his temples. “I’ve just had an interesting conversation with the lapidary, Francillon.”
“Oh?”
“He tells me there’s a strong possibility the theft of the French Crown Jewels was actually engineered by the revolutionary French government.”
Pushing away from the doorframe, she wandered the room, fiddling first with a box of collars, then with one of the ragged coats Calhoun had assembled for Devlin’s selection. “What makes you so certain this blue diamond is in any way connected to Eisler’s death?”
“At this point, I’m not certain it is. I’m also hearing credible stories about the man’s cutthroat lending practices and certain aberrant sexual practices that could very well be what ended up getting him killed.”
She glanced over at him. “Define ‘aberrant.’”
“Compelling attractive young women to lie with him when they—or their husbands—fell behind on interest payments.”
A wave of revulsion flickered over her face. “I’d say that goes beyond aberrant, all the way to downright evil. The more I hear about Eisler, the more I think whoever killed him deserves a reward rather than punishment.”
Sebastian wiped his hands on a towel. “I might agree, except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Whoever murdered Eisler is about to let an innocent man hang for what he did.”
“True.” She hesitated a moment, then said, “So why this continuing interest in the French Crown Jewels?”
“Because for some reason, the more I look into Eisler’s affairs, the more the French Blue keeps coming up. It obviously fits into all this somewhere; I just can’t figure out where or how.”
“Which is why you’re dressed like a fat publican down on his luck?”
Sebastian reached for a battered black hat and settled it low on his forehead. “I’ve decided I need to have another conversation with my friend Jacques Collot. A candid conversation.”
Hero smiled. “And what do you expect him to tell you?”
“Mainly, what happened to the French Blue between the time it disappeared from the Garde-Meuble in Paris and when it reappeared in Daniel Eisler’s possession shortly before his death.” Propping one foot on the edge of a bench, Sebastian loosened the dagger he kept in a sheath in his boot, then straightened to slip a small double-barreled pistol into the pocket of his tattered greatcoat. “And maybe—just maybe—where the bloody diamond is now.”
Chapter 31
B
y the time Sebastian reached the parish of St. Giles, the darkness of the night was complete, the sickle moon and few dim stars that had been visible earlier at dusk hidden now by a haze of coal smoke and scattered clouds. The smell of cook fires and a pervasive dampness left from the day’s rain hung heavily in the air, underlain by the inevitable stench of effluvia and decay. As he paid off his hackney driver, a tousle-haired woman in a tawdry, low-cut red gown emerged from the shadows of a nearby doorway to smile archly. “Lookin’ fer some fun, gov’nor?”
Sebastian shook his head and turned to push his way through the raucous, drunken crowds of costermongers and day laborers, thieves and pickpockets, doxies and beggars, his gaze carefully scanning the sea of rough, dirty faces.
The East End of London was choked with men like Collot: raised in want and desperation, uneducated, angry, and long ago cut loose from the moral underpinnings that typically anchored those who looked askance at them. Most were English or Irish, but in their midst one also found many French, Danes, Spaniards, even Africans. Living precariously from day to day, subsisting largely on potatoes and bread and crammed as many as five or ten to a room, they wreaked their own kind of vengeance on a system that viewed them as a permanent “criminal class,” impervious to improvement and suitable only for containment. Those who didn’t die young or violently could generally look forward to being either hanged or transported to the nasty new penal colony at Botany Bay that had replaced the earlier hellholes in Georgia and Jamaica.
With each step he took, Sebastian allowed himself to sink deeper and deeper into a persona he had affected often during the war, when he’d served as an exploring officer in the hills of Iberia. It was Kat who’d first taught him, long ago, that there was more to carrying off an effective disguise than a dirtied face and old clothes; successful deception lay in recognizing and altering the subtle differences in movement and posture, mannerisms and attitude that distinguish us all. Gone were the upright carriage, the easy confidence and demeanor of the Earl’s son. Instead, he moved from one public house and gin shop