Midnight Masquerade (22 page)

Bidwell moved sideways to block him. “I’ll take the diamond, Belami.” he said while his hand moved to a bulge in his jacket to withdraw his pistol.

Belami raised his two splayed hands and stopped walking. “I abhor violence,” he said meekly. As he spoke, one hand doubled into a fist and shot out like quicksilver. Bidwell sank to the floor, clutching his stomach. “Unfortunately, there are times when it can’t be avoided. I really don’t want to hurt an old man,” he went on, with a warning glance to Bessler. “My groom has gone to Bow Street and will be arriving any moment with a Runner. Your best bet will be to come peacefully.”

Bidwell stirred to life and got himself up on one knee. “What, have you grown the giblets to have at me again?” Belami asked, and rolled him over on his back with the toe of his boot. He leaned over and extracted the pistol from his pocket. “Glad to see you’re using your own this time. You took it with you to Beaulac, no doubt, but decided to borrow mine instead, to incriminate me. You will regret that, jackanapes. How did you ever pair up with this creature?” he asked Bessler.

“Don’t talk,” Bidwell gasped, sitting up and rubbing his stomach. “He can’t prove anything.”

“He’s got the diamond,” Bessler pointed out, defeated.

“He can’t
prove
anything,” Bidwell insisted.

“Some things prove themselves,” Belami remarked idly. “Possession of stolen goods is taken as
prima facie
evidence of theft, or complicity in theft. The duchess’s diamond didn’t hop into the glass of water by itself.”

“It’s true. I took it,” Bessler admitted. “I mesmerized the duchess the day she removed it from the bank, and had her give it to me, substituting a copy I had made in advance. I never meant to involve you, milord, or have anything untoward happen at your house. I meant simply to sell it and return to Austria. It was Bidwell who convinced me to change my plan.”

“How did Bidwell know you had made the substitution?” Belami asked.

“It happened over a couple of drinks the night before we left. We had both lost money at cards and were feeling miserable. He came back here and we drank brandy. I was indiscreet, mentioned a plan to pull myself out of my troubles. Another glass or two, and I had given him the kernel of my plan. He
improved
on it, as he said.”

“Shut up, you bloody fool!” Bidwell said angrily. “Lies. All lies. I was never here before in my life.”

“Pray continue, Doctor,” Belami invited.

“Bidwell told me I wouldn’t realize a quarter of the stone’s worth. I’d be lucky to get five thousand for it at a fencing ken. He said the insurance company would buy it for three times that. He knew a fellow who acted as a go-between in these transactions. I told him the duchess would not know the thing had been stolen, the copy was so good, and if she
did
discover the replacement,
I
would be the first one suspected. He said we must steal the copy, very publicly, and let it pass for the original. I told him it could not be done, but he put himself in charge of it all, for half the profit realized. He was eager to get on with it, and chose the first public appearance of the diamond, at your ball. We didn’t know the policy had lapsed. She didn’t breathe a word of it, till after the theft that night when I was with her upstairs. Then she told me; I was ready to cry for grief. So much work and worry for naught.”

Belami nodded with quiet satisfaction to hear his deductions all neatly confirmed. “Quite a facer for you, Bidwell,” he remarked. Strangely, it was the younger man he despised more in the matter, though, of course, Bessler too was contemptible. Age, he supposed, had something to do with it. One felt pity for the aged and disinherited.

“It was just like my damnable uncle to fool me,” Bidwell charged. “I wanted to get that money from
him.
I didn’t mean you any harm, Belami. It’s the only way I’ll ever see a sou of it. Why must I wait till he’s in the grave to have what’s rightfully mine?”

“Rightfully yours?”
Belami asked, staring. “You’ve already had and wasted what was rightfully yours in your father’s inheritance. Where did you get the notion Carswell owed you anything, only because he married your aunt?”

“He’s got no one else to leave it to.”

“I have a strong feeling he’ll find someone else now.”

“If only the duchess had renewed the policy,” was Bidwell’s next regret. He was ready to blame everyone but himself. That, Belami decided, was what was particularly revolting about the man.

“We decided we must pretend we had known of the lapsed policy all along, to keep suspicion from ourselves. That is why I made a point to mention it to you, Lord Belami,” Bessler said humbly. “Bidwell had destroyed the copy; there was no way to prove we had stolen it. I had the original here. I planned to sell it for what I could get, and we would still split the profit. We are both in urgent need of funds,” he added with a worried frown at his desk, where he had secreted his bills.

“Then the storm came along and confined us all to Beaulac,” Belami urged him on.

“That delay was not too troublesome. It was your announcement that my apartment had burned down that worried me. I envisaged someone’s finding the diamond in the ashes. Disgrace, a trial, possibly hanging . . .”

His face mirrored these horrors.

“Quite possibly,” Belami agreed calmly.

“Not for me!” Bidwell announced triumphantly. “All I took was a chunk of glass. I knew it was glass when I took it. They won’t hang a fellow for that.”

“Assaulting a duchess, causing her grievous bodily harm—the bruise on her neck, dreadful! To say nothing of collusion with Herr Bessler,” Belami pointed out. “Then there is conspiring to defraud your uncle Carswell of a fortune. You may escape the gibbet, but I’d say you’re looking at twenty or thirty years in prison.”

“How did you come to suspect our scheme?” Bessler asked with waning interest.

“Simple deduction,” Belami told him. “Bidwell had the opportunity. He was not in the ballroom when it happened. Neither was there any way of proving he was in Lady Lenore’s dressing room, as he claimed. It was crushing the paste diamond on the hearth that really gave it away. The splinter’s weight told me it was not another wine glass, nor a part of the one you broke at midnight—or was it actually a minute before or after that you called Chamfreys and Lenore? I have not been able to deduce the timing to the second. No matter,” he said when Bidwell proved uncooperative. “Either before or after you lunged down the rope to steal the diamond, you had a drink and broke one of my crystal goblets. When Deirdre discovered the hook that held the diamond to the chain, I took the fantastical notion you had actually stolen the diamond and crushed it, though I couldn’t believe you hated Carswell enough to play such a pointless trick on him.”

“I do, if you want the truth,” Bidwell interpolated.

“Oh, I already have the truth. If we had more time, I would tell you about Mohs’ Scale, which proved that the crushed item was not the diamond. The little clasp kept niggling at my mind. A substitution suggested itself—don’t ask how. I get inspired at times. Bessler, with his mesmerism, was the logical person to have done that. If you could convince Lady Lenore she don’t like wine, you could convince the duchess to hand over her diamond. One trembles to think of that unchained power walking the world. Just as well it will soon be locked up.”

He walked to the window to look for signs of Bow Street and saw Réal and a Runner trotting quickly toward the building. He hastened his speech then. “Once I had the idea of you two working in tandem, the rest was fairly simple. Bidwell was so palpably certain I had not found the diamond when I announced I had that I realized it was not at Beaulac. Where else could it be but in the house of the man who stole it? My story of a fire here confirmed it. I never witnesses such panic, outside of a
real
fire. It remained only to beat you here by a few moments and find it. And by the by, Doctor, I approve of your hiding place. I didn’t look there first, I promise you. I know that if
I
were the thief, I would appreciate a compliment from an expert like me.”

“It was clever, was it not?” Bessler asked, allowing himself a wan, sad smile. “The phrase ‘a diamond of the first water’ suggested the hiding place to me. The duchess herself used the expression. A flawless diamond will disappear entirely in water.”

“True. It is the very expression that caused me to look for it in the glass of water,” Belami told him with a mischievous twinkle in his black eyes.

They were interrupted by the sounds of Réal  and the Bow Street Runner coming up the stairs.

“Pierre Réal  will show you where are the premises,” the groom was heard to say beyond the door.
“Voilà,”
he exclaimed, throwing the door wide open.

Bidwell made one last futile attempt to escape. He bolted for the open door but was stopped by Réal’s outstretched foot. He went sprawling, to be hoisted up by his collar by the Runner.

“What have we got here, then?” the swarthy man asked.

“Foolish, Bidwell. Flight is always taken for confirmation of guilt,” Belami told him, shaking his head, “Your best bet is to go to your uncle and sue for mercy. I shall accompany you gentlemen to Bow Street to explain the nature of this crime. Rather complicated, I’m afraid, but I’ll give you every assistance in explaining its intricacies.”

“I, Pierre Réal, will come to hold a pistol at their heads. You will need assistance to get through the streets. There’s a bit of snow—only a foot or two most places, but to the
anglais,
even a drop such as that present the problem. Come.”

“That’s true. We had a powerful bad time getting here,” the Runner said to Belami. “The main streets is shoveled out clean as a whistle, but here in the hinterlands there’s bad drifting yet.”

“Lead on, Réal ,” Belami said. “Follow the leader,” he added aside to the others, and brought up the rear himself.

When all the explaining and charging were done, Belami sent his groom home to his London residence, to inform his servants he would dine there and sleep overnight. There was still sufficient daylight to allow a walk along the main thoroughfares and meet a few friends. He spotted a traveling agent’s office, and went in to begin arrangements for his honeymoon. He also arranged for a passage to Paris for two, toward the end of January. In a benevolent mood after the successful completion of the case, he was feeling generous.

“The very best rooms, at the very best hotel that has anything available,” he told the agent.

“What name would that be for?” the agent asked, writing down the order.

“Lady Lenore Belfoi, and, er, Mr. Harvey Belfoi.”

“This here check says Belami, not Belfoi,” the agent pointed out when he was accepting the advance.

“Yes, I’m arranging the holiday for friends.”

The lady waiting behind him perked up her ears at the name of Belami. This would be the dandy old Charney’s niece was said to have nabbed, then. Quite a fine dasher, taking a pre-wedding jaunt with Lady Lenore Belfoi, the fastest woman in London. This would be interesting news for Her Grace, if only she were in town.

Belami went straight home and spent a quiet evening alone, with only Réal  for company. His valet had succeeded with his wench and was off to her parents’ home to arrange the wedding.

“That’s two of us. You’ll be next, Pierre,” Belami said as he leafed through some travel books of Italy. “Maybe you’ll find yourself a wife in Italy. I hope you mean to accompany us. You won’t care for the climate. No snow. You will not be accustomed to such heat as we’ll get there.”

“I, Pierre Réal, not accustomed to heat?” the groom asked, staring in amazement. “You think you get heat here, and in Italy? I have fried eggs on rocks at home in Canada. You think we get only snow and winds and ice? Bah, in July we are hotter than the tropics. A hundred degrees: a fine, balmy day. One hundred ten is getting warm. I’ll fry you an egg on a rock when we go to Canada.”

“We’re not planning to go to Canada. And I don’t like my eggs fried, either. I take ‘em boiled.”

“You can do that too, in the ponds,” Réal  told him, his beady black eyes daring him to contradict this foolishness.

“Those extremes of temperature have either fried or frozen your brain, my friend. Have a glass of wine to celebrate with me. Not so potent as you are accustomed to in Canada, I expect, but it will have to do.”

Réal drank it up while considering other imagined marvels with which to impress his employer, who thought he knew everything. Not accustomed to heat indeed!

Chapter 16

At Beaulac,
the Duchess of Charney did not descend to breakfast that morning. Comfortably ensconced in her bed and looking through the window to an endless vista of snow, she could see no reason to. She would loll against the pillows instead and summon guests to amuse her. The first guest summoned was her hostess, Lady Belami. With no son on hand to rescue her, Bertie went trotting to the room, already on the fidget.

“Nasty, inclement weather,” the duchess said in an accusing tone.

Peering into the dim shadows beneath the canopy, Bertie had the strange feeling she was being addressed by a skeleton in a cap. “Why, the sun is shining, and the snow melting wonderfully well,” she objected brightly. “The road is quite open now, Duchess. Several guests have left—such a relief. You can get on home to Fernvale and take Deirdre with you. I’m sure you must be eager to get home.”

“Without my diamond?” the duchess asked, her gray brows jumping to meet her gray fringe.

“But my son found it. Everyone knows that. Don’t tell me you’ve lost it again!” Bertie exclaimed, deeply chagrined.

“What a bubble head you are, to be sure. Of course he hasn’t found it. It was all a conning trick. Where is Belami? I’ll speak to him and find out what progress he is making.”

“Dickie is not here. He’s scooted back to London. Oh, dear! I wasn’t supposed to say so. He’s—he’s indisposed. Yes, that’s it. Or was that to be this afternoon? No, he’s gone over to see how the neighbors go on after the storm, and this afternoon he will be indisposed.”