The Gilded Scarab (16 page)

“Mmn. So, I will send the prescription to my workroom, and you may collect your new spectacles in a week. I daresay you’ll be astonished at the difference! Yes, yes. Astonished. Your eyes will be perfectly good for all normal uses. You’ll notice artificial light will cause you less pain and discomfort, and I believe that you will, to all intents and purposes, have near normal vision. There is, sadly, nothing anyone could do to improve your peripheral vision. You deal with it by turning your head, I assume? Yes, yes. Just so. You’ll find eventually that will become automatic and you won’t think about it. Now then, where did I put that other letter? It should be here somewhere.” Carrington lifted up the model eyeball and waved the papers at me. “You want to fly again, is that it? Mmn?”

I hadn’t mentioned it. Perhaps Beckett had when he wrote to Carrington. “Yes. Very much.”

“Yes, yes. Understandable, mmn? Very well, I don’t see any difficulty there. We’ll give your eyes a few months to settle with the new lenses, then I’ll write you a letter for the relevant ministry that will allow you to transfer your aeronaut’s license direct from the military to the civilian authorities. Yes. That’s all very good news, mmn?” Carrington smiled in answer to the one I gave him, because hell and damnation, it was good news. “I shall write to your princeps to reassure him on that score.”

“What?”

Carrington waved the letter again. “I will write to him directly, unless you wish to make your own report, mmn?”

“The Stravaigor wrote to you?”

“Mmn. His First Heir, I believe. Yes, yes. The First Heir. He writes that the Stravaigor is keen to support your return to flying status. Very kind of him, mmn?”

What. The. Hell?

It was a jolt. I let my hands clench on the cane. Since the interview with the Stravaigor on Christmas Day, I’d taken to carrying it with me everywhere. “Yes. Very kind.”

“The House has undertaken to cover your costs here, of course—” Carrington stopped, perhaps seeing I was less than pleased. He looked startled, his brow wrinkling and his eyes widening. “Is there a problem, Captain?”

“I am perfectly prepared to pay your fees, Doctor.”

“Well, well. It’s normal for a House to take care of its obligations to its members, Captain Lancaster, mmn?”

I wasn’t concerned about the House’s obligations to me. I had a few concerns, though, about the obligations the House was trying to lay on me. “In normal circumstances, you’re probably right. But I will pay my own consultation fees, and I do not wish you to write to the House at all.”

The doctor appeared to be startled into a speaking pattern that was less irritating to the ear. “Well, it’s most irregular—”

Not if the man took seriously his Hippocratic Oath! I hoped my smile was tight-lipped enough to show displeasure. “I believe that discussions between a doctor and patient are confidential, sir.”

The doctor flushed an unhealthy burgundy. At least he recognized a rebuke when he heard one. He hesitated. “I do hope this isn’t going to cause a rift with the Stravaigor, Captain Lancaster? We are gentlemen, sir. We belong with our Houses and I really don’t know…?”

I pressed my lips closed tight against the words that would tumble out if I’d allow them, if I hadn’t needed this man’s expertise. “I have a relationship with my House that suits us both, Doctor. I will respond directly to my princeps’ concerns, now I’m aware of them. And I will, of course, meet your fees now. Thank you for your understanding.”

Carrington mmmn-ed and yes-yes-well-ed and blessed his soul, but he wrote out a receipted bill for me on the spot, and pocketed my five guineas with a finesse that spoke well of his skills as a surgeon. Or a card player.

I took my leave with expressions of mutual esteem that I didn’t mean one iota and didn’t believe Carrington meant either. If I hadn’t thought highly of Beckett’s judgment of the man’s professional skills, if I’d had another medical man handy to call upon for advice and a referral, I’d have dismissed Carrington and found myself another specialist. And not mentioned to the Stravaigor who I was seeing. The insolence and arrogance! That they thought they could step in like that, without so much as a by-your-leave!

Damn the House! Dammit! Damn, damn, dammit!

Dusk was drawing in as I stamped down the staircase and out into the street. I let the street door slam shut with a bang that rattled every window in the house.

Damn the House!

More snow threatened. The sky was dark gray and so low it barely seemed to clear the chimney pots. The wind was icy. Carrington’s house was close to the northern end of the street, and looking at my watch, I gave up on the idea of walking to my next appointment. Instead I hailed a passing autohansom to take me south to Panton Street and my appointment with the Queen’s jewelers.

Damn the Stravaigor to hell.

I started to tell the driver to take me home instead, except I balked at calling the hostel home, and I really needed to sell my mother’s jewels. And if the Stravaigor was willing to pay for them, then by God, he’d pay the top valuation Garrard’s gave them. He deserved to pay for being such a damn interfering, controlling schemer… sticking his nose into my business like that, damn him! And if I could make him pay to help ensure my independence, well, the irony would be very, very satisfying.

Indignation and the thought of turning the tables, even in a small way, were very heating to the blood. I barely noticed the cold at first. It was a raw evening, though, as I became aware when the press of traffic held us stationary and the draft curled in under the door and wound itself around my ankles.

I glanced out to see where we were. Ah. The junction with Oxford Street, with its imposing circus of four identical buildings, one on each corner. Very classical and austere in mood, although rather undercut by the shop in the ground floor of the nearest building. The light of an aether-lamp swinging on a bracket above the shop front played over heaped up piles of apples and shiny nuts—hazels, cobnuts, and chestnuts. The shopkeeper had built a pyramid of oranges in the center of the display, some in their yellow and orange skins as God created them, some wrapped in colored foil that winked red and green in the light. A crowd of boys, street ragamuffins mostly, jostled each other and pointed and oohed, breath puffing out in steamy clouds, dividing their attention between the oranges and the greengrocer’s journeyman. But that worthy stood in careful attendance, arms folded over his chest, eyeing the boys with the air of a man who had seen it all and who didn’t trust them for an instant.

These little vignettes of street life certainly soothed the spirits. It was far more fun to watch the urchins stand off against the journeyman than worry about the Stravaigor’s machinations. Far more fun.

The autohansom lurched forward, crossing the junction and leaving the boys and the oranges behind. The southern half of Regent Street was too affluent for mere greengrocers. I was whirled past a couple of mourning warehouses, past Dickens and Jones’s emporium and Liberty’s, past sundry suppliers of French gloves and extremely modish hats, and on toward Piccadilly and the Haymarket. The shops glowed yellow with lamplight, and most of their windows were frosted with condensation. We stopped in Panton Street, outside Garrard’s.

“A chill ev’ning,” the cabbie said, touching his bowler hat when I handed him a crown and told him to keep the change. “Thank ’ee, guv’nor. Mind how you go, now. The footing’s right treacherous.”

The shop manager waited inside the door. “Welcome, sir. Welcome. Young Mr. Garrard is waiting for you, sir.”

And with this air of slight reproach for the lèse-majesté, the manager bowed me into the semiaugust presence of one of the junior directors of the company. Young Mr. Henry Garrard was a little older than I, in the early thirties, I’d say. He greeted me with cheerful courtesy and a handshake that left me wincing. Garrard was built like a rugby center-forward, and doubtless kept fit by tearing diamonds from the earth with his bare hands. When I got my hand back, I had to check to make sure all the fingers were still there. I certainly couldn’t feel them.

“When you wrote to tell us you were coming in, Captain, I took the liberty of conducting an inventory of the strongbox,” remarked young Mr. Garrard. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

Having had one unpleasant surprise that afternoon, I said I was glad to hear it. Garrard ushered me to the back of the shop and down a discreet staircase to a basement whose steel door any bank would envy. The door was at least two feet thick, with a monstrous great wheel of a locking mechanism that wouldn’t look out of place in one of the navy’s submersibles. Beyond the door lay a warren of storerooms, each opening one out of the other, the walls lined with safe doors. The safes themselves were set deep in the foundations of the shop.

“Impressive,” I said, on Garrard’s unlocking the third, and final, steel door to lead me into the last room in this part of the warren. Like the others, it was lined with safes and had a long workbench running down the center of it. The overhead lights were on—ionic gas discharge lamps giving out a steady, very white light. It made me squint to stop my eyes from hurting.

Garrard nodded, smirking. “As safe as the vaults at the Bank of England. No one could steal so much as a silver sixpence from us here.” He gestured to a chair. “Do be seated, Captain.”

Two porters had accompanied us, dressed in the maroon-and-gold of the firm’s livery. At Garrard’s nod, one went to a safe and spun the dials on it. It took both porters to lift out the red case inside.

Good Lord. That was bigger than I had expected. Perhaps the Lancaster luck was smiling on me again. At last.

Garrard flourished a key. “Shall I? Or would you rather use your own?”

“Go ahead, please.” I did have a key in my waistcoat pocket, that I’d found among the papers my lawyer had sent on my father’s death seven years before. I hadn’t found the inventory list, though, and what I remembered of it was unhelpful. The descriptions had been of the sparse variety with no pretty numbers attached. Not exactly enlightening. But I thought I could rely on Garrard’s honesty. They were the crown jewelers, after all. If Her Imperial Britannic Majesty could trust them with the key to the vaults at the Tower, and sundry portable items like the State Crowns and the Koh-i-Noor, then I supposed I could trust them with my mother’s trinkets.

The case was packed with smaller jewel boxes. And some not so small. The grande parure the Stravaigor wanted was in a large case of its own. Garrard opened it to display the tiara, necklace, earrings, and devant de corsage, each set with clear white diamonds and deep red rubies. The Stravaigor was right, apparently. It was a very exceptional parure.

“Mellerio,” commented Garrard. “One of the very best of the Parisian jewelers when it comes to
haute joaillerie
of this quality. You don’t often get rubies of this true pigeon-blood red or of this size. A very important set, Captain, from around 1870. If you intend to sell it, at least three thousand guineas. On a good auction day, perhaps more. The market isn’t at its highest right now, though. Count on three.”

What? How much?

I opened my mouth and let it close again.

Good. Lord.

Young Mr. Garrard rattled on. The sapphires consisted of a demiparure of necklace and earrings in their own case; this one, Garrard said with great satisfaction, one of their own pieces. There was another tiara, a smaller scroll affair in diamonds, several diamond necklaces and bracelets, and a dozen brooches. I had no real interest in the sparklers and allowed Garrard’s commentary to wash over me.

Three thousand guineas.

Three
thousand
guineas.

And that was only the ruby parure. At the end, Garrard presented me with a written valuation totting up to something a little over double that. Six thousand guineas and some loose change. My head was buzzing. In fact, I felt pretty much as I had that week in the hospital tent at Koffiefontein after I had bounced the old noggin hard on the African veldt—floating and dizzy and liable to nausea. And nary a nurse in sight to soothe my troubled brow.

How on earth had my mother acquired these jewels? I’d expected one or two good pieces—she had been the wife of a wealthy country squire, after all. But the jewelry was far more than I’d anticipated, far more befitting someone in a much higher social position. I’d have given my pension to know where it had come from. At least, I would have given my paltry little pension now I had so much potential capital to play with.

Garrard interrupted my thoughts. “Now then, Captain, are you looking to put these pieces on the market?”

“I need to sell them, certainly. They’re of no use to me except as capital to be realized. I believe the head of my House will purchase the parure, and he may be interested in more.”

“I see. Well, Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York—Mary of Teck as was, you know—is a noted and avid collector. I am certain she would be interested in the parure. And probably the sapphires too. However”—and here young Mr. Garrard coughed and looked embarrassed—“I will say the Duchess drives a hard bargain. A very hard bargain.”

And I could decode that, thank you. Her Highness would expect patriotic fervor to be enough compensation for her offering a price well below the market value. Well, in my view, I’d given quite enough to the Imperium. They’d taken my perfect eyesight and the skies from me. I’d be damned if they’d get my rubies too.

“If the Stravaigor decides against the rubies, then I’ll offer them on the open market. One of the major auction houses, perhaps.”

“We’d offer you a good price ourselves,” said Garrard.

“That’s very kind. We’ll see what the Stravaigor has to say, and I’ll be in touch.” I sorted through the boxes and picked out a brooch of a running fox, rose-cut diamonds set in gold with ruby eyes. That would do for the wedding present I would doubtless be coerced into giving the Stravaigor’s elder daughter. The fox brooch would suit her down to the ground. And there was a little monogram brooch in diamonds and sapphires, an elaborate letter
E
, I’d keep back for her sister one day. My mother had been Elizabeth, but the brooch would do for Miss Eleanor. The brooches weren’t worth much—they counted as the loose change. A couple of hundred guineas, perhaps. They’d do in lieu of a nutmeg grater apiece. “I’d like to retain these two pieces, Mr. Garrard, but I would appreciate a signed description and valuation for the rest, with a duplicate I might send to the Stravaigor.”