The Mountain of Light (34 page)

Arabella Hyde was pretty, vapid, her head as empty as her whole being seemed to be. On the first night, Lady Beaumont had leaned over to Colonel Mackeson with the story that “the Hyde woman had to leave India, ran away with another chap, you know, the quartermaster of all people, and came back to her husband. He's shipping her home to England. It's a
divorce
.”

Captain Ramsay, also at the meals, was surprisingly quiet and watchful. He was taking his responsibilities seriously, Mackeson thought with some amusement. They had come up with a system for safeguarding the Kohinoor, especially during bathtimes. All the first-class male passengers were called at the same time, so Mackeson went up to the deck in his long underwear, a towel wrapped around his middle, and stood on the portside grating while a crewman doused him with buckets of salt water he had pulled out of the Arabian Sea. A quick rubdown with his towel, and he was back again in his cabin, where Multan Raj waited patiently, his clothes laid out on the berth. Captain Ramsay sat on the Kohinoor diamond meanwhile and also waited for him to return. Mackeson put the diamond into his steamer trunk, locked it, and hung the key around his neck while bathing, and left Lord Dalhousie's nephew sitting on top of the box with the strict injunction that he was not to get up even for a second.

When Multan Raj had dressed him, pulled on his socks and shoes, and left the cabin for his own quarters belowdecks, Mackeson unlocked his trunk and took out the Kohinoor, put it back in the bag, and hooked it onto his belt again. At night, he slept with the pouch looped around his wrist, a pistol under his pillow.

Once, he had asked Multan Raj what he thought of the voyage.

“The ship rattles more belowdecks, Sahib. I fall often out
of my hammock at night,” he had said. Then, concerned, “I do not mean to complain.”

Colonel Mackeson looked at him affectionately. His old bearer had disappeared one day in Lahore, into the dust, never heard of again. And Multan Raj had come to him, specially recommended by Lord Dalhousie, who knew of, or knew someone whom Multan's relative had served. That had been three years ago. Multan was Hindu, not Sikh, and could have had no allegiance to the court of the old Maharajah Ranjit Singh, else Mackeson might have been hesitant to . . . take him along on this journey.

“Are you looking forward to being in England?” he asked.

“Will you be there long, Sahib?”

“I don't think so,” Colonel Mackeson said, buffing the buttons on his shirt with a muslin cloth. Soon, Multan was standing in front of him, performing that duty. “I could not live anywhere other than India, Multan.”

The servant's hand stopped and then went on, slowly. “You will go back then, Sahib.”

“Yes, I will,” Mackeson replied.

All of the servants stood behind their masters or mistresses during the meal in the saloon of the
Indus
—just as they did in India. The waiters whisked in and out, between the chairs and the attendants, served the dishes, and left. The rest was done by each personal table servant. In India, there had been different staff for each duty, including accompanying the master and his wife to dinners at other homes. Here, on the
Indus,
the P & O had restricted servants to one per person, and so Multan Raj stood behind Mackeson's chair during dinner, filled his glass when he wanted, took his plate away before the waiter could come.

The dinner was cleared eventually, coffee brought in; there was lemonade for the ladies if they wanted. The saloon crew moved the tables to the edges of the room and rolled
the grand piano to the center. A few ladies sat down to play, some couples danced, slip-sliding on the polished wooden floor; the servants stood with their backs to the walls, watching, waiting to be called upon.

Colonel Mackeson leaned back and lit a cigarette. He was tired; it had been a long, hot day. He had come to the realization that he didn't want to go to England, and so, he couldn't get to England fast enough. And the Kohinoor, now that everyone seemed to know of it, was a bigger burden than he had expected. Perhaps, he thought, he ought to ask for a guard of some sort from Captain Waltham, but where to put the jewel, how to safeguard it unless he was there all the time? It was difficult to maintain the sort of vigilance Lord Dalhousie expected, and perhaps would have been equal to with his ceaseless energy, and his conviction that the Kohinoor belonged to the Queen. Colonel Mackeson did not quite believe in that; oh, he did, in the English part of his heart, but not in the, much larger, Indian one.

Just then, turning her glittering gaze upon him, Arabella Hyde tilted her well-shaped head and said, “Oh, Colonel Mackeson, all this stealth is
so
very exciting. But are you going to let us go our own way without even a
little
glimpse of the Kohinoor?”

Mackeson drew smoke in the wrong way, coughed, and said, “I beg your pardon. I don't know what you're talking about.”

The others at the table had turned to look at him intently, speculation in every eye. Mary Booth had a faint, grim smile upon her face; her brother looked like a bloodhound that had just scented prey on the breeze, all quivering attention. Mr. Huthwaite was not smiling anymore; he had his hands upon the table, and Mackeson had not noticed before how gross and large they were, like the paws of an unruly bear. How did he turn the pages of the Bible when he read out of it every Sunday? Martyn Wingate had surreptitiously brought out a
little notebook and was making scrawls across the page, ink splattering over the table's white linen.

Ramsay rose. “It's time for bed, I think. For me, at least. Colonel, a nightcap at my berth?”

“Yes, of course.” Colonel Mackeson got up hurriedly.

Lady Beaumont, who had been watching and listening, smoke twirling out of her fist, spat out a piece of tobacco and said, “Why all the playacting, Mackeson? Show us the diamond, and we'll let you be.”

At that moment, Colonel Mackeson felt something slip down along his thigh and come to a soft, tinkling rest on the floor, on the inside of his right boot. He glanced down, and the Kohinoor diamond lay there, half under the folds of the tablecloth, half in the light, worth a fortune in the world in which he lived. He froze. The cloth bag had come undone somehow. He could have put his foot on the stone to cover it, but Indian superstition was so ingrained in him, he could not step upon something that was revered and that gave life—a book, paper money, coins, food, a diamond.

He took a deep breath and bent down. Someone kicked his ailing knee, hard, and he went crashing onto the floor, a film of pain blurring his gaze. Everyone at the table rose and came rushing up. There were offers of help, arms appeared to raise him, and he found himself sitting in his chair, bent over in excruciating pain. He could feel the skin on his gouty knee expand and surge. Colonel Mackeson looked around desperately, tried to tell Ramsay to search for the Kohinoor, but the young captain's face swam out of focus in front of his eyes.

He fainted.

•  •  •

The vans were lined up for the passengers when the SS
Indus
put to port outside of Suez. A message had been sent from
Alexandria that the SS
Oriental
had already arrived and was waiting on the Mediterranean for the passengers from India, so the travelers disembarked with a small carpetbag each for the next three days of travel and sent all the rest of their luggage on the procession of camels, some two thousand of them, that waited in patient lines, their jaws moving rhythmically.

The vans were small wagons, two spoked wheels on either side, curved covers to shelter them from the Egyptian sun, open at the back and in the front, where the driver sat, whipping his team of four horses. Each van could seat a maximum of eight passengers, and Colonel Mackeson insisted that all the people at his table occupy the same vehicle. He supervised their boarding, then climbed in and seated himself knee to knee alongside Lady Beaumont. The driver clicked his tongue, the horses roused themselves, the wheels ground into the soft earth, and they began the journey across the desert to Cairo.

Darkness had just begun to fall when they left, and Colonel Mackeson lit the small oil lantern in the van and hung it on the rafters of the roof. It was hot inside, without even the hum of a draft, and the roving light lit all of their faces one by one.

For four hours, they traveled without a word. The movement of the wagon, the jolts and bumps along the rough road, the poor glow from the lantern, made reading or embroidery impossible. The men smoked in silence, throwing live butts out into the desert, where they were quickly extinguished by the wheels of the van that followed. The women sat, for the most part, with their hands folded in their laps. They had three canteens of water until the first stop, which was nothing more than a shack along the road, with water and bathroom facilities out under the night sky. When one of them drank, the others watched carefully, making sure that not a drop of their share was spilled in this parched land.

Finally, almost casually, Colonel Mackeson said, his hands on his knees, his gaze fixed upon the floor of the van, “Which one of you stole the Kohinoor?”

All the silence disintegrated into a babble of voices. He let it go on for a while and then held up his hand, palm outward. His voice was deliberate and cutting. “One of you, maybe more than one of you, is a thief.”

Mackeson had jumped out of his bed on the night of his faint, before dawn, and gone searching for Captain Ramsay. He had jiggled him awake and told him of the loss of the diamond. Then, the two of them had rushed to Captain Waltham.

“What do you want me to do, sir?” the captain had asked, struggling into his trousers, tucking his nightshirt into the waistband.

Mackeson, white in the face, from both the pain and the shock, had said curtly, “Get them all out of bed and into the saloon. Their cabins and belongings are to be searched. Has anyone had a chance to go to the after hold?”

Waltham had shaken his head. “Between last night and now? I doubt it. This morning is one of the scheduled times, though, when the passengers can access their luggage. We're to dock at Aden in a few hours.”

“Find out, will you?”

So the Booths, Lady Beaumont, Wingate, Arabella Hyde, and Huthwaite had been shaken out of their dreams and ushered into the state dining room, protesting wildly all the while. One of the female crew members, the second-class cabin
ayah,
had been dispatched to search the women thoroughly. Mackeson had made the men strip down in front of him. They'd all cursed him, but he had been immovable. He'd searched every body cavity himself. He had made them open their mouths, bend over in front of him.

Then, Ramsay and he had hunted through the cabins, the berths, agitated the bed linens, crawled under the desks and moved the sofas, unfolded every garment. He had asked Multan
Raj for a knife and when it was brought looked at it in a brief moment of surprise. It was a dagger, some eight inches long, its hilt decorated in finely wrought stones embedded in solid gold.

“Where did you get this?”

“It's my father's, Sahib,” Multan Raj had said. “A gift from a king; he saved his life with this dagger one night when dacoits came into the raja's tent.”

Shaking his head in wonder, Mackeson had slit the silk and cotton linings of all the luggage boxes and ripped them apart. At the end, an hour before breakfast, when the other passengers were already astir aboard the
Indus,
and the six people waited, shut away in the saloon, there had been no sign of the Kohinoor.

It had disappeared into the air. Literally. There was no place Mackeson had missed, no earthly place. Unless one of them had swallowed the diamond, and it was cutting up the insides of his or her stomach. When that thought struck, Mackeson had decided that they were each to be followed to the privies, night and day, watched as they went about their business. He'd examined the contents of the bowels himself, unflinching.

And so they had all come to Suez. Everyone's nerves were ragged by now—tattered to beyond bearing.

“Mr. Booth,” Mackeson said. He noticed that Ramsay had his pistol out on his lap, his fingers loosely curled around the trigger.

“What is it?” In a snarl. Tom Booth was afraid; all the blood had drained from his face, his thick eyebrows and hair stood out stark against the pallor of his skin. His knuckles, tied around each other, were knobs of bone.

“I found the Ganesha idol, and it is on its way back on the
Indus
to Calcutta and the rightful owner, the East India Company. The accusations were not false after all, were they, Miss Booth?” This last Mackeson said bitterly.

She raised her eyebrows at him, still cool, even though they were all jostled about by the movement of the van. The dirt road on which they traveled had been stamped down by many such passings, but the mud was still soft, the horses' hooves inaudible. “They might not have been, Colonel Mackeson,” she said, “but that's none of your business. You're hardly in a position to send the idol back. It doesn't belong to you.”

“And neither does it belong to you,” Mackeson said harshly. “There were other things also; I'm sure you tapped everything you could from the auction house that had not yet been cataloged, or you thought was of small value. But tiny as this idol is, given its provenance, it's worth at least three thousand pounds. So, it goes back, and you get to keep your letter knives and silver shaving kits, snuffboxes and decorative mirrors.”

Mary Booth's mouth drew back, and a hiss escaped her teeth. She did not look at her brother, and he unwound his fingers to run them through his hair and wipe a sudden perspiration from his forehead. Neither of them had known the value of the idol, Mackeson realized, or they would have tried to hide it a little better, perhaps packing it in the luggage in the after hold. He hadn't bothered to search the stowed luggage—Captain Waltham had assured him that it had not been disturbed during the night—they could have had no chance to conceal the Kohinoor. And they were only, after all, petty thieves. The temptation to steal the diamond was huge, but there was no way they could dispose of it, and if they could not realize its value in something useful—pounds sterling—it would be just a piece of stone to them.