Harry nodded. “Göran, an enormous Swedish fellow whom I have only ever heard communicate in grunts. Swedish is a distinctly unmellifluous tongue. He answers to her.”
“Her?” I inquired.
Harry shuddered. “Isabel de Armas MacGregor,” he said, whispering the name.
“She is not here, you utter coward,” I said.
“You do not know. She is capable of anything. Anything. And right now she is put out with me. Very angry indeed. I promised her the Eye of the Dawn, and I cannot deliver.”
“Why did you promise her the diamond?” Stoker asked.
Harry’s expression was pained. “There was a little scheme in South America, some months back.” He paused thoughtfully. “How much do you know about the Brazilian Empire?”
Stoker shrugged and I interjected, mindful of the article I had recently read in the Daily Harbinger. “The emperor, Pedro II, is ailing and elderly. He has only a daughter to succeed him, and power is shifting increasingly towards the coffee growers and the generals in his army.”
Harry’s look was one of admiration. “That is a far sight more than most English bother to know. Yes, the emperor is failing, and not likely to hold on to his throne for much longer. He worked for many years to abolish slavery in Brazil, a very unpopular position, it must be said. The landowners complained it would destroy the economy, but slavery was ended last year and, in point of fact, the economy has flourished. That ought to have improved the emperor’s popularity, but it has not. He is living out his own obsolescence. All of Brazil turns to the future instead. And that is where Isabel de Armas MacGregor came in.” He paused as if to steel himself. “Isabel never believed the end of slavery would damage the economy. In fact, she rather thought Brazil would enjoy a boom of sorts, expansion in technology and transportation, new investments, that sort of thing. As it happens, she was correct, and if she had had money to invest, she would have made quite a nice packet. But Isabel is not inclined to invest in the normal, aboveboard way. She had a different plan—a railway. From the Atlantic to the Pacific.”
Stoker stared in stupefaction. “A trans-Andean railway? Man, it cannot be done.”
“You know that. I know that. I daresay even these dogs know it,” Harry said, ruffling Nut’s elegant head. “But the Brazilian coffee growers can be a bit greedy, particularly when one dangles the possibility of opening new markets to the west via a pretty new railway designed to move their crops to the coast of Chile and beyond.”
“And they believed her?” I asked.
“Isabel is a very persuasive woman,” Harry said with a faraway look in his eye. “She had them convinced, in part because she presented herself, most convincingly, as a lady of royal parentage. She appeared one day in Rio de Janeiro and distributed calling cards identifying herself as Her Royal Highness, the Princess Isabella de Armas de Gonzaga-Palmela. Now, an attentive person might have noticed that she cobbled together that title out of Spanish and Italian and Portuguese names, but that was actually quite intentional and rather a stroke of genius. No one could say for certain where she was meant to be from, so it was difficult for anyone to denounce her as an impostor. She presented a letter of credit to the bank in Rio de Janeiro drawn upon the Bank of Scotland and settled into the most expensive hotel in town, entertaining lavishly. It was all most convincing. Naturally, the businessmen who would not give a farthing to Isabel de Armas MacGregor were falling over themselves to write cheques to the Princess Isabella. At least, they said they would. When it came to it, they were reluctant to give the money directly to her on the grounds that it was distasteful to do business with a lady, even one of such august rank. So, she decided to find someone to play the part of a respectable man of business to collect the payments, present them to the bank in exchange for notes, and give them to her in exchange for a percentage of the proceeds.”
“Enter Harry Spenlove,” I guessed.
“Indeed.” He smoothed a hand over the stubble at his chin. “I assumed my most toffee-nosed accents and my soberest suit of clothes and took a suite of offices in the most expensive building in the city. Within days they were lining up, bringing me piles of money. I gave the first few lots to Isabel, but there came a day when the wealthiest gentlemen, a group of five who were very good friends and making the bulk of the investment, were scheduled to come together to present their monies and receive in exchange their certificates of ownership in the nonexistent railway. I took their funds and poured champagne and we all toasted to how rich they were going to be, and they staggered off to have a grand luncheon—to which I was not invited, by the way—and I sat there looking at the pile of cheques. Well, I am not proud of what I did next—”
Stoker held up a hand. “We can guess.”
“Yes, I suppose you can. Isabel, I will admit, did not take things in a sporting fashion.”
“I expect not,” I said. “How much did you swindle out of her?”
Harry murmured a figure and I felt my eyes go wide. “Good heavens. And where is it now?”
“Gone,” he said cheerfully.
“Gone where?” I asked.
“I spent it.”
“How in the name of seven hells could you have spent that amount of money?” Stoker demanded.
Harry ticked off the items on his fingers. “First-class passage to New York. The best suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Dinner every night at Delmonico’s. Then I took a cottage in Providence for the summer,” he added. “A lovely Italianate-style palazzo I had from a Vanderbilt. Deathly expensive, but worth it. And then there was the yacht.”
I held up my hand. “Never mind.”
“And to travel in such circles, I needed the right clothes, everything from suits to cravat pins and watches. I tried my hand at polo but I must say I didn’t much care for it. I sold the ponies at a loss. I came back to the city for the autumn and stayed through the New Year, but America had lost its charm for me by then. New York is a rich man’s town, you know. One simply cannot enjoy it in an impoverished state. Besides, by that time I had got word that Isabel was on my trail, and I thought it wise to elude her as it seemed she was holding a grudge.”
“How do you know that?” Stoker put in.
“She sent a rather vivid caricature. She is not a bad little artist, although I cannot say I much cared for the subject matter,” Harry said with a shudder. “So I had a little wander about Canada for a few months to see if I could lose her, but she tracked me to Halifax. I had quite a narrow escape that time. I booked a steerage ticket for the very next steamer to England, which she must have anticipated. As soon as I disembarked at Bristol, they were waiting for me, Isabel and her pet Swede. She made it perfectly apparent that she was still angry, which I told her was not very understanding and that she ought to take it like a man.”