City of Bells (36 page)

             
“I would never assume that a man wishes to marry me simply because he wishes to bed me.  I understand that these are entirely different impulses.  That they come, one might say, from different hemispheres on the globe.”  She laughed.  “England and India demand different things, and what satisfies one might not please the other.  I know this, so you need never again tell me that you are sorry.”

             
“No,” he said, hoping that he understood what she was saying, for Emma was very strange tonight.  Very strange indeed.  “If I seem to hesitate, it isn’t for that reason.  Not at all.”

             
Another silence, filled only by the breeze and the birds.

             
“So you are thinking that lovers should be well matched and that you and I are not,” Emma said flatly. “And on this point, you are so clearly right that I will not attempt to argue.  I have seen your childhood home, and I assure you that the entirety of mine could fit within your drawing room.  No, you need not think that I fail to understand the gulf between our stations in life, because the minute I glimpsed Rosemoral it only confirmed everything I had ever suspected…“  She hesitated.  “And yet…should I tell you that despite all my time with Geraldine, despite the fact that I have even helped with her bookkeeping, that I still was shocked by the size of the estate?  It is one thing to know a man is rich, born from old money. It is quite another to see that wealth stacked around you, stone by stone.”

             
“You misunderstand me completely.”

             
“Do I?  I don’t see how I could, for Mrs. Steel has explained it all so well.  Some couples are destined to meet in the parlor but others, alas, only in the garden.  Suitable companions only when it is very late and very dark.  You need not try to spare my feelings.  I know full well that I am not good enough for you.”

             
“Will you hush?  Will you hush and draw breath for a minute?  Of course you are good enough for me.  You are as fine as silk.  Our problem, Emma….”

“
              Ah yes, please, tell me now.  What is our problem?”

             
“You have seen my home, yes, and you have seen my family.  Leanna is married and William is soon to be.  Both admirably matched, just as you say.  Hannah and William love nothing so much as to stroll the grounds of Rosemoral, pointing first in one direction and then the other.  All the while discussing what sort of shed or what marvelous breed of cattle or worthy plant they shall deposit here or there.  We have spoken of an Eden and they intend to build just that, those two, which they shall then entrust to Leanna and John.  And what my brother began, my sister shall finish.  Yes, Leanna and her own admirably suitable husband shall expand this little paradise to include health care and legal rights for all.”

             
“What does any of this have to do with us?”

             
“I will never marry.  I will not have children.  These are decisions I made long ago.  And I shall tell you something now that I have never told anyone.  I am a dark seed.”

             
To his surprise, and somewhat to his offense, she laughed.

             
“Dark seed?” she said.  “Is that a medical term you learned at Cambridge?”

             
“Listen to me,” he said fiercely.  It was hard to argue with a woman you couldn’t see, a woman who was little more than a disembodied voice in the darkness.  “I am trying to explain something and it is a truth I have never uttered aloud.  Never even articulated fully to myself.  The Bainbridge family is split, and not only in the way that everyone imagines.  William and Leanna are like my grandfather….they build things. They always have.  When we were children, they would make forts and doll houses and railroads.  They were always creating for some wonderful little world, then climbing within it and shutting the door. And my brother Cecil and I would then come crashing in, you see, just like our father - determined to destroy whatever it was that they had just so painstakingly built.  Anything good and proper, we were compelled to attack it, and can you even imagine what I am saying? I remember one time, at Brighton on holiday… Have you been there?”  She shook her head, another gesture which he could not see, a limitation which scarcely mattered, for he rushed on with his thought.  “Leanna had worked all morning on a sand castle and I kicked it.  Simply kicked it level for reasons I cannot say.  I can still hear the sound of her screaming in fury.  She said she hated me.”

             
“And you find all this unusual? Really, Tom, it is how children play. How siblings sometimes talk to one another.”

             
“No.  No, Emma, it is more than that.  All my life I told myself that my destructive impulses were nothing more than my older brother leading me astray.  And now Cecil is gone and I see…I see I am still flawed.  That the forces which corrupted my brother and my father live deep within me too.”

             
“None of this makes your soul unique,” Emma said.  “We all have our bitter secrets, relatives whose motives are mysterious to us, pieces of the family history we try to keep hidden.  What of my sister Mary?”

             
“What of her?”

             
“She left a respectable job to walk the streets.  There are many women forced into prostitution.  Not so many, I would guess, who choose it.”

             
“That is an entirely different situation.”

             
“Why?  Because we were poor?  Because we were women?  Both situations limited our options, as I shall be the first to admit.  And yet we had employment, a roof over our heads, a safe place in the social order.  But Mary did not find that enough.  She did not like being a governess.  She pulled against the leash.  And now it is my turn to ask if you understand what I am saying.   My sister preferred to –“

             
“That has nothing to do with you.”

             
“It has everything to do with me, for I have the same impulses.  When I saw the wall with Trevor…or that night back in Mayfair… Yes, on that night so long ago, I was upset.  Yes, I had encountered death on that day just as I have on this one, but still I…”

             
“You were vulnerable and I was drunk.  The fault lay entirely with me.  I should never have come to you under those circumstances.”

             
“But you didn’t come to me, Tom, that’s just the point. I came to you. And in the hours that followed, perhaps you used me, perhaps I used you….or here is a rather large thought.  What if no fault lies with either of us?  What if we were merely human beings following a human impulse?  Being no more than what our God had made us to be?”

             
This last remark startled him perhaps most of all.  He had been raised to assume without question that there was always some fault, some failure of the will in every situation, and that usually it was his.

             
“And now shall you move to America?  Take up with the transcendentalists and run naked through the open meadows proclaiming free love for all?”

             
She chuckled.  “It hasn’t gone as far as all that.  But you tell me you are like Cecil and who is to say that there is not some small part of me that is like Mary?”

             
“You cannot compare a single night with me to her unfathomable decision to walk the streets. The actions arise from utterly different impulses.”

             
“In degree, perhaps, but not in intent.”  She paused and her voice changed.  Became softer and more thoughtful.   “If you are a destroyer by nature, as you claim, then why would have chosen to become a doctor?”

             
“I’m not sure I have. My studies in Cambridge have been disrupted so that I might indulge a compulsion, arisen from God knows what infirm part of my brain, to look over and over again upon the face of death.  And who knows when I shall return to school?”

             
She lifted an arm and pointed, a gesture exaggerated enough that even the small and flickering candle rendered it quite clear. 

             
“My room,” she said, “is over there.”

             
“And mine,” he added with an identical movement, “lies in that direction.  You shall now go one way and I shall go another and this conversation – while too extraordinary to ever be forgotten – shall not be referred to again.”

             
“You shouldn’t drink so much, you know.  It makes you morose.”

             
“It is drink that makes me everything that I am, Emma, which is just what I am trying to tell you.”  He rattled his glass and she could hear the bell-like tinkle of ice within.  “Drink makes me clever and clumsy, amorous or sleepy or hungry or bold.”

             
“They say it is medicinal in this heat.”

             
“Ah.  Shall I tell you one of the ugly little secrets of the medical profession?  One of many?  The only difference between a medicine and a poison lies in the dosage.”  He held his cup to her candlelight.  “Look into this glass and tell me what you see.”

             
“A splash, most likely of gin.”

             
“And I see the end of me.  I am under the power of alcohol, Emma, and I have been ever since you first knew me.  This glass and a thousand of his brothers shall someday end my life.  But I’ll be damned if I let it take you down with me.”

             
“I understand.  We shall not marry.  Not have children.  You could not have been more clear.  But shall you now come with me?  In England we may be worlds apart but here in India, my room is not so very far from yours.”

             
He exhaled and drained the glass, then tossed it into the grass.  “Of course.  Despite my bold speeches, was there ever any doubt?  And then perhaps afterwards we might find a child’s sandcastle and kick it to the ground.”

             
“Perhaps we shall.”

             
“You knew from the start, I presume, that this was an argument you would win.”

             
“I suspected as much,” she said, standing up and tossing her romance in the same direction as his empty glass. Let Mrs. Tucker and her servants find them both there in the morning light and wonder at the cause. “But Tom,” she added “you must promise me one thing.”

             
“Anything,” he said, reaching for her hand.

             
“No one must know of this night.  Or of others like it, should they occur.”

             
“Of course not,” he said, although her words were oddly stinging.  “This shall be our guilty secret, yours and mine.”

             
“Especially not Trevor.”

             
Now that was worse than a sting.  It was a slap. So deftly placed that it might have derailed any man who was less drunk or less aroused.  Tom knew that he could ask her what she meant, but he also knew there was no answer she could give that would please him and besides, her hand was cool and soft.  The air smelled of something exotic and, just as she said, her room was not so very far from his.

             
“Especially not Trevor,” he obediently echoed and they walked together toward the light.

Chapter
Twenty-One

Bombay Jail

September 1, 1889

9:20 AM

              Rabbits do not like beer.  Davy had to wrap the protesting creature in a folded bedsheet while Tom forced a plunger full of beer down its throat.  For a time there was no change.  It hopped around the small holding cell within the jail – the room Tom had turned into his makeshift laboratory – with a palpable relief for having escaped his oppressors.  But gradually the hops became more diagonal.   Less enthusiastic.  And precisely four minutes after the beer had been flushed into its unwilling body, the rabbit lay dead.

             
“All right,” Tom said, making notes in his leather-bound book.  “The beer was the vehicle of death, at least that much is clear.”  His voice faltered for just a minute, remembering the plump hand of Morass offering a glass to him, and how close he had come to accepting it.  “Now on to the fingerprints.”

             
“You finish the autopsy, for I can handle those,” Davy said, gazing with dismay at the lifeless form of the rabbit.  He had kept a brood as pets as a child.  “Detective Abrams has offered to go to the school to print Miss Hoffman, Adelaide, and the other students, which means there won’t be nearly so many left for me.  Seal has sent round a contingent of men to round up the other picnickers and bring them here in groups of five or so. “

             
“What fun we all shall have,” said Tom, looking around their cramped quarters with resignation, for the morning had not gone especially well so far.  Mrs. Morrow had offered a room to Emma and Gerry, but when the men arrived at the jail, they were told the barracks were full and that they would be forced to sleep within cells in the attached jail.  Rayley had fussed in his usual manner – the other three could go to any boarding house in town, he had said.  There was no need for them to take up such ludicrously unsuitable lodgings on his account. 

             
But Trevor had stood firm.  Any establishment which would not welcome Rayley would not enjoy profit from the rest of the team. 

             
And so they now occupied six adjacent cells of the Bombay military jail.  Four cells would serve as bedrooms, one as an interrogation room and fingerprinting lab, and the sixth as a morgue.  The body of Hubert Morass rested in it now, the corpse stretched on the narrow cot and staring up at the ceiling, much in the manner of a prisoner awaiting his fate. 

             
Meanwhile the jail’s sole living occupant, Anthony Weaver, was being moved to the infirmary to make room for the needs of Scotland Yard.  Both Tom and Davy froze in their tasks as the man was shuffled out. He was not handcuffed.  Apparently Weaver’s jailers had concluded that anyone so old and frail was hardly an escape risk.  He slowly turned his neck to peer into the room where the two young men were toiling as he passed, his watery blue eyes scanning the cell with acute interest. 

             
And Tom and Davy each returned the stare, for this was the first time either of them had actually seen Weaver.  Tom considered him first in his role as a doting nephew – how could this shuffling old man ever have captured the heart of his wonderfully vibrant Aunt Gerry? - and then as a doctor.  Weaver did have the air of a man who was slowly loosening his hold on life, a man whose fingers were being pulled from their earthly grip one by one.  Cancer, Dr. Tufts had said.  Cancer combined with old age and an almost palpable sense of spiritual malaise.  No matter what evidence would be stacked either for or against the man, his time on this earthly plane was clearly limited. 

             
We are no longer fighting to exonerate Weaver,
Tom thought. 
Perhaps we never really were.  We are fighting to bring a sense of justice, however belated, to a wretched situation.  To ensure that the long-ago disaster known as Cawnpore claims no more victims.

             
Davy too considered the man who was passing, but he was thinking of the bright-eyed face of Felix, how the boy had cheerfully repeated his uncle’s words.  That Sahib Weaver would care for his family for all days. 
This old man is guilty of so many things,
Davy thought. 
Cowardice.  Desertion of military duty.  Desertion of a friend, which is far worse.  Infidelity, betrayal, an indirect sort of blackmail, an addiction to opiates, an addiction to power.  Lying about a thousand matters both large and small.  Breaking the enormous heart of the most worthy woman I have ever met, save me mum. 

             
And yet…and yet he looks so very ordinary.

             
And then Weaver was led from view and both Tom and Davy promptly went back to their work. Tom gave the dead rabbit to a passing attendant with explicit instructions that the creature was to be disposed of, and not become the basis of someone’s evening supper.  He then turned his attention to cutting the ivory linen trousers off the lifeless form of Hubert Morass in start of the formal autopsy, while Davy moved into the second of the working cells to greet the picnickers he would be required to fingerprint.  The first to arrive was a gaggle of the Byculla Club servants who had accompanied the members on their ill-fated holiday.   Although Davy knew it was highly unlikely any of their prints would prove to be significant, his heart was still pounding as he sat up his equipment. 

             
He had only given Hubert Morass one lesson in fingerprinting and yet the man had absorbed the information well.  For as he had not only managed to hold on to the cup as he dropped into the well, but he had earlier somehow managed to get whomever he had been conversing with to touch the glass in question.  Davy knew that Trevor was right.  Morass undoubtedly wished to obtain this fingerprint for the most self-serving of all possible motives: he was a blackmailer collecting even further evidence to hold against his victim.  But still…in taking care to both obtain and preserve a perfect fingerprint, Morass had also handed Davy the sort of clear evidence that is rare in detection.

             
All I have to do now,
Davy thought, waving in the cluster of servants, who were wide-eyed with fear at the strangeness of their surroundings,
is manage not to muck it up.

***

The Office of Hubert Morass

9:35 AM

             
Nine months earlier, when he had dove from a dock while chasing a man he believed to be Jack the Ripper, Trevor Welles had undergone a mystical experience.

             
Admittedly, that statement sounds rather metaphysical and grand, since most people would expect mystical experiences to be accompanied by seraphim, harps, thunderclaps, and the like.  Trevor’s moment of insight had been grimmer and darker, as cold as the waters of the Thames on a November midnight.  The truth had not enveloped him gently, like angelic arms.  It had stabbed him like a blade pushed decisively into his chest.

             
You will never have him,
the vision said. 
The Ripper will never be yours
. 
Accept this, and save what you can. 

             
This singular moment of clarity was the reason that Trevor was able to maintain his equanimity in the sort of cases where his fellow Scotland Yard detectives became paralyzed with frustration. Yes, of course he still felt the ache of each case which was not closed with an arrest… the muddled regret that came when one felt as much sympathy for the criminal as the victim… the sense that to be a forensics officer was to always show up just a little too late.  Even while he pushed for more scientific methodology within the Yard, Trevor accepted that forensics would never be an exact science. The key was to learn from the dead and learn fast. To grieve your errors, but to grieve them quickly.  To indulge your self-recrimination, but only for an instant, and then your eyes must turn resolutely from the past to the future.  For that is the only way a man will ever be able to save what he can.

             
Trevor stood gazing down into an evidence box in the office of Hubert Morass.  It was always tricky to study the notes and souvenirs of another lawman and try to recreate exactly the line of logic the man had been following.  Back in Paris in the spring, Trevor had struggled even to understand the notes of his friend Rayley and, based on the way the man had kept his boarding house room and his generally disheveled appearance,  Trevor suspected that Morass was not the sort to keep spotless records.

             
But he was wrong, for Morass had recorded his evidence with true military precision.  There was a file on his studies with the suicide tree, offering estimates of how much poison it would take to kill a man versus a woman, or to kill slowly in lieu of killing quickly. Benson had evidently got his own chart straight from the work of Morass.   Another file offered a timeline of events surrounding the murders, showing that Morass had drawn much the same conclusions as the contingent from Scotland Yard.  A final file held photographs.  A sad image of Rose Weaver and Pulkit Sang on the floor of the Byculla Club lobby, their feet all but touching, sprawled as if they were sleeping.  Several shots of the kitchen of the Weaver household, including Sang’s bedroom, the suicide tree in the garden, and the very drawer in the kitchen where Davy had surmised Rose Weaver’s medication had been kept.  A duplicate of the portrait of Weaver and Everlee in military uniform that they had found in Benson’s quarters.

             
Trevor leaned back with a sigh and stretched.   He had awakened as bruised and knotted as he feared, and the mad scramble to leave Mrs. Tucker’s house and set up a base of operations in the jail had put him in a foul mood.  And of course it also stung a little to admit that the drunkard Morass and the displaced Benson had together managed to create such a logical and compelling sequence of events. The two men who now lay dead had managed to trump the team from Scotland Yard at every turn.

             
There was one final picture in the file.  Trevor extracted it and lifted it to the light.

             
He held in his hand an aged photograph, showing a family.  It was not an especially good example of the art of photography, true, but it a still represented a remarkable indulgence for a middle class family of the era.  In the picture a husband, wife, and four children all stared straight ahead, awkwardly grouped and ill-at-ease in their Sunday clothing. The woman held a wadded blanket which presumably contained an infant.  From the familiar striped wallpaper and a palm tree placed to the side, Trevor concluded that this portrait was taken at the same location as the one he had seen of Anthony Weaver and Roland Everlee – most likely taken the same day, for a watery blue stamp in the corner declared the month to be December, 1856.  When he turned the photograph, he was rewarded with just what he hoped to find – someone had carefully printed the names of the people photographed on the back. 

             
He was holding in his hand a picture of the Sloane family, taken merely months before their deaths. The members were listed, left to right. The pencil marks had faded through the years, but the names were still legible.

             
Trevor flipped the photograph back over and considered the faces of the doomed.  The father, looking every inch the career military man, holding a toddler on his knee, the boy echoing his father’s stiff bearing.  The oldest child, also a boy – evidently the brave little lad who had made it all the way to the edge of his yard before the mutineers overtook him – sat on the floor at his father’s feet, surrounded by a collection of tin toy soldiers.  The mother, clutching the infant while her two daughters stood flanking her on either side.  The photograph was likely her idea, a memento before her husband joined his unit, quite possibly arranged with the help of his commander, Roland Everlee. 

             
The photograph was speckled with the years and creased in several places.  Heaven knows how either Morass or Benson had come to possess such an item.  Trevor flipped again to the back and read the names.  Rebecca Sloane, holding her son Simon.  The baby’s face was not visible in the portrait.  Leigh Sloane, a colonel, holding his son Allen.  Another son, Arthur, on the floor.  A toddler girl named Kathleen clinging to the edge of their mother’s skirt and then, standing rather aloofly on the other side…

             
The eldest daughter of the household.  Evidently named after her father. Leigh Anne Sloane.

***

The Khajuraho Temple

9:45 AM

             
“Shall we be friends, you and I?” Rayley said, extending a hand toward Adelaide.  “Our conversation was interrupted yesterday, but I hoped we might continue it today.”

             
“No,” she said.  “You lie.  You do not come to talk to me.  You come to steal…”  And here she looked down at her fingertips, as if unsure of the word.

             
“I have come to collect your fingerprints, that’s true,” said Rayley.  “But it isn’t stealing, not at all.  For that is the thing about fingerprints.  I can take them and yet you still have them. They are like photographs, do you see?”