S
ebastian figured he could automatically discount upward of ninety percent of what Jacques Collot had told him. But the Frenchman’s fear, at least, had been real. And his reference to the Hopes was so unexpected, so outrageous, that Sebastian decided it just might be worth looking into.
A respectable old family of Scottish merchant bankers, the Hopes had settled in Amsterdam in the previous century and prospered there for generations. The family business, Hope and Company, was the kind of financial establishment that lent money to kings. Just ten years before, they had put together the financial package that enabled the fledgling United States to purchase the Louisiana Territory from Napoléon’s France—thus, coincidentally, helping to fund the continuing French war effort.
But the Hopes were, predictably enough, not particularly anxious to experience republican principles firsthand. When the French armies marched on Amsterdam and The Hague, the Hopes packed up their vast collection of paintings and sculptures and gems and scurried back across the Channel to England.
Sebastian’s acquaintance with the Hopes was limited to desultory state dinner parties and crowded ballrooms and various similar functions of the kind he generally preferred to avoid. If he had been in Thomas Hope’s vast museum-like house in Duchess Street, he didn’t recall it. But when Sebastian sent up his card, the Hopes’ very proper English butler quickly showed him in. One did not turn away the heir of Alistair St. Cyr, Earl of Hendon and Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Thomas Hope greeted him with a wide smile and firm handshake. But his small eyes were hooded and wary, and Sebastian found himself wondering why.
“Devlin! Good to see you. This is a surprise. Please, have a seat.” A short, ungainly man in his forties with a craggy, almost brutish-looking face, he stretched out a hand toward a yellow satin-covered settee that looked like something Cleopatra might have reclined upon while awaiting Mark Antony. “And how is your father?”
To a casual observer, the remark might have seemed innocent; it was not. Everyone who was anyone in London knew that a deep and lasting estrangement had grown up between the Earl of Hendon and his heir.
“He is well, thank you.” Sebastian returned the banker’s practiced smile. “And you?”
As they exchanged the customary polite nothings, Sebastian let his gaze drift around the room, taking in the mummy cases painted on the ceiling, the alabaster vases, the regal, Egyptian-style cats, the life-sized portrait of a beautiful, dark-haired, sloe-eyed woman painted on worn boards that looked very much like part of an ancient sarcophagus.
“Is that from a Ptolemaic tomb?” Sebastian asked, staring at it.
Hope appeared delighted. “You recognize it! It is, yes. This is what I call my Egyptian Room. The piece you’re sitting on was manufactured to my own design, based on drawings I did of a similar relic discovered in a tomb near the Nile while I was there.”
Sebastian glanced down at the settee’s black wooden frame, which was decorated with paintings of the jackal-headed god Anubis and had bronze scarabs for feet. Thomas, he now remembered, was the Hope brother with little interest in the actual business that generated the family’s fortune. Leaving his relatives to mind the bank and mercantile empire, he’d spent much of his youth on an extended Grand Tour, visiting not only Europe but Africa and Asia, as well. Now confined to Britain by the disruptions of war, he devoted himself largely to increasing his stature as a patron of the arts. Lately he’d also taken to his pen, publishing a folio volume entitled Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, followed shortly by Costumes of the Ancients. His newest project was reportedly a grandly ambitious philosophical work on the origins and prospects of man, although he was said to despair of ever finishing it.
“Have you been to Egypt?” he asked eagerly, nodding discreetly to the butler, who moved to open a bottle of wine.
“Once, although quite a few years ago.”
“Splendid! And Istanbul? Damascus? Baghdad?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Hope’s face fell. “Ah. What a pity. I once spent an entire year in Istanbul, sketching the ruins and palaces. If you ever find yourself presented with an opportunity to visit the city, you must seize it. There is no place quite like it.”
“My wife has always been anxious to travel, so perhaps one day we shall make it there.” Sebastian paused to accept a glass of wine from the butler’s tray, then said casually, “I wonder, were you acquainted with Daniel Eisler?”