The ashen prince nodded, his thin, too-long neck bobbing like a bird’s behind the high collars he wore as disguise for the slight deformity, which had earned Eddy the nickname Collars and Cuffs. “Yes,” he whispered, moustache quivering with his distress, “he said he would bring the first letter tomorrow night if he receives my note today, will exchange it for the money. Please, John, you must advise me what to do, how to stop him! Someone must make him pay for this!”
It took several additional minutes to bring Eddy back to some semblance of rationality again. “Calm yourself, Eddy, really, there is no need for such hysteria. Consider the matter taken care of. Send the note to him as instructed. Morgan will be satisfied that you’ll meet him tomorrow with your initial payment. Lull him into thinking he’s won. Before he can collect so much as a shilling of his blood money, the problem will no longer exist.”
Prince Albert Victor leaned forward and gripped John’s hands tightly, fear lending his shaking fingers strength. Reddened eyes had gone wide. “What do you mean to do?” he whispered.
“You know the energies I am capable of wielding, the powers I command.”
The distraught prince was nodding. John Lachley was more than Eddy’s lover, he was the young man’s advisor on many a spiritual matter. Eddy relied heavily upon Dr. John Lachley, Physician and Occultist, touted as the most famous scholar of antiquities and occult mysteries ever to come up out of SoHo. And while most of his public performances—whether as Johnny Anubis, Whitechapel parlour medium or, subsequent to earning his medical degree, as Dr. John Lachley—were as fake as the infamous seances given by his greatest rival, Madame Blavatsky, not everything Dr. John Lachley did was trickery.