“All,” she said firmly. “I would sacrifice everything to see my country free of English rule. Even to the greatest of my jewels.” She patted her grandson’s hand. “Although I would prefer this one to take rather fewer risks.”
“You fuss too much,” Lord Bhairav said, ducking his head. “I was not harmed, and even if I were, it was a small price to pay to return the Eye of the Dawn to its rightful home.” He looked to us, and for the first time, I saw humor in his dark gaze. “Have you worked it out yet? Our plan to restore the Eye of the Dawn?”
“Almost,” I said slowly. “Let us return to the theft of the jewels. They were taken during the mutiny by Lady Hathaway, who later brought them to England. The maharajah refused to raise the matter with the English authorities in India, so she got away with them, butyou never forgot they were your property,” I said, nodding to the maharani, “and you raised your grandchildren with the story.”
“Grandchildren?” Stoker asked.
“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 smokedspectacles. 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, SirGeoffrey 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 herismonstrous. 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.
