C. Harris - What Darkness Brings

The man downed his gin in one long pull and licked his lips. “You have a job, yes?”

“For Collot.”

“Collot, he is my good friend since many years. You tell me, I tell him.”

“You knew him in Paris, did you?”

“ Mais oui. We were the children together. In Montmartre. You know Paris?”

“I heard Collot was a jewel thief in Paris.”

The man leaned back in his seat, his mouth hanging open in a parody of shock. “A thief? Non. Who says such a thing?”

“The same people who say the nob in Newgate didn’t kill Daniel Eisler. They say Collot did it.”

The man shoved up from his chair, ready to run, his wandering eye rolling wildly. “Monsieur!”

“I suggest you sit down,” said Sebastian quietly. “There are two Bow Street runners waiting out the front for you, and two more out the back.” He punctuated the lie with a smile. “You can talk to them if you prefer, but I suspect you might find it more pleasant to deal with me.”

Collot sank back down into his seat, his voice hoarse. “What do you want from me?”

“How did you know Eisler?”

“But I didn’t say I-”

“You knew him. Tell me how.”

Collot licked his lips again, and Sebastian signaled the barmaid for another shot of gin.

“How?” Sebastian repeated after the woman left.

“I knew him years ago.”

“In Paris?”

Collot downed the second gin and shook his head. “Amsterdam.”

“When was this?”

“’Ninety-two.”

“You sold him jewels?”

The Frenchman’s lip curled, his nose wrinkling like that of a man who has just smelled something foul. “He was scum. The worst kind of scum. He’d as soon cheat you as look at you, and then he’d laugh in your face and call you a fool.”

“Did he cheat you?”

As if aware of the pit yawning before him, Collot drew himself up straighter in his chair. “Me? Mais non. Not me.”

Sebastian tilted his gin back and forth between his fingertips, aware of the Frenchman’s eyes upon it. “The jewels you sold to Eisler in Amsterdam in ’ninety-two, where did you get them?”

“My family. For generations, the Collots have been lapidaries. Ask anyone who knew Paris, before. They’ll tell you. But by the autumn of ’ninety-two, things were bad-very bad. We could not stay. We took refuge in Amsterdam.”

“And sold Eisler your jewels?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve had no dealings with him here in London?”

“No.”

“That’s not what I’m hearing.”

“Perhaps people have me confused with someone else. Some other emigre.”

“Perhaps.” Sebastian shifted in his seat so that he could cross his outthrust boots at the ankles. “Who do you think killed Eisler?”

Collot touched the back of one hand to his nose and sniffed. “What you trying to do to me, hmm? People see me talking to a Bow Street runner, what are they to think? You try to get me killed?”

“I’m not a runner, and everyone in here thinks I’m offering you a job. What kind of jobs do you do, exactly?”

Collot sniffed again. “This and that.”

Sebastian shoved his own untouched gin across the table. After a moment’s hesitation, Collot picked it up and raised the glass to his lips, his hand shaking so badly he almost spilled it.

“You’re afraid of something,” said Sebastian, watching him. “What is it?

Collot drained the glass, then leaned forward, his lips wet, the veins in his forehead bulging against his sweat-slicked skin. Sebastian could smell the fear roiling off him, mingling with the stench of stale sweat and cheap gin. The Frenchman threw a quick glance around, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Eisler was peddling a big diamond. A big blue diamond.”

“How large of a diamond are we talking about?”

“Forty-five or fifty carats. Perhaps more.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Only one big blue diamond I know about, and that’s the one belongs to the banker, Hope.”

“Henry Philip Hope?”

“No. The other one. His brother, Thomas.”

“I haven’t heard anything about a big blue diamond being associated with Eisler’s death.”

“That’s my point. No one has heard about it. So I ask you, where is it? Hmm?” He wiped a trembling hand across his mouth and said it again. “Where is it?”

Sebastian figured he could automatically discount upward of ninety percent of what Jacques Collot had told him. But the Frenchman’s fear, at least, had been real. And his reference to the Hopes was so unexpected, so outrageous, that Sebastian decided it just might be worth looking into.

A respectable old family of Scottish merchant bankers, the Hopes had settled in Amsterdam in the previous century and prospered there for generations. The family business, Hope and Company, was the kind of financial establishment that lent money to kings. Just ten years before, they had put together the financial package that enabled the fledgling United States to purchase the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon’s France-thus, coincidentally, helping to fund the continuing French war effort.

But the Hopes were, predictably enough, not particularly anxious to experience republican principles firsthand. When the French armies marched on Amsterdam and The Hague, the Hopes packed up their vast collection of paintings and sculptures and gems and scurried back across the Channel to England.

Sebastian’s acquaintance with the Hopes was limited to desultory state dinner parties and crowded ballrooms and various similar functions of the kind he generally preferred to avoid. If he had been in Thomas Hope’s vast museum-like house in Duchess Street, he didn’t recall it. But when Sebastian sent up his card, the Hopes’ very proper English butler quickly showed him in. One did not turn away the heir of Alistair St. Cyr, Earl of Hendon and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Thomas Hope greeted him with a wide smile and firm handshake. But his small eyes were hooded and wary, and Sebastian found himself wondering why.

“Devlin! Good to see you. This is a surprise. Please, have a seat.” A short, ungainly man in his forties with a craggy, almost brutish-looking face, he stretched out a hand toward a yellow satin-covered settee that looked like something Cleopatra might have reclined upon while awaiting Mark Antony. “And how is your father?”

To a casual observer, the remark might have seemed innocent; it was not. Everyone who was anyone in London knew that a deep and lasting estrangement had grown up between the Earl of Hendon and his heir.

“He is well, thank you.” Sebastian returned the banker’s practiced smile. “And you?”

As they exchanged the customary polite nothings, Sebastian let his gaze drift around the room, taking in the mummy cases painted on the ceiling, the alabaster vases, the regal, Egyptian-style cats, the life-sized portrait of a beautiful, dark-haired, sloe-eyed woman painted on worn boards that looked very much like part of an ancient sarcophagus.

“Is that from a Ptolemaic tomb?” Sebastian asked, staring at it.

Hope appeared delighted. “You recognize it! It is, yes. This is what I call my Egyptian Room. The piece you’re sitting on was manufactured to my own design, based on drawings I did of a similar relic discovered in a tomb near the Nile while I was there.”

Sebastian glanced down at the settee’s black wooden frame, which was decorated with paintings of the jackal-headed god Anubis and had bronze scarabs for feet. Thomas, he now remembered, was the Hope brother with little interest in the actual business that generated the family’s fortune. Leaving his relatives to mind the bank and mercantile empire, he’d spent much of his youth on an extended Grand Tour, visiting not only Europe but Africa and Asia, as well. Now confined to Britain by the disruptions of war, he devoted himself largely to increasing his stature as a patron of the arts. Lately he’d also taken to his pen, publishing a folio volume entitled Household Furniture and Interior Decoration , followed shortly by Costumes of the Ancients . His newest project was reportedly a grandly ambitious philosophical work on the origins and prospects of man, although he was said to despair of ever finishing it.