Authors: Kim Wright
“Dear God,” said Trevor. “We have come to a most extraordinary land, have we not?”
“The country is indeed extraordinary,” Mrs. Morrow said, “for those plucky enough to explore it. But I suppose you mean it is extraordinary the lengths we expatriates will go to in our search for comfort. Have you noticed anything else about this table?”
“It glows.”
“Indeed it does. Can you imagine why?”
“It would appear that they have set electrical lamps on the floor at each corner of the table”
“Bravo, Detective Welles. And can you further conjure the use of such a practice?”
“To draw the flying insects away from the legs of the diners?”
“Just that,” she said, with another vigorous nod. “A swarm of mosquitoes does so ruin a dinner party.” She glanced down the table. “See the girl at the end there? With the ringlets? She is my granddaughter and that fair-haired young man looking down her bosom, he is with your party as well, is he not?”
“That would be Thomas Bainbridge,” Trevor said. “And, just as you have noticed, he is our anatomical expert.”
“Good sort of family?”
“The very best sort. He’s rich.”
Mrs. Morrow cackled with amusement and Trevor found himself joining in. Extraordinarily fine fortune after all, he thought, to have drawn this woman as a companion.
“The lady just there, with the feathers in her hat,” he continued, nodding in the opposite direction, “is Tom’s great-aunt Geraldine Bainbridge. She is the only one of our number who can claim to have traveled to India before.”
“So I hear,” said Mrs. Morrow, lifting her spoon to begin her soup. One of the advantages of a servant behind every chair, Trevor noted, was that the entire room was able to begin dining in tandem, rather than going through that awkward process of some being served before others and waiting to begin. “She is an intimate of the Secretary-General?”
“She knew both of them long ago,” Trevor said. “He and his wife, that is. May I assume you are likewise acquainted?”
“Everyone at the Byculla knows everyone else. Far too well, if you want my opinion. Which you obviously do, for all the indirection of your approach.”
Trevor laughed again, nearly choking on his own soup. Turtle – heavily spiced and, all in all, a bad choice for the heat of the room.
“Anthony and Rose Weaver,” Mrs. Morrow said, “were not happily married.”
Trevor looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Who told you this?”
“Everyone knew. It was obvious.”
“And this is why their peers are content to believe that he killed her?”
“It doesn’t help his case, as I’m sure you can imagine and I must also confess that there is excitement over the fact of a murder and an arrest. Such drama here among us at the Byculla Club, where nothing ever happens. Before Rose and her manservant dropped dead in the great hall…well the last bit of news was some debate over new curtains in the card room and the breathless scandal of a man who got so drunk that he kissed his children’s nanny. So people care about the crime simply because it is novel.”
“And not for the sake of the Weavers.”
“A disliked man killed a disliked woman. Nothing more to report.”
“Indeed,” Trevor said thoughtfully, putting down his spoon.
The soup was taken, another dish arrived.
“What precisely was so unpleasant about them?” Trevor asked when the servants withdrew. He spoke quietly, for the conversation around them was muted and sporadic and he did not wish to have his tete-a-tete with Mrs. Morrow overheard. “You said they were unhappily married, but I daresay they were not the only couple in the Club to bear that stain, and, in fact, I have noticed that the unhappily married are often quite popular among their social circles. They seem to take more care to nurture friendships than those fortunate creatures who are cozy within the walls of their wedded bliss.”
`
“What an interesting remark,” Mrs. Morrow said, with some surprise. “But I assure you that neither of the Weavers cultivated social standing. He was too pompous to socialize with any man below him in rank and they were all, you see, below him in rank.”
“Earlier today he told me that he breakfasted daily with the other retired men, here at the Club. Said he did just that on the morning that his wife was killed.”
“And so he likely did, if by breakfasting you mean a group of men sitting silently about a drawing room, each reading their separate newspapers and eating their kippers. Women generally demand more of their friendships, but Rose’s only true companions were her complaints and her ailments.”
`
“Have you met their son?”
“No,” Mrs. Morrow said. “He draws attention as he sits among the group, as does anyone new, but we have not been introduced. Have you?”
“Unfortunately, yes. My impression is that the man combines the worse traits of both parents. The bombast of the stepfather and the weakness of the mother.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Morrow. “Then ‘tis a pity indeed he was seated beside your friend, that nice young Miss Kelly. Look at him working over her. Trying to debone her as if she were this little squab.”
***
“The flowers are lovely, are they not?” Michael Everlee said, leaning so close to Emma that she could smell his cologne. “Orchids, you know.”
“Yes,” Emma said vaguely, for she was struggling with the latest dish of the evening, a dainty bird perched whole on a silver plate. “They are such a rarity at home, that it is a shock to see them growing in such profusion.”
“They remind me of women, you know.”
“Women?” she said, even more vaguely.
“The shape. So reminiscent of certain delights.”
“Of course,” she said, not understanding at all. She was beginning to wonder if Everlee was mad. He had talked incessantly since they were seated, but had revealed nothing of consequence. Although the wine was flowing freely around the table he had also brought in a cocktail from the drawing room, which she had thought rather crass, but she wasn’t sure. For a group who held protocol in such high esteem, the Byculla Club seemed to have no rules about drinking whatsoever.
Now Everlee raised this same cocktail glass in her direction and said “These are called pegs and do you know why?”
“Because each one is a peg in your coffin?”
“Quite right,” he said, setting down the glass. “And so you are clever. What a profound disappointment.”
“I say, Everlee,” said a man sitting across the table, leaning forward to disrupt their conversation to Emma’s great relief. “Are you here to see the historical marker?”
It was a potentially painful question, Emma thought with a wince. Most of the people in the room presumably knew that the marker the man referred to was a plaque that had been placed in honor of Roland Everlee. While the Thursday Night Murder Games group had traveled through the Suez, Geraldine had explained that construction was underway on a large memorial at the site of Cawnpore, but that the project was far from complete. All that presently marked the spot was a well where the bodies of so many victims had been thrown and a few scattered plaques reporting the deeds of various martyrs. Roland Everlee first among them.
But Michael Everlee did not appear distressed by this mention of his father’s fate or by the fact that the man on the other side of the table was so old and so drunk that he was all but shouting. Rather he seemed quite pleased to have an excuse to no longer have to converse with a clever woman, for he turned in his chair to more squarely face the man and answered, “No, Sir, this time I travel on behalf of my other father. My stepfather, that is. Anthony Weaver. I have no doubt everyone here tonight joins me in grieving the injustice he has suffered. Is still suffering, I should say, for he sits even now in a common jail without a shred of true evidence brought against him.”
The table, already subdued, fell into a complete hush. People stopped eating. Eyes flitted back and forth. Throats were cleared. Emma, her gaze falling upon a pink orchid directly in her line of vision, suddenly grasped what Everlee had been insinuating and turned the color of the flower.
And there’s the bell
, thought Trevor.
We are off to the races at last.
But he was wrong, for the topic of the Weaver arrest was dropped as quickly as it was raised. Evidently while the members of the Byculla Club were quite comfortable discussing murders which had happened thirty-two years in the past, they were far less at ease discussing an event which had occurred two weeks ago.
“But you must go to Cawnpore while you’re here,” said the loud man, speaking a bit nervously, like a host trying to save a dinner party that was about to run off the rails. “Lay flowers at your father’s plaque. Tour the grounds so you can get a notion of what the memorial will look like upon completion. It shall be glorious, I assure you.”
“Nothing has been the same since the mutiny,” said another man.
“Yes,” said another. “For it splits all time in half, does it not? The years before the rebellion, the years after. We shall never sleep so sound again.”
“Mutiny? Rebellion?” bristled yet another, an angry voice from the far end of the table. “Call it what it was. A slaughter. The Great Slaughter. For to use words like ‘mutiny’ or ‘rebellion’ implies that the savages had just cause. That there was some political imperative which required them to murder unarmed women and children.”
At this last and most strident outburst, Trevor instinctively looked about to catch the eye of Rayley, but of course the man wasn’t there. He was left to draw his own conclusions, based on the reactions, or lack thereof, of his fellow diners. It appeared that rants about the mutiny – or rebellion, or slaughter, or whatever term that particular speaker preferred – were a common occurrence at the Byculla Club. A subject like the murder of Rose Everlee Weaver, while undeniably exciting, was a bit too close at hand, which is why Michael Everlee’s provocative comments had gone unanswered. Each person at the table was likely still sorting it out in his or her own mind, mulling over the levels of guilt or innocence, and the scales of public opinion had not yet settled.
`
But the mutiny? Dozens of women and children hacked to death and thrown into a well? There was only one way to feel about that, so the subject was safe ground. So safe that each speaker at the table undoubtedly knew his own lines, like an actor in a play. As for what the Indians in the room thought, Trevor couldn’t hazard a guess. Each servant stood behind his appointed chair, staring straight ahead impassively. They either didn’t understand what was being said around them, or, more likely, had heard it so many times before that they had grown numb to the subject. Numb even to the sound of their people being described as “the savages.”
“True,” said a voice. “The words one uses to describe something do matter. In America, you know, citizens from the north describe their last great conflict as ‘the Civil War,’ a term citizens in from the south shall never accept. They prefer ‘the War Between the States’ or even, among the exceptionally bitter, ‘the War of Northern Aggression.’ History shall eventually declare that one version of events is the accepted norm, but in the meantime, the words we use to define an event matter greatly. They become our interim history in a way, what we must make do with until the true historical muse finds her branch and perches there.”
These last lines struck Trevor as far more intelligent and fair-minded than the others circulating around the table, so of course their speaker was promptly ignored. A general conversational hubbub engulfed the table. The martyrs. The bodies. The memorials. The fact that none of them could ever be quite so comfortable again. This country was frightening enough on its own with the monsoons and storms, all the bugs and germs and snakes, but there had been a time when they did not have to fear the Indian people themselves. But now even that comfort was gone.