“Anjali,” I told him. “She is your granddaughter, is she not?” I asked the maharani. “Sister or cousin to Lord Bhairav?”
“She is my sister,” he said.
“How the devil— Pardon me, Your Excellency,” Stoker said to the maharani. “How the deuces did you figure that?”
I gave him a narrow look. “I had a little time to think whilst you were occupied with Mrs. MacGregor.”
He blushed deeply and I went on. “And so the three of you concocted a plan. Anjali was to insinuate herself into the Hathaway household. That must have taken some effort.”
“Anjali was at school with Euphemia Hathaway,” Lord Bhairav said.
“But Anjali is miles older,” Harry put in.
“Not if you look carefully,” I corrected. “She wears smoked spectacles so you cannot see her eyes. The grey in her hair must be powder. I did not realize it at first, but when I considered it later, I realized what had been bothering me about her. I had detected an incongruity, and I could not, at Hathaway Hall, discover what it was. It was only when I had time to think that I hit upon the fact that, in spite of being told she was a person of some maturity, I recalled that she moved with the lightness and grace of a much younger woman.”
“Very clever,” said a low voice from the doorway.
“Anjali!” I cried.
It was she, although I am forced to admit that had I encountered her in her present state, I might not have immediately made the connection to the quiet dowd of Hathaway Hall. Her hair, freed of its dulling powder, shone rich and black as her brother’s, and her eyes were bright and shining with youth without the mask of the smoked spectacles. She was dressed, not as a wren in dull grey, but as a peacock, in shifting blues and greens, the silks rippling as she moved into the room and took a chair next to her grandmother with a graceful gesture. She looked at the diamond in the maharani’s palm and gave a nod of satisfaction.
“I must thank you for returning it to us,” she said with an air of authority she had not sported in Devon. “And I must apologize for the stratagems we employed. They were not meant to make you feel foolish or to alarm you.”
“They had nothing to do with us at all, I suspect,” I replied.
She smiled. “You are correct, Miss Speedwell.” She looked with interest at Harry. “Your disguise is as imperfect as mine was. You are the man who claimed to be Jonathan Hathaway and yet you are called Spenlove? Then you were engaging in an imposture of your own?”
He had the grace to duck his head. “I am not Jonathan Hathaway,” he acknowledged. “But I knew Hathaway, and I can confirm he is, as his family feared, buried in Sumatra.”
She pursed her lips. “To give them hope was a cruel thing to do,” she said with all the dignity and authority of her grandmother.
Harry bowed his head further still and Anjali turned to Stoker and to me. “Ask what you like. You have earned it, I think.”
“I presume Euphemia Hathaway knew of your masquerade,” Stoker put in.
Anjali nodded. “She did. The fact that we were at school together was a coincidence, you understand. But there are not many schools which provide the rigor of scientific education we both wanted. Effie’s school fees were paid by her grandfather, who encouraged her studies, and her future seemed promising. She dreamt, we both did, of attending university. But a series of tragedies befell her family.”
“Jonathan Hathaway’s death,” I murmured.
Anjali went on. “With the deaths of his son and grandson, Sir Geoffrey lost much of his vigor. He seemed to age overnight. He no longer studied the stars or guided Effie in her observations. It seemed as if his very will to live had been taken from him.”
“Effie must have known she would have a very different life with Charles as head of the family,” Stoker suggested.
“She did. She lived in dread of the time he would inherit. Charles is not a monster,” Anjali clarified, “but what he is doing to her is monstrous. He has taken all from her that matters, her studies, her passions. He allows his wife to reduce her to a shadow, less than a person. She is permitted nothing of her own, not a dream, not an ambition. He gives all control over to Mary Hathaway, and because she fears what people will say more than anything, she strives to break Effie’s spirit as one would break an unruly horse. It is an untenable situation.”
“Mary Hathaway is the worst sort of provincial,” I put in.
We smiled at one another, bonded—as women frequently are—by our mutual dislike of another.
“How did you come to conspire together to steal the jewels?” Stoker asked.
She folded her hands primly in her lap. “We discussed it often. I knew Lady Hathaway still had the diamond, but Effie said it was always locked away in a bank vault, and for all our cleverness, we could not imagine how we would break into a bank vault and steal it,” she added with a smile that revealed two deep dimples. “But I pointed out to her it would be a very easy thing to take it if it were in Hathaway Hall. First, Effie suggested to Mary that Lady Hathaway needed a companion and she mentioned that she knew of a gently born woman of Indian parentage who needed employment.”
A wry smile twisted her lips and she went on. “Mary Hathaway liked the idea of having Effie further under her thumb, and Effie would have more time for her little chores if the old woman was tended to by someone else. Effie pointed out that even the queen has an Indian servant, and since Mary was often tired of Lady Hathaway’s endless stories of life in India, she thought someone from there would provide her a more willing ear. She was easy to persuade. And Effie put me forward as a candidate.”
“How did she explain knowing you?” I ventured.
Anjali smiled. “She gave me a different surname and said I had been a poor scholarship student at school so that no one at the Hall would connect my name with my grandmother’s. I came to stay at Hathaway Hall—lightly disguised so I would not be recognized leaving London.”
She shifted her head and her hair gleamed in the lamplight. “After that, Effie began to work on Mary Hathaway, very subtly, you understand. Asking her grandmother to tell the story of the jewels so that Mary would hear of them. And because she is acquisitive and grasping, Mary knew that she wanted them. They would complete the picture she is painting for herself of a society hostess of great grandeur. Effie played into this, telling Mary that she ought to be painted in them and suggesting to Charles that he commission such a painting for Mary. That would have worked, I believe, were it not for the return of Jonathan Hathaway.”
Her lips compressed into a thin line as she paused, and the maharani spoke. “It grows late and there is still much to tell. Let us ring for refreshments,” she suggested. We did as we were told, and in a very few minutes, the maharani’s maid emerged from another room with platters of seed cakes and pots of tea flavored with spices and rich with milk and sugar.