The Diamond Keeper

by Jeannie Mobley

Genres: Young Adult

Synopsis

A thrilling tale of the elusive Hope Diamond's journey across Europe during the French Revolution, with gorgeous, absorbing writing from Jeannie Mobley!

Eighteen-year-old Claudie Durand's future is planned. She'll take over the family inn, watch her much prettier younger sister, Mathilde, married off to the butcher's son, and live out her days alone, without the hope of finding a love of her own. Her mother ran off to the cloister when she was young, and her gruff, abusive father has deemed her unmarriageable, a nuisance, and only good for hard labor.

But outside their small village in Brittany, a revolution is brewing. When the Army of the Republic seizes their town, and Claudie finds herself at the center of the conspiracy, she and Mathilde must flee their sheltered life and take up a cause that, up till now, had always seemed like a distant conflict. As the sisters carry out a dangerous mission for the resistance: delivering a precious item to the mysterious Rooster of Rennes - Claudie's conscience is torn between the longing to return to her predictable, lonely existence and the desire to carve out a new future, reaching for the life - and love - she never dared dream of but knew deep down she truly deserved.

 

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Release date: November 16, 2021

Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 352

Sample

CHAPTER 1

September 1792

Though there were riots in the capital and empty harvests elsewhere in France, in our small corner of Brittany, September turned golden and ripe around us. Thick shocks of wheat stood in the fields waiting for threshing, and the apple trees drooped beneath the weight of the harvest. Everyone was busy from dawn until dusk. No one had time for revolution.

Still, when Jacques came galloping recklessly into our innyard, his mouth as full of gossip as his saddlebags were of mail, everyone flocked to him. The men were eager for news, the women for Jacques’s wink and mischievous grin. All the unwed girls dreamed of joining him in the daring exploits he bragged of while they sat, doe-eyed, at his elbow.

Almost all the girls, that is; I was never taken in. I heard his stories—how could I not when it was my job to serve the drink to everyone who came to hear him?—but I wasn’t fool enough to believe them. If all the girls in town were in love with Jacques, he was just as in love with himself.

Mathilde, however, was head over heels, after the fashion of fifteen-year-old girls with dreams too big for their villages. She could hear him coming from a mile off, and whatever chore she was doing would be shoddily finished, or more likely not finished at all. Once he arrived, all she would do was see to his comfort and fill her head with his boastful stories. My sister was too sweet and pretty by far, and too trusting, and I always breathed a sigh of relief when he galloped away, so she could get her head out of the clouds he put it in.

Mathilde had just begun the evening milking when he arrived that September day. At once, the heavy udders of our poor cows were forgotten. She rushed from the barn and into his arms, and he hoisted her up, spinning her once around before planting a daring kiss on her cheek.

I had been sweeping the yard, so I witnessed it all. Seeing me glowering at them, Jacques gave Mathilde an extra peck.

“How did the same man sire one daughter so sweet and another so sour?” he asked her, taking no care to prevent my hearing. After all, what did a few sharp barbs matter to a plain girl like me?

Mathilde giggled. “Claudie’s not so sour,” she said, turning her bright face toward me. “Claudie, will you finish the milking? Please? Someone has to get food and drink for our guest, and Cook will be busy getting supper ready.” With that, she turned her full, flirtatious attention back to Jacques, not waiting for my answer. They entered the inn, Jacques already telling her of his adventures on the road, while I was left alone with his lathered horse and all the unfinished chores.

I tended to the tired horse first, then completed the milking. By the time I trudged inside, lugging buckets of milk in each hand, a small crowd of village girls had gathered and were hanging on Jacques’s every word.

“I tell you, Paris has turned upside down! The king is a prisoner, and criminals rule the streets. The poor wear their poverty with the arrogance of lords, while the lords try to pass themselves off as paupers. Nothing is sacred—the churches have been stripped of their gold, the priests of their vows. Do you know, even the crown jewels have been stolen!”

A collective gasp issued from the girls—whether at the audacity of the crime or the glory of such jewels, I couldn’t be sure.

“Weren’t they guarded?” Mathilde asked.

“They were, but the thieves were clever,” Jacques said, smiling as if he admired their cleverness almost as much as he admired his own. “They bought the service of the guards, or perhaps they were the guards themselves. A window was left unlocked, a door was unprotected, and the next thing you know, the jewels had vanished!”

“All of them?” Terese, the miller’s daughter, asked, her eyes huge and round.

“All the important ones. The yellow Mazarin diamond, and the one they call the Mirror of Portugal, and the greatest prize of all—the Blue of the Crown, in which they say the mighty Sun King, Louis XIV, captured the sun.”

“Imagine!” Mathilde said, her eyes shining. “The crown jewels! Some lucky girl is walking around Paris shining like the queen herself!”

“Don’t be a fool!” I hadn’t meant to snap, but the thought of Mathilde wishing to put herself in danger vexed me even more than Jacques. “They’d have your head for wearing such things. And anyway, they are stolen. Have you no morals?”

Mathilde’s eyes narrowed and she opened her mouth to hurl her answer at me, but to my surprise, and hers as well, Jacques jumped in to defend me.

“Claudie is right, Mathilde. You could not wear those jewels in public. They are too grand. Why, they say the Blue of the Crown is the size of your palm, with a piece of the sun at its heart. Such a thing would be dangerous, would it not?”

“Well, what is the point in taking such a glorious thing if you cannot wear it?” Mathilde said, sounding a little sulky.

“Perhaps those who took it had another reason. Who knows? To fund their revolution, perhaps? To ransom the king?”

“To satisfy their own greed,” I muttered, pouring a bucket of milk into the churn in the corner, another of Mathilde’s jobs left undone.

“Well, I don’t believe a thing of beauty should be hidden away,” Mathilde said, pouting because Jacques had sided with me.

“Such a thing would be a death sentence on the streets of Paris just now,” Jacques assured her. “They are teeming with the self-appointed armies of the revolution, with their clubs and knives, looking for anyone who might be trying to smuggle their wealth out of the city. ‘It is the people’s wealth!’ they cry, and by ‘the people’ they mean any of them who can get their hands on it. They see a man astride a good horse, they swarm like ants to pull him from his seat. ‘Liberté!’ they cry, by which they mean they will liberate the poor sod from his money.”

“Did that happen to you?” Mathilde asked, breathless.

“It did,” Jacques answered, his eyes agleam with adventure. He had, of course, known she would ask and had only paused so that his audience could beg him for more. “There is naught to be gained from pulling me out of the saddle, a mere carrier of the post as I am, but tell that to the mindless rabble packing the streets, throwing bricks through shop windows and working themselves into a bloodthirsty rage. I rounded a corner, and there was the mob, pulling the furniture from a rich man’s house, heaping it like so much splintered firewood in the street.

“Before I could turn and try a different route, they were upon me, grabbing my bridle and my saddlebags, scrabbling like rats at my boots.” His hands grasped at the air, fingers curled into demonic claws to illustrate. Mathilde’s hands went to her mouth.

I began plunging the paddle in the churn hard enough to drown out his words, but to no avail. He only raised his voice.

“It was only a matter of time till they unseated me,” Jacques continued.

“How ever did you escape?” breathed Mathilde, her cheeks flushed prettily with the excitement of it all. Since childhood, flushing prettily had been one of Mathilde’s greatest talents. When I flushed, I looked blotchy and ill, but a rush of blood to Mathilde’s cheeks was as smooth and perfect as summer cream.

“I tell you, I didn’t know if I would,” he said, leaning in, drawing the girls toward him. “But with my free hand, I brandished this!” He pulled the knitted liberty cap from his head and waved it in the air above us all so that the tricolor ribbons of his revolutionary cockade fluttered.

“And then,” he continued, the twinkle in his eye growing more mischievous, “I broke into song.”

He leapt up onto a bench, swung the bonne rouge over his heart, and in a clear, confident baritone, began to belt out “Ça Ira,” a favorite anthem of the Republic.

“Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,

Les aristocrates à la lanterne!

Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,

Les aristocrates on les pendra!”

Mathilde leapt to her feet and joined him in a chorus before falling back into giggles.

“Did that really work?” Terese asked, the only girl in the group bold enough to try to pull his attention away from Mathilde.

Jacques beamed down at her, his eyes still alight with his own resourcefulness. “It caught them off guard, I can tell you. I wrested myself free of their grasp and explained who I was, a messenger for the revolution itself. ‘Vive la révolution!’ they cried at hearing this, and before all was said and done, they drank to my health with bottles of wine they had pulled from the cellars of the house.”

At that point, he reached into the saddlebag he’d brought in with him and extracted a dark bottle. “And they sent me with one for the road!” he added triumphantly, holding the bottle aloft. “Vive la révolution!”

Mathilde clapped her hands in delight, then hurried to the bar and retrieved glasses, enough for everyone in the inn. Jacques pulled the cork from the bottle with his teeth and poured a trickle of the red-black wine into each one, and Mathilde passed them around. The miller’s daughter accepted her glass with a titter of delight. Wine was a rare treat, Brittany being poorly suited to the cultivation of grapes.

As for me, I refused a glass, choosing instead to retreat to the kitchen, where I wouldn’t have to stomach any more of Jacques’s boasting. I hardly believed his story—there wasn’t a scratch on him, after all. It was all bravado, intended to take in foolish country girls, but it wouldn’t work on me.

The inn grew busier after supper, when the local men, finished with their work and eager for news, came to hear what Jacques could report. As they filled the room, he removed his bonne rouge and stuffed it into a saddlebag. I didn’t know what he carried in those bags, or for whom, but he took seriously the requirement that he keep the contents of them safe at all times. The bags never left his sight.

“The Prussian army—the greatest in the world—has already crossed the northeastern border and is advancing. They mean to liberate Paris,” Jacques told the local crowd. “The Duke of Brunswick is at their head, vowing vengeance if one hair on the king’s head is harmed.”

“They will take Paris, surely,” Reynard the butcher said, with his usual unwarranted authority. Beside him, his son, Pierre, sat leering at Mathilde, who still hovered as near to Jacques as she could. “The so-called Army of the Republic is nothing more than a crowd of rabble.”

“They’ve become more than that, I’m afraid,” Jacques said, his expression grim. “The Parisians didn’t take kindly to the duke’s threat. Paris is awash in blood—thousands of prisoners, and the priests and bishops too.”

Everyone sat in silence for a moment, agape at the horror. It was unimaginable how so much rage could be directed toward king and church. Our village priest, old Père François, was like a kind old grand-père to us. He’d christened every child, married every couple, and we all expected him to see us safely off to God when the time came.

“We cannot stand for this,” someone muttered, and debate erupted across the room, quickly escalating to a dozen shouting, arguing voices that made it impossible for me to follow any thread of conversation as I carried trays of mugs and pitchers of cider in and out of the room.

The crowd stayed late drinking that night, but Jacques retired early to his room and rode out the next morning before sunrise. I was in the barn feeding the horses when he appeared and saddled his mount. He led it out into the yard, but I did not hear him gallop away. Instead, I heard a murmur of voices, and I knew Mathilde was with him.

I gave them a few minutes to themselves, but only a few. I didn’t trust him alone with my sister for any length of time. Still, I didn’t want to intrude unnecessarily, so I moved quietly to the doorway of the barn, where I could keep an eye on them.

He had led the horse to the mounting block but had not yet mounted. The reins dangled loosely from his hand as he wrapped Mathilde in an intimate embrace. For all that I suspected Jacques of using my sister, I was moved by the tenderness in his face as he leaned down toward her upturned lips.

“Take me with you,” she said, her whole body pleading as she pressed against him.

He brushed his hand along her cheek. “Soon, mamour, but not today. Today, I must make haste. Great things are afoot. Dangerous things.”

“I want to be part of all that, Jacques. Don’t you see? I could help you.”

“I know, but what of your family? They need you too.”

Mathilde made a dismissive noise in her throat. “My family doesn’t need me! And anyway, Claudie is better suited for tending a dreary inn. She can have it—I want a life of adventure!”

Her words stung like a slap. It was true, the dreary work to keep the inn running—stabling horses, washing bed linens, tending the cows, the cheeses and apple trees—did fall mainly to me. Papa kept the books and managed the cider press and drank with the men of the village every evening while Mathilde and I waited on them hand and foot. But I didn’t do it because it suited me. I did it for my family, especially for my sister, who had only been three when our mother’s escalating fits of religious ecstasy drew her to the cloister, leaving me, a girl of only seven, to fill her shoes.

Perhaps what stung most was that Mathilde was right. However I might feel about it, I was built for the work. I was sturdy and plain beside Mathilde’s petite prettiness. My role would be to keep my father’s house and business as long as he needed me. Mathilde might make a good marriage; several men in the village had their eye on her, and Papa had set aside a small sum for her dowry. But not for mine. He meant to keep me to run the inn until the day he died.

I turned back into the barn, the bitter taste of my fate on my tongue, but my heavy wooden clog banged against a bucket that clattered onto its side. At once, Mathilde sprang back from Jacques’s embrace.

“Claudie?” Mathilde’s sweet voice broke through my anger.

I turned again, trying to look as if I hadn’t heard a thing, as if I was simply done with my work in the barn.

“Do you need anything for your journey, Monsieur Lambert?” I asked, my voice brassy with false cheer.

“Thank you, Mademoiselle Claudette, but I have all I need,” he replied. He turned one last tender gaze toward Mathilde. “I must be off, though parting is a sorrow.” He placed a lingering kiss on her cheek, then leapt blithely to the saddle.

“Au revoir, mamour,” he said with his usual cocky grin, and blew her a kiss.

She rushed to his side, holding aloft her finest handkerchief, one she’d spent hours embroidering while I scrubbed and ironed piles of linens. Now I knew why.

He took the dainty cloth, held it to his nose, and breathed in the sweet smell of lavender. “And I will have a fine gift for you upon my return,” he promised as he tucked the handkerchief into his coat, over his heart. “A gift more marvelous than your wildest dreams.” He winked, then spurred his horse and galloped away.

Mathilde sighed a long, dreamy sigh as she watched him. I turned and went into the kitchen, kicking off my dusty clogs by the door. She was still gazing after him when I returned a few minutes later with the milk buckets and egg basket. I thrust the basket into her hands.

“Did you hear, Claudie?” she said, hugging the basket to her chest, her eyes still fixed on the road in the direction he had gone. “A gift more marvelous than my wildest dreams. What do you suppose it could be?”

“Don’t be a fool. All he’s ever likely to bring you is trouble,” I said, giving her a little push toward the henhouse. “We need eggs for breakfast.”

“There’s nothing foolish about true love,” she said defensively. “Someday he will take me with him.”

I gave a little bark of laughter. “He rides through a dozen little villages like ours every week. He’s probably got a girl in every one who thinks the same thing.”

“He would never!” she protested.

“You’re much better off with Pierre. He will inherit his father’s butcher shop and give you a comfortable home and meat at every meal.”

She tossed her bountiful dark curls over her left shoulder, her usual gesture of defiance. “A comfortable home might be enough for you, Claudie, but I want more. I want love. I want to live in Paris. I want adventure!”

I rolled my eyes. “This is hardly the time to wish yourself off to Paris. Haven’t you heard a word of the news Jacques brings? Or do you only have an ear for compliments and flattery?”

“Of course I’ve heard! I’m not stupid,” she said, planting her hands on her hips. “But surely this will be the end of it. Don’t you see? The Prussians will restore peace. The revolution will be over and things can go back to normal, and I can go to Paris and marry Jacques—”

“He has asked you to marry him?” I had been heading off to milk the cows before putting them out to pasture, but I turned back to my sister in concern.

Mathilde giggled. “Not in so many words,” she said. I breathed a sigh of relief. “But we dream of a time when we can be together.”

“You dream of such a time,” I said. “You and every innkeeper’s daughter on his route.”

“Not everyone. Not you. But then again, you don’t know how to dream, do you?” With that, she turned and flounced off to the henhouse.

I strode off to the milking, my lips pressed into a tight line. So what if I didn’t dream? There was no point to it, not when I knew exactly what my future was to be. Why imagine impossible futures that would only serve to make real life duller and less satisfying than it already was? It seemed foolish at best, and at worst—considering we were our mother’s daughters—it could be dangerous.

CHAPTER 2

Two days after Jacques’s visit, Mathilde and I were in the orchard, bringing in the harvest. Papa had nearly an acre of apples. It would take us a week to pick them, working dawn to dusk, laboring until our necks were stiff and shoulders ached from looking up. Four times a day, we would pull the full cart back to the cider house, where Papa was manning the press. Our livelihood depended on putting up a supply of cider to see us through the year. The rest of France had their grapes and their famous wines. We Bretons had our cider.

Of course, I picked three bushels for every one Mathilde carried to the cart. A pretty girl has a duty to herself and others to allow herself to be wooed, after all. She was the one with prospects and with eager boys happy to oblige her. While I stripped branch after branch of apples, hauling my ladder from one tree to the next, I was accompanied by the soft prattle and giggles of my sister and whatever young man happened to be assisting her at any moment, meaning that neither of them was getting much done. More than once over the years I had asked Papa to find a task for her in the press, but he had always refused.

“It wouldn’t be proper to send you into a field full of hired hands alone,” he would insist. “And anyway, I need you to keep an eye on Mathilde.” By which he meant he wanted to give Mathilde a chance to be paraded before the men of the village, shown for the choice morsel she was, but discreetly. Respectably. Under the watchful eye of her plain, matronly sister.

Papa was most hopeful of Pierre, the butcher’s son. Such a match would not only mean a secure future for Mathilde but also a greater profit for the inn, securing our meat supply at a discount. Pierre was eager to comply and for three years now had volunteered to help us during the apple harvest, where he followed Mathilde like a smitten puppy. She gave him smiles and merry conversation, as she did all the boys, but she was careful not to favor him above the others.

“Who wants to marry a man who smells of blood and death?” she would say, wrinkling her petite nose at the thought whenever I made mention of it. Still, I tried to steer her gently toward the idea, treating him with kindness and encouraging him in the suit whenever I could. I knew, even if Mathilde did not, that in the end her fate would be Papa’s decision, not hers. In that, at least, we were not so different, Mathilde and me. So, despite the lack of help, I was not entirely displeased when, while carrying my next full basket back to the cart, I saw her sitting on a branch, swinging her legs, and listening with a rapt expression to some tale being told to her by the butcher’s ruddy son.

My bushel was the last that the cart would hold, so not wanting to disturb Pierre when he finally seemed to be making a bit of progress, I called over one of the hired hands to help me haul the cart to the cider house, which stood on the edge of the innyard, flanked by the stable on one side and the cheese shed on the other.

As we rounded the end of the stable, toiling and sweating under the weight of the cart, I was surprised to see a man on a huge horse in the innyard. It was only midmorning, an odd time for a traveler to arrive, but there he was, astride his mount and gazing impatiently around him as if expecting an attendant.

“A moment, monsieur!” I called.

He watched as we pulled the creaking cart to the door of the cider house and struggled to tip it up and dump the apples into the pile. It was almost more than the two of us could manage, but the visitor made no offer of assistance. He just watched us or, more specifically, watched me, while his horse rattled its harness impatiently. Perhaps he was surprised to see a girl doing such manly work. Perhaps he was wondering if I was female at all. I gritted my teeth and strained harder against the cart, meaning to show him my worth and squelch the part of me that wished he would make a gallant offer of help.

When the cart was empty, I sent the hired man back to the orchard and I turned to the traveler, reminding myself I had a duty to serve him courteously, as a customer.

The sun was behind him, casting him as a towering silhouette, and for a moment my breath caught as I had the impression of a knight of old atop a great charger. But as I stepped toward him across the yard, the inn blocked the sun and the idiotic idea faded. His steed was no charger, but one of the sturdy Breton draft horses common to the estates west of our village.

The man resembled his mount—large, well-muscled, and shaggy. I might have thought him a farmhand on his master’s plow horse but for his commanding presence and the horse’s fine tack—not rich, but of good quality and sturdy, for long hours on the road. I shaded my face with my hand to better see him as I gazed upward. His hair was dark, and his face well tanned. His eyes were fixed on me with a gaze so intense it bordered on indecent. ...