City of Bells (31 page)

             
“Do you mean the ones who were known to be flirtatious?  Eager to use the situation to their upmost advantage?” Mrs. Tucker said.  “The Raj calls them spins, for they spin from one man to another, always looking for a better opportunity.  Some of the especially pretty and ambitious ones can propel their way to the very top of the social order, even today.”

             
“Yes, spins, that is quite the term,” Geraldine said.  “They somehow always managed to find themselves seated beside the most powerful man in any room, even on occasions when the officers were not in uniform.  I suppose there is a bit of a learned art to it, or perhaps it is more of an inborn skill.  But others, me among them, were frightened by the intensity of the men.  Their desperation, almost, the way they would declare their adoration within hours of meeting you.  And that is how I found myself engaged to Anthony Weaver.”

             
“Weaver was desperate?” Mrs. Morrow asked with a quizzical frown.  “I find that scenario hard to picture.  He has a certain manner and bearing that seems to imply….a certain air of entitlement, you know, as if success has always come easily to him.”

             
Geraldine took a deep breath.  This next was a part of the story she had never shared with anyone and she was not entirely sure what compelled her to share it now, with two strangers bumping along beside her a pony cart.  But the memory had come flooding back with vivid detail – the colors and smells of that night, the way her heart had thudded in her chest.

“No, Anthony
was most certainly not desperate,” she said.  “In fact, he did me a kindness.  I was at a dinner party and trying to get away from one particularly persistent young man.   He had proposed over the soup and then again over the terrine and the entrée and was gearing up for this fourth try over a bowl of raspberry ice when I blurted out I was engaged to Anthony.  I don’t know why I said it.  It certainly wasn’t true and I was merely trying to discourage this pimply-faced boy.  But my statement circulated throughout the party like a whirlwind.”

             
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Morrow.  “You couldn’t find him in time to explain?”

             
Geraldine shook her head.  “As we moved to the drawing room after dinner, someone congratulated him.  They made a great fuss.  The entire room fell silent.  He was standing just beside Rose, that is what I remember best, for she turned away and linked her arm through that of her husband just in the moment that someone loudly congratulated Anthony on his engagement to me.  And Roland, ever the man at the ready, made a charming toast and glasses were raised all around.  Port for the men and sherry for the ladies, I remember that too, odd detail.  And Anthony looked at me….”

             
“He was angry?” asked Mrs. Tucker. 

             
Geraldine shook her head again.  “If he was, he hid it well.  Our eyes locked.  He had never proposed, of course, and most likely had no intention of doing so.  I was a dalliance, a distraction.  But he was too much the gentleman to fail me.  He let Roland toast us and he accepted the congratulations of the room as if he were the happiest man alive.”

             
“So he did not reveal your outright lie to the others of your social circle,” Mrs. Tucker said with some surprise.  “That was certainly gentlemanly of him and out of character with the man I ultimately came to know.  But whatever made you say that the two of you were engaged when you knew he might well have denied it on the spot?”

             
“Complete foolishness,” Geraldine said.  “Or a wishful thought uttered aloud, perhaps.  I was quite smitten with Anthony in those days and may have misread certain things as meaning more than they did.”  She sniffed and straightened in her seat.  “But yes, he was a gentleman, both that night and in the weeks to follow.  Although I can only imagine what playing along might have cost him in his….in his personal life.”

             
“He was Rose’s paramour?” Mrs. Morrow asked quietly.  “Even then?”

             
Geraldine nodded.

             
“Good heavens,” said Mrs. Tucker. “Are you suggesting that while Roland Everlee still lived that his wife and his closest friend –“

             
“Ours was a sham engagement,” Geraldine said.  “Anthony loved another.  Even so, he might have gone through with it.  I was convenient, you see.  The perfect mask to hide behind, just as poor Roland must also have been.”

             
“So what happened?” Mrs. Morrow asked.  “What ended the sham?”

             
Geraldine sighed and tilted her parasol to take in the sight of the walls of Cawnpore, which at last seemed to have moved a bit closer during their conversation. 

             
“The mutiny happened.”

***

              Hubert Morass was drunk.   It was not yet – and here Davy consulted his pocket watch for confirmation – nine in the morning and nonetheless the man’s face was flushed, his speech slightly slurred and his movements a little too tucked in.  He was trying very hard to conceal his condition, but Davy had long ago noticed that those who are intoxicated often behave in an overly cautious manner.  They speak more slowly and enunciate their words more carefully.  They keep their elbows tight to their sides and their feet drawn carefully beneath them and planted just a little too far apart, as if they were prepared for sudden shifts in the universe.

             
This all would have been obvious to anyone who was looking carefully but, other than Davy, no one was looking carefully.  Most of the women were riding up ahead, Tom was sleeping, and both Trevor and Rayley were raptly observing Adelaide, who was seated in the final cart of the processional.  She had abandoned her customary sari for the trip, although whether this decision was hers or that of Miss Hoffman, no one could say.  Nor had Adelaide joined her mentor and teacher in wearing trousers, but was rather garbed in a shapeless grey dress far too large for her, the most unattractive and unremarkable of all possible outfits.  She sat among the youngest students, looking like a governess or someone’s spinster aunt, gazing out into the countryside and ignoring the little girls, who squirmed joyfully about the cart like a litter of puppies.

             
We read her all wrong,
Davy thought. 
The sari, which seemed such a bizarre choice the first time we saw her, was not an attempt to make a political statement or spit in the face of the Raj.  For a woman who spends most of her time on the streets – not within the English district, but in the true heart of Bombay – the sari is an attempt to avoid notice.  And here today, among the members of the Byculla Club who would find a sari so intriguing, she had opted not to wear it at all.  She has instead taken up disguise as a nanny, has swathed herself from head to toe in British broadcloth.  The woman’s goal is singular:  to blend in as well as possible anywhere she goes.  To avoid attracting the eye, to be remarkably unremarkable.

             
She has spent her life in hiding,
Davy continued to mull,
and I would wager that it began long before Rose Weaver died.  I wonder what the deuce has happened to this Adelaide to leave her with such a distrust of society.  Something, obviously.  Something very bad.

***

              “You know,” Trevor said to Rayley, struggling not to shout even though the clanking of the carriage was enough to reduce all conversations to an exercise in lip-reading.  “it occurs to me that our little group may have been unconsciously guilty of the same offenses as those of the Raj.”

             
“What on earth are you talking about, Welles?”

             
“Perhaps we have been too quick to dismiss the Indian role in all this, to assume that the dark skinned men about us are simple creatures with simple motives, a kindly race meant to be patted on the head like a pack of spaniels.”

             
“You are being quite obscure.  And your example overreaches.  I for one have never patted an Indian like a dog.”  Rayley leaned in. “So tell me what you’re going for.”

             
“We have entertained the idea that the poison was meant for Rose. We have entertained the idea that the poison was meant for Weaver.  But we have never discussed the possibility that the draught was intended for Pulkit Sang.  What if he were not an accidental victim but the true target all along?”

             
Rayley paused to chew the notion over.  “What could be the motive?”

             
Trevor shrugged.  “Can’t say, but we haven’t come up with a convincing motive for why someone would kill Rose or Weaver either.  Because he was a servant, we have leapt to the assumption that he had no private life, no history, and ignored the possibility he might have had enemies of his own.  I keep thinking about what that Dr. Tufts fellow told Tom about the English sharing medications with their household staff.  If it were known that Rose, Weaver, and Sang had all on occasion imbibed a few drops from the laudanum mixture, any of the three could be the intended victim.”

             
“Or all three.”

             
Trevor’s brow puckered.  “Why?  What offense might they have shared in common?”

             
Rayley looked at the hill in the distance.   The not-so-far distance now and he shivered as he pondered the sad ruins of what had once been a mighty fortress.  The ruins which now held nothing more than plaques and statues and a well, a well which had thirty-two years ago had been stacked high with bodies.  The bodies of men, women, and children, the dead and the dying, all left to meet their fates in a hopeless hole of misery, baking under the brutal sun.  He wished he had never read the report.  It had haunted him over the last two days and the story that Anthony Weaver had shared in the jail had only added to the horror.  Laid a patina of particulars over the generalized carnage, given faces and names to a few of the victims.  It was detail, Rayley knew, which made the horrid horrible.  A man could ride through scenes of slaughter stone-faced and collapse into sobs at the sight of an ownerless doll lying on the ground.  A cemetery was a place to picnic, but a singular grave was a place to mourn.

             
“But they did share one thing,” Rayley said to Trevor, “and I believe this one thing led to the deaths of two of them and the arrest of the third.  They all knew, to varying degrees, the truth of what happened at Cawnpore.”

Chapter Eighteen

              Did she remember or did she just think that she did?

             
That, of course, was always the question. 

             
The images which had swirled through her mind for the last thirty years might have been fragments of stories she’d been told, books she had read, even shards left from a dream.  She was a great dreamer.  Whole worlds would come to her as she slumbered…

             
And sometimes they would linger, in the morning, after she awakened in her narrow cot.  A nun’s cot, the headmistress of the school used to call it.  Certainly not broad enough to accommodate two bodies.  And although you might not think of it to look at her, she had lived her entire life as a nun.  There was an austerity to her days.  A solitude.  She kept separate from everyone, even the other girls at the school.

             
No.  “Girls” was not the proper word.  For she was a woman now, at least by the measure of the calendar.  Even though she knew the peculiar limitations of her life would prompt some people to consider less than fully female.  Her virginity, for example.  No man had ever touched her.

             
No.  Again, that is not the full and proper truth.  What she means to say is that a man has not touched her in the sexual sense – in what some people mysteriously call “the Biblical sense.”  But a man did touch her once.  He scooped her up when she was but a child.  Ran with her across a burning yard, through a swirl of shouts and screams and threats.   He saved her life.

             
That was what last night’s dream had been about. 

             
She could close her eyes and see the scene in perfect detail.  A brown hand reaching.  A brown arm circling her waist.  The voice, foreign but gentle, saying words she did not understand.  Her baby brother in his other arm, the children rolling towards each other across the man’s chest until they were almost folded together into one child.

             
Through the bright sunlight and the smoke they had run – sunlight and smoke would forever be fused in her mind as a dreadful combination, the epitome of torment – until she at last had been dumped atop the rough floorboards of a cart.  The baby tumbled, none too gently, beyond her.  When she had tried to stand and look back for her mother, the arm had lowered again, but more firmly.  The strange voice had ordered her not to move.

             
Lie still, the brown man had told her.  Lie as still as death.

             
In later years the irony of his statement would bring a searing pain to her chest.  For while she had obediently lay just as he told her, the baby crushed to her side, the brown man had leapt into the cart and they had ridden from that yard of destruction.  The cart had rolled and rumbled.  The driver, whoever he was, did not seem to know his craft.  Under the ceaseless sun they had ridden, until the noise and mayhem of the farmyard finally faded, until the baby had sobbed himself into a shuddering sleep and at one point the brown hand had reached in yet again, to lift her head and pour water in her mouth, water from a canvas bag.

             
And then sleep must have come for her as well.  Merciful sleep, or perhaps just a type of shock. 

             
Because the next thing she saw with clarity was the ceiling of a room.  She was in a house, in a bed, and the wail of the baby from the next room had wakened her.  She called for her mother, of course she did, but the brown man was there in an instant.  He fed her, wiped her brow.  And when she dared once more, this final time, to ask for her mother, a kindly shake of his head told her everything.

             
This was her new life.

             
It was not a bad one.  The room was large and full of breezes.  The bed was soft, the food was plentiful.   Servants came and went, bringing some things and taking others away and there was one woman who was light skinned and clearly not a servant.  She came less frequently than the others.  As she looked at the bed that held the girl, her brow lowering as if something displeased her.  The child slid down in the bed and feigned sleep.  

             
Then – on the morning of the third day, perhaps the fourth - the child at last ventured from her bed.  She waited until the room was empty, then she stood, crossed the room, pushed open the door and found herself in a garden.  A beautiful garden.  The most beautiful garden she had ever seen.  The entire house must be enchanted, she decided.  She had never had a room of her own or even a bed of her own.  But here she had both, and soon enough a new dress, a lovely blue color, and a dolly to hold. At home her only dolly had been the real baby and he was disagreeable, always crying or wetting or demanding the limited attention of their mother.  But now, for the first time in her brief life, the girl was the center of attention. The servants fussed over her.  When she had eaten a certain plum pudding with enthusiasm, a duplicate had appeared the next day.  One of the women brushed her snarled mass of brown hair, tied it up in a great bow and turned her toward the mirror. 

             
This must be me, the child though.  The farmhouse had possessed no mirror, so this was the first time she had ever gazed upon her own face.  She was quite pretty.

             
Therefore…why did they not keep her?

             
The question would torture her for years to come.  Because one morning, without warning, a carriage came.  She was bundled into it along with the dolly and the blue dress. Taken to the orphanage where the blue dress was torn and the doll’s face cracked before the end of the first week.  And there, throughout the years, she had convinced herself that her brief time in paradise had been no more than a dream.

             
That was, until a certain day when an older gentleman had called, claiming he needed a nurse for his wife. 

             
She had been taken to a house.  A fine house, certainly, but nowhere near so fine as the house hidden away in her memory.  Is any scene ever quite as grand as our childhood hearts have painted it?  She might not have known it was the same place at all if it hadn’t been for the elephant.  The elephant with five legs.

             
Her conscious mind began to wage war against her unconscious one.  It was entirely unlikely that she had ever been in this house before.  Why would they have sent her away and – even stranger – why would they have returned so many years later to bring her back?  And yet the elephant greeted her - still beneath his palm tree, still with his great-earred face turned toward her bearing his rakish smile - as if to say that her exile from this paradise must have been the true dream.

             
Almost immediately, confirmation came.  The brown man was also still there, and still kind.  He did not appear to recognize her, but why should he?  More than thirty years had passed since he had grabbed the shrieking child from the farmyard and the woman standing before him now was a changed creature. He showed her through the house and spoke words of instruction that she did not fully understand.  But she nodded briskly, as if it all were clear.  She attempted to look modest, grateful, for she knew this was what was expected.  Despite her shock and confusion, she came to understand that a nurse was needed to care for the white woman.  The same chilling lady who had looked upon her with displeasure so long ago, but who was now much older, stooped and defeated by the years. And the man who had hired her, the one who was to pay her wages?  His face was familiar too.  He had been in the farmyard on the day of hell.  He was the one who had driven the carriage.  And he was also the one who had later taken her to the orphanage.

             
Her first impressions of the house had been confusing to the point of being nightmarish, but over time she came to accept the truth and to fill in even more detail.  She began to notice pictures all through the house of a boy.  A boy gradually growing up, just as boys always do.  A photograph at three or four, pulling a wagon. Then older, maybe seven, looking serious in what must have been his first school uniform.  The boy on the steps of a church, on the shore of a beach, the boy laughing and then pensive.  A picture of him in his teens, on a gay boat…was this a yacht?  She had heard the term but never seen a picture.  And finally the great portrait of him just on the brink of manhood, this time with paint dabbed on top of the photograph, hanging like royalty in his mother’s room.

             
Through the years she had, of course, wondered what had ever become of her baby brother.  But she had imagined his fate to be a masculine parallel of her own – that he had been taken to a home for foundling boys.  Now she could see the truth. 

             
She had been rejected, but he had been kept.

             
Whenever she was alone in the pale woman’s bedroom she would walk up to the portrait and consider it.  A garish thing it was, the man’s cheeks tinted a ludicrous shade of pink.  But there was no doubt that the face staring out at her was the face of her father.  Her brother had been not only kept, but cherished.  Simon had not only lived, he had become the son of a wealthy household. 

             
If she had been able to stop and think of it, she might have understood.  Simon was the right age for an adoption.  Could be more readily passed off as a true child of the pale woman, while where there was no way to explain the sudden presence of a five-year-old girl without raising any number of inconvenient questions.  Not to mention that she had been old enough to have a memory – fragmented but still there and damn inconvenient.  While he, an infant, had none.

             
But of course she had not been able to stop and think.   All she could do was despise them.  The fury hardened in her heart, day after day.  The pale woman and the large man, the twin demons of her banishment.   She hated them, but she hated discreetly and she hated with patience.  She devoted herself to understanding the rituals of the household.   How the brown powder was to be scooped out into the thin white cup.  The cup that the kitchen staff whispered was used by both the woman and the man.  

             
She plotted her measurements with care, for she was not the fool the world took her for.  She knew a bit of math and she knew the sort of tree that would help her.  One of them so obligingly grew in the garden of the Weaver household, the very garden she had explored as a child.   Even more dotted the grounds of the orphanage.  Enough that she could practice and plan.  The suicide tree, they called it, in acknowledgement that while there are those who cling stubbornly to life, no matter what pain it might have dealt them, there were also those who pursued death with equal fervor.

             
Death did not frighten her.  It had been, one might say, the only true constant of her life.  Her father had been killed in the first week of the uprising, her mother run through in the very doorframe of her house.  Her big brother Artie and her younger brother Allen and her sister Kathleen…all dead.   Only she and Simon had escaped and now Simon was someone else.  A man named Michael Everlee, a man who lived half a world away, a man who wore silk and rode in fine carriages while she….

             
Her plan had met with mixed results.  The woman was dead and while her husband lived, the word had come from the street that they had put him in the jail.  She had seen a newspaper with his picture on the cover.  ACCUSED the headline had screamed.  ACCUSED.  So she had not managed to kill them both, but she had killed the pale woman and sent the big man, most probably, to the gallows.  Which would have been quite enough…

             
Only there had been a grave error.  

             
Somehow the brown man too lay dead.

             
And this was not at all what she had planned. In killing her tormentors she had also managed to slay her savior.  And then, before she could even absorb this news, had come the equally dreadful realization that someone knew what she had done.  Someone was on to her, knew her true identity, that the castoff from the orphanage was the blood sister of a rising politician, the rejected ward of a great house, a survivor of the allegedly unsurvivable Cawnpore.

             
This would not do.

             
Now she sits in a pony cart.  Another one, yes, only this time she is jostling her way towards Cawnpore and not away from it.  She is surrounded by squirming, chattering girls but she does not really hear them. Her eyes are fixed on the distance, on a misty fortress which she does not remember and yet she must have spent the first five years of her life somewhere quite close to this place.  Perhaps on the other side of this hill, or maybe the one over there. 

             
Another homecoming, she thinks, and her mouth twists.  She does not bother to hide the expression.  No one ever pays attention to her, do they? Her invisibility has been both the blessing and the curse of her life.

             
Between her feet is wedged a pot of curry.  It is a perfectly fine curry.  Anyone in the procession might take a bowl without fear.  But in her pocket is a vial of brown liquid.  The liquid she now sees she must administer carefully, at the last minute, to make sure it finds its true mark.  For she is clever, far smarter than any of the people in these cursed carts could ever know.