Kate Sedley - The Tintern Treasure

‘When you forgot,’ he explained laboriously, ‘to bring us home any presents, you said we could take anything we liked from your pack. I took my knife. Forget what Nich’las took. Bess took the buttons.’

Vaguely, my memory stirred, then sharpened. Of course! I recollected now. Two weeks ago, on my return from Hereford, I had omitted to bring the children anything. (My mind had been too much occupied with other matters.) Moreover, I had forgotten Elizabeth’s birthday. All three had all been upset and I had lost my temper, storming out of the kitchen and shouting at them to take what they pleased from my pack. Neither Adela nor I had seen what they had chosen, but Nicholas claimed to have taken some tags for his belt, Adam the ivory-handled knife — which he had been brandishing under our noses ever since — and my daughter the buttons. .

But what buttons? The set of carved bone buttons I had bought in Gloucester, of course!

And yet she couldn’t have done! Twice my pack had been emptied, once by myself all over the kitchen floor and the second time by Sir Lionel Despenser when he had invited me in to display my goods to his housekeeper. And on both occasions, if I shut my eyes and concentrated, I could clearly recall seeing the buttons amongst my other wares: six prettily carved buttons threaded together on a length of ribbon. The very set of buttons I had given to the farmer’s wife the preceding Sunday in return for a dish of pig’s trotters stewed in butter, an apple dumpling and a beaker of homemade cider. .

I realized suddenly that this was what all my dreams had been trying to tell me. And Adam’s remarks about belly buttons — they too had been jolts to my memory, but I had been too dull, too stupid, to see their significance.

I held out my hand.

‘Give me that bag at once, Adam,’ I said sternly.

He hesitated, but recognizing the note of authority in my voice, the tone which meant I was deadly serious and not to be trifled with, surrendered his prize. For a moment I stood weighing the bag in my right hand, then, loosening the drawstring, upended its contents into my left.

There was a flash of white light, a rainbow of colour, and I stood staring at what I was holding like a man in a dream.

I heard the sharp intake of breath from both Henry Callowhill and the goldsmith. Then the latter murmured in an awestruck whisper, ‘Dear Mother of God, the Capet diamonds!’

There were eight of them, the largest and most perfect stones I had ever seen, and each one had been set in a cup of gold, exquisitely shaped like flower petals, with a tiny, pierced shaft so that they could sewn on to a garment and used as buttons.

I looked at the goldsmith. ‘What. . What did you say they are?’

He took one from my hand and stood twisting it reverently between his fingers.

‘The Capet diamonds,’ he breathed. ‘They belonged to Philip IV of France.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Probably looted from the Templars. When Isabella Capet married Edward II, the goldsmiths of Paris turned them into buttons which she brought with her to England to adorn her coronation robes. Alas, they suffered the same fate as most of her other jewels. Edward seized them and gave them to his Gascon favourite, Piers Gaveston.

‘After Gaveston was murdered by the barons, the diamonds disappeared. No one knew what had happened to them. Gaveston was related in some degree or other to the great banking family of the Calhaus, and it has been generally assumed that the buttons were deposited with them and never reclaimed.’ Gilbert Foliot paused, turning the gem this way and that, watching the light flash and sparkle before going on, ‘But it would seem that this assumption was wrong. Edward must have taken back the diamonds after all. And when he and Hugh le Despenser fled into Wales, escaping from Mortimer and Isabella’s invading army, he took them with him, leaving them eventually with the abbot of Tintern for safe-keeping and until he should need them. Of course, he never did, and there they remained in the secret hiding place in the abbot’s old lodgings, no one suspecting their existence.’

‘Not,’ I said, ‘until Walter Gurney went to work for Sir Lionel when, in view of their families’ shared history, he told him about the tradition amongst the Gurneys of Edward having tried to bribe his gaolers to let him escape.’

‘How did you know about that?’ the goldsmith asked sharply.

‘I didn’t. It was something I worked out for myself. Sir Lionel told you. You remembered the secret hiding place and began to wonder if it had contained more than the original documents discovered fourteen years ago. Peter Noakes overheard the conversation between you, and. . Well, the rest we know.’ I dropped the buttons back in the bag, taking the final one from Gilbert Foliot’s hand and putting it in with the others. ‘And now,’ I continued, ‘we’d better take these to the Lord High Sheriff without delay. They’re far too precious to remain in my keeping.’

The two men glanced at one another, then Henry Callowhill smiled.

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘We’ll take the diamonds, Master Chapman. They’ll make a valuable contribution to Henry Tudor’s war chest.’

I laughed. I thought he was joking. Then I saw that he wasn’t. He was perfectly serious and there was a hard look in his eyes that I had never seen before. The genial wine merchant had vanished. This was a man with a purpose.

There was another change, also. The two men seemed to have switched roles. Gilbert Foliot was suddenly the subordinate, looking to his friend for instructions, and I realized that their previous relationship had been a blind for the true state of affairs. I remembered, too, Lawyer Heathersett’s warning that the goldsmith was not ‘the only man you need to look at in this town’. And there had been young Martin Callowhill’s description of his father — a man of ambition and pride in his ancestry — that had not tallied with the man I thought I knew.

The meeting in Wales had not been accidental, either. I now felt sure of that. No doubt as soon as Sir Lionel had passed on Walter Gurney’s information to his friend, Gilbert Foliot had, in his turn, relayed it to Henry Callowhill. The two men had gone there together to test the soundness or otherwise of the knight’s theory. .

I put the leather bag into the pouch at my belt and backed away until I could feel the far parlour wall behind me. They were two to one and there was bound to be a fight. Not only did I have what they wanted, but I now knew them for Henry Tudor’s men, traitors to King Richard, whose agent and spy they thought I was. If it came to taking my word against theirs, they must feel certain that I should be believed.

Neither man, however, made an immediate move to wrest my pouch from me. Instead, Gilbert Foliot turned to his friend. ‘There’s no Breton ship at present in harbour, nor will be for a week or two. The winter weather’s closing in and sailings will be less.’

Henry Callowhill shrugged. ‘We must follow Bray to Cornwall. He’s making for Rame Head where he told me a ship will lie offshore, somewhere between there and Penlee Point, as soon as it arrives from Brittany. We must go now. Today. As soon as you return home, send a message to Sir Lionel informing him of our intentions and tell him to join us as soon as he can.’

‘Today?’ the goldsmith queried, horrified.

‘As things have turned out, we’ve no choice.’ His friend sounded impatient. ‘You must see that! If we’d found the jewels ourselves, it would have been a different matter. As it is. .’ He let the sentence hang.

‘But if, when we get to Cornwall, we find that Reynold has already sailed?’

Reynold Bray! Of course! I had in the past heard Timothy speak of this most loyal and capable of Henry Tudor’s agents.