Dad Hears My Thoughts novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: My Father's Mark

The stone carries her father's secret mark, Tristram admits he hears the baby, and her test proves it; at dawn a drowned woman wears the blanket's daisies.

I didn't believe him, so I picked up my loupe.

The stone sat in my palm like a warm yolk.

I turned it to the lamp and found the girdle, the thin waist where the top meets the bottom.

There it was.

A star with six points, smaller than a flea, cut so fine it looked like a scratch.

My father put that star on every stone he ever finished.

He made me promise never to tell anyone where to look.

"It's real," I said. "It's the Sun Diamond. My father cut this."

"I know," Tristram said.

"You don't know anything. You thought your mother's ring was sapphire for thirty years."

"She told me it wasn't."

He bounced the baby on his shoulder. She was chewing his fur collar.

I set the diamond down very carefully on a square of velvet.

"Say that again," I said. "Slowly. Like I'm the one who's mad."

He opened his mouth, then shut it and glared at the baby.

"She says the lady has a hole in her stocking."

I looked down. I had a hole in my stocking, under my apron, where nobody could see.

"Lucky guess," I said.

The baby slapped his cheek with a wet hand.

"She says she doesn't guess. She's hungry."

I looked at him for a long time.

Then I went into the back room and came out with my trays.

"Turn around," I said. "Face the wall."

"Is this a test?"

"It's a test. Face the wall."

He faced the wall.

I sat the baby on my counter on a folded cloth and set six stones in a row in front of her.

Two sapphires, a garnet, a white topaz, and two pieces of paste I kept to show apprentices.

She put both hands flat on the row and patted them.

"First one's alive," Tristram said to the wall. "Second one's dead. Third and fourth are alive. Fifth is dead. Sixth is alive."

He was right.

I shuffled them while he stood there with his nose to my plaster.

He named them again. Right again.

So I took a stone from the drawer of client work I hadn't tested yet.

A ruby in a cheap ring, brought in by a carter who swore it was his grandmother's.

I put it in front of her.

She pushed it off the counter.

"She says that one's a liar," Tristram said.

I caught the ring before it hit the floor and looked at it under the loupe.

Glass. Red glass with a foil back.

I sat down on my stool.

"All right," I said. "All right."

"You believe me?"

"I believe her."

He turned around. For the first time all night he almost smiled.

I made porridge at the stove with the last of my milk.

He held her while I cooled it, blowing on the spoon.

She ate four spoonfuls and then spat the fifth down his doublet.

"She says it has lumps," he said.

"It does not have lumps."

"She says it has a lot of lumps, and that the lady should try harder."

"Tell her the lady cut the Queen's diamond out of her blanket tonight and is very tired."

He listened for a moment.

"She says she'll have more anyway."

She had six more spoonfuls.

When she was full she went soft and heavy against him, the way babies do all at once.

He lowered his voice. "What do we do with it?"

"We don't walk it into the palace," I said. "You show up holding the Queen's stone, and they say you had it all along."

"And you were hiding it."

"Exactly. Then they hang us both, and she goes to the foundling house anyway."

He looked down at the curls under his chin.

"Her mother sewed it in there," he said. "The Keeper. Ralph called her the Keeper's brat."

"The Keeper of the Queen's Jewels."

"She kept it from him. Then she brought her baby here."

"Because of my father's star," I said. "It's the only thing that proves this stone is the real one."

He was quiet a moment, listening.

His face changed.

"I asked where her mama is," he said. "She says Mama went to the water. Mama said be very quiet."

Neither of us said anything after that.

I unscrewed the brass foot of my father's big scale. It was hollow. He'd kept his savings in it.

The Sun Diamond fit inside with room to spare.

I lined my bottom drawer with my spare shawl for her, and set it by the stove.

He folded his cloak on the floor beside it.

"You can't sleep on the floor," I said. "You were a duke's heir this morning."

"I've slept in a ditch in the war. Your floor is warmer than a ditch."

"Thank you, I think."

I climbed to my loft.

Below me he was murmuring something to the drawer.

I lay awake listening to the two of them for a long while.

The bell woke me.

Not the chapel bell. The flat iron bell at the end of the quay, the one they ring when the river gives somebody back.

I pulled on my boots and went down in my nightdress and coat.

Tristram was already at the door with the baby bundled inside his cloak.

Half the street was out in the gray light, walking toward the water.

On the stones of the quay, two watchmen were laying something down out of a boat.

A woman. Pale hair, soaked dark.

Around her shoulders was a cream shawl.

There were daisies sewn all along its edge.

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