Authors: Kim Wright
“Ah,” said Miss Hoffman. “That was likely Adelaide. She was an associate of the Weavers, you see.”
“He said she looked fully British.”
“And perhaps she is. The paperwork on our charges is not always complete, as you might guess.”
“He only wished to talk to her. Why did she run?”
“She is troubled.”
“Troubled by what?”
“Am I being interviewed, Detective? Is that what you believe your Miss Bainbridge has bought with her donation? Access to information about my girls?”
That was precisely what Trevor believed Gerry had bought, but it was probably prudent to avoid saying as much, at least for now. Looking at the woman sitting so placidly in front of him, he tried another tack.
“But this woman is not a girl at all, is she? My officer estimated her to be close to forty in age. And yet she remains a charge of yours, here at the school? ”
Miss Hoffman brushed back a strand of her hair. It was graying but still full and lustrous and tied at an untidy knot in the back of her neck.
There is something beautiful about her,
Trevor rather irrelevantly thought.
And what strength it would take to toil against these hopeless odds year after year, with so little friendship from your own kind. So little variation in your days.
“You are not the first to ask of Adelaide,” Miss Hoffman finally said. “A Mr. Seal from the Viceroy Council was here just yesterday. I gather you sent him to round up all of the Weaver’s household staff?”
Trevor raised an eyebrow. “She was a member of the household? That is what you meant by the term ‘associate’? That she worked for them?”
“Not exactly.”
“Miss Hoffman,” Trevor said, trying to keep the exasperation out of his voice. “A sizable bank draft is quite visibly folded and tucked into your pocket. We can argue the moral subtleties of the situation all day long, but it will save everyone’s time and temper if you simply hand over what we have bought. And please humor us by starting at the beginning.”
“Very well,” Miss Hoffman said, with no apparent resentment at his directness.
We are playing chess, this woman and I,
Trevor thought.
And she is rather enjoying it. Perhaps I am as well. Or at least I would be enjoying it were Emma and Gerry not sitting right here, holding their breath and waiting for me to make a foolish move.
“You ask for the beginning, but I do not know precisely where the beginning began,” Miss Hoffman said. “For your officer’s estimate was likely correct. Adelaide came to this school as a small child more than thirty years ago and has lived with us since. It was obvious at an early point that she would not be one of the ones who married out or who was likely to find an elevated employment.”
“You are saying she is mentally impaired?”
“I suspect the trouble lies more in her spirit than in her mind. But she remains, yes, suspended in a somewhat childlike world. I did not deem it likely she would find any sort of position at all until the day the Secretary-General came calling. He wanted a British girl for his wife, he said. She required nursing. Some vague ailment that required the attentions of a fair-skinned attendant.”
“But you said Adelaide was unfit for elevated employment,” Emma broke in. “And now you are suggesting she was trained as a nurse?”
“Excuse me,” Miss Hoffman said, abruptly pushing to her feet. She walked to the edge of the portico and called out something to a couple of girls who were straggling toward the school and they halted obediently, then stooped to drag a heavy black hose to a new part of the field.
“You speak Hindustani to your students?” Emma asked in surprise, when Miss Hoffman turned back.
“Both Hindustani and English,” she answered. “The girls need to be equally capable in both languages, for who knows what sort of life they’ll be called to?”
“Do some of them go into mission work as well?” Geraldine inquired.
“Some,” Miss Hoffman said, plopping down in her chair so emphatically that Trevor noted there was something masculine in her movements.
This is a strange business,
he thought.
She has the charm of things which do not try to be charming and yet there is an abruptness in her manner that is rather
….well, he wouldn’t say she was unfeminine, for that sounded like a criticism. Perhaps it was more accurate to say that Leigh Anne Hoffman was a half-breed of sorts herself.
She was not at all his type, his tastes leaning more toward dainty, ladylike girls of good family, which made it all the more strange that he couldn’t seem to stop staring at her. Perhaps his tastes were becoming more catholic as a result of his international travels - or perhaps he was merely having a bit of trouble shaking off the lingering effects of viewing the erotic wall. His mind kept drifting back to, of all things, the mosaic image of the woman’s face. The direct and almost challenging way she observed those who had come to observe her, her unapologetic smile of delight. It was not that she was merely doing what she was doing, it was that she appeared to be enjoying it. Demanding more of it, in fact, extending some sort of invitation which Trevor had briefly imagined to have been directed solely to him. The woman on the wall had the standard issue of female body parts, of course, but that was not the core of her appeal. Thanks to the whores of Whitechapel he had seen the bits and pieces often enough. But he had never seen that expression on an Englishwoman’s face.
“It is hard for some of the girls to leave us,” Miss Hoffman was saying, all the while crossing and uncrossing her legs in a manner Trevor found most distracting. “This is the only home they have ever known, of course, and the alternatives are not always attractive. Faced with a choice of marriage to a junior officer they’ve scarcely met or genteel servitude in the homes of the Raj, perhaps it is not surprising that a few of them suddenly declare a devotion to Christianity just as they are on the cusp of leaving the school.”
“This is what happened with Adelaide?” Geraldine asked. “She decided to become a nurse rather than leave the school and take her chances in the broader world beyond?”
“She wasn’t really trained as a nurse,” Miss Hoffman said. “But then again, Mrs. Weaver wasn’t really sick. As I mentioned, white servants give a Bombay household a certain panache and within seconds of our interview I gathered that the Secretary-General was precisely the sort of old windbag who would gladly pay for that panache.”
Geraldine had flushed at his unflattering summation of Anthony Weaver’s personality but, having met the man but once, Trevor suspected Miss Hoffman’s evaluation of his motive was accurate.
“He told me he drives by here sometimes, simply to observe the temple,” Trevor said. “Said he did it on the morning of his wife’s death. Were you aware of that?”
She wasn’t. It showed on her face. “I have never seen him here,” Miss Hoffman said slowly. “Other than the one time months ago, that is, when he came looking for a servant.”
“You wouldn’t,” Trevor said. “I doubt he ever left his carriage. So let us resume with our history…Secretary-General Weaver makes his request and within days Adelaide had her first real position, which I gather required little more than sitting beside an old woman and listening to her complaints. But Mrs. Weaver has now been dead for almost two more weeks. Why would Adelaide have gone back to an empty house where her services clearly were no longer required?”
“I have no notion,” Miss Hoffman said, still fussing with the wayward lock of hair. “Perhaps she was happy there. Or perhaps she does not fully grasp what the changes to the household mean.”
“You do not monitor her movements?”
“She is a grown woman, Detective, and I have twenty-three girls here for whom I am solely responsible.”
“So she roams the streets unattended?”
“I suppose she does. Are you suggesting I bell her like a cat?”
“May we talk to her? If not now, when she returns?”
“If you wish, but you’ll get nothing. Nothing of any use in a legal sense. Adelaide is prone to fantasies… perhaps one might even say hallucinations.”
“What is the source of her affliction? Did she suffer some sort of trauma?”
“I cannot say.”
“Cannot or will not?”
“Miss Hoffman,” Emma said, leaning forward, for she could read the telltale signs that Trevor was on the verge of losing his temper. “I appreciate that the paperwork on Adelaide is just as you say, incomplete, but perhaps something in it can help us. We are doing background checks and interviews with everyone who was in the household the day Mrs. Weaver died.”
“I was told by Inspector Seal that Rose Weaver died in the foyer of the Byculla Club early in the morning. What can that possibly have to do with Adelaide?”
“She did die at the Club,” Trevor said. “But we believed she was poisoned in her home.”
“Poisoned?” For the first time since their arrival, Miss Hoffman appeared genuinely shaken. She glanced toward the garden, where the girls were finishing their morning labors, a few of them wandering back toward the house with their arms linked. Someone among them was singing.
“That is our best guess at this point,” Emma said. “So you can understand why we need to talk to all the members of the household.”
“But she truly wasn’t a member of the household,” Miss Hoffman said. “She only visited Mrs. Weaver for a few hours in the heat of the day. She came back here at night. Every night. She would not have been there in the morning when this poisoning must have occurred. ”
“Indeed,” said Trevor. The woman’s protectiveness was quite touching, but he was glad he had not mentioned the recovery of the medicine dropper. “No one is accusing Adelaide of anything. But her papers….Might we have a look?”
Without answer, Miss Hoffman rose in one supple movement to her feet and went inside the temple. When she was gone, Emma turned toward Trevor.
“It is a mistake to push her too hard.”
Trevor looked at Geraldine. “How much did you give her?”
“Four hundred pounds.”
“Dear God. Then I shall push her as hard as I like.”
“No, darling,” Gerry said. “Emma is quite right. Our Miss Hoffman knows something that she is not telling us, this much is obvious. But just as obviously, her chief motivation is to protect Adelaide. So if you –“
And then she broke off, for Miss Hoffman was walking back through the door. Although she had been gone only moments, she seemed different, her assurance rather miraculously restored, and she tossed a large folder down on the tile table beside the teacup.
“These are the earliest papers we have,” she said. “They go back to the late fifties and if there is anything that tells you how and why Adelaide came to the temple, it will be in here.”
“What is her surname?” Emma asked, as Miss Hoffman opened the folder, releasing an arc of dust into the air.
“The girls don’t have surnames. We give them English first names when they – ah, here we are. 1857 is when she came, which would make her one of the first girls to be taken in and –“
She picked up the paper as if to read the faded ink more closely and it fell to dust in her hands. No, it fell more like sand, Trevor thought, as if a solid thing had turned to liquid, the paper crumbling into a thousand small pieces and raining down upon the slate floor.
They sat for a moment in silence. Then Trevor exhaled a low curse.
“How unfortunate,” Miss Hoffman said. “It’s those beastly white termites. They seem to get into everything.”