Final Witness

Chapter 20

On that same Monday afternoon, the third day of the trial, Thomas roamed restlessly from room to room in the House of the Four Winds, unable to settle down to any occupation. He could hear the murmuring voices of Aunt Jane and the detective from Carmouth coming from behind the half-closed door of the kitchen, but he did not try to make out what they were saying. He knew that Aunt Jane would be talking about the trial down in London; she’d talked about nothing else since she’d gotten back to Flyte the previous evening until Tom didn’t want to hear any more about Greta’s fat barrister and his tricks and the jury that watched everything and said nothing. Thomas knew that he would have his turn the next day. For now he didn’t want to think about it.

He stopped his pacing and stood in the center of the wide hallway midway between the open front door and the staircase behind him. He looked out beyond the yew trees into the hot summer’s day, and suddenly it was as if there were voices all around him, snatches of conversation drifting in and out of earshot like specks of dust on the air.

Thomas recognized some of the voices or thought he did, but they were gone before he could be sure. He thought he heard his mother saying something about a dress, but it was his mother younger than he had ever known her, with an eager voice that had no awareness of responsibilities. Then there was a voice behind him that was like his mother’s but richer, talking about a horse. Thomas turned but there was nothing, only the sound of a man crying and the name Sarah wrenched from somewhere deep down inside.

The voices were above Thomas now: a man talking in clipped tones about India and another voice, an older woman’s cursing. Her words came from very far away, and Thomas could barely make them out.

He stood rooted to the spot, unable to tell if the voices were real. They had been calling him to climb the stairs, which he had avoided for so many months. At the top he could see the bookcase where he had hidden, but he couldn’t get to it without crossing the place where his mother had died. They had taken up the carpet and laid a new one since, but he knew where the bloodstains had been. He’d had to step over her when he ran to Christy Marsh’s cottage.

Thomas closed his eyes and realized his mistake. The voices hadn’t been calling to him from the hiding place at all. They were coming from somewhere else. Slowly he began to climb the stairs and the voices came down to meet him. The older woman and the military man were arguing about a present.

“It’s mine, I tell you. It’s mine. To do with as I please.”

“Stephen, Stephen,” came the woman’s querulous voice, but again it faded away on the air, replaced by the voice of his mother speaking to him in the car on the way to London the previous year when he had struggled to hear her above the sound of the wind: “I do so wonder what she was like, Tom. I do so wonder what she was like.”

Curiously Thomas felt his fear and anxiety leave him as he climbed the stairs. He had not been this way in over a year, but his mother’s death was far from his mind as he passed over the place where she had died. He knew where he was going now and turned toward the bedroom without a glance at the great bookcase on his left. He wondered for a moment if Aunt Jane would have locked the door, but the handle turned easily and he went in.

Thomas knew that some of the paintings in the bedroom had been damaged by the men when they ransacked the room looking for the safe, but the portrait of his grandmother had been restored to its former position over the fireplace. She was as he remembered her. Flashing eyes and a flashing smile, a face full of energy and freedom, although there was love in her dark eyes too. Thomas stared up at her, this Lady Sarah Sackville whom he had never known. He felt an overwhelming sense that the portrait had something to tell him, but he could not fathom what it was. His grandmother looked out on a world he knew nothing about. Artist and sitter were long dead, leaving behind this picture, a relic to gather dust.

It was just as Thomas turned away toward the windows that he realized what it was he had been looking for in the portrait. It was the ring on his grandmother’s finger glowing midnight blue, just like it had on that day in the car when his mother had worn it and he had shivered in the sunlight.

Her words came back to him as if they had been spoken only yesterday: “She always wore it. Her father gave it to her when she was twenty-one. There’s that old story I told you about it. About where it came from in India. I’ve got a letter about it somewhere. I’ll have to dig it out…”

As far as Thomas knew, his mother had never dug it out. London and Macbeth and Greta had driven it out of their minds, and then had come the murder. Lady Anne was gone as far away as her mother now. Both dead at forty, leaving only whispers behind.

Thomas looked about him. His mother’s clothes still hung in the dressing room, and it came to him that nobody would have gone through her little walnut wood desk in the corner of the bedroom if the killers had not done so. Sir Peter had stayed away from the House of the Four Winds since the funeral, and Aunt Jane had a horror of anything involving documents.

Thomas crossed to the desk and opened it. The contents were undisturbed. He thought back to that defining moment with Matthew the previous autumn when he’d remembered his mother’s voice telling him about the secret drawer in the desk in London. He’d gone into the drawing room and opened that desk almost as an afterthought. All that time searching in the basement and on the computer and then upstairs in his father’s bedroom before he stopped on the first-floor landing and remembered his mother calling him: “Come here, Tom… There’s something I want to show you… It’s a secret.”

He’d pressed the knobs on the bottom drawers gently just like she’d shown him until the recess opened and he found the locket. He remembered it all: holding it up, opening it, showing it to Matthew, moving across the room to the doorway and seeing Greta on the stairs with that crazy look in her eyes.

Thomas shook himself, banishing Greta and the locket from his mind. They could wait until tomorrow. Greta’s fat barrister would no doubt have plenty of questions to ask about his visit to the house in London.

Thomas returned his attention to his mother’s desk. There was no secret drawer here. Just letters and papers neatly filed into the pigeonholes or tied up in rubber bands. On the top was an unfinished letter to a garden center in London ordering a rose with an extravagant Latin name. It was dated May 31, 1999: the day of his mother’s death.

Thomas hardly knew what he was looking for as he unpacked the papers onto the floor so that he soon became a human island in a sea of documents. In the end he found it in the bottom drawer: the letter folded round a small black jewelry box. Thomas knew what would be inside the box before he opened it, but the perfection of the dark blue stone still shocked him. The sapphire glowed in his hand, drawing his eyes down into its dark mysterious interior like a magnet.

Why had his mother not put it in the safe with her other jewels? Perhaps the paper might provide a clue. It was folded four ways, and Thomas opened it carefully. The once white vellum writing paper had turned yellow with age, and for a moment Thomas was filled with a superstitious fear that the black ink would disappear in the sunlight or that the paper would crumble to dust in his hands.

It was indeed a letter, written under the heading “The House of the Four Winds” and dated November 28, 1946. It was signed “Daddy,” but Thomas soon realized that the writer was his great-grandfather, Sir Stephen Sackville, whose portrait hung downstairs in the drawing room. Sir Stephen had lived the longest of the modern Sackvilles, and the portrait had been painted in honor of his eightieth birthday. He would have been fifty-eight when he wrote this letter to his daughter, and she would have just turned twenty-one.

My dear Sarah,

You asked me to tell you a little about the Sultan’s sapphire, as the jewel that I gave you for your twenty-first birthday is called. It does indeed come from India, where it was owned by a nawab in one of the wild northwestern provinces near the Afghan frontier. I know nothing of the Sultan that once owned the jewel and nothing of how the nawab came into possession of it. The sapphire was, however, famous throughout northern India for its perfection, and I had long been curious to see it when chance brought me into contact with its owner. The dark glow of the jewel is in my opinion quite extraordinary. I have never seen one the like of it, and you know me for a keen collector of precious stones.

Thomas looked up from the dry words to the portrait of his young grandmother with the sapphire on her finger put there by her father. Wearing the ring had made Thomas’s mother feel close to her own mother, but the jewel he held in his hand now felt foreign and dangerous. This heirloom passing down the generations had brought no luck to the Sackvilles who had owned it.

Thomas turned back to the letter:

I had been posted to the northwestern frontier and found clear evidence that the local nawab had been conspiring against the British. There was no alternative but to act quickly and decisively, and I led a small troop against the nawab’s palace, as he called his rather ugly fortified house. He was mortally wounded in the short skirmish that followed and I had in fact taken him to be dead when I entered his quarters and found the famous sapphire. The old rascal had, however, more life in him than I thought and followed me into his private rooms. He had an ornamental dagger in his hand, but I am relieved to say that he lacked the strength to throw it very far. The effort was too much for him and he died soon after, although not before he had seen the sapphire in my hand. His last words were to curse me and all my descendants, but I paid this no attention. Some might say that I should not have taken the jewel, but I have always thought that I had a right to it, having risked my life to deal with its owner’s treachery.

I also draw a sense of justification from the four years of hard service to my King and country in the trenches of Flanders that followed my return from India. I certainly have no doubt that the Sultan’s sapphire sits better on your beautiful finger, my dear, than it would in the back of some dusty case in the British Museum.

You should therefore feel no qualms that the jewel is rightfully mine to give and yours to receive and the sapphire’s romantic history should make you value it more and not less.

I asked Cartier in London to set the jewel in a golden ring, and I hope that you will agree that they have made excellent work of the commission. Our family’s name is engraved on the inside, and I hope that the ring will become a Sackville heirloom.

Thomas read the letter two more times, and each time he was more struck by the self-justifying tone of the writer. The document was not the romantic history that it purported to be but rather an unsuccessful attempt to defend actions that clearly still troubled his great-grandfather more than thirty years after they had occurred. It was surely significant that Sir Stephen let slip in the first paragraph that he already knew about the sapphire before he met its owner. Was the nawab’s alleged treachery just a pretext for murdering him and stealing the jewel? If so, setting the sapphire in a golden ring did not change what had happened.

Thomas walked over to one of the high windows that looked down toward the sea and held the ring up to the sunlight. Sure enough, SACKVILLE was engraved on the inside in flowing script, but the engraving did not make the sapphire the property of Thomas’s family. Murder and theft did not create property rights, whatever old Sir Stephen might say to the contrary.

The killing of the nawab on the other side of the world almost a hundred years before and his mother’s death on the landing outside became connected in Thomas’s mind. He felt as if there were a purpose behind his discovery of the jewel and the letter. It was as if they had been left there by his mother for him to find. The great blue stone was a test. He saw that now. It was for him to choose what to do with it.

Thomas tried to imagine the scene described by his great-grandfather in his letter. For some reason he thought of the nawab as a handsome young man dressed in a crimson tasseled jacket and white baggy trousers, perhaps because that was what the sultan of Baghdad was wearing in Thomas’s old copy of The Arabian Nights, given to him by his mother for his seventh birthday. The nawab had dark, almost olive skin, and his hair was concealed under the folds of a turban. There was a yellow canary in the palace that sang while the nawab ate Indian delicacies served by girls with long black hair and high breasts. Outside there was a fountain of stone dolphins where foaming silver water splashed down onto the marble paving stones of the nawab’s courtyard.

Into this scene of lazy luxury painted by Thomas’s imagination burst a younger, crueller version of the man who smiled down so benevolently from his portrait in the drawing room downstairs.

Sir Stephen was no knight then. He was plain Stephen Sackville, three years out from England, with a fortune to make and a pair of black revolvers in his pockets to secure it with. This Stephen Sackville was a young man consumed with a lust for jewels. He had listened greedily to all the travelers’ tales until his attention narrowed and became focused on the sultan’s sapphire, the gem that contained all the mystery of the subcontinent within its deep, dark blue interior. Stephen Sackville could not rest until he had made it his own.

Thomas had no idea how he knew all this, but he was nevertheless certain of what had happened on that afternoon, almost a century ago, on the other side of the world. His great-grandfather had had no right to do what he did. There had been no British interest involved. The justification for the action had been manufactured after the event, and the nawab had not been alive to contradict the lies told about him.

Thomas imagined the murder. He thought of it as a hot day with the nawab resting on his divan after lunch while two servants moved the still air with palm-tree fans. Thomas did not know if the yellow canary was singing, and he could not see the servant girls. He did not know if the nawab was asleep or just had his eyes closed in meditation, but he saw him rise up from the divan when he heard the horses’ hooves on the stones in the courtyard and the sound of shots and cries. Perhaps they were the cries of the servant girls. Thomas could only see the nawab running on his silver-slippered feet through the palace until he came face-to-face with his assassin and looked for a final moment into the cold blue eyes of Stephen Sackville of the House of the Four Winds in the county of Suffolk, come upon the King’s commission to kill and steal. Two shots and the Englishman stepped over his victim, just like the killers had stepped over Thomas’s mother as she lay on the landing, bleeding her lifeblood out onto the carpet.

The parallel did not stop there, of course. Sir Stephen had come to steal the sapphire just like the killers of Thomas’s mother had come for the Sackville jewels and had taken them all, all except the sapphire. It had remained in the drawer of the walnut desk, waiting for Thomas to find it so that the Indian’s curse could continue on down through the generations, until there were no Sackvilles left.

Thomas put the sapphire in his pocket and looked out of the high east windows of the bedroom toward the sea. It was a view of the elements — sun and sky and water stretching out to the horizon. Suddenly Thomas knew what he was going to do.

He put the letter and the other documents back in his mother’s desk. He glanced once up at the portrait of his grandmother, thinking of the conflict between her free spirit and the grasping hand of her father. Thomas wondered if she had ridden her horse on the beach below the house where he was headed now. She must have, although his mother had never told him where she met her death.

At the bottom of the stairs he paused, wondering whether to tell Aunt Jane where he was going. He could hear her voice in the kitchen. She was still talking to the policeman, who would insist on accompanying Thomas if he went outside, and Thomas needed to be alone. He grabbed a towel from the downstairs bathroom and set off across the lawn toward the north gate secure in the knowledge that he could not be seen from the kitchen windows.

He turned the key in the lock and stepped out into the lane. There was no one there, but Thomas felt suddenly vulnerable. It was the first time he had been outside the grounds in a week. The sun shone through the trees whose branches overhung the lane, creating a natural canopy, and Thomas found himself walking through dappled dancing shadows as he made his way down to the beach. The crash of the still invisible waves on the shore grew louder, and Thomas remembered how excited Barton would become by the sound, torn between the need to keep his owners in sight and his longing for the wide open spaces awaiting them beyond the final turn in the dirt road. There was no Barton now; he was buried next to little Mattie back behind the north gate, and Thomas was all alone in the world.

The sudden force of the sunlight made Thomas blink almost in pain as he came out onto the beach, and he put his free hand up over his eyes to protect them. His other hand was held deep inside his trouser pocket, clutching the sapphire ring hard in his palm.

It was one of those rare summer days when the omnipresent clouds had been chased away by the hot sun from the wide Suffolk sky, leaving it a pale blue heaven. The only sign of humanity was a high-flying airplane that drew a white pencil line across the blue as it passed overhead.

Thomas thought of his mother. She always became almost childishly excited by days like this and would bully Aunt Jane into accompanying them to the beach, where the old lady would sit on a folding chair with her long black skirt coming down to her ankles. She would make no concession to sand and sun except for a pair of rather terrifying sunglasses that made her look like a member of the Sicilian Mafia. Thomas and his mother would swim out beyond the waves and then come running back over the sand to eat the sandwiches that Aunt Jane had packed in a hamper she kept under her chair so Barton couldn’t get at them. Afterward his mother would lie in the sun and talk to Aunt Jane about the past while Thomas built sandcastles and peopled them with the knights that his mother bought for him at the toy shop in Flyte.

Thomas walked across the deserted beach and put the memories of his childhood out of his mind. Near the water’s edge he stopped and took off all his clothes, leaving them in a pile weighed down by his shoes. He stood for a moment naked under the sun before he plunged into the breaking waves, clasping the sapphire tight in his hand.

The day’s sunshine seemed to have had no effect on the temperature of the North Sea, and Thomas felt the cold water pressing against his chest like shards of ice as he stood on the sandbank just beyond the waves. He opened his palm and looked at the sapphire glowing in the sunlight. Turning it over, he read his family’s name engraved in the gold. It was a beautiful thing, a most precious stone, but it had attached itself to his family like a millstone. There was a price to be paid for what his great-grandfather had done, just as there was a price to be paid by his mother’s murderers, but their fate awaited them in the future. The Sackvilles had atoned for Sir Stephen’s sins with their blood, and now it was time to be rid of this jewel.

Thomas raised his hand in the air and threw the ring out to sea. It was gone in a second, barely disturbing the surface of the water as it was swallowed up. The sea, like the earth, was indifferent. Pebbles and precious stones were all the same. It was human beings who distinguished between them, murdering one another for the sake of small inanimate objects.

Thomas swam back to the shore filled with a sense of release. He felt the rush of a new beginning and ran across the sand forgetful of his nakedness. He thought of his daredevil grandmother galloping her horse across the beach. He felt her blood in his as he kicked up the surf and the sun shone down on his young body.

Dressed again, Thomas climbed the steep cliff path toward the house. His mother had forbidden him to go this way when he was a child as the cliff sand was crumbly and it was easy to fall. But today Thomas felt immune from danger, and he was soon at the top standing by the viewing cairn — a pile of rocks with a smooth gray central stone in the middle, on which a nineteenth-century Sackville had engraved the landmarks visible from this high point.

Behind Thomas across the sloping dunes were the east gate and the house. In front of him the North Sea stretched out as far as the horizon while to his right were the towns of Flyte and Coyne, separated by the River Flyte. Thomas could see the two church spires and between them a tiny fishing boat leaving the harbor and putting out to sea.

On Thomas’s left was the larger town of Carmouth, where the road became wider and the cars and lorries sped up on their way to London and the west. That would be the way Thomas would be going the next morning, in the back of an unmarked police car. Sergeant Hearns had said that they would need to leave just after six to be sure of getting to the Old Bailey on time.

Thomas’s head dropped as he felt the weight of the trial that he had done so much to bring about descend on his shoulders. With one last look at the great wide sea, he turned for home.

He let himself in through the east gate, hoping that Aunt Jane and the policeman had not noticed his absence. He had no wish to cause them anxiety if he could avoid it, but he need not have worried. They were halfway through their third cup of coffee when Thomas went into the kitchen. Aunt Jane had always been fond of the forces of law and order, but she seemed to have taken a particular shine to this policeman. He was local and shared her interest in Flyte gossip as well as providing a willing audience for her views about Greta and her barrister, which seemed to become more extreme by the day.

It was not a subject that Thomas wanted to talk about. He needed help with moving a picture out of his mother’s bedroom and hanging it in his own.

Twenty minutes later the task was done. Lady Sarah Sackville’s portrait hung on the wall of Thomas’s bedroom between the map of Suffolk shipwrecks and a photograph of his mother holding Barton.

That night Thomas looked up at his grandmother from his bed, warmed by the smile in her flashing dark eyes. It gave him strength to face the prospect of meeting the glittering green eyes of his adversary across the courtroom the next day.