Ryman, Rebecca (93 page)

Olivia
nodded. "Yes, I do see all that but about my question ..."

"I'm
coming to that, I coming to it." Animated, Ransome inched forward in his
seat as if to emphasise the importance of what he was about to say.
"Everything Josh had dreamed of achieving, you see, Jai seemed to achieve
first: sizable tea exports to America despite those Tea Parties, the innovation
of individual tea packets for the retail trade, the fastest fleet of seagoing
vessels out of Indian ports—and Josh's ultimate dream, steam navigation. Josh
had seen those giant tea trees up in Assam. Anyone who could cultivate
indigenous tea would be forever free of the bondage of China, of opium. Thanks
to his tribal heritage, Raventhorne did and was. Whereas European experimental
tea gardens struggled with labour problems, rising costs, poor quality crops,
Raventhorne's tribal kinsmen used their traditional expertise, and his gardens
thrived.

"Riddled
with envy and corrosive jealousies, Josh began to feel dangerously threatened.
And don't forget those acts of ruthless sabotage whereby our opium consignments
were consistently pillaged and our teas to London adulterated. Our reputation
was crumbling, our credibility was on the chopping block, the roots of our very
endeavours were being eroded—and Raventhorne
still flourished. The man was a maniac.
He had to be stopped somehow."

"And
so," Olivia mused aloud, "a lynching was arranged..."
Remembering her own glass of milk, she started to sip. Despite Ransome's
passionate efforts, somehow none of the dramatis personae in his story seemed
real to her anymore. From a distance, they all looked faded, like flowers
pressed between the pages of a book and forgotten.

"Yes."
He did not deny the charge. "The night-watchman's death was not part of
the plot, but everything else was. Thwarted in his ambitions, Josh forgot that
Jai was his son, forgot those early years, forgot all the indecisions and
contradictions, remembered only that the labours of his whole life were at
stake. He ... I too, of course, how can I deny that? . . . wanted Raventhorne
dishonoured, publicly disgraced, thrown out of Kirtinagar, barred from
commercial practice—"

"Hanged!"

He
was startled by her caustic interjection. "Yes," he conceded.
"Even that. And Raventhorne would have hanged, make no mistake about that,
had Josh revealed to Slocum the whereabouts of Das's body."

Olivia
sat up and looked openly sceptical. "Are you trying to tell me that he
didn't?"

Carefully,
Ransome reclined again. "I don't know. I wasn't with Josh that night. He
said
he did, but that Slocum dithered. By the time Slocum decided to move, the
Ganga
was out of reach anyway."

"He
said
he did? You don't believe that?"

"At
that time I didn't know
what
to believe!" He spread his hands.
"When I questioned Josh later outside Slocum's office, he flew into a
temper and shouted at me, railing obscenities. 'How dare you question my
motives, Arthur?' he yelled, apoplectic with rage. 'Don't you think I
want
to
see the bastard swing?' Well, I believed him then. But now I wonder again,
Olivia, I wonder again. I suppose I will always have to wonder now." The
deeply etched lines of sorrow were once more upon his face. "Had Josh
known that his daughter too had sailed with the
Ganga,
there would have
been no need to wonder."

Briefly,
the faded flowers pressed between the pages of memory burst into full blossom,
their colours alive and vibrant. The evening of her party leapt into Olivia's
inner vision as clear as crystal. "It was on this tenuous chance, this
whimsical fragment, that Raventhorne staked his life that day?" Like the
flowers,
her incredulity revived. "He could court certain death merely in the
hope
that his father would not be able to kill him? Because of some vague
childhood memory . . .?"

"Again,
I don't know. I simply do not know." He shook his head. "Unless
Raventhorne chooses to confide in us," he laughed at the absurdity,
"that too we will never know. But Raventhorne is canny, unnaturally
perceptive. And he has, as he warned us, a long memory. He remembers details,
has an arcane ability to reach into people's minds—as I once told you. Even as
a child, he was disquietingly intuitive. Perhaps there is some other-world
language he shares with his father; perhaps it told him something in those few
minutes. Or, perhaps, it was just his good luck. Besides, he had no choice
but
to face Josh's challenge."

"Of
course he had a choice!" Olivia scoffed. "He could have picked up the
Colt and shot his father instead. He
was
facing a challenge. It would
have been an act of self-defence."

"Yes.
He could have. And it would have been justified. I know a great deal, Olivia,
some of it admittedly conjecture, but I don't know everything. I certainly
don't know Jai anymore. Sometimes I feel I didn't even know Josh as well as I
had thought. What I
do
know with certainty, however, is that with his
despised weakness publicly exposed, Josh would not be able to live with
himself. He believed fervently that his son
had
desecrated his daughter,
he believed that he
should
be killed, he believed that he
would
be
the one to do it. But when the time came, he could not look into his son's eyes
and wilfully destroy him. It was a moment of bitter self-knowledge for Josh. He
was fallible like other human beings—and in that fallibility, he had let
Raventhorne snatch victory away from him. No—that he could never have lived
with."

This
time as he relapsed into silence and the quiet expanded into ticking minutes,
Olivia presumed that he was finally finished, and she rose. If, by breaking the
seal of confession with such brutal frankness, Ransome had expunged much from
his conscience, he had also exhausted himself completely. But he still made no
move to rise with Olivia. Obviously, there was more he had to say. His gaze,
open and steady until now, dropped towards his toes as if the weight of his
eyelids prevented him from meeting her patiently questioning eyes.

"You
asked me something earlier that I was not ready to reveal to you then, not
because I intended to withhold it but because I am covered with shame at what
else was perpetrated. Yes, Jai has a great deal against me too! This, you see,
has to do
with his mother." Alert again, Olivia shook off her drowse and reseated
herself. "Once more we have to go back three decades, to when Josh saw
that forgotten naiad again. What he felt for her now was not passion but pity.
Removed from her pastoral utopia, she had become ordinary in his eyes, merely
another native woman like one of the ayahs. In his persisting guilt he was
still kind to her, but throughout those eight years of her stay in his house he
was terrified that one day she would, perhaps unwittingly, reveal her secret.
And his!"

"And
she never did? She never confided in anyone, even the other servants?"
This was another aspect that Olivia's rational mind could not accept.
"Knowing servants and their penchant for gossip, surely they did at least
talk amongst themselves about their suspicions?"

He
nodded, but a trifle impatiently. "It is precisely this that I am about to
explain. As for Jai's mother, no, she didn't confide in anyone, perhaps not
even in her son. Josh had forbidden her to, you see. For her that was enough.
She loved him, you know. Right until the end, she loved Josh without seeming
qualification. If the servants did gossip among themselves, well, half-breeds
were no longer a novelty. Many sahibs kept Indian mistresses, some of whom
might be good-looking domestics from their own households. It is an iniquitous
sign of our times, Olivia, that to some Englishmen such arrangements are included
in their rights as rulers. And many Indians—curse their submissive fatalism!—
meekly accept that right without question, some even with pride." For a
moment he forgot his indignation to glower at the fire-red tip of yet another
cheroot. Then he recollected the thread of his intended revelation and shook
off the momentary deviation. "Nor should you find it surprising, Olivia,
that in later years no one in station has made the connection between Lady
Stella Templewood and Jai. She died even before Estelle was born. Jai did not
return to make his splash until many years after even that. Apart from myself
and maybe one or two oldtimers, no one remembers the
colour
of Lady
Templewood's unusual eyes!"

But
Olivia was no longer interested in that obscure phenomenon; what gripped her
mind now with curious tenacity was that blameless waif and her blind devotion
to one who so little deserved it. It was about her that she wanted to learn
more. "But did the girl never want justice for herself? For her child?
Uncle Josh's one callous command was enough to keep her quiet?"

"Yes,
it was enough. For her, it was enough. But it was not enough for the rest of
us. To ensure that she did not break her
silence, we initiated other
precautions. We kept the girl quiet on opium." His eyes again dropped to
his toes, his deliberate monotone more expressive than any emotion. "The
idea originated with Lady Templewood, but we both, Josh and I, endorsed it with
enthusiasm. And it was those lethal little pellets that put the unbreakable
seal on her tongue. They made her a slave to our will. They drove her and kept
her chained to that dream-world where there is no inconvenient reality, no
escape. By the time Jai was eight, she could not survive a day without those
pellets. She was a hopeless addict and, of course, no longer a threat to our
respectability."

From
Olivia no comment was required, nor was any offered. But even though the fire
glow was warm, she felt her extremities tingle with cold. Haunted by his
relentlessly resurrected private ghosts, Ransome shuddered. Wordlessly he rose
now, glanced at his pocket watch through obscuring tears, then nodded, as if
really aware of the time it told him, and picked his coat off the back of a
chair. He started to put it on in front of the long mirror, fastening each
button with meticulous intent.

"So
you see, my dear, between us we destroyed Jai's young mother." His air of
calm was a façade; inwardly he was trampled by guilt. "We sacrificed her
without a care in the good cause of preserving our pristine reputations. Oh
yes—Jai Raventhorne has plenty against me still, plenty!" He thrust his
hands deep into his pockets and a bitter little smile sat on his mouth.
"What he has been seeking to redeem over these many years is merely this
infamous disparity in the scales of justice. All things considered, would you
not say we have been entirely deserving of his vengeance?"

Mumbling
apologies for having ruined her rightful hours of sleep with his pointless
remembrances, expressing gratitude to her for having listened to them with such
patience, he quietly walked out the door. Still shaken by his final confession,
Olivia watched him go in silence.

It
was almost three o'clock in the morning. They had talked for hours, scratched
many surfaces beneath which wounds still throbbed. By all considerations Olivia
should have been exhausted, her debilitated body screaming for slumber. But in
the aftermath of Ransome's pitiless self-recriminations she felt wide awake,
strangely re-energised. All at once her thoughts raced on several levels, her
mental revival as therapeutic as Dr. Humphries's copious medications. For one,
talk of Hal Lubbock, even in passing, had jarred her into a much needed
reminder. She too was
an American, a born and bred fighter! All her life she had lived with the
glowing example of a father who never conceded defeat even when defeat was a
foregone conclusion. He had taught her to detest moral cowards, to despise
those who would not fight, who surrendered without even attempting battle. She
had suffered a setback, true, but—as Dr. Humphries had pointed out—it was not
the end of the world. Why should she hide in corners from Jai Raventhorne? What
would her father have to say now if he could see her crippled with anxiety,
wallowing in self-pity? His advice to her, were it available now, would be to
let
Jai Raventhorne return and do his worst! If circumstances ordained that she
had to stay, had to fight, then she would stay and accept his challenges as
they came. And if he ever dared to claim her son and try and remove him from
her, she would not make the mistake her uncle had: She would aim straight for
Jai Raventhorne's heart. And she would not miss.

The
complex, cathartic narration with which Arthur Ransome had sought to relieve
his long-fermenting transgressions had melded in Olivia's mind the past with
the present in odd, patchwork patterns. Her heart ached for him; he had not
spared himself even though his was not the major part in the conspiracy. In his
generous loyalty to his dead friend, he nonetheless appropriated half the
blame. This other level on which Olivia's thoughts raced produced inner
turmoils of a different nature, guilt in another direction. As much as Ransome
had been able to, as much as he would ever be able to, he had cast off some of
the ballast weighting down his conscience. It was perhaps time she too did the
same.

Ignoring
the dawn of another day and the fact that she had not slept at all, Olivia sat
down at her desk to write another, longer, letter to her cousin Estelle.

It
was the season of Christmas.