Summary
Beneath the blistering Transvaal sun, a pale child—Rosanne Ozanne—gasps back to life in the arms of Rachel Bangat, a Malay nurse whose incantatory fingertips stitch more than health into the girl’s marrow: a lust for fire-bright stones and an equally incandescent talent for hatred. Years later, that subcutaneous glitter has metastasized into midnight break-ins at Kimberley’s fortress-like mines, where Rosanne, now a serpentine beauty in ivory silks, trades rough diamonds for faceted perfection with Syke Ravenal, a magnate whose desire for her is measured in carats and coercion. Hlangeli, a Zulu smuggler still carrying the drumbeat of his village in his blood, ferries stolen crystals in the soles of his cracked boots, believing each illicit stone buys back a slice of colonized soil. When Dennis Harlenden—an English surveyor whose eyes carry the cool gray of North Sea tides—arrives to map the veldt, he maps Rosanne instead, tracing the curve of her clavicle as though it were a meridian of mercy. She spurns him, shackled by Rachel’s dying curse, until Hlangeli is clapped in leg-irons and the scaffold’s shadow stretches across the camp like a theodolite of doom. Guilt detonates inside Rosanne; she storms Ravenal’s lamplit study to return the glittering evidence of her sins, only to be pinned beneath his predatory weight. Dennis crashes through the door, revolver glinting like a final gemstone, and in the acrid haze of gunpowder the spell fractures. At dawn the pair board a Union-Castle liner, soot still clinging to their clothes, the African coastline receding like a rejected jewel.
Synopsis
Rosanne Ozanne, the child of a wealthy widow living in South Africa, is cured of a serious illness by Rachel Bangat, a Malay servant who returns the infant to her mother after endowing her with a love for bright stones and a passion for hating. In later years, her love for bright stones induces Rosanne to become a diamond thief. Hlangeli, a Kaffir boy, smuggles from the mines uncut stones which she exchanges for cut gems with Syke Ravenal, who is infatuated with her. When young Englishman Dennis Harlenden falls in love with Rosanne and proposes to her, she resists, still under the influence of the Malay woman, until young Hlangeli is arrested during a mission. Her enormous feelings of guilt allow Rosanne to break the spell as the old Malay woman approaches death. Entering Ravenal's room in order to return the diamonds, Rosanne is attacked by him, but Dennis arrives in time to rescue her. Freed from her sins, Rosanne and Dennis are married and sail for England.
Review Excerpt
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The first time we see Rosanne Ozanne alive, she is being lifted out of death like a fish hauled from a chalk-bright river, water sparkling off its scales.
Cinematographer James Smith bathes the child in over-exposed sunlight until her skin becomes translucent parchment; you half expect to read there the future thefts she will commit. It is 1910-ish, somewhere in the Transvaal, and the Boer War’s scorched earth still smolders in the background chatter of servants. Cynthia Stockley’s source nov..."
