I listened to The Moonstone while painting a banker’s wife, and the week’s royal news turned a Victorian mystery into a current one
Monday, the Studio, North Light
I paint portraits for a living, in a studio over a frame shop in Salt Lake City. Mostly commissions. Retiring judges, university presidents, somebody’s mother from a photograph. It is slow work, and my hands are busy but my head is not, so I listen to books.
This year I have been working through the British nineteenth century, and in particular everything it wrote about India. I did not plan it. I started with one novel and kept pulling the thread. I am not a scholar. I am a woman with a brush and forty hours a week of listening time.
This week it was a mystery about a stolen jewel. And I was painting a necklace.
The Book
The Moonstone came out in 1868. A famous poet later called it the first and greatest of English detective novels. It has the country house, the locked-room theft, the bumbling local policeman, the brilliant eccentric detective from London who grows roses. All the furniture of the genre, being used for the first time.
But it does not begin in a country house. It begins in India, in 1799, at the storming of a city called Seringapatam. A British officer, during the looting, cuts down three priests who are guarding a sacred yellow diamond set in the forehead of a statue of the moon god. He takes it. The last of the three, dying, tells him the stone will have its vengeance.
Fifty years on, the officer leaves the diamond in his will to his niece, on her eighteenth birthday. It is not a kindness. That night it vanishes from her room. And three Indian men have been seen near the house.
The Twist That Is Not About the Thief
I will not give away who took it. What struck me, listening with a number four sable in my hand, is what the book thinks of those three men.
In any other novel of 1868 they would be the villains. Sinister foreigners lurking in the shrubbery. And the English characters assume exactly that.
The book does not. The three are priests, descendants of the original guardians. They have given up their caste and their homes and spent their lives following the stone across the world to bring it back. They are patient, intelligent and entirely justified. The diamond was stolen. They are the only people in the story with a clear right to it.
And in the last pages, a traveler in India sees the stone again, back in the forehead of the god, with thousands of worshippers before it. The English never recover it. The author plainly thinks that is how it should end.
For a bestseller written at the height of the empire, that is a remarkable thing to say.
The Real One
Everyone who read it in 1868 knew what he was thinking of. There was a real diamond.
It had passed for centuries between rulers in India, Persia and Afghanistan, usually by conquest. In 1849, after the British defeated the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab, the treaty required its ruler to surrender the stone to the Queen of England. The ruler was a boy of ten.
It was shipped to London and shown at the great exhibition of 1851 in a cage like a birdcage. The crowds were let down. It was cut in the old Indian manner and did not sparkle. So the Queen’s husband had it recut, which made it brighter and took away more than a third of its weight.
It has been in the British crown jewels ever since. It is in the Tower of London now, set in a crown. Four countries have asked for it back at one time or another.
The novelist changed the color and the name. Nobody was fooled.
This Week
I would not usually connect a book I am listening to with the news. But a client of mine, an Englishman who teaches at the university, sends me a daily digest of royal coverage because he thinks it is funny that I paint people in robes. Friday’s had an item I read twice: a report that the King is to acknowledge the “darkest days” of Britain’s colonial rule on his tour of the Caribbean, alongside another saying he will not apologize for the slave trade.
Different part of the world, different history. I know that. But the question underneath is the one the novel asks. If something was taken, what do you owe?
The officer in the book never gives the stone back. He keeps it in a bank vault and it poisons his life. He leaves it to a girl as a kind of curse. Nobody in the English family ever says: this is not ours. It takes three men from the other side of the world to say it by acting on it.
What a Painter Notices
Here is what I was doing while I listened. The sitter is the wife of a man who made his money in banking. She wanted to be painted in her grandmother’s necklace, a rope of old-cut stones. I have spent three days on those stones.
You learn, painting jewels, that they are not really there. A diamond in a portrait is five strokes. A dark, a middle tone, a point of white, a touch of reflected color from the dress, a cast shadow. The eye does the rest. The thing itself is almost nothing. What you are painting is the light it throws on the person wearing it.
That is what a great jewel is for. It is not valuable because of what it is. It is valuable because of what it says about whoever has it. The Queen did not need a diamond. She needed to be seen to have that one.
I think the novelist understood that. His moonstone is unlucky for everyone who owns it and holy for those who do not. In the house it is a possession. In the temple it is not owned by anyone.
Fairness
I should say that the argument about the real stone is not simple. It was taken from a child by treaty, yes. Before that it had been taken by the boy’s father’s dynasty from an Afghan king, and before that by a Persian conqueror from the Mughals. Nobody’s hands are clean. Which of the four claimants would it go to?
The British answer has generally been that it is too tangled to undo. That may be convenient. It is also not nothing.
The novel’s answer is simpler, because it is a novel. Back to the god.
Tuesday
I finished the necklace. Thirty-one stones, five strokes each. The sitter came to look and said it was “exactly Grandmother’s.” I did not ask where Grandmother got it.
My English client also put me on to a London humor paper, the London Prat. I looked at what it has to say on the subject. Its British satirical news on the Crown Jewels has a tour guide’s patter with the provenance left in, and its London satirical news about returning things is drier about museums than I would have dared. Here at home I read Bohiney Magazine, where the stolen goods are of a more recent date.
Next week’s sitter is a dentist. No jewels. I shall start a new book.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/