City of Bells (39 page)

             
“The news, Sir?”

             
“That his stepfather is being set free.  His purpose here in Bombay is done.”

             
“But the rest of it, Sir?  The bit about how he came to live with the Weavers and the truth about who Leigh Anne Hoffman truly is?”

             
“Use your discretion.” 

             
“My…discretion, Sir?”

             
“Absolutely.”  Trevor picked up his woven dome hat, the one he had bought merely two days before but which was already stained with sweat and streaked with dust, and nodded briskly at Seal.  “Let us hurry with our paperwork, you and I,” he said.  “And give us until sunset before you set your wheels of justice into motion.  It’s just as Emma says, but if we try, we may still be able to extract some small sliver of good from this hopeless mess.”

***

The Belvedere Hotel – Bombay

12:5
0 PM

              “You are telling me I have a sister?”

             
Michael Everlee was blinking back tears.  He strained toward Davy with such intense hope that for a moment the boy faltered.

             
“Yes,” he finally conceded.  “Two of the five children of the Sloane family were rescued on the day of the Cawnpore attack.  You were an infant and your sister was nearly six years old.”

             
And now he will ask,
Davy thought. 
He will ask the inevitable question, which is how one of the children ended up being adopted by the Weavers, to live a life of privilege, and the other was deposited at an orphanage, to fend for herself.

             
But Everlee asked no such question.  His face, in fact, was glowing with joy.

             
“I always knew I wasn’t their proper son,” he said, leaping up to resume his characteristic pacing.  “Not really.  For I displeased them, you see, in a dozen small ways.  Oh yes, Officer, they gave me all the finer things, but they …they never really cared for me. Even as a child I knew that I was there to serve a need, to be the required heir and proof of something – although precisely what my presence was meant to prove, I never understood until today.  They sent me off to England as early as they decently could, and there I stayed.”

             
“Your last name gave you certain privileges,” Davy said mildly, hoping his voice was devoid of reproach.  For neither he nor any of his brothers had gotten past primary school and he had never set foot within the walls of Parliament.

             
“They worked to set me forth with their agenda,” Everlee said, “but I never fit the prototype of what they wanted in a son.  As you have likely noticed, Inspector, I have certain inclinations…Oh, do not misunderstand me.  I am like Jonathan Benson, the very soul of discretion, and still they found means to mock me.”  He stopped pacing and turned to face Davy.  “But now it all is clear.  For I am not the son of the great Roland Everlee or even his pale echo, Anthony Weaver.  No, not at all. I stand before you the youngest child of some middling officer who most likely managed to get himself killed the first day of the mutiny.”

             
But with this the obvious thought finally dawned and Everlee cocked his head.  “My older sister,” he said.  “Why would they take her to the orphanage and not me?”

             
“She was too old to be passed off as a blood child,” Davy said.  “It seems your mother - pardon me, I mean Mrs. Weaver – had concocted some fiction about being with child before the mutiny began.  She didn’t want to be shipped back to London with the other ladies.”

             
“A fictional pregnancy?    But surely her husband…  Or her doctor…”

             
“Husbands can be hoodwinked and doctors can be bought.”

             
Everlee grimaced and resumed pacing.   “That’s no surprise.  Apparently anyone or anything can be bought in Bombay. So Rose had concocted this story to allow her to stay close to her lover, Weaver?

             
Davy nodded, taking note of how quickly “mother” and “father” had become “Rose” and “Weaver.”

             
“Apparently,” he said.  “Weaver has confessed that they were prepared to announce an equally false miscarriage in due time.”

             
“Ah,” said Everlee, his nimble politician’s mind grasping the implications at once.  “But then came the uprising, and Roland’s death, and the unexpected boon of two children.  The girl quite the wrong age but the boy just about perfect to carry their fiction to fruition.  For a widow holding the hero’s child in her arms is an even more pitiable figure, is she not?  And the man who steps in swiftly to marry her and raise that child, even more admirable?  I was not kept because I was loved.  I was kept because I was useful.  The truth is sometimes a bitter pill to swallow, is it not, Officer Mabrey?”

             
“Sometimes,” said Davy, but he would have described the truth as being more like one of the elephants he had seen at the waterfront.  A cumbersome thing, which has to be prodded into motion.  But when it finally begins to move, then Davy knew that the unchecked truth could rapidly become a danger, stumbling through the square and injuring any number of innocent bystanders. 

             
“What became of my sister, Officer Mabrey?  Tell me.  For you know her story, I can see it in your face.”

             
Davy hesitated, genuinely unsure of what to do next.  Two souls had made a lasting impression on his young heart.  One was Trevor, with his notebooks and microscopes and fingerprinting kits and – most of all - his insistence on the truth.  The truth at all costs, even when it was painful and inconvenient.  The other was his mum.  Davy could see her standing out in their scrappy little yard, pinning a wet sheet to a sagging clothesline and saying, “Kindness, love.  It’s what matters most in the end.”

             
Everlee was prepared to accept that his sister was Adelaide, not Leigh Anne.  In truth he and his sister were very much alike - both had risen through their wits and tenacity to the top of the heap, even if her heap was an orphanage for half-breeds and his heap was Parliament.  But instead he had been quick to assume his sister was a woman who had found herself a total outcast, someone who had spent her entire life fitting in neither here nor there.

             
He accepts it,
thought Davy,
for he too has always felt like an outcast. In this whole tangle of good and evil, it is Adelaide and Everlee who are somehow a pair.

             
Davy considered the man before him.  He was a thoroughly unpleasant creature on many levels – pompous and bullying, not above trying to force the hand of the Queen herself or getting Rayley thrown from the Byculla Club.  The man who was so uncaring when his lackey Benson was killed, and so willing to bribe Morass to bring convenient information to light and leave other, less useful, facts in the shadows. But Davy could also see the rejected child who lived within.   His evaluation of the Weavers and their motives was undoubtedly apt.  They didn’t want him - they wanted the pictures, the proof of his existence, the convenience of an heir.  It was the child Michael who proved them to be a family and not a nest of vipers.

             
He has been alone and lonely all his life,
Davy thought
. And what of Adelaide?  Her youth had been even more brutish and solitary.  Would it really be such a grave miscarriage of justice if these two ended up together?  Believed themselves to be a proper family?

             
“The Weavers did not give me much,” Everlee was saying.  “Not in terms of love and understanding.  But they did give me a hero’s name and a large inheritance and I promise you I shall use both, Officer Mabrey, to rectify the slights my sister has suffered.  She shall have not only the best doctors London can offer, but she shall recover in my home and when she is well, I shall introduce her…”

             
His voice trailed off and Davy’s imagination was left to finish the thought.  He was struck with the vision of Adelaide scrambling over the garden wall, her legs splayed and arms grasping like those of an ape.  Could this man really introduce such a woman to his political allies in London as his sister?

             
But from the set of Everlee’s chin, there was no doubt he intended to try.  His determination to have family, at long last family, seemed to override every doubt.

             
Trevor said some good might come of all this
, thought Davy. 
It is up to me to see that it does.

             
“So your trip to India has given you back your sister,” Davy said to Everlee, who was now unashamedly wiping tears and even nose drippings onto the sleeve of his Savile Row suit.  “And a sister is a fine thing to have, is it not? I have often wished that I could claim as much.”

             
“True, true.”  Everlee paused.  “But will she be prosecuted?”

             
Davy swallowed.  The question would require another lie, this one more convoluted than the first.  For it was a lie mixed with the truth and they were, in the end, the trickier kind.  For a moment he almost sympathized with the icy Rose Weaver, who had found herself caught in the snare of a faked pregnancy and thus forced to tell one mistruth after another to protect the first.

             
“Any doctor, whether bought by a bribe or not,” he finally said “would readily testify that Adelaide is not in possession of her full senses.  She did not plan the crimes herself, but was merely acting on orders issued by her headmistress, a woman with a most powerful personality and whom Adelaide viewed as a figure of absolute authority.”

             
“I know this Miss Hoffman,” Everlee said with a shudder.  “And she is bad business indeed.  That day at Cawnpore- “

             
“Yesterday.”

             
“Yesterday?”  Everlee frowned.  “Yes, you are right, it was merely yesterday.  Anyway, at one point when I was descending the hill I found Miss Hoffman simply standing there at the bottom and staring up at me.  The expression on her face was most disconcerting.  I would readily believe that woman to be capable of anything.”

             
Davy forced himself to feign a shrug.  “The important thing is that Trevor has convinced Seal it is unlikely a jury would convict Adelaide.  If the case were heard in London, a judge will most merely refer her to the care of an asylum.  Or more likely, in lieu of an institution, to a doting relative who swears to fend for her.”

             
“And that I shall,” said Everlee. “She shall have the most advanced practitioners in London, not these half-wits of the Raj.  And I believe the change of scenery shall do her good as well.  Get her away from this place and all its memories – even those memories that we don’t precisely know we remember, if you follow my drift.”

             
“I do,” said Davy.  The man’s desire to save this woman – and thus himself in the process – was touching, and therefore worthy of the lie.  They were both innocents, after all, their lives knocked off course in earliest childhood, forced to live out fates that were never fully their own.
I am becoming the dissembler of the group,
Davy thought.
Dispensing justice along the shape of my own conscience, and all I can say in my defense is that the two times I have failed to come forward with all I knew of the truth, I was in Russia and then in India.  Lands not my own, places where I have taken no vow to enforce the law of the realm.  If all of this had happened in England, it would end much differently…I would be forced to say “But this girl is not your sister.  Your blood sister, to use the painfully apt term, goes by the name of Leigh Ann Hoffman and she will be arrested this afternoon for the murders of three people.”  But we are not in England.  We are in India where the only task I have committed to is the freedom of Anthony Weaver.  That has been accomplished, and thus I can allow my sympathies to override my honesty. 

             
“So you say that your group is sailing today,” Michael said, returning to himself a little as he wiped his face.  “On the
Fortitude
in midafternoon?  I wish to go as well.  Shall we ride together to the dock, the three of us?  For I plan to hire a driver to take me to that wretched temple and collect my sister at once.”

             
“Yes, with any luck we might all be on the same ship,” Davy said.  “But you must go on to the dock without me.  I have one more stop to make before I bid a final farewell to India.”

             
“Ah, India,” Michael said, at last fishing a handkerchief from a pocket and giving his nose a proper blow.  “It confounded us all, did it not?  And yet it is still as miraculous and as spiritual as everyone claims it to be.  Do you think you shall ever return?”

             
“Absolutely not,” Davy said.