“So, what did you learn at Rundell and Bridge?” Seb asked as Alex strode into the Tricorn’s private salon a short while later. “How did our thief get in?”
“He had himself delivered.”
Seb, seated at the dining table with a plate of ham and eggs, raised his brows in silent question.
“The Belle Sauvage,” Alex explained. “It’s the coaching inn located directly behind the jeweler. The Nightjar hid himself in an empty beer barrel and had himself delivered to the Belle Sauvage on a vintner’s wagon. According to the hostlers, the place is always teeming with people, so there’s no way of knowing exactly when that was. Either way, the barrel was taken down to the cellar, the southernmost wall of which is shared with the basement of Rundell and Bridge.”
Seb smiled, obviously impressed, and took another bite of ham. “Most enterprising.”
“Our thief climbed out of his barrel, removed the few bricks that separated the wine cellar from the jeweler to make a small opening—which he concealed with another stack of barrels—and climbed through into the shop.”
“Did you look at the barrel? A brewery name might help.”
“I thought of that. It was sent from the entirely fictitious ‘Black Feather Brewery.’ Our thief has a sense of humor.”
“Huh. How did he get into the safe?”
Alex shook his head. “Used a key, if you can believe it. When I questioned the irascible Rundell Senior and his far-more-pleasant nephew about any unusual incidents, they both recalled an elderly lady who’d fainted outside the shop the day before the robbery. The lady’s companion asked whether they could sit inside while her friend recovered from her light-headedness. Rundell Senior produced some smelling salts and summoned a doctor. Rundell Junior, it seems, was more than a little taken with the companion. He gave me an excellent description of her ample bosom and charming dimples.”
“I assume she was the distraction?” Seb chuckled.
“Indeed. It seems the Nightjar has some female accomplices. Since the key to the safe is still in Rundell’s possession, the Nightjar must have used a copy. One of the women must have managed to make an impression of it in a piece of wax or soap while the men were distracted. At any rate, the lady ‘recovered’ before the physician arrived, and they left the scene in a hired hackney.”
“So the Nightjar opened the safe, stole the diamond, and left a black feather in its place?”
“Precisely.” Alex helped himself to a plate of eggs from the covered dishes on the sideboard and sat at the dining table next to Seb. “The owner of the stone was none other than our very own Prince Regent, although he hadn’t actually paid for it yet. Rundell was quite tight-lipped, but I persuaded him to tell me what he knew. The Prince was having it made into a necklace for his mistress Maria Fitzherbert.”
“I thought he’d given her up long ago?”
“Apparently not. And that’s not the half of it. According to Rundell, the vendor of the diamond is none other than Prinny’s own wife, Princess Caroline. Both sides swore Rundell to secrecy. She told Rundell she was given it by her father, the Duke of Brunswick.”
Seb let out a long, low whistle. “Now that is awkward.
“As you can imagine, Conant’s keen to keep the whole thing under wraps to avoid any scandal.”
Seb crossed to the bow-fronted sideboard and picked up a sheaf of papers. “He sent these over while you were out. Lord Sidmouth, at the Home Office, has been in contact with our counterparts across the channel. He asked for any information they had on the Nightjar, and got this from Eugène Vidocq.”
Alex grimaced. “Not five minutes ago the French were our mortal enemies. Now we’re swapping information like one big happy family.” His tone was bitter. “It’s as if the past ten years of bloody warfare never happened.”
“It is hard to forget, when you think of all the men we lost—”
“Harder still when you’ve got a blind spot as a daily reminder of French ‘hospitality.’”
Alex sighed. Enough. The war had been over for almost a year. The world was a different place. He had to move on. “What did the head of the Sûreté have to say about his fellow countryman?” he asked dryly. “As an ex-criminal himself, one can only assume he’s all admiration for the man’s skill.”
The French head of police, Vidocq, was a most unusual character. He’d passed the first half of his adult life as a soldier, thief, smuggler, gambler, and convict. He’d escaped from one prison after another, often through the use of ingenious disguises. A decade ago, while still locked up in La Force, he’d begun to pass along cellblock gossip to the authorities. Later, when a set of emeralds belonging to the Empress Josephine went missing, Napoleon—under the logic of using a thief to catch a thief—tasked Vidocq with investigating the crime. Vidocq used his underworld contacts, his keen observational skills, and the previously unheard-of technique of undercover investigation, to track down Josephine’s emeralds, the thieves, and their buyers, in less than three days. He earned both a formal pardon and the Emperor’s continued favor.
In keeping with the man’s rather warped sense of humor, he’d begun a new career with the Paris police, at first informing on his former companions in crime, then tracking down the culprits behind various robberies and killings. Within a year, he’d founded a plain-clothes unit called the Brigade de la Sûreté and become its first chief. He regularly hired ex-convicts and prostitutes as agents and attempted to prevent crimes, not just solve them. Under his command, the Sûreté had captured thousands of criminals over the past few years.
“Funny you should say that,” Seb said, tapping the folder with his hand. “Conant seems to think that Vidocq never tried very hard to catch the Nightjar. Sounds like he has a certain professional respect for the man.”
He paused, and Alex narrowed his eyes. Seb was deliberately withholding information for dramatic effect.
“And?” Alex prompted.
“He did, however, have a suspicion as to who the Nightjar might be. An aristocrat named Louis d’Anvers. The son of the Comtesse de Rougemont.”
Alex exhaled slowly. “That’s not a name I’m familiar with.”
“He was born here in England. The family changed the name to Danvers to sound more English.” Seb opened the file and selected a handwritten report. “Unfortunately, Louis d’Anvers died four years ago. So even if he was the Nightjar, he can’t have committed the Rundell and Bridge job last night.”
Alex held out his hand for the folder of documents and skimmed through them.
“What of the rest of the family?”
“Danvers’s mother, the comtesse, is still alive. Danvers married one Emily Chadwyck, a gentleman’s daughter from Leicestershire. They had two children, a boy and a girl. The wife died giving birth to a stillborn son when the daughter was only three years old. The children live with their grandmother in Waverton Street, between Hyde Park and Berkeley Square. The son is thirty, the daughter, twenty-three.”
“The son could have reprised his father’s role. Or this new theft could be a copycat crime.”
“The Nightjar is dead; long live the Nightjar,” Seb said wryly.
Alex extracted a yellowed newspaper clipping from the file. He began to read, and his eyebrows rose in surprise. “The man’s identity isn’t the only lead Vidocq’s given us. We have a motive here too. Look at this.”
He angled the page toward Seb. It was an excerpt from La Mercure, the Parisian newspaper, dated April 1800; sixteen years ago. The headline was “J’accuse—!”
The Nightjar had written an open letter to the editor, publicly denouncing revolutionary leader Georges Danton as a traitor to France. He claimed the theft of the French crown jewels from the Louvre had been an inside job, masterminded by Danton himself. The jewels, he said, had been used as bribes to purchase support for the Republique and, later, for the Emperor Napoleon, from foreign powers such as the Austrians and the Prussians.
“I vow to steal back our country’s bounty from those who have received it unjustly,” the Nightjar had written. “The jewels shall be recovered for the glory of France and held secure until the upstart Napoleon has been ousted and the Bourbons are once more restored to their rightful place upon the throne.”
Alex sat back in his chair with a slow exhale. As a declaration of intent, it was certainly impressive.
On the following page Vidocq had compiled a list of the jewels missing from the national archives and correlated them with the gems the Nightjar was known to have stolen. They matched perfectly. The Nightjar had, apparently, been doing exactly as he’d promised.
“The thefts aren’t random at all,” Alex said. “He’s stealing back the crown jewels of France.”
“Exactly.”
Alex pointed at one of the lines on the list. “The diamond taken from Rundell and Bridge must be this one the French call the ‘Regent’s Diamond.’ Which means there are only three major jewels still unaccounted for. The blue diamond they call the ‘Bleu Du Roi,’ a ruby, and a thirty-carat sapphire known as the ‘Ruspoli.’” He flipped through the remaining pages. “Do we know the location of these three jewels?”
Seb leaned back in his chair with a satisfied grin. “As a matter of fact, we do. Vidocq didn’t discover where any of the jewels had gone until Napoleon declared a twenty-year statute of limitations on crimes committed during the Revolution. Since the original theft occurred in 1792, that meant nobody could be prosecuted for the crime after 1812. As the deadline neared, Vidocq told his agents to listen out for information regarding the gems. Sure enough, not two days after the statute of limitations expired, a London jeweler named John Francillon sold a forty-five-carat blue diamond to the diamond merchant Daniel Eliason. Vidocq believes that stone is the ‘Bleu Du Roi,’ cut down and reshaped to disguise its origins.”
“Where is it now?”
Seb tapped another piece of paper. “Eliason failed to find a buyer. Perhaps afraid of having it stolen from his own premises, he decided on what you might call the old ‘hide-in-plain-sight’ tactic. He loaned it to the British Museum. For the past three years, it’s been on public display in their rocks and minerals gallery.”
Alex couldn’t prevent a chuckle. “Clever. And what of the others?”
“The ruby has been incorporated into a necklace that was purchased by Lord Carrington for his wife, Lady Sophia. She’s worn it on numerous occasions in public. During the season, they reside on Park Crescent. The sapphire, according to Vidocq’s sources, is in the possession of a disgraced Italian diplomat named Franco Andretti who now lives in a small village just outside Gravesend.”
Alex took a deep draught of wine. “If this information is correct—and provided this new Nightjar has the same goal as his predecessor—then we have an excellent chance of predicting where he’ll strike next.”
“Indeed we do.”
“All right, then. Tomorrow we’ll investigate the security arrangements at both the British Museum and the Carringtons’ town house. And I want to know more about the family of Louis d’Anvers. Especially his son. Do they ever attend any functions in the ton? Do we have any common acquaintances who might make an introduction?”
Seb shot him a cocky grin. “I knew you’d say that, so I strolled over to visit my great-aunt Dorothea, the Dread Dowager Duchess, this morning. She expressed amazement at seeing me clothed, shaved, and sober before midday. The old battle-ax knows everybody in the ton, and she has the memory of an elephant. Never forgets a thing. She’s like a walking, talking Debrett’s.”
Alex gestured for Seb to get on with it.
“Turns out Dorothea is good friends with the comtesse. She couldn’t believe I’d never made her acquaintance, although she did concede that being absent for three years ‘fighting that odious Bonaparte’ was a partial excuse. She confidently expects to see the comtesse and her grandchildren this very evening at Caroline Turnbull’s soirée.”
Alex smiled. “I’m sure Caroline will be delighted to see us.”