City of Bells (5 page)

             
“So it is more a matter that you hope someday to join it?”

             
“What if I do?  Only a fool would want to remain here, in this godforsaken outpost of civilization.”

             
Morass smiled, but only a little, and his amusement was largely concealed by the profusion of facial hair on his broad splotched face. The Byculla Club hardly seemed like an outpost of civilization to him.  On these grounds, flowers bloomed.  Fountains tumbled.  Ladies sipped their own gin and tonics, dubbed a Bombay Splash in their honor, as if changing the name somehow diluted the alcohol.  A cellist played in a corner of the terrace and across the great lawn long-suffering nannies watched as toddlers and dogs dashed about.  A man could see Bombay and the Byculla Club, Morass reflected, as either the pinnacle of civilization or the nadir of self-important silliness, depending on his perspective.  Depending on where he had come from, or – perhaps even more telling – where he hoped to someday end up.

             
“So you’ve invited me here to help you fingerprint the two bodies?” Morass finally asked, which made Seal stop mid-pace and turn toward him.  “I cannot imagine what benefit that would provide, Yard or no Yard, seeing as how the two bodies in the kitchen are the victims and not the accused.  Anthony Weaver is the man whose fingerprints we might need, and he is penned up at the jail.”

             
“I know that,” Seal said. 

             
“Besides,” Morass continued. “From what I’ve read about fingerprinting, which I will admit is not much, the practice is most helpful when one is trying to prove that the accused touched a murder weapon.  A gun or knife or the like.  And we have no such murder weapon.  We have, in fact, no idea how the lady died.”

             
“This I know as well.”

             
Morass squinted up at Seal, but the man’s face was largely shadowed by his hat, a strange affair with an absurdly broad brim.  Woven in straw as if Seal had been, at one time or another, upon safari.  “Poison would be my guess,” he said quietly. 

             
Seal stiffened.  “Poison is a woman’s weapon.  Anthony Weaver is a decorated officer.”

             
Morass wiped his chubby hands on one of the delicate serviettes on the table, without much effect.  “So you are suggesting he would announce this fact by running through his prey with an army issued saber?  Yes, he is an officer, but he is also an old man and a smart one.  Smart enough to choose a weapon which is both less expected and which allows him to be far away when the victim succumbs.  Victims, I should say.  We all keep forgetting the Indian.  You have not been in this country as long as I have, Inspector Seal.  There are any number of botanicals here on the subcontinent which would confound detection in a European laboratory.”

             
Seal at last abandoned his pacing and sat back down at the table.  “We have collected blood,” he said.  “Enough to give this Scotland Yard doctor a decent crack at analysis.  And as for the fingerprints, I shall concede your point, that the prints of the accused are more likely helpful than those of the victims.  But let us assume your theory of poison is a sound one.  Would fingerprints not help us to reconstruct the case, learn more about how the poison was administered?  Via a teacup or spoon or through some sort of legitimate medication?  If so, knowing what she touched last would be most helpful and for that we need her fingerprints as well as her husband’s.”

             
Morass nodded.  “True enough, I suppose, especially when one reflects upon the role of the Indian.  For he’s the most puzzling piece of the puzzle, is he not?  I find it hard to imagine circumstances in which a servant and his mistress might have imbibed the same substance.  They would hardly take tea together, or share a cocktail, and he certainly would not take her prescribed medication.”

             
“It is confounding, I agree,” Seal said, reflecting that perhaps he had dismissed Morass too quickly.  The man’s observations were surprisingly sound.  Seal added, a bit lamely, “So perhaps we should both be grateful that the Yard is on their way to lift the matter from our hands.”

             
Faced with such a blatant lie, Morass could only snort.  “Damn the Yard.  All they shall do is take credit if the case is closed and blame us if it isn’t.  So I suppose you are right, we must provide them with the fingerprints of everyone in Bombay if only to cover our own arses. And you are right as well that it must be soon, for the decomposition is no doubt advancing hourly, despite that heap of ice.  Did you bring wax?  Or is ink the preferred method?”

             
Seal slumped in his chair and looked down, the hat now completely obscuring his features. ”I brought neither.  I haven’t the foggiest notion of how to take fingerprints, you see.  I have read articles, of course, but I was hoping…I was rather hoping you might have sometime seen it done.”

             
“I have never even read the articles,” Morass said.  “We could borrow some ink from the club secretary, I suppose.  Go down to the kitchens and give it a try?”

             
“But in trying we may muck it up worse,” Seal said.  “Damage whatever prints do remain past the point that even Scotland Yard could retrieve them.  How much do you know about decomposition?”

             
“What sort of question is that? I know what any other man knows.  That it happens.  Heat accelerates the process.  That it stinks.”

             
“But the extremities go first simply because they are the extremities, isn’t that the case?  The fingers and toes because they are small, and the points most removed from the torso, the frozen core.”

             
“I suppose,” Morass said, with a frown.  “What are you getting at?”

             
“We shall visit the bodies, just as you say,” Seal said, standing once again and this time nodding for Morass to join him.  “And on our way through the kitchen we shall furthermore trouble the chef for the use of his best cleaver.”

Chapter Five

The
Fortitude
– Top Passenger Deck

August 22, 1889

7:20 PM

             
The steamer ship was stunningly loud in comparison to the sounds produced by a clipper – that gentle billow of the sails, the steady splash of water against the hull, the cries of the gulls as they circled above. Leaning against the railing, Geraldine risked a deep breath and was rewarded not with a bracing gulp of sea air, but instead with a lungful of smoke and ash.  She coughed and spat, but the burning taste in her mouth lingered.

             
Would she have fallen in love with Anthony if they had met aboard such a machine as this?  If their first words had been shouted above the roar of the engines rather than whispered to the accompaniment of birdcalls? The
Weeping Susan
had been all fluttering and flapping, a vulnerable vessel at the mercy of the elements, and thus much like the woman she carried.  But now, thirty years later, The
Fortitude
roared its way unapologetically toward India.  The directness of the approach, the solidity of the ironsides, the steady drone of the engines… the ship was the very personification of British supremacy, of a nation which – much like Geraldine Bainbridge herself – had grown into a position of such power and self-assurance that seemingly nothing could stop its progress.  

             
Another whistle shrieked and the iron railing trembled beneath Geraldine’s palms.  She smiled, a smile with irony, and ambivalence, and perhaps a touch of sadness.  The
Fortitude
was so loud that this time there was no chance she would hear Bombay before she saw it.  This time the ringing of the bells would not catch her unawares.

***

The
Fortitude
– The Card Room

7:20 PM

             
“We’ve gone over it all a thousand times,” Emma protested, her eyes darting around the table at the four men.  “We simply must face the fact that, at least compared to our trips to France and Russia, intelligence on this case is very limited.  All this speculation is only prejudicing our minds.”

             
“Emma is right, as always,” Tom said, with a lazy wink in her direction.  “I can practically recite that Seal fellow’s telegram by heart.  Any collected evidence is bound to be compromised, but it’s pointless to make predictions until we have it in hand.”

             
“Compromised?” Davy said with a frown.

             
“I’m not suggesting either of the Indian investigations was corrupt,” Tom said, drawing in on a cigar he’d obtained for a remarkably good price in the shops of Suez.  “But I think there’s a strong possibility they were inept.  And when I ponder the condition the bodies will be in after lying two weeks in India.  India in August, for God’s sake…”

             
“They iced them,” Trevor reminded him.

             
“They always ice them,” Tom said.  “Trouble is, freezing alters tissue nearly as much as decomposition.”

             
Rayley pulled on his own cigar, which was of a different brand and leaf but purchased at the same agreeable price. “While Miss Bainbridge is off taking her stroll on deck,” he said, “there is something else we need to discuss.  What if the evidence doesn’t exonerate Weaver? No matter what their level of detective skill, it remains entirely possible that the locals have the right man.  How would Miss Bainbridge cope with the revelation that we have traveled all this way only to build a better case against her old beau?”

             
Davy nodded, as if the same thought had troubled him, and Trevor and Tom both began to talk at once.  Leaving the men to their circular discussion, Emma slipped out of the card room and made her way to the so-called observation deck.  An earlier trip up had proven there was little to observe – they were at the exact midpoint of their journey, with neither Arabia nor Africa in view - but Gerry had been gone for some time.  And this Emma found disturbing.

             
Once Emma emerged from the steps to the deck she immediately spied her, standing alone in the smoky mist, braced against the railing and apparently deep in thought.  Emma moved slowly beside Gerry, glancing up at the sky as she spoke. “The stars should come out soon,” she said, struggling to project her voice above the steady mechanical roar.  “Although thanks to the marvels of modern engineering, we shall have only two evenings to appreciate them, and not the forty days and nights of your last voyage. Oh, wait. My mathematics have failed me.  It was closer to sixty, was it not?”

             
“Something like that,” said Geraldine, following her gaze. “The trip is much easier now, but a certain charm is lost.”

             
“Charm?” Emma said skeptically, remembering Gerry’s tales of passengers sleeping in hammocks as dirty bilge water sloshed across the floor beneath them and in particular her story of the time an enterprising rat had gnawed through the strap of her hammock, thus depositing the slumbering Geraldine in a veritable river of refuse.  “It seems the modern era trumps the past in every way, for we now have so little time aboard and so many amusements along the journey that I find myself dashing from one activity to the next, rather like a child at the county fair.  The men spent the whole afternoon out on the sporting deck, you know, learning some grand new skill they call shuffleboard.  Apparently Davy is quite the natural.”

             
Geraldine gave an obligatory little chuckle, but there was clearly no heart in it.  She was staring out into the growing darkness, in the direction of Arabia.

             
“But no matter how different the ship,” Emma said gently, “you still find yourself headed once again to India.  Does it bring back memories?”

             
“Not a one,” Geraldine answered.   She had always considered herself to be a good liar.  It was one of her private little brags.

             
“Do you regret ever having loved him?” Emma asked.

             
It may have been a rude question, but it was a pertinent one.  She had not been fooled in the least by Geraldine’s claim that she was not reminiscing, for the woman was clearly snared in the web of memory. 

             
“The events which followed certainly tainted the memory of our affair,” Geraldine admitted, after a pause.  “For once a woman begins to question one thing about a man, it seems impossible to stop.  It is like pulling a single thread from a tapestry and watching the entire picture unravel.”

             
“And this…this betrayal…this knowledge that you were cruelly used…”

             
“Was I cruelly used?  Yes, I suppose I was, although not nearly so cruelly as poor Roland.  Perhaps you can even say that Anthony, admittedly quite by accident, helped me to find my true fate.  Romantic disappointments often do just that, my dear, although you’re too young to know of these things just yet.  Whenever that object that we thought we wanted most is abruptly taken from us, there is an awakening in that moment.  It can be a harsh awakening, true, a bit like throwing cold water on a dreamer, but it is still effective.”

             
Geraldine thought she was too young to have known heartbreak?  That was quite the laugh.  And proof, Emma supposed, that we all suffer from a type of emotional nearsightedness, seeing the people closest to us in a kind of soft-edged blur.

             
“Are you saying,” she said, “that after your romance with Anthony failed, you knew without question that you would never marry?”

             
“That is precisely what I am saying,” said Geraldine.  “From the moment I received the letter telling me that he had married Rose, I saw that the still life of domesticity was not for me.  That my life’s purpose would be placed out against a broader landscape.  Heavens, listen to me ramble on, for I am quite poetic tonight, am I not?  Filled to the gills with metaphors.  Tapestries and paintings and cold water and the like.”

             
Emma shook her head and pushed away from the railing. “I know you think I am too young to understand, and in truth I don’t.  I’m not sure at all why you answered that horrid man’s letter or why we are undertaking such a complicated journey.  Is it that you feel the need to show him that, despite or perhaps because of his absence, your life is a grand success?”

             
It was Geraldine’s turn to be pulled up short. Could that truly be why she had so readily written to assure Anthony she was on her way?  Because she could not resist the chance to show him the woman she had become – an heiress, a socialite, known and respected in her own right, never again to serve as the ornament of some undeserving man?  But the minute she had the thought, Geraldine rejected it.  No, she was not crossing an ocean merely to gloat.  Not to look upon Anthony in his cell and Rose in her coffin and relish the knowledge that, in the end, she had bested them both. 

             
“Not at all,” she said.  “I have come to India with one purpose alone.  To face up to my past.” 

             
“But the past is…past,” Emma said.  “That’s rather the whole point, isn’t it?”

             
“Ah, my dear,” Geraldine said.  “You truly are so very young.”

***

The
Weeping Susan

April, 1856

             
It had surprised her to learn that the doldrums were a real thing.  Not a synonym for unhappiness or boredom, as the word was often used on dry land, but rather a feature of the wind.  The
Weeping Susan
became caught in them just as she neared the equator, which is where the danger is most acute.  Almost at once, the breezes failed. The sails sagged.  Even the cawing birds and chattering porpoises which had followed the ship around the tip of Africa were abruptly, instantaneously gone.   All movement and sound ceased and there they sat, day after day, just as the poet described. 

             
As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.

             
The first week was tolerable.  The second, stultifying.  In the third week a sort of panic set in among the passengers, who could see land in the distance and who begged the captain to lower the rowboats and take them to shore.  Anything to escape this floating prison.  He refused.  ‘Twas Africa, he said, with a jerk of a thumb toward the verdant land mass.  The savages would devour them before they were ten steps up the beach.  Then on the other side, he offered, before anyone could bother to ask, lay Arabia.  Even worse.  A land where little children were trained as soldiers and the knife blades ran as long as a man’s body.  And the Arabs, unlike the Africans, were utterly immune to Christian conversion.

             
In the beginning of the fourth week, something shifted. Not the winds and not the sails, but within the mood of the passengers. A sort of frenzied, devil-may-care energy possessed the ship.  People laughed, sometimes rather maniacally.   Some sang, and others danced.   The crew, never circumspect in this regard, doubled their amount of drink and one woman, in a sleepwalking sort of stupor, attempted to throw herself overboard. 

             
The captain had seen it all before. He knew well enough what the doldrums could do to a group of people and he’d be damned if it would happen again on his watch.  Not with a shipload of middle class ladies entrusted to his care.  He ordered that everyone must sleep up on deck.  The heat was the danger, he declared. The heat and the lack of true rest for them all. 

             
And so that very night, with the sun burning the edges of the water to red, they all trooped up on deck from their various cabins.  The passengers from the posh staterooms and those poor souls crammed into the lesser berths below.   From the wife of the Secretary-General to the cook’s spindly-legged galley boy, they all stood before him, holding their bedclothes in their arms,  their eyes mutely begging him to deliver them from their misery, if only for a single night. 

             
In order to preserve what was left of the group’s rapidly dwindling sense of propriety, the captain ordered that the useless mainsail be lowered from its mast and stretched across the length of the deck.  It became a canvas wall between the sixteen men and twenty-seven women, and, after a bit of fuss, everyone made up their pallets and lay down to sleep.

             
Almost immediately they were thrilled with the unaccustomed sense of an evening breeze, cooling their bodies for the first time since the ship had rounded the Cape.  And then, as the sun sank completely, they were treated to a canopy of stars.  The constellations of the Southern Hemisphere were strange to most of them.  One of the more scholarly sailors called out the names in the darkness - Orion, Taurus, and of course the Southern Cross.  The men could see where he was pointing, but from their side of the canvas wall, the women had to work a bit harder to find the promised figures in the ink-dark sky.