City of Bells (37 page)

             
She looked at him blankly.

             
“Like photographs taken of the very ends of your fingers,” Rayley continued.  Something about the woman’s stare made him feel guilty.  “Have you ever had your photograph taken?”

***

The Office of Hubert Morass

9:50 AM

             
The baby, Simon, had grown to be the man now known as Michael Everlee.  That was the easy part. On the first night they had all met him, back at the Byculla Club, Everlee had bragged he was one of the youngest men in Parliament.  Thirty-three in September, which was precisely the age of the faceless infant in the picture.  Rebecca and her husband Leigh?  Both dead.  Their elder sons and younger daughter?   Also gone.  But the oldest girl, just like the youngest boy, lived on. 

             
And the orphanage had not changed her given name. 

             
Trevor stood.  Walked briskly from the rooms of the police station and across the barren courtyard to the adjacent jail.  He passed Davy, in a cell and pressing the hand of some valet or carriage boy into the pad of ink, and made his way to the next cell, where Tom was extracting blood from the half-naked form of Hubert Morass.  He looked up as Trevor entered.

             
“Go to Mrs. Morrow’s home at once and fetch your aunt,” Trevor said.  “And then make sure Weaver is comfortable enough to talk to her.  Really talk.  We can create an evidence trail if need be, but I suspect a confession will be much faster.”

Chapter T
wenty-Two

Bombay Jail
Infirmary

10:32 AM

              If I ever find myself arrested in Bombay,
Tom thought,
I must remember to pretend to be ill. 
For the infirmary was a far more agreeable setting than the jail, a bedroom in the warden’s own home.  In fact, propped as he was in a high bed with a fan lazily circulating overhead, Anthony Weaver looked more like a family guest than an inmate.

             
Tom entered the room and introduced himself.  Weaver was uninterested in the news he was with Scotland Yard, but stirred when Tom added the fact he was also Geraldine Bainbridge’s grand- nephew.  And when Tom further explained that Gerry was waiting for Weaver only a few feet away, in the parlor, the man visibly shivered with emotion.

             
“Help me wash my face and comb my hair, boy,” Weaver said.  “I don’t have a proper shirt, but I…”

             
“Yes, I will help you,” Tom said, surprised and a bit impressed the old man could still muster a tone of authority after all he’d been through.  “And I can also offer you a bit of laudanum if you think it will help you compose your mind.”

             
Weaver’s gaze flitted wildly around the room.  “A week ago…”

             
Tom nodded briskly.  “I know.  A week ago you would have sold your soul for such an offer and the worst of the withdrawal is past you now. I assure you that my purpose is not to force you back into the grip of addiction, merely to give you a very small dose of the drug.  Just enough to help you master your nerves.  And only if you want it.”

             
“You are ensuring I will be pliable to any plan you have in mind.”

             
Tom hesitated.  Judging by what Dr. Tufts had told him as well as the man’s extraordinary pallor, Tom concluded that Weaver’s level of discomfort must be significant.   But just as he was preparing to withdraw his offer, the man looked at him with exhausted eyes and said, “Just do not make me nonsensical, boy.  For my sweet Gerry has come to me at last.”

             
“Not too much,” Tom promised.  “Only enough to soften the edge.”

             
“The edge,” Weaver said softly and rolled up his sleeve, readying for the injection.  By the way he tightened his fist and rolled his arm toward Tom to expose the best veins, Tom knew he was dealing with a veteran of the opiate wars. 

             
Ten minutes later Weaver emerged from the room washed, combed, shaved, and wearing a fresh shirt.  Geraldine turned from where she was standing by a parlor window.  For a moment, neither of them spoke.

             
“Geraldine,” Weaver finally managed to croak.  “You are exactly the same.”

             
“I most certainly am not,” she replied.  “Although I will admit that I am less changed than you are.  That is the advantage of having been plain in one’s youth.  The thief of time doesn’t find quite so much to steal.”

             
Weaver brayed a bark of laughter.  “And your spirit is as intact as your face.”  He gestured toward a small table and settee where the warden’s wife – the same romantic woman who had readily surrendered one of her husband’s clean shirts for this early morning tryst between two long-separated lovers – had placed a pot of breakfast tea and an assortment of biscuits.  “Let us sit and talk,” he said.  “I have confessed first to your friend Welles and then to your friend Abrams, telling them so many stories that I am like one of those excavation sites in Egypt or Pompeii, stripped layer by layer of anything valuable I have to yield.”

             
Geraldine smiled and moved toward the settee.  “Knowing you, Anthony, I rather doubt that.  You have always known how to hold something back.”

             
“Just so,” he said, joining her.  “The best of my secrets have all been saved for you.”

***

The Bombay Jail

10:40 AM

             
Rayley burst into the jail cell.  “So here we go at last,” he gasped.  “The fingerprints of Adelaide and Leigh Anne Hoffman.  Surely one of them will match those on the glass.”

             
Davy looked up.  “They raised no resistance?”

             
“Not as much as I would have guessed.  Adelaide is terrified of anything new, but the Hoffman woman….I get the sense she understands the jig is up.”  Rayley looked around the small cell.  “Where is Tom?”

***

Bombay Jail Infirmary

10:40 AM

             
“Rose was never actually pregnant, you see,” Anthony was saying.  “Of all the lies which were told in the year of the mutiny, that is the one, in retrospect, which seems the most pivotal.”

             
Tom, who sat unobtrusively in the corner taking notes, noted that Weaver’s voice was calm.  Good.  He had hit the dosage right.  Enough to dull the man’s pain but not enough to render him, in his own words, “nonsensical.”

             
“Rose was not pregnant,” Geraldine echoed with a pensive frown.  “I don’t know why I didn’t consider that possibility.  I knew, of course, that the reason she had journeyed from India to London in the first place was to consult with doctors there.  She never confided the exact nature of her ailment, but it was obvious she was nearing forty and had never borne a child.”

             
“The physicians in London told her that motherhood was impossible,” Weaver said.

             
“You traveled with her, in both directions?”

             
Weaver winced with memory, even though everyone in the room was aware that far worse confessions were likely coming.  “I accompanied Rose only at Roland’s insistence.  She felt guilty over not having given him a son and  Roland feared that if the news from the London doctors was discouraging, as would likely be the case, she might collapse.  He did not want her to be alone.”

             
“But yet, he did not go with her himself.”

             
“He was Secretary-General of the Presidency in a time of growing unrest.  You know Roland.  All duty.  I was expendable.”

             
Geraldine’s expression did not change.  “You and Rose were lovers, even then?”

             
Another spasm crossed Weaver’s face, but it was less intense this time. “We became so while we were in London.  When the doctors told her that she was likely barren, she was of course inconsolable…”

             
“Which didn’t stop you from trying to console her.”

             
Weaver leaned toward her.  “The story I must tell you, Geraldine, is not a pretty one.  But I believe that if you can bear to listen, and if I can bear to tell it, that it may bring peace to us both.  The truth is that I was attracted to Rose’s sorrow.  Her fragility, her delicacy…even her weeping.  All of these things served to make her somehow finer in my foolish, mawkish eyes.”

             
“It strikes me as the great mystery of all time,’ Geraldine said, “why a man will ruin himself in the pursuit of a certain kind of woman.”  Her voice held a trace of bitterness, an emotion she rarely indulged.  But even after so many years, the advantages that the Roses of the world held over the Geraldines of the world still smarted.  An intelligent and passionate woman with an unfortunate face might be packed off to England, and thus obscurity, on the order of a selfish shrew who chance had blessed with a symmetrical profile and slender waist.

             
Weaver was looking at her sharply, as if intrigued by this sudden display of anger.  “And I suppose you are suggesting that no woman has ever dashed herself on the rocks out of love for an unworthy man?  I think we need not indulge that fantasy, my dearest, not when we sit here in this charming little parlor with the truth all around us.  Life is never fair, and romantic love is the least fair of all.”

             
“So you became her lover in England,” Geraldine said, making no comment on this last observation. There was no comment to make, for she knew that he was right.  “No doubt the very night she turned to you in tears over her doctors’ damning diagnosis.”

             
He nodded. “Quite true. And the fact I knew she would not conceive even managed to alleviate my guilt in taking Roland’s wife into my bed.  For this is a man’s greatest fear, you know.  That he will be cuckolded in this most primal way.  That he will raise another man’s child, believing it to be his own.”  Weaver reached for his cup of tea.  “Upon our return to Bombay, Rose told her husband quite honestly what her doctors had said, that it was unlikely she would ever become pregnant.  The situation twisted only later, after the uprisings began.  Roland wanted to send her back to England until the danger had passed.”

             
“As you sent me.”

             
“As I sent you.”

             
“To be rid of me.”

             
In the corner, Tom frowned.  Neither of the older people seemed to notice.  They had a score to settle, and not much time to do it.

             
“My motives were mixed,” Weaver said.  “I cared for you, Geraldine, very deeply. You know the circumstances of our engagement, as well as I do.”  He gave another bark of a laugh.  “It was hardly moonlight and lilies, was it, my darling?   But once we found ourselves socially yoked, I found much merit in the idea.”

             
“Much merit in the idea?  You are a sweet talker, Anthony, even now.”

             
“You have guessed half of the rest already, no doubt,” he said, “but let me tell you just the same.  Yes, you and I may have stumbled into physical intimacy based on my miscalculation, and then we stumbled into a betrothal based a miscalculation of your own.  One might say our entire relationship was accidental.  And yet….once I got used to the idea, I began to see that it might be my salvation.  Rather I should say that I hoped you might be my salvation.”

             
Geraldine appeared to be absorbed in the trifling task of selecting a biscuit from the tray. “But you were all youth and strength and charm. Whatever could you have needed saving from?”

             
“Come now, Gerry, don’t be a fool. I needed what every other man needs.  To be pulled from my smallness, my fear, my tendency to always take the easy downhill road.  I needed to be saved from the darkness in my heart.  And you might have done that – been more of an angel of fortune than a mistake – had it not been for Rose.”

             
“She did not wish to return to London.”

             
“She did not.”  He shrugged.  “And she called it ‘home,’ strange to report.  I remember her most specifically saying ‘I will never go home.’  Of course all British citizens call England ‘home,’ even those who have lived the entirety of their lives in India.”

             
“With me gone, she knew she could reclaim you,” Geraldine said, her voice having dropped almost to a whisper.

             
Weaver nodded.  “I can’t think why.  She never loved me.  I was a dalliance, but you know how it is with a child and a toy.  She might put it down in boredom but the minute another child shows interest… she was jealous of you.“

             
“Bosh.  Rose Everlee would never have been jealous of the likes of Geraldine Bainbridge,” Gerry said, leaning back against the soft settee and closing her eyes as a memory drifted by.  The image of Rose’s hands on the rails of the
Weeping Susan
as the ship made its long-delayed entrance into Bombay harbor.  The two women had stood side by side, and Geraldine had happened to notice their four hands, lined up and gripping the railing.  Rose’s were small, white, dainty, and bejeweled.  Her own had been large, blunt, and unadorned. “I have come prepared to listen to anything you want to tell me, Anthony, and to accept it as the truth.  But the one thing I know deep in my soul is that Rose would have never feared me.”

             
“Perhaps she didn’t at first,” Weaver said, pouring more tea.  “In fact, I shall confess we laughed about it, that night after you and I became so awkwardly engaged.  She said you would be the perfect cover for our affair and I shall further risk your rage by reporting that she described you as vague.  ‘Vague,’ she said, ‘in the way bookish women so often are.’  But in time, as you and I became closer, as I unwisely confessed that my affection for you was growing…”

             
He stopped.  A silence fell over the room.

             
“You know, once….” Weaver finally said, after sipping his tea, “I was walking through the compound and found one of the soldiers kissing his sweetheart.  An English girl, and heaven knows how he had managed to smuggle her through the gates.  I reprimanded him, of course.  Had the girl delivered back to her parents in disgrace.  He was furious at being caught and, just as the girl was packed into her carriage, he said to me ‘You are too old to remember how it feels.’  But he was wrong, for no matter how old I become I shall never forget that night on the
Weeping Susan. 
The first.  That endless night without sleep.  You know the one.”