Uprooted from her home in India, Alice is raised by her aunt, a spiritualist medium in Windsor. When the mysterious Mr Tilsbury enters their lives, Alice is drawn into a plot to steal the priceless Koh-i-Noor diamond, claimed by the British Empire at the end of the Anglo-Sikh wars.
Said to be both blessed and cursed, the sacred Indian stone exerts its power over all who encounter it: a handsome deposed maharajah determined to claim his rightful throne, a man hell-bent on discovering the secrets of eternity, and a widowed queen who hopes the jewel can draw her husband's spirit back. In the midst of all this madness, Alice must discover a way to regain control of her life and fate...
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Raised in lovely, lively Lahore by her ayah, a makeshift mother in place of the real parent who passed away on the birthing table, Alice Willoughby is spirited away one dark day by her father — a doctor in the employ of the Empire who deems the days ahead too dangerous for his darling daughter. To wit, he leaves little Alice in Windsor, with instructions to "learn [her] heritage. What it is to be an English child. What it is to be a Christian." (p.41)
Alas, Alice's father is unaware that the aunt who swears she will care for her in his absence harbours certain indefinable designs... on a diamond, and indeed the dead.
My father said it was summertime when we first arrived at Southampton docks. But, so often I found myself shivering and oppressed by the dreariness of day when it seemed all the colours in the world had been bleached away to a dirty grey. My father left me yearning for the only home I'd ever known to live in a house like a darkened maze where, at first, I was very often lost in the claustrophobia of walls too close, of ceilings too low, of narrow stairs that led up and up to a bedroom where the walls had been papered with rosebuds. But those flowers were pale imitations, too regimented and prim by far when compared with the fragrant, blowsy blossoms we'd left behind in India. I would lie in that bedroom and think of home, feeling hungry but never wanting to eat, with the food so bland and lacking taste. And the only thing to comfort me was to stare through the gloom to a gap in the shutters, where I sometimes saw the starlit skies and wondered if those self-same stars were shining over India. To sparkle in my ayah's eyes. (p.22)