The Diamond House Read online

  Dedication

  For Sherry Cuthbert

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. The First Wife

  2. The Oliver Diamonds

  3. The Other Diamonds

  Epilogue: The Diamond House

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Dianne Warren

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  The First Wife

  For all the years there were children in the Diamond house, and long before a woman named Emyflor Santos lost control of a rogue vacuum cleaner hose, a white hand-thrown teapot sat on a corner shelf in the dining room. It was clearly the work of an amateur: oversized, indelicate with its evident throwing lines, and heavy as a ten-pin bowling ball. The children had a vague idea that it had been made by an Aunt Salina they’d never met. They imagined a woman bent over a muddy potter’s wheel, an eccentric old relative back east in the town their parents had come from. They knew nothing of that town. To them, East was a foreign country.

  One night, when the rest of the house was asleep, the youngest of the five children, Estella, decided to sneak downstairs and have a good look at the teapot. She knew it had been kept for some reason other than steeping tea, and she wanted to know what that reason was. She descended the stairs in the darkness and turned on the light in the dining room, then climbed on a chair and retrieved the teapot from the shelf. It was so heavy she could hardly lift it. She set it down carefully on the mahogany dining table, trying not to make it clunk. The lid wouldn’t budge, so she found a wooden spoon in the kitchen and began to tap carefully around the rim. She was persistent. It finally gave way.

  Inside, Estella discovered a collection of old letters and, on top of them, a small velvet bag. When she opened it, she found five black clay beads wrapped in a soft cotton cloth. She removed the beads to have a closer look and saw that each had a miniature white figure in relief on its surface. The figures reminded her of creatures that might keep watch over a mummy’s tomb, but they did not tell her much, so she set them aside and turned her attention to the letters. She was only five years old and there wasn’t much she could do better than her brothers, but none of them had learned to read before they’d even started school.

  As she stared at the glossy teapot and the pile of letters on the table, she thought, I knew there was something.

  She opened the top letter.

  At first, she almost gave up and put it back because the handwriting seemed impossible to decipher, but she stuck with it and the ABCs began to emerge, or at least enough of them that she could guess at some of the words. The letter made little sense, but after struggling through it for a second time, she discerned that it was personal correspondence from her father to a woman named Salina Passmore, who was clearly not her aunt and clearly not the old woman she’d imagined. Estella was picturing this Salina and her father walking home together in the pouring rain—there had been a funeral, she’d figured out that much—when she realized her father was standing in the doorway to the dining room, watching her. She’d been concentrating so hard on the cursive writing that she hadn’t heard him coming down the stairs. Without saying anything, she folded the letter, slipped it back into its envelope, and placed all the letters once again in the teapot in the order she had found them. She set the bag with the ugly beads on top, just as it had been, and replaced the ill-fitting lid, although she was careful not to jam it on too tightly so it would be easier to remove in future. Then she climbed onto the chair and put the teapot back on the shelf, aware the whole time of her father in the doorway, and the whole house in darkness behind him.

  When she’d returned the chair to its spot at the table, she faced him and said, “Am I in trouble?”

  He replied, “Curiosity is a gift, not a thing to be punished. Perhaps I should give those beads to your mother. I imagine they’re valuable.”

  “She wouldn’t like them,” Estella said. She was thinking, So, the beads are his to give.

  She waited for him to say more.

  Finally he spoke. “You’re a smart girl, Estella,” he said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And handy with a wooden spoon. I’d like to sit and have a pipe, but I think we should likely just go back to bed. Without further ado, as they say.”

  Estella squeezed past her father in the doorway and he followed her to the staircase. He placed a hand on her shoulder as they climbed the stairs. She took note of the steps that creaked, so as to avoid them the next time.

  “Good night, then,” he whispered when they reached the top of the stairs.

  Third from the bottom. Fifth from the top. Or was it the fourth?

  She forgot to say good night before she returned to her room. Her father watched until she was back in bed.

  * * *

  THE FUNERAL WHERE Estella’s father and Salina Passmore first met in the fall of 1902 was in an Ottawa Valley town called Byrne Corners. It had been an awful day for standing in the cemetery during the committal. The rain was pelting, and it dripped from the brim of Salina’s hat, from her eyelashes, the tip of her nose, and she was all too aware of her appearance, given that a young man was standing across the grave from her: Oliver Diamond, a visitor from the West. She knew that his father and brother both worked at the Morris Castings plant, his father in a position of some importance. The elder Mr. Diamond was apparently not pleased that his second son had turned his back on a secure future at the factory and was instead wasting an unexpected inheritance on some folly halfway across the country. Oliver’s brother had invested his inheritance in a house and a Morris Castings bond. That was the sensible course of action. Most people in Byrne Corners would have agreed. The daydreamers go west, they believed, or the ones with no other prospects.

  To Salina Passmore, this younger Diamond brother was an intriguing prospect. He’d left Byrne Corners before her own family had moved there, when Mr. Passmore had taken up a post at the Union Bank. In the five years since that move, both of Salina’s older sisters had found husbands, and one of them, Roseanne, was already the mother of two noisy toddlers. Salina, on the other hand, had met no man of marrying age who interested her in the slightest. She had nothing against men—as evidenced by her tingling awareness of the young man in the cemetery—but she lacked enthusiasm for the kind of prospect her family wished for her, that is, one who could offer a woman money and comfort. With the constant attention her mother and sisters gave to finding her a husband, Salina felt as if she had already been deemed a spinster, and that being unable to attract a suitable man was the worst tragedy that could befall a woman who was not unpleasing in the looks department and more than reasonably intelligent. The choices they’d steered her toward were all so ordinary, and marriage to any one of them would, she was certain, lead to an impossibly predictable life. Perhaps that was the reason the unorthodox Oliver Diamond—or at least the idea of a man who eschewed his father’s conventional wisdom—was so appealing though they had never been formally introduced, or even said hello to one another on the street.

  It was rumoured about town—and Salina had been listening—that his interest in the West was entrepreneurial rather than agrarian, but no one seemed to know the nature of his ambitions. Something to do with the building trade, or perhaps the farm equipment business, neither of which he knew anything about. Oliver Diamond, they said, had an elevated impression of his own potential. What experience did he have that could possibly be of value in the new frontier? What influential people did he know there? What skills did he possess? None. That’s what an unearned inheritance did for a young man. He thinks he is above working his way up at the foundry, too goo
d for axe heads and frying pans and such, Salina had heard her mother say to another lady before the subject was quickly changed so they could not be accused of succumbing to the habit of common gossip. Good women of the Methodist persuasion, Salina thought, were happy to yammer away; they just didn’t want to get caught.

  As the storm lingered above these particular Methodists gathered in the cemetery, the minister led them in verse after verse of “Shall We Gather at the River,” and Salina wondered how long this was going to take, and did the minister not know about truncation? She lowered her head against the rain and watched the pools of water at her feet turn slick and spill toward the open grave. Poor Aunt Aideen, she thought, who’d always hated the rain. Salina listened to the voices around her, trying their best to give Aideen a good send-off despite the conditions.

  With her head lowered and the brim of her hat hiding her eyes (she hoped), Salina furtively studied Oliver Diamond. She concluded that he was handsome in a lanky way and had an air of confidence that went beyond the extra three inches he had on every other man there. He was, like her, without an umbrella. His shock of dark hair was as wet as a mop just lifted from a bucket, and the rain ran down his face and surely inside the neck of his wool jacket. Still, he stood to his full height and acted as though he didn’t care. She could hear him belting out the words—“Soon our happy hearts will quiver ”—as he sang with the most devout, although Salina detected a hint of irony in his obvious defiance of the rain. A provocative man, she decided, and she resolved to catch his eye when the cause of them all being there was over with and she’d had a chance to return herself to her pre-downpour state of attractiveness.

  Please, someone put a stop to this, she thought, for the sake of preventing pneumonia in everyone here. As one verse of the hymn slid into the next, her eyes scanned the congregation, and she took note that another young lady—Beatrice Shaughnessy was her name—seemed also to be watching Mr. Diamond. She knew Beatrice from the Young Women’s League at the church, where they had disagreed vehemently at one meeting on the matter of suffrage. Beatrice was pretty enough, Salina thought, but she would be better suited to one of Jane Austen’s vicars, or perhaps a dairy farmer. She knew she was being unfair to poor Beatrice, but she was well-sick of the service by this time, and the rain, and the minister who didn’t know when to call it quits. Beatrice was still relatively put together thanks to the umbrella protecting her hair, and when Salina looked down at her own feet once again she saw that her shoes were probably beyond saving, and the rain had served to weight and lengthen her black skirt so that the lace hem now hung in a puddle. She lifted one foot and it sucked mud like a rubber wellington. She would have to go home and change before the reception. She considered which skirt and shoes she ought to change into. Another black skirt—it was a funeral, after all—but the blue shoes, she decided, with the embroidery on the toe, the ones she would have worn in the first place if the sun had been shining. She imagined herself in the church hall, crossing her ankles just so, and young Mr. Diamond admiring them from a spot close by, where he had strategically positioned himself.

  When the hymn was over, the minister finally launched into the solemn rite of committal, and when that was done Salina looked up and saw that Oliver Diamond was no longer where he’d been standing, and Beatrice Shaughnessy was gazing off in the direction in which, Salina assumed, he had left the cemetery. As Salina dared to scan the grey horizon in search of a disappearing figure, a flash of lightning split the sky and the almost instantaneous clap of thunder caused several ladies to scream, and everyone at the gravesite forgot about piety and went running through the storm toward the safety of the church. Another crack of thunder caused the woman in front of Salina to slip, and Salina managed to grab her arm and keep her upright, and it turned out to be Beatrice. They ran arm in arm until they reached the church steps, at which point Beatrice said, “Oh, thank you, Salina, you saved me from a disaster,” and Salina let go of her arm and muttered something about the dreadful day as she wondered which of the two of them Mr. Diamond would have preferred had he stuck around, and whether she would have bettered her chances if she’d let Beatrice land in the mud.

  The poor minister found himself alone at the gravesite, and then he too sloshed through the puddles toward the church, where all were now taking refuge. Inside the door, a pile of muddy footwear and wet umbrellas grew, and the bedraggled mourners retired to the downstairs hall in their stocking feet desperate for hot coffee and no longer caring what they looked like because everyone there looked the same. The hall floor was impossible to keep clean with all the mucky hems and pants cuffs dragging across it, and it soon looked as though an army of salamanders had slithered from one wall to the other. Salina gave up on the idea of running home for a change of clothes. With Oliver Diamond absent, there was no point.

  The smell of fresh coffee soon filled the hall, while outside the storm continued to rage. Salina was cross that she had been deserted but thought it was probably for the best. In the electric light inside, she no doubt looked considerably worse than she had in the cemetery. She wondered how Beatrice had managed to keep her hair dry in spite of that dash for the church. As Salina stood forlornly watching the door, wishing that it would open but hoping at the same time that it wouldn’t, her sister Roseanne appeared and grabbed her arm and whispered, “I saw you sizing up that Oliver Diamond. Don’t tell me a man has come along and caught your attention?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Salina said, pulling away from her sister. “He looked like a drowning rat out there. No, I take that back. He must be eight feet tall. It would take an ocean to drown him. Anyway, I wasn’t sizing him up. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Everyone saw,” Roseanne said. “Don’t think they didn’t.”

  She hated the idea of being caught out. And did everyone include Oliver Diamond himself?

  “That wasn’t me,” she said. “It was Beatrice Shaughnessy who had her eye on him.”

  “Beatrice would never go for a man like him,” Roseanne said. “She’s as likely to smile at a stray dog.” Then she hurried off to get in the coffee lineup.

  Salina decided she was too completely miserable in her wet clothes to stay for the reception, and she was not about to endure gossip about her desperate need for a husband. When she saw her mother and her sister Edith glance in her direction and then nod as though they were talking about her, she headed for the stairs and the pile of ruined footwear. She jammed her feet into her shoes—they were already on their way to shrinking a size—and stepped out once again into the rain, and who was walking up the boards toward the church door but none other than Oliver Diamond, looking dapper as could be. He’d changed out of his wet clothes into a dry suit, and was carrying an umbrella big enough to keep the rain off a small crowd.

  “Oh,” said Salina. She could not imagine how unappealing she must look. Her hair. Her face powder. Her bedraggled blouse clinging, and her shoes looking like a pair of turnips just pulled out of the ground. Whatever chance she’d had to attract Mr. Diamond was surely gone.

  But he was undaunted by her sorry state and he said, “Miss Passmore, let me introduce myself. Oliver Diamond, at your service.” He held up his substantial umbrella in a way that invited her underneath. She thought of ignoring him and stepping around and marching home in her usual independent manner, but there was no chance of a dignified exit, and the rain was still coming down. She was sick of being wet and cold and she did not look forward to getting even more so.

  “Oh hell,” she said, stepping under the umbrella. “Curses to Aideen McCreary for deciding she had to be buried today of all days. What an inconsiderate old thing.”

  He laughed in a way that displayed his appreciation for her impertinence.

  “Are you making a break for it?” he asked.

  “What does it look like?” she replied.

  “I was hoping,” he said, “that I might have the pleasure of walking you home, but I thought I was goin
g to have to earn it by suffering through at least an hour of church basement small talk.”

  Now it was her turn to at least smile, if not laugh out loud the way he had. And even though she was still miserable, she felt the tetchiness lifting, because it appeared that Oliver Diamond had come back to the church because of her and not Beatrice Shaughnessy or any other young lady, and he hadn’t changed his mind when he’d seen her dismal self step through the door out into the rain.

  They began to walk, well-protected by his giant umbrella, which she kept expecting to flip inside out, but it didn’t. He appeared to know which direction they ought to go.

  “Your umbrella is very sturdy,” she said.

  “True, it is,” he said. “Although not sturdy enough for the winds in the West. An umbrella there is a useless bit of conceit.”

  Then he said to her, as if he were conducting an interview for the local newspaper, “Miss Passmore, I understand that you have an interest in the processes of clay production.”

  “Where did you hear that?” she asked.

  “About town,” he said. “The post office, I think.”

  She tried to imagine the circumstance that had led to her being the subject of a conversation, or perhaps an inquiry.

  “Why do you ask about my interest in clay?” she said.

  “Oh, curiosity.”

  “That’s fatal to cats,” she said, “in case you haven’t heard.”

  “Good thing I’m not a cat, then, isn’t it.”

  The Passmore home was now in front of them—a stately two-storey brick on High Street, with a unique rounded porch—and they hurried up the steps and sheltered under the roof. Oliver lowered his umbrella and said, “I knew the family that used to live here. Before I went west.”

  “I hear they ran into financial problems,” Salina said. “Our luck that it was available when . . . well, when my father chose so thoughtlessly to uproot us all and move us to a town where cast-iron skillets abound, or whatever else they make at that plant, but you can’t purchase a decent pair of shoes.”