Miss Emily’s Smile – By Paul C Venter – Chapter 1

This is a mad, beautiful, frightening story about the largest diamond ever taken from the earth. And the men and women who would die for it. For many of its parts the story is partly true. Especially the ending. I changed names, dates, situations and increased the body count. Apparently violence sells – the author

First Chapter

The only good Englishman (said Oom Schalk Lourens) is a dead Englishman.

     This is not just a story about a diamond. It’s a story about the mother of all diamonds, the biggest, the brightest, the most awesome ever. And it’s the story of those who carried it over a great distance into the light, and those who died on that terrifying journey.

     We should start with Willy, the diamond’s original owner.     

     Herewith a paragraph from a letter discovered among the papers of Sir William Gibson whose body has only recently been found; forensic science had to prove it was him. The letter was dictated by Sir William (Willy to his friends and enemies) and handwritten by a personal secretary. After more than a century the ink has faded to light grey. The letter is dated 7^th of August 1908:

The stone was extracted four days ago by Captain David Lawrence, our mine manager, just below the surface at a depth of eighteen feet. We all thought that particular level of the mine had been worked out. At 3,106 carats it is, I believe, the largest blue diamond ever found. We have not yet arrived at an estimate of its value. Our intention is to put the uncut stone on public display at the National Bank in Johannesburg, and then offer it for sale through our London agents. For obvious security reasons, once the advance on the sale has been received, we will assign a team of special detectives to the steamboat carrying it to England from Durban, and the stone will be locked in the ship captain’s safe for the duration of the voyage. The danger is not only avarice. As you can imagine, the post war political climate being what it is, there must be any number of individuals who would prefer such a stone remain on South African soil. We have decided to name it the Gibson Diamond.

     We have decided. The man whose signature appears at the bottom of this letter, Sir William Gibson, enjoyed naming things after himself. He also owned the Gibson Mine near Gibson, a town situated on the Highveld of the old Transvaal republic now turned province of the Union of South Africa. Born British in the former Cape Colony, the son of a bricklayer who in his youth became a bricklayer himself, Willy had not yet dubbed himself Sir William when the Gibson diamond was found. Yes, he later did get tired of waiting for the royal sword and imagined tapping himself with an invisible one. People laughed, the King frowned, his young wife refused to be called Lady Emily, but Sir William didn’t mind. He had what would decades later became fondly known as fuck-you money.

     For long hard years Willy worked as a bricklayer, often barely surviving in a crowded trade, but then he accidentally discovered a diamond field. No more laying bricks. He left that to the tradesmen who built him a fine mansion in Parktown, a new suburb for the ridiculously rich in the mining boomtown of Johannesburg. The great house sat on high ground so he named it Heavenly. Really? The Heavenly Mansion? His wife probably said something like: “Willy, we simply cannot refer to everything as Gibson, for heaven’s sake.”

     Emily did have a fair education, her life just didn’t work out as good. She was pretty. That was a gift and a curse.

     Three decades younger than her husband, Emily Gibson was the eldest daughter in a large family left destitute by the death of a proud soldier father. He fought well for Queen Victoria and Country in South Africa, brought his family out there after the war against the Boers, then promptly left his wife dirt-poor with seven daughters by getting so drunk he never realised he was taking on a vengeful Boer twice his size.  Emily, the eldest daughter, was forced into the dance halls and saloons to help the family survive and keep her sisters in school. Openly becoming Lady Emily Gibson would have exposed that chapter of her as yet unwritten autobiography, and she didn’t want any of that. Her husband didn’t want that either, so Willy accepted her decision to remain what everyone in the family called her: Miss Emily.

     For Willy a knighthood was the ultimate raspberry at the Old Money English who were still calling him The Bricklayer or Bricky. And it was a title he wanted his children to be proud of. If he ever had children.

     Miss Emily seemed to be struggling with that.  

     Willy wouldn’t admit it to just everyone, but he desperately wanted children. That would really make all this scheming worthwhile. At 50 he looked the part of a mining baron with a sweet tooth, and his attractive wife at 28 could still hide the scars of her hard life, but he knew they were really just a bricky and a saloon dancer for hire who caught a lucky break. He wanted children who would never have to lay bricks or drunks in a saloon.

     The children of a wealthy man who was also a great shining bloody knight.

     But how do you persuade a pissed-off King of England to grant what you’ve already claimed? To impress his frowning Willy would have to pull off something big to warrant an official knighthood. Something seriously big.

     The biggest diamond on the planet could do the trick, couldn’t it?

     Willy was not a gossip. The rumour was almost certainly started by his young wife. Miss Emily and her gossipy mother loved tea parties. Soon it was widely known that Willy was possibly considering the possibility of turning his fabulous Gibson Diamond into a royal gift.

     But which royal should actually receive the gift? The newish King? The Queen? The Prince of Wales? Which one would appreciate the gift the most? And which one would be the least offended if not considered?

     A man with Willy’s humble beginnings couldn’t get through this political quagmire without sinking. He needed help.

     He needed Louis Botha. Willy knew the legendary Boer General who became the first  Prime Minister of South Africa through his wife Annie, a socially active and strong-willed woman raised in the Anglican Church and partly responsible for her husband’s softening attitude towards the English. Today’s Afrikaners, those who had been taught a Nationalist version of their history, will probably have with a fit when they read this: Louis Botha, that great and brave Boer warrior, that fine Christian, had not only married a Tommy slut but also an Anglican?

     But had Annie made her husband so soft he would endanger his leadership position to help a fat, fake knight? Louis Botha, probably one of the most ambitious white politicians ever born on African soil?

     Not so you’d notice.

     But, as usual, Willy had a plan. His wife Emily and her mother gave gossipy tea parties frequented by the Prime Minister’s wife.  Obviously Annie Botha knew nothing about Emily’s blemished past. And Willy knew what Botha’s weak spot and still secret ambition was.

     Like virtually everyone in Pretoria or Johannesburg with ears back then, Gerrit Johannes Pretorius soon came to hear of Willy’s plan. He heard it from the two socialite widows he regularly serviced for money but no-one concerned would stoop so low as to call it that. The two widows were his so-called guardians, and they often attended Miss Emily’s tea parties.

     Gerrit Johannes had convinced his very loving guardians of a wild fiction: that he was related to the Pretorius family who once owned the farm on which Willy Gibson found the rich diamond pipe twisting like a volcanic screw down into the Highveld. The young chancer was not related to anyone he could prove as a relation. Gerrit Johannes Pretorius was a name he took for himself, found under obituaries in a newspaper. He was reading obituaries while learning how to read.

     You won’t find much about Boer War orphanages in the history books. Especially English history books. The war the English believed they’d win in six months but could only pull off using war criminal tactics – what else do you call starving the enemy’s women and children in overcrowded and underfunded concentration camps? – was not quite ancient history yet. It had stuttered to a sad and shameful end four years before Willy’s mine manager, Captain David Lawrence, told his tale of extracting the diamond from the Gibson mine.

     Extracting does sound like Captain Lawrence working his arse off. But what was a mine manager (probably wearing a suit with a black bow tie and eye patch to match) doing down in the mud on his knees?

     Gerrit Johannes Pretorius invented his name, but he really was a Boer War orphan. Never adopted.  With all the bitter hatred of a Boer War orphan boiling inside him. As well as the wiry, hard look of someone not raised on a healthy diet but forced to steal his food and then do a good deal of running with it. And on top of that sinewy body built for speed, Gerrit Johannes carried a beautiful angelic face passing girls would shyly glance at and blush. Older women would do more than glance. Older rich women generally, two widows especially: Agnes and Gladys, not related, but their dead husbands were distant cousins who came from Wales to seek their fortune in the South African mines and found it. They also found death down an unstable mine. The widows Agnes and Gladys frequented the tea parties where Miss Emily’s loose-lipped mother and rumour always had a seat at the table. The socialite gossips present never actually knew the name Miss Emily’s mum responded to, so we won’t bother with it either.

     Gerrit Johannes moved his lips when he read, but he managed well enough to get through parts of the daily local newspaper and some of its advertisements: the one claiming GIBSON MINE OFFERS UNDERGROUND WORK SITUATIONS was right up his street. From the age of 16, Gerrit Johannes had worked as a blaster’s boy in a Johannesburg gold mine. The blaster was the gunpowder and dynamite expert who concocted the explosions needed to open new underground mining levels. The blaster’s boy carried the gunpowder and dynamite in a pack on his back. Scary, dangerous work, the kind you could die doing. Many did and the bodies were always buried in closed caskets. You really don’t want the family to see what an explosion in a narrow tunnel does to the human body. Gerrit Johannes escaped from the job when he met the widows Agnes and Gladys who paid his room’s rent, stocked it with food and drink, and bought him the three-piece suits he loved. Nowadays he didn’t have to work at all, but he had his own reason for wanting a job in Willy Gibson’s diamond mine.