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I stared. It was the King John coin, without mistake, safe in its plastic case. I opened my own wallet, just to be sure, and drew out the matching coin. Harry stabbed it with a beam of light.
“How curious,” he said. “I wonder how on earth it got there.”
“I don’t know.”
Christian leaned in closer for a better look. “It is very old, yes? Somebody must have found it on the ground here, near the tombs perhaps, and put it with the other coins as tribute to Sainte Radegonde.”
“Y-yes, I suppose that’s how it could have happened.”
“You don’t sound terribly convinced,” said Harry, grinning. “What other explanation is there—Sainte Radegonde herself, perhaps? A helping hand from beyond? Don’t tell me that you’ve found religion, Em.”
“Of course not.” And I meant it, only… only…
Behind the altar, lovely pale Sainte Radegonde just went on gazing at nothing in particular, her blind, carved eyes serene and peaceful. I put the coin back in her dish of offerings, and pushed it well down, frowning. Neil moved up behind my shoulder, and his breath brushed warm on my neck. “The world would be dead boring, don’t you think, if everything were easy to explain?”
My cousin grinned. “The true Romantic viewpoint,” he pronounced. “Come on then, are we ready? Tunnels again, Emily. You’ll have to cope. She has a tunnel thing,” he told Neil, confidingly.
“Oh, yes?” Neil glanced my way. “I’ll have to remember that.”
Beyond the second gate the glare of harsh electric light seemed almost an intrusion. The chapel caves cried out for candles, I thought, or the flicker of a burning torch. The hanging bulbs and switches took away much of the mystery, and it wasn’t until we’d reached the steep and crooked steps that dropped down to the holy well that I felt again the ancient and eternal sense of wonder shared by all explorers.
Harry must have drunk more than I’d thought. By the time the rest of us had slid with caution down the steps my cousin had stripped neatly to his underpants.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
“Well, you can’t see anything from here. Just pebbles, really. If I’ve come all this way to see diamonds, then I want to bloody see them, don’t I?”
I looked down at the narrow shaft of clear blue water, plunging several meters deep into the rock. “You can’t be serious.”
He just grinned, stepped cleanly off the ledge and dropped feet-first into the well. The spray that came up after him was cold as ice. Neil knelt beside me, one arm braced against the pale stone wall to see I didn’t accidentally topple in myself. “We’ll fish him out again,” he promised. “Never fear.” The three of us peered over the edge, to watch as Harry forced himself toward the bottom, his hands splayed out in search of the elusive diamonds. “Runs in your family, does it?” Neil asked idly. “This sort of behavior?”
“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.”
