Fever Quest: A Clean Historical Mystery set in England and India (The Isabella Rockwell Trilogy Book 2) (12 page)

Guilt and exhaustion made her steps heavy and her head
span. Of course she’d done the wrong thing – once again – but she couldn’t
think about that now. She must focus on one problem at a time. What was
important now was keeping Livia alive. Then she could think about how to
persuade Midge to come with them. If she could find the seeds, surely she could
barter with Vritra for their escape?

Behind her, paws making little sound despite the puddles,
came the dog. What was it with this dog? She looked back at him. Just her luck
he was so ugly, with his one missing ear and a chipped front canine. His
striped brown-and-black coat was dull and lay tightly over his prominent ribs,
and his feet and ear looked too big for his body.

Maybe if she ignored him, he’d go away.

The foliage on either side of the path had grown more
dense and heavy waxed petals with a cloying scent pushed against her face. It
was several, sweaty minutes before the track widened out and she could push the
leaves to one side to find a small pool of clean water.

As she returned to the bungalow, Vritra took her arm.

“Come. Let us use the fever tree we have, at least. I
could do with some help.”

But she shook her head.

“I don’t think you’d want my help.”

He glared at her; his expression was scathing.

“Don’t be so precious. Here.” He handed her the brown
packet. “Let’s get started.”

Isabella took it hesitantly. If Vritra were with her, then
maybe she wouldn’t make any mistakes. Her hand shook a little, but she bit her
lip and concentrated.

They divided up the fever tree powder into doses and she
carried the medicine as he moved from patient to patient, helping where they
could not help themselves. The lessons Abhaya had taught her were not slow in
coming back. Here and there were opportunities for her to use the herbs that
belonged to Vritra, and she took them. Her fingers fumbled with disuse at
first, but they grew surer the more she did. A touch of papaya salve on
someone’s bedsores, some sweet-smelling lavender oil on another’s pillow to
help them sleep, and a whole teaspoon of poppy seeds for a young man suffering
terrible hallucinations. The time passed quickly.

A few hours later Vritra stretched.

“There. We are done. You did well. You would make an
excellent healer if you wanted to become one.”

He walked outside and squatted next to a fire on which an
old man was cooking a large pot of daal. The sun had set and the smell made
Isabella’s stomach contract with hunger so fiercely that she almost fell
forward. Vritra scooped up a ladle full of the fragrant lentils and handed it
to her. She tried not to eat it too quickly, but she couldn’t help herself.
Vritra talked to the cook for a moment.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” she said, as the last
creamy remnants made their way down to her stomach.

“I don’t know. Maybe I believe you tell the truth.” He
handed her a piece of papaya, ripe and sticky.

“Where will Midge be now?” She didn’t need to tell Midge
she knew he’d found a diamond. If she could just see him, she knew she would be
able to convince him he must leave. As for the seeds …

“Asleep at the palace, I should think.”

“Is there any chance I could see him? Maybe you could ask
him?”

Vritra swung around the torch so she could see its light
reflected in his eyes.

“I have done all I can for the moment. Even for me,
talking to him in secret would be difficult.”

“But Stone doesn’t know Midge has found the diamond yet.
He can’t be keeping him under such close watch, surely?”

“Ah, but he is. His rage towards you towers over
everything. Even I daren’t go against his orders. You have crushed a dream he
has held for thirty years. There will be a high price to pay.” Vritra’s face
was taut with emotion, the skin stretched over his bones. “I just wish it
didn’t include the lives of so many innocent people.” His eyes clouded over and
he rubbed his hand over his eyebrows. “Still” – he patted his pocket – “you
delivered the Jesuit’s Bark to me and I am grateful.”

He went back into one of the buildings and returned with a
small bag which he handed to Isabella.

“What’s this?”

“Just some food and water.”

“We must get you back to the mine in the morning. It would
not do for Colonel Stone to find you out of your prison.”

“Vritra?”

“Mmm?” He was digging around in one of his pockets.

“I didn’t tell you the truth. Al Hassan gave me more than
just the fever tree powder.” Vritra turned to look at her. “He gave me nine
seeds as well.”

For a moment he didn’t speak, then his face broke into a
broad grin.

“What very wonderful news.”

“You’re not cross with me?”

“How could I be, when the news is so very good?’ Vritra’s
eyebrows disappeared into his turban. “Can I see them?” He was unable to
contain his excitement.

Isabella looked away for a moment.

“I haven’t got them.” Vritra winced, though he tried to
hide it. “I threw them away, I thought they were nothing important.” Vritra
didn’t speak. “But I know where they are.”

A little light came back to his eyes.

“Are they far?”

“No. I dropped them on the prison floor.”

Vritra’s face lit up. “So we can retrieve them?”

“Of course.” Isabella felt a deep sense of delight at the
pleasure she had brought to his seamed face.

“You’re sure you can find them?”

She nodded. “Yes. What should I do with them when I find
them?”

Vritra’s face was resolute.

“You must do as your conscience decides, but first
you must sleep.” He opened the door to Livia’s room to show both girls fast
asleep. Isabella fell down onto the blanket laid out for her. She was asleep so
quickly she didn’t feel the dog settle into the hollow of her back with a small
“hrmpff”. His eyes twitched, but they didn’t close.

The sun was rising in a riot of orange and pink.
Livia sat against her pillow, her face still grey and stretched, but her eyes
were clear. Isabella couldn’t speak for surprise and relief.

Rose’s tone was accusing.

“How could you disappear when you knew Livia was ill?”

Isabella felt Livia’s forehead. The fever was still there,
but it had abated to a dull simmer.

“Do you want a drink?”

Livia nodded weakly. Isabella looked up at Vritra, who was
smiling from the doorway.

“Does the fever tree really work this quickly?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Livia swallowed the water and then spoke, her voice harsh
and cracked. Even back from death’s door she was beautiful.

“I don’t know what you’re both talking about, but
honestly, I thought this was a sick room.”

Rose leaned over her, her voice gentle.

“It is, dearest.”

Livia’s voice took on a cross tone.

“Well then, who let that dog in here?”

The room smelt of mint, the suffocating stench of sickness
gone for the moment.

Isabella sat down next to her.

“What are we going to call it?” Livia’s eyes flickered
tiredly to the dog curled up at the foot of her bed.

“I thought you didn’t like dogs,” said Isabella, smiling.

“I’ve changed my mind.” Livia reached a shaky hand to
caress the dog’s head. The dog closed its eyes.

“You choose,” said Isabella.

“Rat.”

“Rat?”

Livia nodded. “Yes. He looks like one. On the side where
he’s got no ear.”

“Rat it is, then.”

Livia looked at her.

“So, what happened? You look different.”

Isabella reached up and touched her cheeks.

“Do I?” She took a deep breath, not yet able to talk about
what she had seen. “How do you feel?”

Livia’s eyes were beginning to close, her long lashes
lying on her cheeks like caterpillars.

“As if I have no bones, in a way. Otherwise I feel I may
be on the mend.”

Isabella nodded. “Sleep again now, whilst it’s cool.”

But Livia was already asleep.

Isabella went out onto the porch, grateful she didn’t have
to walk across a room full of dying soldiers to get there. She’d had her fill
of death. She sat down and leaned her head against a post. Rat settled his
weight in behind her and with a sigh went back to sleep.

The sky above her was a deep indigo and high clouds were
visible by the light of a new moon which showed its face in the east. For a
brief moment the smell of the pond was lifted and a waft of jasmine came from
far away. She squinted. The stars were being driven away by the dawn, but the
charioteer, her father’s favourite constellation, remained swinging his way out
west.

Her father.

How long had it been since she’d thought about him? Or was
it that the idea of him was with her all the time so she no longer had to think
of him consciously?

Either way. He couldn’t have felt more distant.

Whatever Prince Ernest’s letter said, at moments like this
she didn’t believe he was still alive. How could he be?

A flash of lightning made her jump, the light showing
towering mountains of cloud, far, far away. The hairs on her arm lifted. It had
been a night like this on which her father had first rode away, laughing over
his shoulder at something Josha Bilram had said. He’d been carefree, ready for
an adventure. He hadn’t been worried. He’d returned a hundred times from
battle. He’d had no idea this time would be different.

The gods are kind indeed not to let us see the future.
So Abhaya had always said.

Now Isabella understood what she meant.

Worries chased themselves around and around her head,
snapping at each other’s heels. Midge, Livia, Rose and her father blended into
each other. Yet in the centre of them all was Al Hassan’s face, not ill and
drawn, but brown and healthy as he’d been when she’d first met him. His
scimitar was drawn, but he was smiling.

“No!” Rose’s voice was almost a shout. “I won’t go
back in there, and nor will Livia. It will be the death of her.”

Rose was as unhinged as anyone Isabella had ever seen, and
the temptation to leave her behind was almost overwhelming. The last thing she
needed to factor in to her plan was mad Rose with her swirling eyes, festoons
of spittle escaping from one corner of her twitching mouth. They could leave
her and she might know no different.

Isabella swallowed hard.

No.

There would be no leaving of anyone; not any more.

“We have no choice. You either stay here alone or come
with me. Rose?” Isabella took Rose by the shoulders and waited until her eyes
alighted on Isabella’s own. “What will it be?” Rose’s eyes gradually stopped
spinning. “You don’t want to go back to your parents, do you?”

Rose looked at her mutely and shook her head.

“Good. You must concentrate, then, and do what I tell you.
Do you think you can do that?”

Rose’s mouse-brown head nodded and her eyes suddenly
became clear as she focused on Isabella.

Isabella mentally shook her head. What was she thinking
of? If ever there were an expedition unlikely to succeed, this was it. A sadhu,
two ferenghis, an invalid and a dog. She might as well step out on the road and
wave the white flag of surrender. Thank God for Vritra, who had helped them to
the door of the mine and was now telling the guards he was escorting them back
to their cells. She didn’t like to think about how they’d have managed without
him.

Livia’s face was white and her breath was coming in harsh
gasps. Isabella took Livia’s arm and looped it over her own shoulders.

“Just stay with me,” she whispered, as the dark of the
cavern embraced them and they left daylight behind.

She could hear Vritra up ahead, talking to a miner in
Hindi. Livia’s breathing was loud in her ear and she was warm with the effort
of supporting Livia down the winding stone steps to the vault beneath. On into
the belly of the earth they wound their way, until Isabella felt Kali’s gaze
fall upon her and her chamber opened in front of them.

“Put her in one of the chairs,” said Vritra. Isabella
wondered briefly whether they had any idea Midge had found a diamond.

A blast of hot air came from a tunnel cut into the wall
facing them. Was that the one she’d seen Midge emerge from?

“Is that tunnel four?” she muttered to Vritra as she
wrapped one of her saris around Livia’s shoulders.

Rose plonked herself in a chair next to Livia. Rat looked
at Isabella expectantly, shifting his weight from paw to paw.

Vritra was lifting a torch from the wall.

“Yes, it is.” He handed her the torch. “But you are to go
that way. That is where the prison is.” He gestured towards the only other
tunnel off Kali’s chamber, which sloped downward into darkness. “We’ll wait for
you here. There will be no guards. Good luck.”

Isabella nodded and took off for the other side of
the chamber. Rat, his good ear flying, matched her stride for stride.

The sound of Vritra’s hushed conversation with the
girls disappeared the moment Isabella entered the tunnel that led to the cells.
She jogged along the downward slope, her feet slipping slightly in the scree. A
few minutes later she saw the her cells in the flickering half-light of her
torch, its key hanging half out of the lock.

She ran to where she’d been sitting when she dropped the
seeds and fell to her knees, keeping the torch high whilst the fingers of her
left hand pushed through the muddy debris of the floor. In a few moments she’d
found eight seeds, hard and cool, in the dirt. Hadn’t there been more? Just a
couple more … She was sure there were nine. She widened the area of her
search and was rewarded with one more, halfway across the cell. It must have
been on her sari and fallen when she stood. Rat was nosing the ground where
she’d been searching and he looked at her with his ear cocked. Isabella smiled.
He was odd. His skinny face seemed to have a look of understanding that she’d
be hard-pushed to find in most adults.

She turned back to the seeds in her hand, hurriedly
thrusting them into the paper wrapping she’d saved, and then reached for her
bag.

But she was not quick enough.

There was a long low growl and then another. Rat was
standing erect and looking up the tunnel, the fur on his back raised in a
battleground ridge. A flickering glow crept across the wall opposite the cell.
Isabella cast frantically around, but there was nowhere for her to hide.

“Told you she’d come back.”

Midge stood in front of her, his face as hard as the
diamonds he was so intent on finding. Isabella’s stomach clenched.

“So you did.”

Stone stood next to him, dressed in the same outfit as
Midge, the same blood-red stone around his neck as Midge had worn.

“I’d have thought you’d buy a few more workers with those
rubies you each have around your necks, Colonel Stone, then you wouldn’t have
to use children and old men.”

Stone’s face was a mask.

“And a good morning to you too, Miss Rockwell.” He looked at
her hands, which held Abhaya’s pouch. “Where are your friends?”

“I’m sure you know exactly where they are,” she answered.

Stone inclined his head like an ugly bird.

“You chose to leave them. Why does that not surprise me?”
Midge sniggered.

“But I’d have thought you’d be a million miles away by
now. Why did you come back?” Stone’s eyes flickered to her hands again. “Did
you forget something?”

But Isabella wasn’t listening to him.

She was studying Midge who, in the torchlight, appeared as
a caricature of himself. His open face was closed off and his broad forehead
and freckled nose and chin seemed sharp and pinched like the marionettes she’d
seen once at the theatre with Alix. Across his broad forehead lay a deep
furrow, which hadn’t been there before. He looked like an uglier waxwork of his
former self; as if what made him Midge had packed its bag and gone away.

“Isabella?”

She returned Stone’s gaze, close to tears.

“No. I didn’t forget anything. Not this time, anyway.”

“Then why are you here?”

She looked at Colonel Stone, his shadow giant on the wall
behind him. Then she looked back at Midge. She knew Stone was going to search
her. The only thing she had going for her was that he would find nothing in
Abhaya’s pouch. The seeds she clutched in a handkerchief in her hand. Other
than dropping them on the floor, it was too late for her to hide them.

Stone took a step towards her and the smell of camphor
reached her.

“What do you have in your hand?”

She didn’t reply.

“Yeah, Iz. What have you got?”

Isabella looked at Midge – this new Midge whom she didn’t
know.

“What about what you’ve got, Midge?” She almost spat the
words, surprised at her venom. “Why don’t we talk about that?”

Midge’s face went white with shock and, too late, he tried
to wipe the expression from his face.

Stone stopped his approach towards Isabella, clearly
surprised at Midge’s reaction.

“What is she talking about?”

Midge held his hands at his sides, but his fists were
clenched.

“I don’t know.” He was going to bluff it out. “She’s just
trying to get the attention off herself. Go on, ask her what’s in her hands.”

Stone took a step towards Midge.

“No. I’m much more interested in what you’re hiding now.”
Again the dip of the head, swooping towards him like a bird of prey. Midge took
a step backwards. “Has the Maharajah been giving you pretty presents? I told
you to be careful of him, didn’t I?”

Midge was almost against the cave wall.

“No. He hasn’t. I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

Stone had taken Midge by the collar of his tunic, the
silver chain of the necklace digging into his skin, and was patting his clothes
up and down, white skeleton’s fingers poking and prodding

Isabella went cold and then hot. It might not be Midge as
she knew him, but somewhere under all that bluster and bravado it was Midge.

Midge whom she loved.

She ran out of the cell and grabbed another torch from the
wall with her free hand. The metal handle was hot, but she barely felt it.

“What is this?”

Stone’s voice was so different, Isabella’s arm stopped
mid-swing.

Now it was Stone’s face that was lurched from white to
red, his whole body arched in fury over Midge. Isabella edged forward, the
torch flickering above her. In the palm of Stone’s hand, on a bed of black
felt, lay an uncut chunk of shining stone, still grubby from its bed in the
earth. It was the size of her thumbnail and though it had no facets, it still
gleamed dully in the light of the flame.

Isabella didn’t know who was the most shocked of the three
of them, but it was she who moved first.

The torch in her hand swung through the air and clouted
Stone hard on his temple. He fell quietly to the ground, unconscious. There was
a scuffle from the top of the tunnel and guards’ footsteps could be heard. She
bent and grabbed the diamond, then grabbed Midge’s hand and pulled him out of
the cell, locking it behind her.

“Come on!”

Midge didn’t need any encouragement and he followed
Isabella to the entrance of the tunnel. The guards were running towards them.
Now what? But she had forgotten about Rat who, as if he’d been waiting for this
moment his whole life, leapt from the shadows and made straight for the leading
guard sinking his teeth into his ankle. The man screamed and the other
soldiers, when Rat turned on them, teeth bared and his ear flat to his head,
ran into an empty cell, slamming the door behind them.

Isabella and Midge ran towards the top of the tunnel,
Isabella holding tightly to Midge’s hand. The urge she had to move quietly was
strong, but each crunch of their feet was loud and crashing to her ears. Even
Rat, behind them, sounded like he was wearing hobnailed boots. Both of them
bent low as the tunnel opened back up into the Chamber of Kali, but they
couldn’t see any guards.

In fact, there was no one there at all.

A warm wind moved behind them, propelling them forward
like a giant invisible hand. Isabella paused in a crouch and wiped her dripping
face with her sari sand scraping her cheek. She opened her palm in which the
nine seeds sat, hot and sticky, in her hanky. In her other hand, the diamond,
hard and cold, glimmered in the chamber’s orange glow. Exhausted, she sat back
on her haunches and rested her head on her knees, gazing at them both. What a
bloody fuss over such very small things.

“I’m sorry, Iz. I was so angry with you for accusing me of
ruining your cabin.”

Each of Midge’s words was like a knife to her soul. His
face was sad and tired, suddenly young. Isabella lifted her arm and placed it
around his shoulders.

“I think I owe you an apology, too, now we know who really
did it.”

Midge rested his head against her shoulder. His matted
hair smelt of dust.

“So we’re even?”

“Yeah.” She closed the palm of her hand on the diamond.
“We’re even. Anyway, I started it. I’m sorry I was so awful to you on the boat.
My head was turned – I’d never wanted to impress anyone before.”

“Why’d you care about them so much, anyways?”

She turned to look at him. His hair was sticking up but
his face looked a bit smoother, as if some of the lines she’d noticed before
had been erased.

“I think I just wanted to be a part of their club. They
seemed so grown-up. I never had friends like that before.”

“But you’d had Alix.”

Isabella smiled and nodded. “Yes, but she’s my age. Livia
and Rose were older. What they talked about seemed so interesting.”

“What? Like boys?” Midge rolled his eyes in disgust, now
looking much more like his old self.

Isabella nudged him. “Maybe. You haven’t cornered the
market on romance, you know.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Midge was looking at the ground, but he was smiling and
she knew he was thinking of Minna, the baker’s daughter, about whom Isabella
used to tease him back in London. She held out the diamond.

“Here you are.”

Midge hesitated.

“I don’t want it.”

Isabella raised her eyebrows.

“But it’s yours.” She paused. “You found it.”

Midge looked away and Rat pushed his nose into Midge’s
face.

“I told you, I don’t want it.” His voice was muffled.

Isabella closed her hand and put both the treasures away
in her drawers.

“No one will ever find them there, will they?” Midge’s
voice had the suggestion of a giggle to it. Isabella slapped him gently on the
arm, and then hugged him to her.

“I won’t ever leave you behind again.”

Midge didn’t speak, but she could see a tear glisten on
his blond lower lashes. Isabella stood up and held out her hand.