Authors: Kim Wright
Michael smiled. “Nor shall I.”
***
Bombay Jail Infirmary
12:5
0 PM
Tom ripped open the envelope and scanned the message. Then he glanced toward Geraldine and Weaver, who had both fallen silent at last. They sat shoulder to shoulder on the small sofa, holding their empty cups.
“The fingerprints on the glass in Hubert Morass’s hand matched those of Leigh Anne Hoffman,” Tom said. “Which means, Secretary-General, that you will likely be freed later today.” And with that, he rose and slipped out the door. Weaver’s comments were no longer relevant, at least not to the charge of the murders, and Tom wanted to allow the two of them to say goodbye in private.
“So I am to be dismissed,” Weaver said, after the echo of Tom’s slamming door finally subsided.
“Congratulations,” Geraldine said.
“I owe this to you,” he said.
“You owe me nothing,” she said, pushing to her feet. “I must go.”
“And I shall go with you,” he said, grabbing her hand. “Or I shall entreat you to stay with me…”
“Anthony, really. This is not necessary.”
He looked up at her. In this pose, the man cast back into the soft cushions of the settee, the woman on her feet, looking down, they were in a bizarre parody of a proposal. He clutched at her fingertips with fervor.
“Gerry…I meant everything I said. If I had married you back in the fifties I should have been a very different sort of man. A better man.”
He is likely right,
Gerry thought, looking down at their hands. Both wrinkled. His trembling.
For men rise or fall based entirely on what the women in their lives demand of them.
“I must go with you,” he said again. “Back to London. Bombay holds nothing for me now.”
She shook her head. “You belong here, Anthony. You always did.”
Now he released her hand and struggled to his feet. “It is not too late,” he said, his voice quavering, his eyes wild with fear. “Not too late at all. You could have saved me then, and you might still save me now. Give me something to live for, my darling. Rehabilitate me, challenge me, dangle a purpose in front of me so I might even yet find, at this late point, an incentive to stand and walk.”
Good God,
thought Geraldine, stepping back.
Was he always like this? What a fool I have been.
“Anthony,” she said firmly. “Do come to the door and compose yourself enough to bid me a proper goodbye. I am 69 years old and only God knows how many years I have left or how they shall play themselves out. But you must try to understand me when I say this. I expect more from my life than the opportunity to be useful to a man.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Bombay Jail
1:10
PM
When Geraldine stepped from the front door of the warden’s house she found Trevor waiting for her under a palm tree.
“I am quite well, I assure you,” she said, even before he could speak. “Have you come here expecting me to shriek or swoon?”
“Hardly,” he said, offering her his arm. “I simply thought we could walk a little. See a bit of Bombay.”
“Starting with the jailyard?”
He laughed and they made their way out the gates and up the street a bit in companionable silence.
“Are you disappointed?” Trevor finally asked. “You have passed many years and traveled many miles only to come to the end of your quest and find a man who is so…”
“Ordinary?”
“I suppose that is the proper word.”
“I have come to a conclusion,” Geraldine said, picking idly at one of her gloves.
“And what might that be?”
“That it is a mistake to look up an old lover. Now don’t you snicker at me, Trevor, for I am quite serious. When one begins to fondly wonder whatever happened to their beloved Anthony or Roberta or Joe or Anne or Willie, one should…you know. Just keep wondering.”
“I have come to a conclusion too,” Trevor said.
“And what is that?”
“That when someone seeks revenge, especially for slights long in the past, the collateral damage is always more than intended. The pain that you inflict upon yourself and other innocents is double that which strikes your intended victim. When revenge is the motive, it seems to affect the aim. The hand begins to shake and the bullet can fly…very far from the intended target.”
“You regret the bit with the woman,” Geraldine observed gently. “You take no satisfaction in turning her over to Seal and his heartless brethren within the Viceroy’s office.”
“That shall be the story of my life, I fear,” Trevor said with an unconvincing laugh as they stepped aside to allow a shopkeeper shake a dusty broom. “Have them carve it on my tombstone.
Here lies Trevor Welles. He regrets the bit with the woman
.”
“You believe Miss Hoffman’s rage was justified?”
“Justified? That is a tricky word. I believe it is understandable. And yet three people – one of them a man whose behavior was utterly blameless – lie dead.”
“She is not responsible for the electrocution at the Club?”
Trevor shook his head. “An accident, that one. But with three more deaths laid at her feet…” His voice trailed off uncertainly for he did not wish to finish the thought. The truth of the matter is that with three murders on the Viceroy books, Leigh Anne Hoffman would almost certainly hang.
As if reading his thoughts, Geraldine quickly said, “She never meant to kill Sang.”
“I imagine she never meant to do half the things she dd. Tragedies exist in every life, it seems, even in those which seem prosperous and normal and happy. You can’t always tell by people’s faces, but at any time on any city street, the wounded walk among us, undetected.”
“Undetected that is, until a detective comes along.”
Trevor shrugged. “I don’t make claim to understand the human heart, Geraldine. Not half so well as a poet, or even a priest.”
“A woman can be wrong about a man.”
“I daresay she can.”
“And men…are sometimes wrong about women. They often fail to see the most important things about them, even when they stand in plain view.” And before he could ask her what on earth she meant by that, she abruptly asked, “Where are the others?”
“Tom has moved back to the jail to clear out our things,” Trevor said. “Emma is packing for the two of you, and Rayley has gone down at the docks trying to finagle us all onto the next ship out of Bombay. You have no objection to leaving today, I trust?”
She shook her head. Quite vigorously. “And Davy?”
“I’m not entirely sure where he is,” Trevor admitted, as he guided Geraldine carefully around a gash of missing cobblestones. “He only said he has one final task before he is prepared to say goodbye to India.”
***
The Cliffs Above Bombay Harbor
1:27 PM
It was not much of a cage, Davy thought. A determined bird could have broken through the fragile bamboo walls at any point. Pecked or chewed her way free and found the broader world that lay just beyond.
He had carried the cage to the cliff on the hills beyond the Weaver House, a moderate walk which had caused great agitation to the bird. She had hopped from perch to perch within her flimsy palace, looking around with her bright black eyes and chirping in the manner of a question.
Where are we going
? she seemed to ask.
And shall I like it when we get there
?
As he neared the edge of the cliff, Davy paused. Bombay lay dozing in the midday heat beneath him - the glittering harbor, the exalted waterfront buildings, the bright colored huts and hovels behind. He could see their own steamer with its immense gangplank, no doubt trembling and belching as the engines began to be fired up, the ship as anxious as a racehorse in the slot. Within hours he would be aboard it, and India would be just one more thing behind him. One more story for his grandchildren.
He pulled open the door of the cage and it cracked in his hand. Brittle and insubstantial. Tentatively, carefully, he reached for the bird.
She drew back. Or perhaps he was the one to hesitate. It occurred to Davy he had been thinking of the little yellow songbird as female all along, based largely on its seeming helplessness and sweetness, and his own somewhat irrational desire to protect it. But males can become trapped as well, can they not? Men as well as women often need someone to lead them out of their captivity, to illustrate how easily the walls surrounding them can crumble and snap.
Davy’s hand closed around the feathers. He could feel the rapidly beating heart of the bird, the tremor of the untried wings.
Would it even know how to fly?
he wondered, for the creature had likely spent its entire life within this ornamental cage. So he did not toss it into the air in a flamboyant manner and thus risk the irony of throwing it to certain death. Instead he merely opened his palm and said “This is the world.”
The bird appeared to consider the remark. Hopped a bit on his palm, looked over the precipice of his fingers and then, with a sort of awkward jump, flapped its way to a patch of grass at Davy’s feet. There it sat among the green grass, a fluttering invitation to larger, stronger birds of prey.
This was a mistake
, Davy fretted.
Too much freedom can be fatal, especially when it is unfamiliar.
But just as he thought this, the bird hopped, and then again, as if testing both its wings and its confidence. Slowly, unsteadily, it flapped a few feet in the air. He held his breath as it rose a bit more, leaving the ground behind it. And finally the bird climbed higher, into the sky.
Davy crushed the remains of the cage within his hands. The curved walls, the grand onion dome, the little perches and the small mirrors. They crumbled to his feet as he continued to watch that small yellow dot in the sky, growing even smaller, and smaller yet.
Of course it’s a girl
, he thought.
The way it looks at you so helplessly and then leaves, all at once, without looking back.
“You are welcome, milady,” he called after the tiny bird. “’Twas my pleasure to serve.” And he stood guard there on the cliff until he could no longer see her at all
***
The Khajuraho Temple
2:40 PM
“We have faced death together once before, you and I,” the old man said. The words were murmured gently and without malice. Even the setting was companionable. Two heavy English rockers pulled in close congress on a portico, both of them facing the blazing sun.
The woman sitting beside him – younger, but not young – stretched out her legs and propped them onto a woven footstool. The legs, muscular from years of hard work, were encased in khaki trousers, much like women wear on safari. Yet this woman had never been on safari, nor had she ever dined in a restaurant, been examined by a doctor, or taken a lover into her bed. Her life had been both very big and very small and now, sunk low into reflection just as a human must be in these circumstances, she felt a pang for every road she had left untraveled.
“Yes, we have faced death,” she said to the man and her voice, like his, was pleasant and conversational. “In fact, as I recall, you attempted to throw me into the very jaws of it.”
“But you lived, did you not? And I have spent my life trying to make amends for that singular day.”
“You have come to ask my forgiveness?” she asked brusquely.
“I know it is too late for that,” Anthony Weaver said to Leigh Anne Hoffman. “Your fate diverged from that of Michael, it is true. But it is not because you were a girl as you undoubtedly think. It was your age. I was afraid that you might remember. That you might someday ask me about that day on the outskirts of Cawnpore.”
“I did remember.”
“It was Rose’s idea to take you to the orphanage,” he said, as if such a thing might matter now. “That part was all Rose’s idea.”
“Then I am not sorry that I killed her,” Leigh Anne said matter-of-factly. “Even though my draught was aimed at you. Would you like tea?”
“I’d rather have something stronger.”
“I have that as well.”
“Truly? I am surprised.”
“The running of a girls’ school, Secretary-General, is not the unalloyed joy you seem to think it is. At times through the years my solitude has been almost unendurable. So I have made friends with the bottle.”
“But I did fund this school,” he blurted out after her, as she rose and went to the small cabinet where she kept her malted scotch. “And I drove past it almost every day. Not with Felix, of course, my regular boy. But any time I had a private coach I would direct the driver, just here, see that tree at the top of the road? I think I wanted to assure myself that you…”
He broke off, unsure of what to say next. It seemed almost as if they were the only two human beings left in the world.
Where were the girls from the school
? he wondered parenthetically. It was so silent here under the portico, looking out at her great garden. The only sound was the distant tinkling of the bells that lined the erotic wall.
She has covered the profanity of the wall
, he thought,
but she has not silenced it.
“I was your benefactor,” he said in a weak conclusion and then gulped the scotch she had handed him. It was not a fine one. No, not fine at all. Some cheap, inferior brew and it burned his throat. “I was that anonymous donor who sustained your work, over and again throughout the many years. If you had known that, would have still tried to poison me?”
She shrugged. “It was the elephant, you know.”
Rough or not, he took more of the scotch. “The elephant?”
“The tile in the hearth with the five-legged elephant. I remembered so little of your home. How long was I there, before you and Rose decided that I must disappear?”
Weaver shook his head. “I don’t know. Only a few weeks.”
“Only a few weeks,” she echoed, staring out into the sun. “And I was undoubtedly in shock, having seen all that I had seen. But that elephant with five legs – such a whimsical mistake by the artist, just the sort of thing a child might notice and remember.“ She looked at him now, directly in the eyes for the first time. “I never knew your name, of course. Never knew the identity of the man who would have so happily abandoned me and my baby brother to certain slaughter. Never knew what became of him, or your wife, or of the kind Indian who scooped us up when you ran, who carried us to the cart and forced you, against your will, to drive us out of that burning barnyard. I might never have known that you married Roland Everlee’s widow, that the two of you were still in Bombay, or that you had raised Michael as your own son. Never would have put any of it together at all - that is, without Adelaide.”