“Not that I remember.”
“Then you must get Lady Marion to procure you a couple of his letters. Say they’re for autographs. Study the handwriting, and then forge a letter requesting the keeper to give the bearer (whom you will call an American journalist of note), permission to sketch the regalia. I think you will find these instructions enough for the present.”
“Yes, quite enough to land us at Portland,” said Rees, cheerfully.
Reckless as impunity in crime had made him, he was not dull enough to ignore the stupendous risk of such a colossal piece of knavery. But the excitement of carrying out Goodhare’s daring plans had now become necessary to his jaded senses, on which the risks of smaller and meaner thefts were beginning to pall. Trusting, therefore, to the fertile invention of the elder man for the details of the plot, he at once set to work on the preliminaries Amos had suggested, and persuaded the reluctant Sep to do the same.
Weeks passed on, during which Amos put the younger men through their paces with regard to their recently acquired knowledge of the geography of the Tower, tested Rees’s progress in the art of using a file expeditiously and without noise, and caused him to forge letters from Lord Wenlock, until he produced one which the general himself might have mistaken for the production of his own pen.
Then, when all was ready, came a spell of bright weather; and Amos, who had implicit faith in the disorganising powers of fog, waited until the kindly brown cloak was again drawn over the sky.
One morning in the middle of February he announced that all was ready, and that the attempt would be made that day. Sep, whom Amos had kept under his own eye for a week or more, made his way through a thick sepia-colored mist to the Tower, presented the forged letter, and after only a short delay was admitted to the Wakefield, or Record, Tower, where the Crown jewels were kept, and accommodated with a seat.
The day was so dark, and the consequent difficulties of locomotion were so great, that only very few visitors came to the tower at all. These few were chiefly of the country cousin sort, and those who came into the Record Tower did not scruple to crowd round Sep, and to pass their opinion, in loud whispers, on the merits of the series of neat little pen-and-ink drawings which he was making from different points of view, so that from time to time the warder, who stood at the door, had to come forward and beg them not to interrupt the gentleman.
Presently, in the midst of a small batch of strangely-dressed people fresh from the colonies, there sauntered in, guide-book in hand, a young fellow of rather rustic appearance, dressed in the sort of clothes a respectable carpenter might wear for his Sunday suit. He was greatly interested in the work of the artist, who was making his way, by easy stages, all round the great cage, in the centre of the small stone room, in which the Crown and other jewels are kept. Wherever the American artist stopped, the young carpenter stopped too, carried away by his interest in the sketches. The warder, who never remained for many minutes out of the room, grew interested also, and watched the progress of the little pictures with much admiration. The day was so dark, and the fog so thick even inside the stone chamber, that the gas jets between the deeply-embrasured windows were all alight, giving to the precious gems a fiery lustre as they glittered through the murky atmosphere.
Sep had almost reached that side of the room which was furthest from the door when a tall, well-dressed man appeared at the entrance, and peeping in, said in cheery tones: