Thomas Hope was no fool. He took his time accepting his own wine, using the delay as a cover for thought. He had a big mouth, loose and wet, and a habit of flexing it in a peculiar way right before he began to speak. He flexed it now, like a sleek, wily fish considering and then rejecting a juicily baited hook.
“Eisler? Of course. He was in Amsterdam with us, you know.” He sipped his wine, his eyes above the glass downcast. “His death is shocking, is it not? I do believe that one of these days the English simply must agree to the formation of a proper police force, lest we all find ourselves murdered in our beds.”
“Did you ever buy jewels from him?” Sebastian asked, refusing to be distracted by what was a popular, perennial topic.
“From Eisler? You must be thinking of my brother, Henry Philip. He’s the family jewel collector, not I. You really must ask to see his collection sometime. He keeps it in a great mahogany cabinet with sixteen drawers, one for each category of specimen. He has a pearl that is said to be the largest saltwater pearl in existence—nearly two hundred grams, and two inches long. It’s lovely—quite spectacularly so.”
“What about big blue diamonds? Do they interest him?”
“Blue?” Thomas Hope sipped his wine and pursed his lips so that he now resembled nothing so much as a frog. “I couldn’t say, actually. I know the red ones are the rarest. And of course, the ladies generally like the pink ones.”
“Daniel Eisler wasn’t trying to sell a large blue diamond for your family?”
Hope laughed out loud. “Good heavens, no. Now is the time to be buying jewels, not selling them. The prices are quite depressed. It’s all these émigrés, you know. Henry Philip was telling me about a twenty-five-carat square white table-cut diamond he bought recently from some old Frenchwoman who was so desperate, she was willing to part with it for a song.”
A light step sounded in the hall. Hope turned his head, his mouth puckering feverishly as a woman appeared in the doorway. She was considerably younger than Hope, perhaps by as many as fifteen or twenty years. She wore her dark hair styled short, so that it curled fashionably around her face and showed off her long neck and sloping white shoulders. Her eyes were dark and luminous, her nose perfectly straight, her mouth full lipped and rosebud pink.
“Ah, Louisa, dear,” said Hope, working his mouth into a smile. “How kind of you to join us. I believe you’ve met Lord Devlin? Devlin, this is my wife.”
“Mrs. Hope.” Sebastian rose to his feet and sketched a bow.
La Belle et la Bête, society called them. Beauty and the Beast. It wasn’t hard to see why. Beauty extended her hand for Sebastian to kiss, her face glowing with the kind of smile that inspired poets and painters. “Lord Devlin. What a pleasant surprise.”
She wore a simple gown of white muslin caught up beneath her full breasts with a pink satin ribbon; a simple gold chain and locket encircled her neck. She was one of those women who had about her an air of gentle repose and serenity that made one think of Evensong and incense and sunlight streaming through stained-glass windows. But Sebastian knew the impression of gentle beatitude was deceptive. A professional killjoy in the mold of Hannah More and the Clapham Saints, she was an active member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a nasty organization dedicated to stamping out dancing, singing, card playing, and just about any other pleasure and amusement that might gladden the hearts and ease the sorrows of the city’s laboring poor.
She did not urge him to sit again, so that Sebastian found himself wondering with some amusement if she’d been lurking outside the drawing room door, ready to rush in and put an end to any conversation that threatened to stray into unwanted channels.
“You must come see us again, with Lady Devlin,” she said, her laced fingers coming up to rest charmingly against her chin, her gentle smile never slipping.
The thought of the two women together—Hero with her forthright, radical principles and Louisa Hope with her self-satisfied, sanctimonious moralizing—threatened to overset Sebastian’s gravity. He reached for his hat. “I will, yes. In the meantime, I won’t intrude on you any longer.” He bowed again. “Servant, Mrs. Hope. Don’t bother ringing; I can see myself out.”
“I’ll walk with you to the door,” said Hope, as if vaguely embarrassed by his wife’s maneuvers. “You really must come back with Lady Devlin and see the rest of the house. I’m doing each room in the style of a different country, one for each of the various places I’ve visited.”
They descended the grand wide staircase, their footsteps echoing as if in a vault. Sebastian said, “If Eisler were trying to sell a large blue diamond, where do you think it might have come from?”
Hope paused at the base of the stairs, his mouth puckering as if it were a necessary prelude to thought. “Hmm. Difficult to say, really. The provenance of so many of these large specimens is . . . well, shall we say shaky at best?”