India Black (9 page)

Vincent bridled at this affront; the two thugs who’d brought me here were no match for him in skill or cunning, though they were certainly victorious in the muscles sector and were running neck and neck in the odor department.

“’Twas easy,” he said scornfully. “Them two buggers was so busy draggin’ India around they didn’t even shut the door. I just slipped in be’ind ’em and followed ’em up the stairs and down the ’all. While you all were jabberin’ and introducin’ yourselves like proper gennelmun, I snuck in behind them dusty ole curtains and stayed still as a statue.” Here he paused to glare at French. “’Til you winkled me out.”

I cut in before Vincent lost his temper. “Thank you so much for coming, Vincent,” I said. “And your concern for my honour is touching. I won’t soon forget it. But as you can see, all is well.”

“Run along,” said French, not unkindly, for he certainly knew it was inquisitiveness that had brought Vincent here and not concern over my virtue.

Endicott was still sputtering, stalking around the room and uttering threats against Smith and Jones (you would think our senior ministers could show just a bit more imagination, wouldn’t you, when it came to aliases?).

Vincent gave me a beseeching look. I could see he was desperate to stay and hear the rest of the story. I was about to add my own injunction to depart, but it occurred to me that had I
been
in any sort of trouble, the little toad might have been my only salvation.

“Oh, let him stay, French,” I said. “He’s been in a whorehouse before, so I don’t suppose it will do him any harm to spend time in a politician’s office. This might be the only civics lesson he ever gets.”

“You can’t be serious,” Endicott fumed. “It’s bad enough that we’re talking to a harlot about government affairs. Now we’re explaining the position of the British government to a filthy child off the streets.”

“That will do, Endicott,” French said sharply, before either Vincent or I could get out a word, which was fortunate for Endicott. “The boy is an associate of Miss Black’s, and I might add, a very resourceful one. He might prove useful. In any case, it’s growing late, and we have only a few hours to effect our plans.”

I expect French’s change of mind was due less to the lateness of the hour and Vincent’s potential utility, and more to Endicott’s insolence.

French nodded to Dizzy. “Prime Minister, you were about to explain what is at stake here and why we need Miss Black’s collaboration.”

He pushed Vincent into a chair next to mine and then stood upwind. No such luck for me; the stench rolled off Vincent in almost visible waves.

“Ah, yes,” murmured Dizzy. “It would behoove us to explicate the matter to Miss Black. I’ve no doubt when she understands our plight and its fullest implications, we may count not only upon her sympathy, but her assistance as well.” He tucked his chin and smiled bravely at me. “Our nation faces a grave peril tonight, Miss Black. You will grace us with your company for an hour, won’t you, and let me explain to you this dire predicament we confront and how you might provide the succor we require in our time of need?”

He said it very prettily, with all the sincerity of a Romany horse trader, which indeed he resembled in his garish clothes and glittering rings, but I nodded gravely and sat down with an air of amiable attentiveness, while French lit a cheroot, Endicott settled back in his chair with a scowl on his face, and Dizzy put a boot on the fender, assumed a professorial air and began to talk.

“
I
t is ironic that your name is India, my dear, for that country shall be the subject of our conversation tonight.” He looked down that formidable nose at me. “Of course, you are aware how vital the subcontinent is to the wealth and power of our tiny island nation?” Without waiting for me to confirm that I was in fact aware of the great amount of loot some of my fellow countrymen had pillaged from that unhappy country, he plunged on.

I’ll summarize it for you, for if I repeated verbatim all that Dizzy told us that night, you’d be retired to Torquay and have forgotten your name by the time I finished the tale. Lord, that man loved to talk. The nub of the matter was this: in the summer of 1875, a handful of peasants (Orthodox Christian and Mussulman alike) in Hercegovina (part of the Ottoman Empire, and ruled at the time by Sultan Abdulaziz from Istanbul, or Constantinople, as the West persisted in calling the city) objected to paying their sheep tax after the harvest had failed. The Turkish ministers evidenced their sympathy to the peasants’ position by dispatching their military to slaughter them. The butchering of Mussulman villagers went unremarked; the massacre of the Christians sent shock waves through the capitals of Europe. Andrassy, the Hungarian prime minister, issued an ultimatum to the Turks to stop the taxation of the luckless farmers and to guarantee the religious liberty of the Empire’s subjects, an approach supported by Dizzy’s Conservative government. The boys in Berlin went further, demanding that Christians be permitted to bear arms, a suggestion that nearly caused the sultan to suffer an apoplectic fit, as he had been under the impression that he was the caliph, heir to Mohammed and the undisputed ruler of the Sublime Porte (as the Turks liked to call their pleasant little realm). The sultan responded to Europe’s meddling by brutally suppressing the spreading revolt.

Refugees poured out of Hercegovina into Austria, Serbia and Montenegro, with wild stories of Mussulman atrocities, which inflamed Christian sensibilities. Excitable as children, the leaders of Serbia and Montenegro wasted no time in declaring war on the sultan, at which act of audacious daring the rest of Europe drew a collective breath and wished, not for the first time (nor, I’d wager, for the last), that the bloody Serbs and Montenegrins would mind their own damned business. For their declaration of war meant that the great powers of Europe would be sucked into the vortex. The Russians, fellow Orthodox Christians, had long had a soft spot for their Serbian cousins and immediately declared their support in the war against the Turks.

The alarm bells went off in London, where Dizzy and his gang saw the Russian move as nothing more than a pretext for displacing the Turks and helping themselves to Constantinople and control of the Dardanelles. It was at this point in his lecture that Dizzy looked grave and motioned for us to follow him to the great oak table covered with maps, where he unrolled a chart and weighted the corners. He tapped Constantinople with his finger, then drew his hand along the coast of the Mediterranean, through Turkey into Syria, straight through Damascus and Jerusalem, until the moving finger reached Port Said, at the mouth of the Nile, where it stopped and tapped the map once more.

He fixed me with a stern look, and said: “Even a child can see the danger. If the Russians take Constantinople, there is nothing to stop them from marching all the way to Egypt.”

Well, nothing but rocks and sand and a few thousand Mussulmans who’d like nothing more than to come swooping down out of the hills on the crusaders slogging through their territory, I thought, but there’s no stopping Dizzy when he’s in full flow.

“The Russian Bear could easily take the Suez Canal, cutting us off from India and bringing the British Empire to its knees.”

I expected the music to swell patriotically at this point, but all I heard was Dizzy’s fevered breathing and Endicott chewing the end of his mustache.

“Another Crimea,” intoned Dizzy. “And we all know what that campaign did to the flower of English manhood.”

“I think perhaps you’re being a bit melodramatic, sir,” Endicott murmured. “Lord Derby thinks the danger is greatly exaggerated.”

The prime minister rounded on him, black eyes flashing and curls flying. “My foreign secretary spends entirely too much time enjoying the company of Count Shuvalov,” he said acidly. “Lord Derby’s friendship with the count renders him loath to act under the most auspicious of circumstances. If it were left to him, England would stand by while the tsar’s army occupied Egypt.”

“Who’s Count Shove-a-lot?” whispered Vincent to me, leaning closer to do so. I nearly fainted.

“The Russian ambassador to the Court of St. James,” French muttered under his breath.

Endicott’s face was pale, except for two crimson stains across his cheekbones. He inclined his head stiffly at Dizzy. “My apologies, sir. I was merely trying to express the views of the secretary. After all, I am here as his representative.”

“Quite so, Mr. Endicott.” The prime minister smiled wanly. “I’m afraid the urgency of the situation prompts me to speak more warmly than I should.”

“No doubt Mr. Gladstone’s behavior contributes to your feelings on the matter,” Endicott said, with a touch of spite.

If he expected his words to have an effect, they certainly did. Dizzy’s face flushed unhealthily, and his eyes burned with contempt. “The old fool. Why can’t he busy himself with church fetes and stay out of politics?”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What’s Gladstone got to do with this?”

Dizzy made a retching noise and stalked over to the sideboard for more whisky. “You tell her, French. When I think of that buffoon, my blood boils.”

It was an open secret that Dizzy and the former prime minister hated each other as only a loquacious dandy and novelist with a whiff of the Levantine about him could hate a Bible-spouting, hymn-singing moralist. They’d been going at it tooth and nail since they were first introduced at a dinner given by Lord Lyndhurst in 1835. For four decades they’d traded jabs, insults and offices, arguing over budgets, trade, the extension of the franchise, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, Anglo-Catholic church ritual, land reform, the British Empire, whether Vicky should be Empress of India (Dizzy won that battle, though the vast majority of the Indians seem unimpressed) and anything else they could think of to argue about, regardless of how petty it was. Possibly the nadir of the relationship between the two occurred when Gladstone succeeded Dizzy as chancellor of the exchequer. It was customary for the incoming chancellor to pay the outgoing chancellor the cost of his office furniture. It was also customary for the outgoing chancellor to pass along the official robe of office to the incoming chancellor. When Gladstone refused to pay Dizzy for the furniture, Dizzy decided a fair trade would be the chancellor’s robe, which he immediately spirited off to his country house in Buckinghamshire, where I suppose it remains to this day. It’s hard to credit a story like this, when you’re talking about two grown men, but it’s true. You’ll be able to look it up in the history books one day.

While the prime minister fortified himself with a tot, French picked up the story. “You may have heard of a place called Batak, Miss Black. It’s a small village on the slope of Mount Rhodope, in Bulgaria. The peasants there are Orthodox Christians, or were.”

“Were?” I asked.

“Four thousand of them were slaughtered last summer by the Bashi-Bazouks, Mussulman irregulars allied with the Turkish authorities. The incident was first reported in the
Daily News,
who referred to matter as the ‘Bulgarian atrocities.’”

“Bah!” Dizzy exclaimed. “The stories were largely invention. Coffeehouse babble. And no one seems to give a tinker’s damn for the thousands of Mussulman villagers murdered by their Christian neighbors.”

French shrugged. “Nevertheless, devout Christians, Mr. Gladstone among them, were outraged at the affair. There have been repeated calls for the British government to act.”

“To act?” I asked.

“To attack the caliphate and liberate its Christian subjects.”

“Gladstone wants you to invade the Ottoman Empire?”

“Ridiculous,” Dizzy expostulated. “The man is a prize idiot. We hold millions of pounds in bonds issued by the Turks. If we invade, the bonds will be worthless. And then there’s the matter of what to do with the Russians. We don’t want to fight Ivan again, only twenty years after the horrors of Gallipoli. But we can’t allow the Russians in Turkey, not at any cost. We’re in a damned tight spot. We have tried to remain on the sidelines, urging the Turks to refrain from attacking their Christian subjects and warning the Russians to stay out.”

Endicott stirred himself and fetched more whisky. “It’s deuced difficult siding with the Turks against the Russians as long as the bloody Turks keep slaughtering Christians. Mr. Gladstone is outraged, and he’s doing his best to incite the public to support a move against the Turks.”

“He may be incensed,” said Dizzy. “I’ve never doubted the old parson’s faith, but it has no place in politics. Good God, just imagine if each man allowed himself to be swayed by moral compunctions; we’d never get a damned thing accomplished in Parliament.” He shuddered at this unspeakable idea and fortified himself with a drink. “The man’s a lunatic if he thinks Britain should mount another crusade to take on the Saracens and free their subjects from bondage. And don’t think Gladstone doesn’t have another motive behind all that proselytizing. He’d like nothing more than to see this Cabinet humiliated and this government fall. He’s got an eye for the main chance, does Gladstone.”

I’ve often wondered how a politician can keep a straight face when he talks, decrying as he does in his rivals the very same ethics he shares.

“Whatever his motives,” said French, “Mr. Gladstone has struck a chord with the British public. In September he published a pamphlet on the situation in the Ottoman Empire. It sold two hundred thousand copies in less than a month. You may have seen it yourself, Miss Black.
The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East?”

I vaguely remembered the tract; Calthorp had brought in a stack on a fine autumn day, mustache trembling with suppressed fury at the horrors inflicted on the Bulgarian peasants. Since he’d waded through a swarm of unfed, unwashed and unwanted children to deliver them to Lotus House, I hadn’t been able to muster much sympathy for nameless, faceless villagers half a world away.