The Mountain of Light (32 page)

Mackeson edged toward the screen; there was barely enough space for all three of them. “Speak little, Ramsay,” he
said quietly. “Not until we are somewhere we cannot be overheard.”

Lord Dalhousie had been insistent upon secrecy. Even the Treasurer knew only that something—in a Chubb safe with its three skins of iron and tin and its detector lock—had been brought into the main safe room in the middle of the night. He had instructions to keep the room locked and open it only to Colonel Mackeson and Captain Ramsay—not necessarily both together, but not Captain Ramsay without Colonel Mackeson. After waiting for Ramsay to show up, Mackeson had walked from his hotel room to the Treasury in the morning, opened the room, taken the safe, put it into a large wooden box, and signed for it.

Lord Dalhousie was a stickler for paperwork. Mackeson had signed a paper stating that he had received the Kohinoor diamond (in the Chubb safe) from the Governor-General, and added his initials to another stating he had been contracted to take the Kohinoor to England and her Majesty, and to another which said that Captain Ramsay was to be his companion, and to yet another for all the contingencies that might befall them if one or the other was to fall ill or die during the voyage.

His pen running dry, Mackeson had asked, What if the diamond is stolen, Lord Dalhousie? The Governor-General had frowned. Surely not, Mackeson, it's a remote possibility. Every precaution has been taken; no one even knows that the Kohinoor has left the Punjab, let alone is on its way to England.

In his hotel room, Mackeson had looked at the big, ugly safe, black and squat on the mosaic floor. He might as well advertise that he had the Kohinoor and let all of Bombay see him carrying this monstrosity in his arms. Mackeson had removed the key that he wore on a chain around his neck and opened the safe.

He had been assured that Chubb had come up with a
foolproof lock—if any other key was put into the lock, it jammed, and only the original key, or a regulator key, could undo the jam and allow the lock to be opened. There, in the middle of the safe, was a thin cloth packet, about four inches by two, densely embossed with blobs of sealing wax—Lord Dalhousie's seal, Mackeson's own seal, Ramsay's seal, the seal of the Lahore physician, Dr. John Login, who had been acting treasurer of Maharajah Ranjit Singh's Toshakhana. A little like Lord Dalhousie's letters, this too was done in excess.
Only
to be opened in the presence of the Director of the East India Company in Portsmouth—who had been sent a detailed list of every seal on the package.

Mackeson had always been a timid man. Well, not perhaps
timid,
since his physical courage was enormous, his head steady in situations that would have frightened most men into heart arrests. But he had always followed orders, which was, after all, the hallmark of the perfect soldier, and the perfect officer.

He spun the packet in his hands. At the other end of the room, Multan Raj had created mounds of ironed clothes and was lifting each stack and setting it gently into the trunk.

“Come back after ten minutes, will you please, Multan?” Mackeson said.

“
Ji,
Sahib,” the man replied, his back still to his master, and then, without turning, he shuffled out of the room.

Mackeson took a knife and slit open the cloth. There were other layers of cloth, all wrapped tightly around, and he undid each one until the diamond draped over his closed fist, its gold chain linked between his fingers. In his trunk, Mackeson found a thin muslin bag with a loop around the top. He slipped the Kohinoor into the bag and then slid the loop into his belt. The bag he then tucked inside the waistband of his trousers and buttoned his coat over it.

“Where is it?” Ramsay asked in a whisper.

“On me.”

Captain Ramsay's eyes flickered with glee. “Say, not in the pouch my aunt stitched and my uncle used to wear? Did you break all of his lovely seals? How are you going to explain that to the lordly Court of Directors?”

“Yes and yes,” Mackeson said. “I think they'll be happy enough to just have it, no matter how it traveled.”

Lady Dalhousie had stitched the cloth bag herself for the Kohinoor, and it was true that Lord Dalhousie had worn this purse on the waist of his trousers all through the long journey from the Punjab to Bombay. “It would have been foolish to leave it in that clunky box.”

“All right,” Ramsay said, pulling back the wooden screen. “Let me know if you want me to have it, be glad to relieve you anytime. Oh.” This last was at the man whom the screen had revealed, standing right up against the wood, his nose a few inches from Ramsay's shirtfront.

“Pardon me,” the man said. “I was wondering if you gentlemen would like to go out on the deck. It's time for the departure.”

For a few minutes Mackeson and Ramsay stared at the stranger. If he had intended to knock, the only reason to be so close to the door, he did not have his hand raised. And he had been turned to the side, in an attitude of listening. Colonel Mackeson felt his collar grow tight in the closed confines of the cabin. He patted his middle involuntarily. It was there, and no one knew it was there.

“Of course,” Captain Ramsay said casually. “I'm over there, two berths away. Where are you, sir?”

The man beamed. He had a round face with a shock of black hair, parted in the center of his head and combed neatly down the two sides. His chin was clean-shaven, his eyes sunken in the folds of skin on his cheeks, and when he moved his head up, both Mackeson and Ramsay saw the gleam of a short, white clerical collar. “William Huthwaite,” he said. “I'm opposite.”

Mackeson introduced himself and Ramsay. “On home leave?” he asked. “Where were you stationed, Mr. Huthwaite?”

Huthwaite laughed. “I found my calling at Cawnpore, gentlemen. A small church built out of funds raised in the cantonment, Sunday school classes for all—including the natives. But”—he rolled his big head on his neck—“the fever, you know. The interminable fevers in India have sapped my strength and I find it necessary to spend time back home. It will be an interesting voyage; I haven't been back in twenty-five years.” He raised his thick and black eyebrows.

“Forty for me,” Mackeson mumbled.

“My dear sir!”

“Three,” Ramsay said easily. “My mother . . . ah . . . is unwell.”

“You served together perhaps? At Lahore?” The clergyman stood back to let them move into the passageway and followed them out onto the deck. “That's been our latest victory, hasn't it, the annexation of the Punjab?”

And so his quiet chatter chased them into the sunshine. He kept talking, his voice growing louder and louder in Mackeson's ear. The ship's band had struck up a tune, trumpets blaring, cymbals clashing, and it was rivaled by the dockyard's band below. Huthwaite asked a few questions, but mostly he spoke of himself, who he was, where he had come from, how he came to be in India. Huthwaite was the son of a copper miner in Cornwall, and had somehow lifted himself from the drudgery of his father's life to attend Cambridge on a scholarship, and achieved the position of Second Wrangler there—the second overall mark in mathematics in his graduating class. He had intended to study for the bar, then changed his mind and entered a seminary to work with the Church Mission Society in India. But even that plan had had to be altered when his father died, debt-ridden, leaving his sister and him destitute. So, he had applied for the position
of a clergyman with the East India Company and eventually worked his way from the bases of smaller regiments to the position at Cawnpore. It hadn't been easy for Huthwaite to gather funds for his voyage, and only three days ago, the East India Company's headquarters had sent him the money. He'd been in Bombay for a month now, waiting, having missed last month's sailing of the
Indus
.

Mackeson thought of the lovely Mary Booth—what had she said? That they hadn't been assigned their berths yet because they too had bought their tickets late. Curious, that.

The captain of the
Indus
came up alongside and said in his other ear, “Would you care to step down to the dock, sir? A word with you, if you please.”

Mackeson excused himself from the voluble Mr. Huthwaite—Ramsay had long disappeared into the crowd—and followed Captain Waltham down the main gangplank. The captain had a craggy and weather-beaten face, lines everywhere, around his mouth, his eyes, on his forehead under the cap with the P & O logo. Mackeson hobbled behind until they had reached the flat of the dock's concrete paving.

A space had been cleared near the foot of the gangplank leading to the after hold, where Captain Waltham led Mackeson. They both slipped under the cordon of guards and stood in the center—here finally they would not be overheard, and the crowds on the dock were kept at bay.

Captain Waltham took Lord Dalhousie's letter from an inner pocket of his coat. “I will be candid, Colonel Mackeson. I'm deeply uncomfortable about giving control of my ship to another officer, even on the Governor-General's orders. What is all this about? My crew tells me you brought onboard only one box; it was examined at the Customs House, and there's nothing in it but clothes and personal effects.”

Mackeson shrugged. “I can say no more, Captain.”

The captain tipped back his cap. “I see you feel the awkwardness
of this situation too, sir. The letter says I am to cede charge only ‘if necessary.' And what might necessitate such an eventuality that it does not yet have clearance from the Court of Directors of the P & O? And why should I even pay heed if it doesn't?”

“Because”—Mackeson said this quietly—“if things were to come to such a pass . . . the whole reputation of the Governor-General's office depends on their”—he hesitated, searching for words to explain that would really say nothing after all—“not happening. I'm sorry; believe me when I say that this is a matter of the utmost importance. You do not question that the letter is addressed to Captain Lockyer of the HMS
Medea
?”

Captain Waltham smiled; it transformed his face, and Mackeson could see that Waltham would be charming and engaging at the dinner table. “I am not such a fool as to disregard the Governor-General's letter, sir. And not so gullible as to believe it without question. I heard about the fire in the
Medea
's engine room and talked with Captain Lockyer. He didn't seem to know much more about this.”

“Thank you,” Mackeson said and turned to leave the circle of sentries.

Waltham put a hand on his shoulder. “Stay, sir. The mail is due to arrive anytime now, and it will make it seem, to anyone watching us, that you're involved in duties here.” He bobbed his chin toward a man at a corner. “That's the Admiralty Agent in charge of her Majesty's mail. He oversees the loading of it on the
Indus,
and accompanies it on the voyage.”

Mackeson nodded. The primary function of the P & O steamers—the very reason they came into being, and could manage a profitable existence—had been the contract signed with the British government for carrying the mail. Passenger traffic was but a small part—Mackeson's ticket, first-class, had been a hundred and twenty-five pounds sterling, and the
Indus
transported a total of some seventy passengers, not enough by far to pay for the fuel, the food, the linens, the
entertainment onboard, the coaling stations at Aden and Suez in the Red Sea, Malta and Gibraltar in the Mediterranean, the camel convoy over the desert, and the steamer passage from Alexandria to England across the Mediterranean.

He drew to the side and watched as four enclosed carriages, drawn by horses, were brought up to the gangplank, accompanied by ten guards dressed in the red livery of the Postmaster General. The guards unloaded the mail—some of it was in sacks, and these would travel only as far as Alexandria, and some of it was in boxes of the same dimensions as those the passengers had been advised to use, and these would be put onto the SS
Oriental,
waiting at the Alexandria dock. The boxes were all locked securely, and Mackeson saw the keys transferred to the Admiralty Agent, who held the loop of iron against his chest. They were also color-coded—the Alexandria and Mediterranean mail was in red sacks; the mail marked “via France,” to be dropped off at the island of Malta and thence to Marseille and Boulogne and by steamer across the English Channel, was in blue boxes; the Falmouth shipment (the
Oriental
would stop here before her final destination in England) was green; the Southampton mail was in white boxes.

The mail was always the last thing to come onboard, and people began shouting good-byes.

•  •  •

On the deck, Lady Anne Elizabeth Beaumont took out a cigarette and lit it, the breeze brushing smoke through the rampage of white curls on her head. This was the end of her Eastern adventures. She had been overland through Persia and Afghanistan, been feted at the courts of the Shah and the Amir, danced the waltz at the Governor-General's ball in Government House in Calcutta while the women,
so
provincial, had gawked at her from behind their fans. She had
been married when she was a chit of a girl, nineteen, but Edgar was so damnably boring, so unable to do anything. Money had never been a problem—there was an earl somewhere in her lineage, acres of parkland and hunting grounds full of grouse—and she had a pedigree. What would have been scandalous in a woman of lower birth, no parentage, no estates, was overlooked as eccentricity on her part, and she was, at fifty-two, too old to worry about whisperings behind hands. She had ridden over the Khyber Pass on a stout horse, wearing men's trousers specially made for her in London, sitting astride a horse as a man would.

“It's going to be quite a journey, eh?” a voice said next to her.

She squinted through the cigarette smoke at the boy who had addressed her. He was a thin, sallow-faced young man, with a weak, receding chin, teeth that jutted out so his lips did not fully close over them, spiky hair that he smoothed down ineffectively.