“When did you leave her?” I asked.
“On the road to London—and I mean that quite literally,” he said with a grimace. “I waited until Göran was whipping the horse up a hill and then I flung myself out of the carriage. I rolled down the hill and flagged a hansom going the opposite direction. They had not even got the carriage turned round by the time I was well and truly gone.”
“And you think she will come here to look for you?”
He shrugged. “Isabel is a mercurial creature, as are all women,” he added with a meaningful look in my direction. “She will most likely deduce that my precipitate flight means I intended to return here and free the pair of you. In which case, she must decide either to take her diamond and flee or come back here herself and finish us all off—in which case I would vastly prefer not to be at hand when she arrives.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Of course, if my departure has struck her as suspicious, she may well examine the diamond, in which case, she will most definitely come here and we are all well and truly sunk.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“Because,” Stoker said coolly. “She does not have the Eye of the Dawn.” He rose, dropping his ankle irons to the floor with a clanging flourish. “I do.”
* * *
• • •
I stared from Stoker to Harry and back again before pressing my fingers to my temples. “I beg your pardon?”
Stoker nodded to Harry. “Clever of you to have figured it out.”
Harry gave him a modest nod. “Well, it was clever of you to have hid a false diamond. It very nearly fooled me.”
I held up a hand. “If the pair of you might possibly leave off admiring one another for just a moment and explain?”
“Not now,” Stoker said in a tone of unmistakable command. “Harry is quite correct. We need to leave, and quickly. Did you keep the hansom?” he asked.
Harry nodded. “It will be a bit of a squeeze with three of us, and we shall have to pay him over odds to keep quiet about this.”
Stoker looked at his clothes ruefully. His shirt was still missing and his trousers were liberally stained with blood. Harry had found his coat and Stoker managed, wincing, to drape it over himself to conceal the worst of his wounds. “Not much I can do to remedy this.”
Harry shrugged. “We shall tell him we were engaging in some country fisticuffs and I beat you.”
“A likely story,” Stoker muttered, but he did not stop to argue. He pushed me out of the cellar ahead of him, and Harry brought up the rear. We hurried through the house—pausing only to snatch up a cold duck leg that Mrs. MacGregor had left behind—and hurled ourselves into the hansom. The driver looked startled and grumbled at the extra distance and the demands upon his horse with a third passenger until Stoker flung the contents of his notecase at him and ordered him to drive.
The fellow complied, much happier with his pockets stuffed with banknotes. I huddled between Harry and Stoker, a thousand questions tangling in my mind. But the driver was too near, and the events of the day too fresh; the hour too late, and the moment too impossible. We hurtled along under that April moon, the heavy scents of the country flowers bearing down upon us in bursts of exquisite sweetness as the rushing hansom brushed the dew from the leaves. We were jolted and jostled, and yet there was something magical about that moment, that liminal time between our liberation and our arrival back in London. We could do nothing but be carried along like so many leaves upon the surface of a churning river. The leaf so moved does not think, and neither did I, content to feel the whip of the wind against my cheeks as we dashed through the night.
Stoker had ordered the driver to leave us some distance from Bishop’s Folly lest a pursuer be watching. But we saw no one as we made our way on foot the last half a mile through the dark streets of London. We wended around Marylebone High Street, keeping to the narrow alleys until we came at last to the back gate.
Once more I led the way through the estate until we reached the Belvedere. The dogs, exhausted by our nocturnal adventures, did not even stir as we entered. Stoker locked the door behind us while I lit the lanterns. I instructed Harry where to find food and he retrieved more slabs of fruitcake and a bowl of apples gone only a little soft. I looked around for Stoker but he had vanished. I found him with his thylacine, bent over the creature with a solicitous air.
“I assure you I did not damage it,” I said, bristling. “I cut only the stitches you placed and did not so much as nick the hide.” Its teeth seemed even more menacing, its lips curled back in a snarl that might well have been a fair imitation of my own. Stoker was at the far end, beneath its belly, lying on his back as he maneuvered his tools. To my intense irritation, he said nothing but continued to work, doing something—I could not imagine what—to the scrotal pouch.
After an interminable interlude, he rose, dusting himself off. “There,” he said in a tone of quiet triumph. He held out his hand, and there, burning its cold fire upon his palm, was the diamond.
I gaped at him. “It’s true then.” I sat down heavily as Harry came to stand behind me, crunching loudly into an apple. After a few deep breaths, I looked at Stoker. “This is no trick? This is the real Eye of the Dawn?”
He displayed the jewel again and Harry and I stared. “Explain.”
Stoker shrugged and held the diamond up, watching the play of light as it shimmered through the facets, into the heart of the stone, and back again. “It occurred to me that Harry might prove tenacious about retrieving it,” he began.
Harry shrugged. “A reasonable precaution under the circumstances,” he said through a mouthful of apple.
Stoker went on. “So I put the real diamond aside for safekeeping last night, just as I said I would. But I also concealed a second jewel as a sort of decoy, something to throw him off the scent should he decide to play the villain.”
“Where exactly did you find a diamond of appropriate dimensions?” I asked. He seemed mesmerized by the stone in his hand, answering my questions almost as an afterthought.
“In the costumes Lord Rosemorran acquired from the French opera company. You will remember he said they performed Le roi de Lahore by Massenet. One of the characters is a king from India. Luckily, there was a paste jewel approximately the same size, so I pried it from its setting and hid it.”
“But a paste jewel could never be mistaken for the real thing,” I protested.
“And it wasn’t,” Harry said. “At least not by me. I caught only a glimpse of it in your hand and I knew at once what he had done. And that is when I realized I had a choice to make—expose you to Isabel or go along with the charade and try to save all our necks. And the diamond.”
“Your motives being, I conclude, not entirely altruistic,” I put in.