What Darkness Brings

Chapter 12



A

quarter of an hour later, Sebastian walked down the steps of his house to find the curricle waiting, with Tom standing at the grays’ heads.

“What the devil are you doing here? I told you to take the day off and rest. Where’s Giles?”

“Giles is feeling peakish. And I done rested—for hours.”

Sebastian leapt up to take the reins. “I don’t recall hearing anything about Giles feeling ‘peakish.’”

Tom scrambled onto his perch. “Well, he is.”

Sebastian cast the tiger a suspicious glance.

But Tom only grinned.



Lying just to the northwest of Covent Garden, the nest of fetid alleys and dark courts known as Seven Dials had once been a prosperous area favored by poets and ambassadors and favorites of Good Ole Queen Bess. Those days were long gone. The once grand houses of brick and stone lining the main thoroughfares were now falling into ruin, their pleasure gardens and parks vanished beneath a warren of squalid hovels built of wood and given over to beggars and thieves and costermongers of the meanest sort.

The Pilgrim, on a narrow lane just off Castle Street, was technically licensed to sell beer as well as spirits but appeared to cater mainly to those who preferred their alcohol in the form of cheap gin.

“A go of Cork,” said Sebastian, walking up to the counter.

The gin slinger, a stout, aging woman with a massive bosom swelling out of the bodice of her ragged, dirty dress, looked at him through narrowed, suspicious eyes as she splashed gin into a smudged glass. “Wot ye doin’ ’ere? We don’t need yer kind ’ere. Yer kind is always trouble.”

“I’m looking for Jacques Collot. Know where I might find him?”

“Collot?” She sniffed and shook her head. “Never ’eard o’ ’im.”

Sebastian laid a half crown on the stained countertop. “If you do happen to see him, tell him I have a job he might be interested in, would you?”

“I told ye, I ain’t never ’eard o’ ’im.” But the coin disappeared.

Sebastian went to settle at one of the rickety tables at the rear of the room, the glass of pungent gin twirling back and forth between his fingertips. He even raised it as if to drink a few times, although he was careful not to let it touch his lips.

A sluggish fire burned on the shallow hearth, filling the room with a bitter smoke that didn’t encourage many of the patrons to linger. Sebastian watched a steady stream of men file into the low-ceilinged chamber, throw down a shot of gin at a penny a glass, then leave again. As far as he could tell, the glasses were never washed.

After some five or ten minutes, a stocky, middle-aged man with graying side-whiskers and one strangely wayward eye walked through the door. Bypassing the counter, he came straight to pull out the chair opposite Sebastian and sit.

They say Collot’s got a wandering eye, can’t control which way it looks, Calhoun had told Sebastian before he left Brook Street. He’s maybe forty or forty-five; about my height but carrying more flesh.

“I hear that you search for Collot,” the man with the faulty eye said in a heavy French accent. “I am not he, mais je puis—er, I can perhaps find him for you, if you wish. Yes?”

Sebastian nodded to the slatternly barmaid, who slapped a shot of gin down in front of the Frenchman, exchanged a veiled glance with him, and went away again.

The man downed his gin in one long pull and licked his lips. “You have a job, yes?”

“For Collot.”

“Collot, he is my good friend since many years. You tell me, I tell him.”

“You knew him in Paris, did you?”

“Mais oui. We were the children together. In Montmartre. You know Paris?”

“I heard Collot was a jewel thief in Paris.”

The man leaned back in his seat, his mouth hanging open in a parody of shock. “A thief? Non. Who says such a thing?”

“The same people who say the nob in Newgate didn’t kill Daniel Eisler. They say Collot did it.”

The man shoved up from his chair, ready to run, his wandering eye rolling wildly. “Monsieur!”

“I suggest you sit down,” said Sebastian quietly. “There are two Bow Street runners waiting out the front for you, and two more out the back.” He punctuated the lie with a smile. “You can talk to them if you prefer, but I suspect you might find it more pleasant to deal with me.”

Collot sank back down into his seat, his voice hoarse. “What do you want from me?”

“How did you know Eisler?”

“But I didn’t say I—”

“You knew him. Tell me how.”

Collot licked his lips again, and Sebastian signaled the barmaid for another shot of gin.

“How?” Sebastian repeated after the woman left.

“I knew him years ago.”

“In Paris?”

Collot downed the second gin and shook his head. “Amsterdam.”

“When was this?”

“’Ninety-two.”

“You sold him jewels?”

The Frenchman’s lip curled, his nose wrinkling like that of a man who has just smelled something foul. “He was scum. The worst kind of scum. He’d as soon cheat you as look at you, and then he’d laugh in your face and call you a fool.”

“Did he cheat you?”

As if aware of the pit yawning before him, Collot drew himself up straighter in his chair. “Me? Mais non. Not me.”

Sebastian tilted his gin back and forth between his fingertips, aware of the Frenchman’s eyes upon it. “The jewels you sold to Eisler in Amsterdam in ’ninety-two, where did you get them?”

“My family. For generations, the Collots have been lapidaries. Ask anyone who knew Paris, before. They’ll tell you. But by the autumn of ’ninety-two, things were bad—very bad. We could not stay. We took refuge in Amsterdam.”

“And sold Eisler your jewels?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve had no dealings with him here in London?”

“No.”

“That’s not what I’m hearing.”

“Perhaps people have me confused with someone else. Some other émigré.”

“Perhaps.” Sebastian shifted in his seat so that he could cross his outthrust boots at the ankles. “Who do you think killed Eisler?”

Collot touched the back of one hand to his nose and sniffed. “What you trying to do to me, hmm? People see me talking to a Bow Street runner, what are they to think? You try to get me killed?”

“I’m not a runner, and everyone in here thinks I’m offering you a job. What kind of jobs do you do, exactly?”

Collot sniffed again. “This and that.”

Sebastian shoved his own untouched gin across the table. After a moment’s hesitation, Collot picked it up and raised the glass to his lips, his hand shaking so badly he almost spilled it.

“You’re afraid of something,” said Sebastian, watching him. “What is it?

Collot drained the glass, then leaned forward, his lips wet, the veins in his forehead bulging against his sweat-slicked skin. Sebastian could smell the fear roiling off him, mingling with the stench of stale sweat and cheap gin. The Frenchman threw a quick glance around, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Eisler was peddling a big diamond. A big blue diamond.”

“How large of a diamond are we talking about?”

“Forty-five or fifty carats. Perhaps more.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Only one big blue diamond I know about, and that’s the one belongs to the banker, Hope.”

“Henry Philip Hope?”

“No. The other one. His brother, Thomas.”

“I haven’t heard anything about a big blue diamond being associated with Eisler’s death.”

“That’s my point. No one has heard about it. So I ask you, where is it? Hmm?” He wiped a trembling hand across his mouth and said it again. “Where is it?”