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 Indianservant, 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.
The maharani sat back, holding her glass of tea, and gestured towards her granddaughter. “You may continue.”
Anjali bowed her head towards her grandmother. “We realized if the diamond went missing but no one in the house left, then the house would be searched. So we hatched a clever plot to get the diamond out whilst we remained inside.”
“Clever?” The maharani gave her granddaughter an exasperated look. “It was the scheme of melodramatic children.”
“The ghost,” I said. I slanted a look at Lord Bhairav. “I presume that is the role you played?”
He grinned, baring teeth as beautiful as his sister’s. “I made a very good ghost,” he said, raising his arms into a menacing stance. “Were you not frightened by my spectral ball of light?”
“No,” I told him calmly. “But you terrorized the villagers to no end.”
He shrugged. “I gave them a good story to raise their hairs. They will talk of it for generations. Can you guess how I did it?”
“A glass ball with galvanic effects?” Stoker guessed. “Carried against a black robe so it would appear to be floating in midair?”
“Exactly right,” Lord Bhairav said. “But the construction of the orb was Anjali’s doing,” he added with apparent pride in his sister.
“Of course!” I exclaimed, turning to Anjali. “We spoke at length about Galvani and Volta when I visited the observatory. But your interest is not merely theoretical, is it?”
“My scientific studies,” she said modestly. “My speciality is electrical fields. Bhairav and I had to meet occasionally to discuss matters, and I could not always get away at convenient times. And, of course,” she added with a wry smile, “we did not want the villagers to note a man of Indian appearance upon the moors. So we met at night, a treacherous proposition for him since the moorland is full of dangers. I developed the orb as a sort of lantern to guide his way across the moors, but also to frighten the local folk should they see him. We could not risk anyone seeing him close and asking questions.”
Another piece of the puzzle slotted neatly into place. “You stayed with Nanny Burnham in her cottage on the moor, did you not?” I asked Lord Bhairav. “I heard someone moving about when I called upon her. She told me it was the cat, but the cat was sleeping on the hearth.”
“Nanny Burnham was forcibly retired by Mary Hathaway,” Anjali volunteered. “Not refined enough to teach her children, she said. So it was not hard for Effie to persuade Nanny Burnham to help us. All she need do was give Bhairav a place to stay hid during the day. His only problem was Nanny Burnham’s cooking,” Anjali added with a glance at her brother’s slender midsection. “He ate too much of her nursery fare and was growing fat.”
He grinned and patted his belly. “Nanny Burnham made a very delicious rice pudding and something called a jam roly-poly.”
“Damson jam?” Stoker asked hopefully.
“Raspberry,” Lord Bhairav told him.
“Even better.” Stoker’s expression was wistful. His fondness for natural science was rivaled only by his fondness for nursery foods.
“At long last,” Anjali said, picking up the thread of the conversation, “the Eye of the Dawn was retrieved from the bank vault and the time was at hand. Effie broke into the casket and took it, leaving behind a handkerchief marked with Jonathan Hathaway’s initials.”
“In order to implicate me,” Harry volunteered.
Anjali shrugged. “Anything to bring confusion to the matter would serve our purposes. Within the family there was dissension as to whether you really were Jonathan Hathaway. If Jonathan’s handkerchief were found, apparently dropped during the theft, then it was a certainty that Charles would insist upon a search of the house. But the diamond would not be there. It would have vanished, into thin air,” she said, fluttering her fingers.
“But everyone in the house would have lived under suspicion, most of all you,” I pointed out.
“I was never going to stay,” she replied. “A few days to let them search my things and find nothing. Then I would quietly disappear, remove my disguise, and become myself again.”
“And if anyone decided to circulate your description, they wouldbe looking for someone considerably older,” I finished. “It would appear you thought of everything.”
“Except that without a clear resolution to the crime, without a proper solution, the atmosphere would have become poisonous,” Stoker objected. “Everyone would have been under suspicion, always wondering who might have taken it.”
