The Mountain of Light (28 page)

Henry rode to the outskirts of Lahore to meet her. She descended from the
palki
in a faded blue gown, the lace at her collar and the edges of her sleeves fraying, her face brown under a straw hat. Her skin was pitted with prickly heat. She was thinner than he remembered, older also—but then so was he.

He held her hands, and felt an overwhelming rush of emotion for this woman who had braved seas, squalls, heat, and a dangerous journey to find her way to him.

“You'll still marry me, Honoria?”

“That is why I'm here, darling Henry,” she said, her eyes shining with love.

He sent her to the
zenana
at the fort. The next day the vicar rode in from Firozpur. And in Jahangir's Quadrangle, with his brother John on one side, the Maharajah of the Punjab on the other, he waited for her to walk up to him in a pale green gown, a spray of tiny white jasmines in her hair, and took her for his wife.

Once, many years later, after their children had been born, he asked her how that first day at Lahore had been.

“The girl in the
zenana
was very kind,” she said. “If you hadn't loved me, Henry, I think you could have been in love with her.”

April, 1850

Four years later

T
he whole third page of the
Bombay Herald,
almost all of it actually, was taken up with the advertisement by Dossabhoy Merwanjee and Co., addresses at 6, Parsee Bazaar Street, in Bombay. They were “American” importers, purveyors of all things American, from the basest—kerosene oil, navy stores, ropes, canvas, lumber—to the finest—tobacco, bar soaps, Waltham watches, and Dr. Townsend's famed and celebrated sarsaparilla, a tonic for the purification of the blood and for curing dullness or lassitude.

Having had his weekly paper all laid out—and to accommodate this relatively late-breaking story—Mr. Wingate, the publisher, cut out a small corner at the bottom right of the full-page advertisement and inserted the story there. It looked odd enough that people noticed it, and consequently the advertisement. And Mr. Dossabhoy, bathed, his beard spruce, fresh and cool in his white vest at the entrance to his store, was gratified to see large crowds who cleaned out his stock of the sarsaparilla.

The story, by “our local correspondent,” read simply,
Under other circumstances, the visit of a Governor-General would be nothing less than royal, but not if we are to believe that Lord Dalhousie slipped into Bombay two days ago, under cover of dark, without notice to Lord Falkland, who as Governor of this city, has sorely missed an opportunity to parade the other Lord around with a plenitude of pomp.

Why, one wonders, all this secrecy? Would it have something to do with the annexation of the lands of the Maharajah Ranjit Singh? Or with the jewels of his famed Toshakhana? Or with one specific stone—large as a woman's clenched fist, the ransom of a king . . . on its way, perhaps, to a Queen?

Mr. Wingate had once been sued for libel and slander by a man who had offended him, and about whom, previously, he had not been flattering in his
Bombay Herald
. But this story, with its innuendos and delighted whisperings,
had
to have some truth in it. The Government of India and the East India Company could hardly call him out in public without revealing at least some of those truths.

Two nights ago, driving back in his horse-drawn carriage, Wingate had passed the Treasury part of Fort George, and who should be coming out of it but Lord Dalhousie—with a smile on his face! Now, everyone knew that the dour Governor-General never found occasion for mirth. A smile would spoil that handsome façade of which he was possessed; even perhaps, ruffle that coolly blond hair so carefully brushed across his noble forehead.

So, sitting in his carriage, wrapped in a cigar-smoke fug, his mind pleasantly blurred by an evening of port, brandy, sherry, Madeira, and a splendid dinner, Mr. Wingate was sure that this man was none other than Dalhousie. He had been last reported in the Punjab, in Lahore; for him to appear in Bombay could only mean that he had brought here something from the Punjab. Something so secret, so valuable, it had to be deposited into the Treasury building. Why else would he be here? Dalhousie surely had a furtive air about him.

The next morning, behind his cluttered and paper-strewn desk, Mr. Wingate was reading the ship lists that his
Herald
published every six months. His blunt, nicotine-yellow finger rubbed its way down the columns. Ah, here it was. On the first of April 1850, on regular schedule, the P & O paddle steamer the SS
Indus
was to depart from Bombay to Suez. From Suez to Alexandria, via Cairo, would be a three- or four-day journey at the most, and by the twenty-second or so, one of the P & O steamers that plied the Mediterranean route—Alexandria to Southampton or Portsmouth—would pick up Indian passengers and take them to England by the end of the month.

The list of warships at the Government Docks in Bombay was not so readily available to the public, but Mr. Wingate nonetheless received a copy of it at the beginning of each month. The frigate HMS
Megaera,
commissioned as a troopship, was due to arrive in two days, and . . . the HMS
Medea
was already at dock. This last, as Mr. Wingate read, was a second-class sloop, a warship, troops and cannons and other fine things, he assumed.

He glanced up at the tear-off calendar he had got as a gift from Dossabhoy Merwanjee & Co. when buying—of all things non-American—a couple of Persian carpets from them. There had been very little discount on the carpets, even though Mr. Wingate had given Dossabhoy a quarter rate cut on a full-page advertisement in the
Herald
for a whole three months. Mr. Wingate groaned. Twelve weekly page spaces to that well-fed and slick Dossabhoy, all for two Persian carpets and a cheap paper calendar with no colored paintings on it. However, the Persian carpets had kept his wife from complaining, and she happily massaged the plush pile with her toe while chatting desultorily with visitors during her “at homes.” And the calendar now told him that it was the twenty-fifth of March, some six days before the
Indus
's departure.

He sent his
chai
boy to smoke English cigarettes at the Government Docks and distribute them liberally in exchange for information. The HMS
Megaera
would be leaving tomorrow night, and she was headed to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Curious, Mr. Wingate said. Why there? The jail is there, Sahib, the boy said. A penal colony in the Andamans, thought Mr. Wingate. He was quite certain the Bay of Bengal and the islands were not in the direction of England, but to make doubly sure, he pulled out his Victoria Regina Atlas and traced over Madras and then out into the Indian Ocean. There they were, scattered in a tattered line in the middle of the waters, far, far away from England.

And the
Medea
? he asked the
chai
boy. It goes to England, Sahib, very soon, even the deckhands did not seem to know when. The man commanding the ship, Captain Lockyer, has orders to take onboard two men from some . . . government office, and to follow their orders. The captain is not very happy about leaving the fate of his ship in the hands of two nonnaval men.

Mr. Wingate gazed with adoration at the sweaty, scrawny face of his
chai
boy. He was an unprepossessing lad, long of nose, big of mouth, knobby about the knees that showed under his khaki uniform shorts. His hair was always thick with oil, and he reeked of the coconut. But he had performed a veritable miracle.

Would he, Mr. Wingate inquired delicately, happen to know the names of the two, um, nonnaval men? Co-lo-nel Mac Gragor and a Cap-i-tane Ramsay, the boys at the dock said that this second man had the same name as the Governor-General.

Colonel McGregor and Captain Ramsay, Mr. Wingate decided. He went for his
Burke's Peerage,
and again, his finger laboriously moved over the pages until he came to the current Earl of Dalhousie, who had a given name (among many) of Ramsay, and who was the head of the clan of Ramsay,
and whose father was a Sir William Ramsay. Why, thought Mr. Wingate with sheer delight—Dalhousie's family was littered with Ramsays! So this captain was surely, as the
chai
boy said, a kinsman.

He searched assiduously through the military lists and found a few McGregors, a few MacGregors, but none of them seemed important enough—subalterns, or lieutenants, one a captain. It made no sense. Who
was
this McGregor?

Mr. Wingate thought about this for a long while. The
punkah
in his room flapped forward and backward, braiding the warm air into thick cords around him, setting some of the papers on his desk aflutter. The
chai
boy breathed through his mouth, wiped his running nose on the back of his hand, and then smeared that on his shorts. But surely, the HMS
Medea
would be carrying Dalhousie's precious cargo, whatever it was that he had deposited from Lahore into the Bombay Treasury, and these two men were in charge of it. The newspaperman chewed on the end of his pencil and hawked out the wood fragments into a dustbin conveniently placed within spitting distance.

The
chai
boy snorted and took in a deep, noisy breath that gargled the phlegm in his chest.

Mr. Wingate dug in his waistcoat pocket for an
anna
coin, glanced at it briefly, and then took out a rupee coin—a whole sixteen
annas
—and flipped it to the boy. The lad's smile, when he had caught the coin and weighed its value in his palm (he was too polite to actually look at it) was wide, showed all of his teeth and a good deal of the inside of his mouth.

“You're a marvel,” Mr. Wingate said. “You really are.”

“Thank you, Sahib.” The boy bowed and backed out of the door, salaaming furiously.

What should he do with this information? Mr. Wingate wondered. No other paper in town knew of Dalhousie's visit—or they would have been buzzing with the news—
there had been no talk in the Bombay Club, or the Navy or Army Club. No mention in the theater last night during the intermission; a lot of inconsequential chatter, which he always kept his ear open to, but something as big as this would have been bandied about for months—with every person in the city trying to get onto the party lists at Government House, the morning rides lists, the tiffin lists, or trying to invite Dalhousie's wife to open a club here, a swimming bath there, a charity ball or an orphanage.

Now, if only the item in the Treasury was going to travel by the commercial P & O steamer, Mr. Wingate would have considered buying a ticket to England, or sending someone else on his behalf . . . for what he did not know yet. But it was surely being taken aboard the British Navy's HMS
Medea,
impossible to board with a captain already livid at the rattling of his authority.

What
should
he do with this information? Mr. Wingate pored over the copy for the next edition of his
Herald,
shouted at a few editors about the headlines on a couple of the pages. At the end of the day, he took his hat off the hook behind the door and went home to his wife and his children in the comfortably luxurious neighborhood of Colabah, with its lush palm trees, its bright bougainvilleas, its
chunam
-washed bungalows and neat tile roofs.

After dinner, Mary and he went for a drive in the nearby park. Mr. Wingate normally enjoyed the daily parade of nations in Bombay—the only city in the world where this could be possible. The Chinese man in his satin jacket with thin braided hair wrapped around his head; the Hindu with his fat wife and equally fat kids, their hair oil-slicked; the Portuguese with their olive complexions, short, curly hair, and white cotton shirts, looking more Indian than the Indians; the Roman Catholic priests, pale and ascetic in their flapping gray cassocks; the stiff military Englishman, quite from another country than the casual civil service Englishman,
so dissimilar that they might speak different languages; the Muslims, the Bengalis, the Gujaratis, the Jains, the Buddhists, all in their distinctive outfits; and the Parsi, quiet, composed, his beard trimmed with a precise hand . . . the Parsi! Mr. Wingate turned his head around as the Parsi's carriage passed, and in it, resplendent in his white vest, was none other than Dossabhoy Merwanjee.

“You're preoccupied today, Harry,” his wife said. “You hardly noticed that nice Mr. Dossabhoy's bow; he's the one who sold us the carpets, you know. And I've got my eye on one of those American toy pistols for little Harry's birthday. Will you be nice to him next time, please?”

“A lot on my mind, Mer,” Mr. Wingate mumbled. “I was thinking about poor Lucius, struck with cholera in those dreadful barracks at Calcutta.”

Mrs. Wingate shuddered; it was a delicate movement of her massive shoulders.