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.

It was enough for us. More than enough. We spent the summer playing a game in which we searched for the diamonds. The game was a ritual, the ritual a spell. As though from above, with an all-seeing eye, I see the five of us, each of us a finger of a single hand, probing the manor’s nooks and crannies.

I used to try to hear the diamonds. When we played the game, I used to listen for them, very hard, making myself quiet, as though they would speak to me and tell me where they were.

Perhaps a month before the end? An August rain falls from a cloudless sky and dries instantly. I am barefoot by the stables. I have been balancing on a rotting rain barrel searching the guttering. My hands are green with slime. David is walking toward me. He has been wading in the fountain. Wet footprints trail behind him. His T-shirt and shorts are soaked through. He is wearing an expression of mild surprise. It is an emptying thing to play the game. The hours slip by. The past and future retreat to dark corners far away. Something inside, in the heart, is being worked upon. There is an unlocking feeling, an unlocking feeling in the chest.

So David wears a surprised smile, a dazed look. His expression is reflected on my face. Our smiles touch first. I turn and go back toward the stables, toward the open door to the room full of birds’ nests, spiderwebs, and old bits of tack. David follows me. His footprints shrink and disappear.