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 émigré.”
“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?”
Chapter 13
S
ebastian 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 Napoléon’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