Abandon - Meg Cabot [71]
He held up the illustration to show me. “Marie Antoinette, in all her glory, wearing your diamond. Her husband, King Louis the Sixteenth, gave it to her. I have no idea how he got his hands on it. Furies allegedly have the power to possess any human they wish to — that is, any human who has a weak enough character for the Furies to bend to their will — so perhaps a Fury possessed the king, or the queen, or whomever gave the necklace to them, hoping to cause mischief. Bad luck for them both, however it happened. This portrait was the only time Marie Antoinette had a chance to wear the stone before the peasants rose up against both her and her husband and had them executed for treason and crimes against the state. They have mentioned the French Revolution to you in school, haven’t they, Miss Oliviera?”
I stared at the picture, a reproduction of a portrait of Marie Antoinette, the doomed queen of France. Amazingly, she was wearing a gown that resembled the sort of toga in which Persephone, the reluctant bride of Hades, was always depicted on the sides of ancient vases. There were even grape leaves woven through the queen’s enormous powdered wig. Well, grape leaves made of gold, but whatever.
And at her neck — that slender neck that would soon be sliced in two by Madame Guillotine — hung my diamond, but on a dark green velvet choker instead of a gold chain.
John had told me men had died for the diamond he’d given me. Not just men, it turned out.
Had he known? Had he known its bloody “provenance,” as the jeweler had called it?
Of course he had. He had to have known.
And he’d given it to me anyway. He’d said it was supposed to protect me.…
A lot of good it had done Marie Antoinette.
I was shivering uncontrollably by now. I’d left my cardigan back at the house. I wished I’d thrown it in my bike basket.
But how was I to know? How was I to know I’d be hearing about…well, this?
The cemetery sexton still didn’t appear to notice my discomfort, though. He was quite cheerfully telling his morbid story.
“The diamond disappeared,” he said, closing the book, “along with most of the rest of the queen’s jewelry, after her arrest. Until, quite randomly, it showed up again, a little more than fifty years later, on the cargo list of a merchant ship that was docked here in Isla Huesos, of all places, on October eleventh of 1846. And that’s the last time it — or anyone on that ship — was seen again. It, like every ship that was in port that day, was sunk by what was likely a Category Five hurricane that appeared from nowhere, drowning over a thousand people, destroying every boat and building on the island — including the hospital, so there was nowhere to treat the wounded, and the lighthouse, so there was no way to signal for help. It also,” he added, “washed every coffin that was buried here in this cemetery out to sea. So there was nowhere to bury the newly dead, either.” He shook his head. “Must have been quite a mess, what with the mosquitoes and the cholera.”
I think I made some kind of choking noise that Richard Smith mistook for disbelief, since he hastened to assure me, “Oh, yes. That’s why we keep the coffins in crypts now, you know. Of course, they ought to have known better, even then, considering what the Spaniards found three hundred years earlier when they got here, but…” He gave an elaborate shrug. “Some people choose to turn a blind eye to history.”
I didn’t feel like fainting anymore. Or cold. Now I just felt…nothing.
“Interesting fact about that hurricane,” the cemetery sexton went on. “It was the deadliest in recorded Isla Huesos history. A more superstitious man than I might say it was almost as if someone didn’t want this diamond — with its bad juju, as my partner would call it — making it off that ship. Because it never did, you know. It sank down to the bottom with the rest of the ship’s cargo, never to be seen again…though the company that owned the ship