkish gem merchant who owned it briefly drowned at sea, and the Hope family went bankrupt.
May Yohé, the actress, doomed her career the moment she clasped the necklace around her neck.
She hasn’t booked a leading role of any importance again, and from what I hear, her theater named the Hope is struggling.
The diamond brought bad luck to France and to everyone else ever since. Except for me.”
I gazed at her in disbelief. Some of the story was as silly and the facts as convoluted as she’d said, but more importantly, how could she be so blind to the events in her own life that had been less than lucky the past several years?
Evalyn’s own brother and father passed away unexpectedly.
Perhaps she saw only what she wanted to, only believed what she could face.
I was beginning to learn that wasn’t always the truth.
She yawned and stood. “It’s getting late. Why don’t you come by tomorrow, and we’ll set up a proper schedule. Besides, there’s somewhere else I’d like to take you first.”
I agreed to her request, relieved to, at last, put a schedule in place. She kissed my cheek good night, and I left on a high.
* * *
As the memory of the night before receded, the comforting scent of sandalwood candles rushed my senses, and the drawing of the Hope leapt from the page, I picked up my fountain pen.
I recorded what Evalyn had told me the night before and tried to put the curse out of my mind. I’d never believed in them anyway.
And yet I’d touched the Hope only once, and now it invaded my dreams.