The Hope Keeper
I am ushered through time and circumstance and location.
I am lighter, a lesser version of myself, separated from my other half.
Still, I am very large and beautiful. My value is as great as ever, perhaps greater as my legend grows, and I am sold quickly to a collector.
Mr. Hope is from a greedy family, one that must own as much art and property and jewels as they can acquire.
He does not love, he does not cherish; he possesses, and I am promptly renamed after my new possessor.
But as with the others who have kept me for a time, misery and misfortune haunt him and those he will bequeath me to.
And their lives become a tangle of bankruptcy and desperation.
Soon, I am once again sold and passed on from one gem collector to another.
A remarkable beauty, a symbol of wealth, a marvel!
This is how they tempt the willing to purchase such a stone. This is how I find a new home with a Turkish diamond merchant. But he does not pay his debts, and I am once again unbound and dispossessed.
Ruin streams behind me. Despair infuses the air around me. For I am not a diamond of hope. I am, in fact, hope’s thief. To such a fate, it seems I must be resigned and so must my keepers.
As I embark upon the next leg of my journey across the Atlantic and back again, I arrive at last on the doorstep of an expert jeweler. A man who understands the power of legacy.
“Sir, it is not only one of a kind,” my keeper says as he presents me. “It was once a prized French possession.”
Pierre Cartier gasps, takes me into his capable hands. “It is the French Blue!”
My keeper smiles. “It is. It was. But now it is the Hope.”
“And now,” Pierre says with his own broad smile, “it is mine.”