It had helped Peter that his stepfather had been the Reverend Hugh Ransome, much respected for his work amongst the poor of south London, and amongst the heathen in South Africa. His stepfather had taught him manners, and proper dress, and all the niceties of small conversation. But none of these graces had really been enough to whiten his face, and he had known ever since he was at school that only an Act of God could win him admission to the prizewinner’s enclosure of Edwardian society.

Perhaps this diamond was it. The one miracle which could change everything. He opened his hand, and the huge stone was warm, already infused with his own heat. The sun caught it, just the tip of it, and it flared up with brilliant rainbows and shatteringly bright triangles of reflected and re-reflected light, a spangled hall-of-mirrors in miniature.

‘Your father made sure you were taken care of,’ his mother had whispered, and the words fell on his memory like sheets of soft tissue paper.

He recalled sitting by his mother’s knee almost twenty years ago on a winter’s night in the old vicarage, toasting muffins on the end of a fork, his cheeks hot as baked apples, and he remembered his mother saying, ‘Did I ever tell you the story of the man who gave up everything he had, all his possessions, even the estates that he adored so much, just to buy his secret love the most precious stone in the whole world?’

He had said no, tell me. But she had simply smiled in an absent-minded sort of way, and tousled his hair, and told him to be careful not to drop his muffin into the coals. Now, however, he knew what she had meant.

He looked through the drawers of his mother’s dressing-table until he found a silk drawstring sachet that had been used for carrying a gold powder compact. He dropped the diamond into the sachet, tightened the string, and slipped it into his pocket. Then he straightened his necktie in the looking-glass, and went downstairs to the front parlour, where Olive was setting out the tea things. There was a large Rockingham pot of fragrant Ceylon, and a small plate of rather stale rock cakes.

‘You’re looking pale, sir, if you don’t mind my saying,’ said Olive. ‘You’re not considering going down with the fever?’

‘I didn’t have it in mind,’ said Peter. ‘Would you pour?’

Olive poured, and the steam from the cup twisted up into the sunlight like the Indian rope-trick. ‘I keep dwelling on your mother, sir,’ said Olive, sadly. ‘Such a lovely woman, you know; and even lovelier when she was younger.’

‘Yes,’ said Peter, sipping his scalding tea. He didn’t really want to share his memories with Olive. ‘I miss her very much.’