The Empress of India (21 page)

Moran laughed. “He lies,” he said. “The booking agent assured me that his is a nice little cabin.”

“True,” the mummer admitted. “With ‘little’ being the word of choice. They got no respect for the mercantile classes, which is what I’m traveling as, you might say. Course, I ain’t got it as bad as the servants. They got ’em four decks down where there ain’t hardly any windows and they puts ’em six to a room.” He pulled himself up onto the wooden
chair that went with the small built-in desk in a corner of the cabin. “Course, even them ain’t got it as bad as the soldiers, and
they
ain’t got it as bad as the native crew, who really do sleep with the cows and the sheep and the pigs; or at least on the same level, which is way below the waterline.”

“I’m surprised they believed you were anything as sober as a merchant,” Moriarty said. “You look like a busker in that suit. You ought to be outside the Gaiety Theatre in London entertaining the crowd with a twirling cane and a fast buck and wing.”

“This is my traveling merchant’s disguise,” said the mummer, looking offended.

“Ah!” said Moriarty.

“And I’m practicing that pitch, what you told me, about them statues,” the mummer said. “Thinking over what they might ask, and how I might answer. I’m ready to go anytime.”

“We’d best wait a few days,” Moriarty told him. “Give Colonel Moran a chance to get chummy with the officers of the Duke’s Own.”

“Course, I really did have an ’andsome suit o’lights once, with little mirrors sewed into it all over and everything. My mother made it for me when I were six years of age. I was not much smaller than I am now, but, of course, I looked considerably younger. I used to do an act with two other six-year-olds and Morty—he was seven, but he looked six. We would dance and sing.” The mummer stood up and did a shuffle, and sang in a high-pitched voice, “I want—to be—alone—with you—for just—an hour or two.” He stopped and sat down. “And other suitable material,” he concluded.

“You must have been beautiful,” Moran said.

“ ’Andsome,” said the mummer, looking annoyed. “ ’Andsome, I was.”

“Sorry,” Moran said. “Handsome, then.”

“Morty, now—
he
was beautiful,” said the mummer.

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
—William Shakespeare

V
iceroy Sir George Montague, in consultation with General St. Yves and Captain Iskansen, of
The Empress of India,
had decided to wait until the passengers and crew were all aboard the
Empress,
and steam was up, before transferring the maharaja’s gold to the specially constructed vault deep inside the ship. Normally this would be done well before sailing, so as not to draw attention to the cargo, but as it seemed that attention had already been drawn, the triumvirate determined that strength and speed would have to make up for the lack of stealth.

When the last passenger was safely aboard, the gangplank was removed,
and the ship’s officers conducted a walk-through of the ship looking for anything untoward or unusual, aided by such of the crew as were believed to be absolutely reliable—although how reliable any man will prove when faced with the possibility of making off with some part of two tons of gold was a question that had already kept St. Yves up for several nights. At the same time two companies of the Pandiwar Foot, a highly dependable local regiment, conducted a sweep of both banks of the Hooghly River for a couple of miles in either direction.

When all was declared normal by the sweepers on and off the ship, a phalanx of guards descended on Commissariat Jetty, a cargo door in the side of the
Empress
was opened, and six reinforced goods wagons emerged from Fort William and proceeded to the pier.

It took the best part of four hours to effect the transfer of the boxes of gold from the wagons to the specially prepared vault, what with the checks and rechecks and precautions-in-depth against every eventuality that the viceroy or his most misanthropic aide could imagine. Divers were sent down to examine the exterior hull of the ship. Had there been a military observation company within two days’ travel, the viceroy would have sent up a hot-air balloon.

The gold had been cast into uniform bars, each of which weighed twenty-one pounds four ounces. They were packed six to a box, the boxes being wooden frames that constricted, without concealing, the six bars. When the gold was stowed and had been checked, counted, recounted, and several bars had been selected at random, freed from their boxes, and shaved of minuscule slivers of soft gold for assay (and those bars put aside for reweighing), the consignment was signed over by Sir George, signed for by Captain Iskansen, put on the manifest by the ship’s purser, and the vault’s inner door of specially hardened steel bars was locked, and the key put into an envelope and sealed with some scarlet tape and a blob of wax, upon which was impressed the viceroy’s seal, and the envelope put into an inner pocket of the captain’s dress jacket for stowing in the small safe in his quarters, then hands were shaken all
around, the cargo door was closed and sealed, and the captain headed up to the bridge to give the command to get under way.

“There’s an outer door and an inner door to the vault,” Colonel Moran told Professor Moriarty, who was lying on his bunk reading as the ship weighed anchor. “The outer door is solid reinforced steel, and the inner is tempered steel bars, like a prison cell. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the vault are half-inch steel plate, riveted every six inches along the seams.”

Professor Moriarty looked up from his book,
Advances in Organic Chemistry
by Janifer, and frowned. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“In case anything should come to mind,” Moran said. “The outer door’s going to be left open all day,” he continued doggedly, “and only shut at night. Anybody can wander along the corridor on C deck and peer in at the gold through the steel bars of the inner door whenever they’ve a mind to. In the evening, right before the first seating for dinner, the captain and a covey of his officers go down and peer at the gold for one last time and then close the outer vault door for the night. Three of those new electrical lights, and very bright ones they are, have been rigged up in the corridor to keep the corridor and the vault doors illuminated at all times, day and night. And there are two inside the vault itself, lighting up the whole inside so bright that it hurts your eyes to look.”

Moriarty stared at the far wall for a second, lost in thought, then he closed his book and sat up. “You don’t say?” he said. “How odd.”

“The Lancers are posting their guards at both ends of the corridor all day,” Moran continued, “and at the top of the stairway, which I understand is called a ‘ladder’ on a ship. And right smart they look, too.”

“You don’t say,” Moriarty repeated. “How interesting.”

“You’re mocking me,” Moran complained.

“Not at all,” Moriarty said soothingly. “I’ll wager this conversation is being repeated in half the cabins on the ship, and most of them occupied by people of a much more, ah, honest turn of mind than you or I. There is something about large sums of gold that brings out the speculative nature in people.”

“That’s so,” Moran agreed. “The problem as I see it is not so much how to get the gold out of the vault as what to do with it once you have accomplished that. After all, when you’re on a ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean, there aren’t very many places to which you can abscond.”

“I trust you are considering this merely as an intellectual exercise,” Moriarty said.

“Even so, even so,” Moran replied. “I may wander by the vault occasionally and stare wistfully through the bars, but I won’t do anything foolish. Not with this other matter so well in hand. It is well in hand, is it not?”

Moriarty chuckled. “Have faith,” he said. “Your job is to get to know General St. Yves. Befriend him, and fascinate him with your tales of military derring-do, or whatever. Exchange stories of killing large animals. Play cards with him and don’t cheat.”

“Don’t cheat?” Moran asked plaintively.

“And do your best not to win. You are a retired colonel of independent means. You play only for the relaxation and enjoyment.”

“That’s so,” Moran agreed. “But I do enjoy winning.”

Moriarty peered at him over the top of his pince-nez. “Restrain yourself,” he said. “Think of the larger picture.”

Moran grinned. “Oh, I know, I know,” he said. “I just like to see the annoyed expression you get when you contemplate my inability to refrain from cheating at cards.”

It was past four in the afternoon when
The Empress of India
’s horn sounded a series of low, mournful bellows, and the ship backed away
from the dock and started down the river, flanked by the oceangoing tugs
Egbert
and
Ethelred,
and accompanied by the steam launch
Clive
. Behind her, following her closely into the Bay of Bengal, was the torpedo gunboat
Sea Lion
. Ahead of her, flags and pennants flying, was the Maharaja of Najipur’s paddle-wheel steam packet
Maharaja of Najipur,
given this position of honor in recognition of the fact that Najipur was one of the few Indian states to have its own navy, as well as the fact that almost a quarter of a ton of the gold in the
Empress
’s vault belonged to the maharaja.

Margaret and Lady Priscilla stood forward on the port side of “A” deck with a smattering of the other first-class passengers who weren’t too preoccupied or too blasé to watch the ship’s embarkation. It was a grand sight. The
Maharaja of Najipur
was about five ship lengths in the lead, with all the sails on its two masts furled, and its paddle wheel churning away amidships. Sailors in spanking-new white uniforms with red hats and sashes stood perched on the
Maharaja
’s masts, rigging, and yards as though they were frozen in motion, eternally caught at the moment they were about to hoist the sails.

And, standing at attention at the prow of
The Empress of India,
facing forward, clad in the gloriously colorful full regimental uniform of the Duke of Moncreith’s Own Highland Lancers, was the Lancers’ piper, Master Sergeant Warren Bruce of that ilk, and the eerie wail of the “Lament for Douglas” sounded even over the throb of the ship’s engines and the slapping of the waves.

Margaret spread her arms and lifted her head high to allow the wind to blow against every part of her. The skirts of the red silk frock she wore pressed against her knees and billowed behind her. “I can feel the infinite possibilities of the future approaching!” she exclaimed. “I must be ready to grab at life as it passes, and cling to it firmly and with resolve.”

Lady Priscilla turned toward her companion and wrinkled her nose.
“I have no idea,” she said, “what you’re talking about, you know. But I admit that it has a jolly sound to it.”

“Whenever something comes to an end,” Margaret told her, “some-thing else begins. And one has a very short opportunity to influence the direction this new beginning is to take.”

Lady Priscilla nodded and stared thoughtfully at the men on the rigging of the
Maharaja of Najipur
. They were engaging in an elaborate aerial dance, where they all shifted position rapidly and recklessly and according to some design that was not readily apparent, showing off for the watchers on the
Empress
and along the shore. “Tell me,” she said to Margaret, “if one wished to ascertain the cabin number of a particular person, how would one go about it?”

“Ask the purser or the cabin steward,” Margaret told her.

“Yes, but if one did not wish anyone to know of one’s interest in the, ah, location of this person?”

Margaret dropped her arms to her sides and turned to look at her companion. “Oh, I see,” she said.

Lady Priscilla turned faintly red about the face. “No, you don’t,” she insisted. “For there is nothing to see. I asked out of idle curiosity, that is all.”

“Of course,” Margaret said. “Well, if you will entrust me with the name of this person whom you’re idly curious about, I’ll find out his cabin number for you.”

“What makes you think it’s a man?” Lady Priscilla demanded.

“Really!” said Margaret. “And why would such caution and secrecy be necessary were it a woman?”

“Oh,” said Lady Priscilla. “His name is Welles. Lieutenant Welles.”

General St. Yves and his two adjutants, a stout, red-faced colonel named Morcy and Major Sandiman, a tall thin man with a thick mustache under
a prominent nose, met Captain Iskansen in the corridor leading to the gold vault. The newly posted guard at the end of the corridor snapped to attention and wished fervently that he’d been more attentive in memorizing the special orders of the day as all the well-pressed uniforms pockmarked with brass insignia and entwined in gold braid passed him.

“You wanted to see us?” St. Yves asked the captain.

“Yes,” Iskansen said. He was a large man whose face was weathered, his blond hair mostly gray, who wore the stripes of command with an easy familiarity. One felt just by looking at him that he would bring the
Empress,
its crew, and its passengers through any storm, past any reef, safely to port. “Come.”