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 performedLe roi de Lahoreby 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.
Stoker spoke quietly. “He needn’t have come back for us, Veronica.”
“Of course he did—he did not know where the real diamond was!”
Harry shook his head ruefully. “She will not credit me with any nobler purpose, and I cannot blame her. I have been, as you know, the great tragedy of her life.”
“Tragedy!” I cried. “You were a youthful mistake.”
“Mistake? You wound me,” he said, putting a hand to his breast. “I have oft thought of us as Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Eurydice, Apollo and Daphne...” He trailed off with a dreamy look.
“Stabbed, cursed to the underworld for all eternity, turned into a tree,” I said, ticking off the endings on my fingers. “I do not much care for the fates of your heroines,” I told him.
Stoker clapped his hands abruptly. “Do you think we might return to the matter at hand?” He turned to Harry. “Does Mrs.MacGregor know where we live?”
Harry shook his head. “I never spoke of any connection with Lord Rosemorran. She knows Veronica and I were meant to go into London to fetch the stone, but I was deliberately vague as to exactly where we were going.”
“How did she know where to find us in the first place?” I challenged. “Is it an accident that she was lying in wait for us outside the Sudbury?”
Harry colored. “Well, as it happens—”
“I knew it! You reprehensible, custard-spined, maladroit—”
Stoker held up his hand. “Harry, I presume that you sent a message of some sort to Mrs.MacGregor at the villa indicating when we would be in the vicinity of the Sudbury? And provided her with a handy description?”
Harry’s color deepened. “I had a lapse, a moment of weakness, all right? I lay awake a good long time last night, thinking of everything Isabel might do to me if she didn’t get her hands on that diamond, and I panicked. It is not worthy of the man I wish to be, but it is the truth. I thought she might spirit you off to the villa and persuade you to give up the location of the diamond. And then it would be finished—I could start my life anew without the threat of her hanging over my head like a veritable sword of Damocles.”
“What changed your mind?” I asked with narrowed eyes. “You were willing to betray us and play the coward ten hours ago—why have you now decided to dance to a different tune?”
“That is my business,” he said, folding his hands over his chest. It was an imitation—albeit not on purpose, I suspected—of Stoker’s posture. It was the pose of a man who was stalwart, determined. And I saw a resolve in Harry’s expression I had never seen before, a firmness to his chin. Could it be possible that the feckless creature I had married had finally decided to grow up at last?
“When did you realize the diamond we were taking to Mrs.MacGregor was false?” I asked.
“At once,” he said. “I handled the real one, remember. I made note of the weight of it, and I have considerable experience with precious gems. You found an excellent substitute,” he told Stoker, “but anyone who had seen the real thing would have known the difference.”
“I didn’t!” I was indignant.
Harry canted his head with a thoughtful look. “You saw it briefly at Hathaway Hall and did not hold it. I felt the heft of it when it restedin my palm. Real gems are usually far heavier than paste imitations. And I suspect when we collected it earlier, your mind was on other things.” He flicked a glance towards Stoker.
