In 1936, a diamond necklace is stolen at the manor. The manor, then as now, is three stories high, built of redbrick and sandstone. A small portion belongs to the sixteenth century, most to the seventeenth, and of course there are the later additions: the outbuildings and stables, the Georgian folly of a Greek temple in Portland stone down by the lake. There are sixteen bedrooms on the two upper floors, not including those in the servants’ quarters. On the ground floor, there is a library and a drawing room, a dining hall and a room for billiards. There is a boot room and a run of sculleries and pantries.
The road that passes in front of the house is at the time little more than a cart’s width wide. Even in 1936, it’s a rare day that sees more than a handful of motorcars, which is to say cars are noticed.
The manor’s heyday is long gone. It is the same all over the country. The estate is being sold parcel by parcel to pay taxes and death duties, to make up for investments gone south with the Wall Street crash. The family cannot get the staff. There are factories in Swindon and Oxford where the wages are higher, where the young people don’t have to bow and bob, where there are bosses, not betters. Still, the staff—all old hands (too old it is lamented), all trusted faithfuls, no newcomers, no one who can’t be vouched for—do a fine job, the all-important appearances are maintained.
The manor has been in the family since Queen Anne. They won’t sell it until they have to. In 1936, having to is twelve years off, when the Denfords’ boy is dead and Lord Denford, shunned from 1940 onward for his vocal support of Hitler in the years before the war, for having stood up in the House of Lords and sung “Land of Dope and Jewry” to the tune of “Land of Hope and Glory,” finally accepts that the writing is on the wall.
Back to the manor: Beyond the grounds, there is a small wood that rises to the horizon; the surrounding farmland is made up of rolling fields which grow wheat and barley. There are racing stables and gallops and, on the higher ground where the Downs are steep, flocks of sheep. Just to the south, there is a hamlet that bears the same name as the manor. It has an inn and a small church with a graveyard where those who have lived in the house are usually buried, those who did not die in foreign wars or marry into families who claimed them for their own.
We are close to the Ridgeway here and not far from the White Horses, the stone circle at Avebury, various long barrows and Iron Age earth fortifications. Marlborough is three miles as the crow flies; the nearest train station is in Kendon, two miles to the north.
On the night the diamonds go missing, all is swathed in snow. Overnight a thick layer has fallen to blanket the house, the fields, the lichen-speckled graves. All is white, save the shadows, which are blue, and the lake, which is black in parts and gray where the ice is spreading, growing over the surface like a cataract forming over an eye.
It is the dead of winter, and the dead of night, and there are tracks, human footprints, in the snow, beginning in the courtyard, at the door to the library. At first, they follow the path toward the outbuildings and then past the stables, moving in the direction of the road, but at the foot of the drive they falter and then halt, perhaps contemplating the drifts of snow ahead, the likelihood of any vehicle at all being able to reach the manor, no matter what plans have been made, no matter how vital the mission.
After that, the footsteps double back, briefly disappear into the tack room adjoining the stables, and then reemerge, this time leading down through the drifts to circle the lake, tracking across the film of snow that has blown over the floor of the little temple, until at its center they turn and, very distinctly, the toes point out over the lake, as though their maker paused here to contemplate the frozen reeds and thickening film of ice.
When they leave the temple, something new starts to happen. The drifts on the lawn are, in places, knee deep and as the tracks return in the direction of the house, they begin to wander. Here and there, the snow is greatly disturbed and, once back within the walls of the kitchen garden, the tracks become smears. Finally, by the stone bench in the rose garden, they stop.
The scene is one I have visited in my dreams, both sleeping and waking.
A man, a Mr. James Mortimer, is slumped on the bench, his panting exhalations creating small puffs of smoke in the freezing air. He is dying, and James Mortimer is not his real name. It is the name he assumed when he befriended Lord Denford’s son at the races, when he offered him good tips that led to fair-to-middling wins, when he coaxed and flattered and listened his way into Clive Denford’s trust. It is a name that leads nowhere.
In his lap lies a small tin, its two halves prized apart. Later they will test the tin for poison but find instead gelignite. Mortimer took it for his heart. He is looking down sadly into the empty case, panting as he dies.
“It would have been all right, I suppose, if it wasn’t for the snow.”
Mortimer doesn’t look up. You would think that it would be better to die looking up at the sky than down at your knees.
“There was an accomplice, wasn’t there? They were supposed to come and spirit you away. Except it started snowing and it didn’t stop.”
A bubble forms on his lips and bursts. Behind us the house is quiet. There are seventeen souls inside: the four family members, six servants (the four who sleep in and two who have accompanied their employers), and the seven weekend guests, the men there to shoot, the women to gossip and play cards. There are four more hours until the stable boy and scullery maids get up, seven more till Sir Thomas Denford and his weekend guests have their tea taken up, and Lady Mary Ashton realizes her diamond necklace, her famous diamond necklace, is missing, its velvet-lined case empty and the door to her room—which she swears she locked from the inside—open, the key missing.
“Where’s the necklace?” I ask. “Where did you put it? We looked everywhere. Em always said it was in the lake.”
I sit down and reach over to tilt Mortimer’s chin up so that he gets a view of the night sky. There’s no moon, but the night is aflame in blue and white.
He’s not going to speak to me. He never speaks to me, not even to tell me his real name.
Mortimer has stopped panting now. He seems to have given up exhaling. Instead he takes a series of tiny in-breaths while his eyes scan the heavens left to right as though reading a book. I try one last time:
“Where is it, James? Where’s the necklace?”
But it’s useless. He’s leaving, taking his secrets with him.
What we know about him—the racing tips, the paternal interest he showed in a somewhat lost young man, the promise of a lucrative business proposition—is all we’ll ever know. Eight years later, Clive drowned in the shallows of a Normandy beach during the D-Day landings. Four years after that, his father, Lord Denford, sold up and moved to a house in the village of Ramsbury. When he died, a former domestic told the papers he kept a picture of Hitler and a revolver in the top drawer of his bedside table.
James Mortimer expires, becomes extinct. The papers have a field day. Half a million replicas in glass are made and sold in Woolworth’s. When the police fail to find the diamonds, Mary Ashton’s family hires a private detective. The search goes on for months. For years the theories multiply—an insurance swindle, an inside job. People claim to know who Mortimer was, or that they’ve seen the diamonds in Rio de Janeiro, or Sydney, around the neck of a gangster’s moll in Chicago. None of it comes to anything. The story fades, is revived first on the occasion of Mary Ashton’s scandalous divorce and then upon her death. It lingers in the minds of locals like Mrs. East, enters the annals of local history, becomes an anecdote here, a footnote there.