“Is that true?” I asked him. “You have no proof of her crimes?”
Brisbane’s jaw tightened. “I do not. She has been clever enough to secure the item in question somewhere other than her room or her trunk. I had a strong suspicion she was going to move it tonight. I hid myself in the gallery of the ladies’ wing and followed her when she entered the hidden passage. Once I realised she was assuming her disguise, I retraced my steps and resumed my hiding place in the corridor. From there, I knew once she was garbed in her ghostly costume, she would lead me directly to her cache.”
I felt a cold chill creep over my limbs that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. Brisbane was regarding me with an icy stare, and I understood with a thrill of horror what I had just done.
“You mean I ruined—” I could not bear to finish the thought.
“You did,” he put in brutally. I had thought him angry with Charlotte. I should have known better. Brisbane was a professional. He did not permit his emotions to become entangled with the criminals he pursued. My interference, however, could be viewed in a very different light.
“Oh,no,” I groaned, burying my face in my hands.
Charlotte laughed again, mirthlessly. “I suppose I ought to thank you, my lady. Brisbane has nothing to charge me with except the wearing of old clothes I found in the lumber room, and there is no crime in that.” Old clothes she had likely discovered when Aunt Hermia had led a party of chattering ladies to the lumber rooms to choose Lucy’s wedding finery. How simple it must have been for Charlotte to mark those few articles, then return later to fashion them into her ghostly garb. Under different circumstances, I might have admired her ingenuity.
I raised my head. “But clearly you were abroad for some nefarious purpose,” I argued, desperate to salvage this calamity I had wrought.
Charlotte smiled at me and took a sip of her whiskey. “Or was I creeping around in this disguise to preserve my reputation? Perhaps I was seeking an assignation?”
There was no malice in her eyes, only the calm certainty of a woman who has taken every precaution in a dangerous game. This was why she had courted Plum’s attentions, then. She had earned herself a stalwart defender should she have need of one, and an alibi as well.
She rose and placed her glass on the table, patting her hair to smoothness. “I do hope you will excuse me. I am very tired, and it is quite late. I will of course return these things to the lumber rooms, my lord,” she said with an arch smile at Father. “I should not like to have it said I took anything that did not belong to me.”
She dropped a deep curtsey and left us then. I sank further into my chair, wishing I could escape as easily as that.
“I am sorry,” I murmured. “I had no idea.”
“Yes, you did,” Brisbane said bitterly. “You knew I would never seriously consider marrying a woman like that. You taunted me with it that day by the river. But you could not reason further to realise I was engaged upon an investigation?”
I spread my hands helplessly, wishing Father would say something, anything at all. “I did realise it, but I never took her for a villainess. You even implied someone else might use her as a scapegoat, if you will remember. You said someone else might cache jewels in her room to throw suspicion upon her. And even if I were inclined to believe the worst of her, two minutes in her company would have cured my doubts. She looks like a Dresden shepherdess and she talks like a milkmaid!”
Brisbane’s mouth twisted. “Well, your little Dresden shepherdess managed to steal one of the single most valuable jewels in the entire kingdom, and if I do not recover it…”
His voice dropped off as if he could not bear to give voice to the magnitude of his ruin if he failed. “What did she steal?” I dared to ask in a very tiny voice.
“The Tear of Jaipur,” Father said softly. “I have only seen it once, but it was the most magnificent thing I have ever laid eyes upon.”
“A diamond?”
“Not a diamond,” Brisbane corrected, his voice thick with sarcasm. “Thediamond. The largest one in the queen’s personal collection. It was a gift from an Indian potentate when she became their Empress.”
I nearly laughed aloud. The very idea was preposterous, another one of Brisbane’s nursery stories to keep me in the dark. “The queen? Charlotte stole the queen’s diamond? How? Did she scale the walls of Buckingham Palace? Or did she overpower the guards like Colonel Blood?”
Father winced and Brisbane looked grimly at the glass in his hands. He rolled it between his palms, the flames on the hearth flickering in the reflected depths of the whiskey. Too late I realised he had told the truth.
“The queen had given the jewel to her daughter-in-law. No, I will not say which,” he said sternly as I opened my mouth to ask. “But she gave it as a mark of extreme favour. And the stupid woman gave it away.”
I blinked at him. “To whom?”
“A lover,” Father said, pulling a face. It might have been a deliciously scandalous story if matters had not turned out so disastrously for Brisbane, I thought.
“How could she possibly expect the absence of such a thing would not be noted?” I demanded.
Brisbane shrugged. He did not grimace, and I wondered if the aftereffects of the hashish were still allaying the pain of his injury. “He spun her a tale. He told her he wanted to keep it, just for one night, a pledge of her faith and devotion.”
“And she believed him?” I scoffed, but Father gave me a world-weary shake of the head.
“Never underestimate the stupidity of a woman in love,” he said. “Or a man,” he hastened to add.
“The lady did believe him,” Brisbane continued. “She gave him the jewel for one night and never saw him again. His name was Edwin Campbell. He is Charlotte’s husband, or rather, the man she acknowledges as her husband. I have found no evidence they were ever wed. She took the diamond from him and he has not seen her since.”