City of Bells (38 page)

             
“I know the one,” said Geraldine.

             
Tom stopped mid-scribble.  Someone had to be there to take notes…and to ensure this meeting did not become too much for either Weaver or Geraldine.  But it was damn awkward being forced to overhear their story in such detail, to stay alert without drawing any attention to himself, especially considering he’d had no more than an hour of sleep himself the night before.

             
“So our separation was all of Rose’s devising,” Geraldine was saying, glancing at Tom as she gamely tried to get the discussion back on track.  She was taking Trevor’s orders to get the full story seriously, no matter how much some of Weaver’s comments must have stung her, and Tom admired her all the more for it.  God knows, his own mind was darting all over the place.

             
Weaver chuckled at the jealousy in Geraldine’s voice, a little pleased to think he could stir that much emotion in a woman, even now. “Well, Rose could hardly devise the Mutiny, could she?  That was real, and so was the danger, as I imagine history has shown us clearly enough.  So you were not merely sent to England to free up space in my bed, but also for your own protection.”

             
“And this is the point in your story where I suppose I am to thank you?”

             
He raised an elegantly thin white eyebrow.  “You might.  Considering what happened later.”

             
“I can only assume that Rose lied yet again to Roland?  Told him that the doctors were wrong and she was now somehow magically with child?”

             
Weaver nodded.  “He came rushing up to me one morning at the Club on a wave of jubilation.  A miracle had occurred, he said.  He and Rose were to be parents at last.”  He coughed.  “I was appalled, of course.  She had never discussed this plan with me.  But when I confronted her about it later, she was all laughter and light.  It was her way to make sure she stayed in India, she said, and she could claim to lose the baby at some point in the future.  Miscarriages were common in women her age, after all, especially in a region with such abysmal health care and unsanitary conditions.”

             
“Forgive me,” Geraldine said.  “But I am struggling to understand the sequence of events.  You and I became engaged, just as you say, quite by accident.  But then you decided that you liked me, that I was to be somehow the vehicle of your salvation, and Rose became jealous.  At the same time, the threat of mutiny was rising and officers were sending their families back to England in droves.  Rose saw it as the chance to get rid of me.  I was packed off to England, while she concocted a false pregnancy to both give herself an excuse to both remain with you and to keep poor deluded Roland at bay.  If he believed this late-life baby to be his one chance at fatherhood I’m sure he would not dream of touching her and risking a miscarriage.  The story, up to that point, does make a sort of cruel sense.”

             
Weaver nodded.  “And you told it wonderfully well.”

             
“But then there really was a child?  The faked pregnancy somehow resulted in a real son?”

             
Weaver coughed again.  “Ah yes, Michael.  He was both the complication of some plans, and the solution to others.  Rose thought of it, of course.  She was the one who thought of everything.  In the confusion following the mutiny, no one stopped to count the months of a gestation.  There were so many dead and missing and such a complete breakdown of communication all across the subcontinent. Rose said that if she was not merely a widow, but a widow with a baby, that she would receive double the pension, and double the sympathy as well.”

             
“And there would be double the incentive for the two of you to marry quickly.  Claiming responsibility for your fallen comrade’s fatherless boy.  Rather touching.  But if you were truly already beginning to have doubts about Rose…why did you play into her fiction?”

             
Weaver looked at her, his blue eyes misty with memory.  “Cawnpore changed everything, Geraldine.  Changed us all.  There were events that – Your Detective Abrams?  I trust he told you everything?”

             
“He said that you had spent a lifetime sickened with regret that you could only save two of the children while the rest were left to perish with their mother and Roland.”

             
“That is what he said?” Weaver gave a shaky exhalation. “He is a good man, your Jewish detective.”

             
“The finest I have ever known,” Geraldine said.  “Well, one of the two finest.  You needn’t look at me like that.  You aren’t the other.”

             
“I daresay I am not.”

             
“Is this the end of your story?”

             
“Not quite.”  Weaver took yet another sip of tea.  “As I said, the confusion following the mutiny played into our hands.  No one asked precisely when the child was born and if Michael was a bit too sizable a baby to have been the result of Rose’s feigned pregnancy, this trivial fact did not merit much mention in those dark days, when not even the Viceroy could hazard a guess of how many British citizens had been killed. We told our friends in the hill district that Rose delivered in Bombay and our friends in Bombay that she had spent her confinement in the country.  And we married quietly.  A military chaplain.  Strangers for witnesses.”

             
“That’s sad.”

             
The blue eyes struggled to focus.  “You feel sorry for us?  After the betrayal you suffered at our hands?”

             
Geraldine smiled.  “You did me a favor, Anthony, albeit by accident.  I was never intended for sacrifice on the altar of matrimony and while being an unwanted spinster is a pitiable state, nothing is more romantically appealing than a woman who lost her great love through a tragic event.  Whenever someone would be crass enough to ask me why I never married, all I would have to do is cast down my eyes and say ‘I was engaged and then….Cawnpore.’  That one simple word could silence even the most determined biddy at once, I assure you, and made me the object of fascination among my social circle.”

             
Weaver smiled too.  “It pleases me to think someone benefited from Rose’s mad scheme.”

             
“Michael benefitted.”

             
“Yes, I suppose he did.”

             
“But the girl –“

             
Weaver blinked.  “Was an impossible age to explain away with a fiction and besides, she kept crying for her mother.  Yes, I buckled to the pressure which Rose applied and yes, I drove the child to the orphanage.  But I followed her progress through the years.  Supported her from afar.  Provided funds.”

             
“You told Trevor that you drove past the temple where the school is housed on the morning Rose and Sang died.”

             
“And so I did, just as I had made that journey on many previous occasions.  I used hired carriages for these visits, since young Felix was a chattering sort who reported every fact to his uncle.”

             
“You would go in?  Speak to the girl?”

             
Weaver shook his head.  “I would simply have the driver park the carriage and then I would sit in silence and stare at the gate.  Struggle again to make peace with my conscience.  I suppose you think me a coward, Geraldine.  A man who spent his entire life in the thrall of his wife’s machinations.  Unable to do the right thing, even when it was clear what the right thing would be.”

             
“Rose did not recognize the girl?  When you went to the school in search of a white nurse and retuned with the child she had thrown into the jaws of fate?”

             
“More than thirty years had passed.”

             
“I suppose that thirty years could be either an eon or the blink of an eye depending upon one’s perspective.   For it would seem that the girl remembered the house. Or your face and that of Rose and even Sang.  Something triggered a memory which was strong enough to evoke…to evoke a passion that wiped out the last thirty years and turned her once again to the child who had played in those rooms.  Had slept in those beds.  ”

             
“Ah,” said Weaver.  “So she did remember her days within our house.  I always wondered, but her face…on the rare occasions in which I saw her, she never made a sign. “

             
“The rare occasions?  She came every afternoon to attend Rose, did she not?”

             
“No…only a few times with the nurse.  To assure we would be good to her, I suppose, and not demand any services which were beyond that poor creature’s limited capacities to perform.”

             
Geraldine’s heart, which had spent this entire odd audience in a sort of suspended stupor, began to beat more quickly.  “Anthony,” she said.  “Whatever are you saying? “

             
“The child I took to the orphanage thirty-two years ago…” Weaver said.  “She grew up smart and strong and defiant and ultimately became the headmistress of the school.  She assumed a new surname at some point in the process, as I gather they all do.  You hate me for not saving her, I can see it on your face, and no doubt she hates me too, even though…”  He broke off as realization hit, belated and painful.

             
“When she realized who we were, she hated us too,” he finally said.  “Hated us enough to murder.  Or rather enough to teach that Adelaide creature how to kill in her stead.”

             
“Adelaide is not the child you carried from Cawnpore?” Geraldine asked hollowly, although she already knew the answer.

             
“No,” said Anthony.  “Of course not.  What a notion.  The child I deposited at the orphanage thirty-two years ago, has grown up to be the woman they call Leigh Anne Hoffman.”

***

Bombay Jail

11:10 AM

             
“There are only two sets of fingerprints on the glass Hubert Morass held as he toppled into the well of Cawnpore,” Davy said.  “His own and, just as suspected, those of Miss Hoffman.”

             
At first no one reacted to this announcement.   Emma, Trevor, and Rayley all sat in silence.  It was Henry Seal who found his voice first.

             
“I will get the full credit for the arrest, I assume?”

             
“Fine,” Trevor said with distaste.  The politics of police work, which marched on even in the most ghastly and blood-soaked of circumstances, had always repelled him.  But the Scotland Yard crew had no interest in the ultimate prosecution of Leigh Anne Hoffman – in fact, he himself hoped to be far away, somewhere along the waters of the Indian Ocean, when that woman met her fate. 

             
“Morass is the one who solved the case,” Davy said flatly.  “That glass yielded the two most perfect prints I have ever seen.  He turned the vessel perfectly, presented it to her just so…”

             
“And I shall see that he gets a posthumous commission,” Seal said, barely restraining himself from rubbing his hands together in glee.  “It would mean a bigger pension for his family…did he have one?”

             
“He lived alone,” Trevor said shortly. 
Like me.  Like me and Rayley and Benson and so many of us.  Take note, young Davy.  You have your family of birth around you now, but within a few years, you shall see what a lonely business this copper work truly can be.

             
“Promise me two things,” he said to Seal.  “That Secretary-General Weaver will be released immediately and that Leigh Anne Hoffman won’t be arrested until after we sail.”

             
“Gladly.”

             
“What will happen to Adelaide?” Emma mused aloud.  “And all the girls in Miss Hoffman's school?  For here we have a killer who has created much benefit with her life.  It seems a good many innocents shall suffer in her absence.”

             
“I agree, it is a disheartening business,” said Rayley.  “All losers, no winners, unless you count Anthony Weaver, and I somehow doubt he shall enjoy his freedom very much.”

             
“It would seem some good would have to come out of this somehow,” Emma went on.   “I can’t bear the thought that our bloody English justice system has cast all those little girls out upon the street.”

             
But Trevor was all business.  “Rayley, I want you to go down to the shipyard and see to our paperwork.  Show them the Queen’s letter, for with any luck we can arrange passage on this evening’s departure.  Now that our business is concluded, it is best we leave Bombay at once.  And I will send a message to the jail informing Tom and Geraldine of these latest developments, and Emma, you must explain the situation to Mrs. Morrow.  You need to return to her house to pack your things and those of Geraldine no matter what, and besides….somehow I suspect she and her granddaughter shall play further into this matter before all is done.  I shall accompany Inspector Seal to the station house to make my final report, and Davy, you take the news to Michael Everlee.  If I read the man right, he is undoubtedly as eager to depart this country as the rest of us.”