The Mountain of Light (33 page)

“Martyn Wingate,” he said, bringing his hand into the range of her vision. “You're Lady Beaumont, aren't you? I peeked at the passenger list. I'm opposite you in the cabin.”

“Where's your father, young man?” Her voice was icy.

“Ha-ha,” he said. “I'm not as young as I look. And my father is the publisher of the
Bombay Herald
.”

Lady Beaumont contemplated the end of her cigarette. She too had read the article in the paper, and she'd booked her passage afterward just to be onboard the
Indus
. Her original plan was to visit the court of the Hyderabad king—someone had wrangled an invitation for her—but she had had to regretfully decline. A pity, she thought, for she had not been to southern India yet, and Edgar wouldn't care if he didn't see her for another year. He was perfectly happy in her ancestral home, with his horses, his dogs, and his interminable mucking about in the gardens.

Martyn Wingate left his hand hanging in the air, then
withdrew it, and put it into his pocket. He waited for a long while, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, wondering if she was cutting him.

“You think the diamond is on this ship?” she asked. They were standing very close to each other, leaning on the deck railing. The noise from the band blasted around their ears. In the background, the smokestack heaved and hissed as the
Indus
's engine room built up steam and sent a spiral of gray fog into the blue Bombay sky.

“I do.” Eagerly. Then, meeting her cynical gaze, he added, “My father does. The old man booked my passage without even telling me about it. He's a crafty one, much under the influence of his wife and his snotty children—not my mother, you understand; this one's much younger; he met her at the theater.”

“Who's taking it?”

“I think,” Wingate said carefully, “a Colonel McGregor and a Captain Ramsay.”

“How do you know?”

“Papa,” he said. “Papa knows everything.”

“There's a Ramsay on the list, but not a McGregor . . .” Lady Beaumont had reached into her reticule and drawn out a sheet of paper. “Plenty of other army officers, but only one colonel. Mackeson.”

“Maybe he didn't come then?”

She shook her head. “Your father has the name wrong. It's that man.” She pointed at the dock with her cigarette, where the mail was being loaded up the gangplank. “Colonel Mackeson.”

Just then, one of the guards lost his footing, and his box fell from his hands and crashed into Colonel Mackeson. They watched as Mackeson righted himself, rubbing his knee, and hobbled over to the guard to pull him up and then lifted the green box and carried it himself up the gangplank and disappeared into the hold. He was a while in coming back, his limp
more pronounced, his face ashen with effort, sweat dotting his forehead. He shook hands with the captain and then made his way up the passenger gangplank.

A few minutes later, all the mail had been packed into the
Indus
's after hold; the mail carriages withdrew, people flapped their handkerchiefs in the air, and the ship's band stopped playing as the crew took their places.

The dockhands wheeled away the gangplanks and untied the moorings, flinging the ropes back onto the deck. The
Indus
gave a long, musical hoot with her foghorn, the paddles moved, crunching through the water, and the pilot guided the ship out of the harbor.

•  •  •

The night skies were enormous over the lone ship cutting her way through the Arabian Sea, spread out from horizon to horizon, the stars a pale blue glitter of diamonds strewn with a careless hand. There was no wind, not even a whisper of one, as Mackeson walked up and down the deck. Mary Booth's little hand was tucked under his arm; her head came just up to his shoulder. He could smell a whiff of jasmine in the glossy ringlets of her dark hair. They were alone on the forward deck, far from the sole lantern swinging from a post, circling its pool of light below.

“What does your brother do, Miss Booth?” Mackeson asked. He walked slowly; in the last week his knee had become more swollen, uncomfortably tight in his trousers.

She turned gleaming eyes up to him. “He used to work at Lattey Brothers.”

“The Calcutta auctioneers? Used to, you say?”

Mary moved a little apart. Her lids fell over her eyes, and she picked at the lace on her sleeve. When she spoke, her voice was low, and Mackeson had to lean over to listen. “They . . . someone accused him . . . of taking one of the
Ganesha idols, a small one, from the sixteenth century. It was part of the East India Company's booty, spoils of war I think from the conquest of a small kingdom in the south, somewhere in the Madras Presidency.” She looked out to the sea, her profile rigid. “He didn't do it, Colonel Mackeson. Tom's a man of great integrity and honor; the very thought of being suspected was too much for him. And so . . . we left.”

Mackeson had met Thomas Booth at the dinner table that had been assigned to the first-class passengers on the very first night of the passage, and had taken an almost instant dislike to the man. He had been impeccably dressed, too foppish by far, with a care for detail that a finicky woman would take. His coattails had been brushed, his collar was pristine without a rim of sweat, his hands clean, his nails cut freshly, the gleam of a gold chain connecting his watch fob to the buttons of his ruffled shirt. His skin had been too white for Mackeson's comfort, as though he had spent his time in Calcutta under the shade of a parasol during the day, emerging only at night to show his face. And, he didn't sweat. To Mackeson, who had stewed in perspiration all through his years in India, this was the ultimate folly for a man. Booth's voice was not all that manly either; he had a mincing way of speaking, not quite opening his mouth fully, the words seeming to escape from one corner or the other. And though long grooves cut their way on either side of his lips, Mackeson had never seen him smile.

He had compared the two of them—brother and sister—seated side by side, and seen similarities in their manner of eating, of wiping their mouths at the end of each mouthful, in their dark coloring, hair and eyebrows, but what suited Mary Booth merely looked comical and unbending in Thomas Booth. Mackeson wondered if Mary had not been able to marry—if indeed she had never received a proposal at all—because of her brother. Not just for his behavior but because Tom Booth had after all been only a clerk, a minor one, at the auction house in Calcutta, and they would not have had
entry into the Government House parties or the balls held in the regimental messes.

So he had walked away with one of the goods entrusted to his master, he thought. Mackeson made a pretense of adjusting his belt and felt for the bag hanging from it. There, underneath his hand, solid and comforting, was the outline of the Kohinoor diamond.

He looked at Mary Booth, still gazing into the waters, her nose and mouth outlined by the stars behind her, and felt a sudden yearning to put his arms around her and bury his face in her hair. He had heard stories about shipboard romances, how quick they were, how you could find yourself married at the end of two or three weeks, the captain officiating, and then find yourself in gentle regret for the rest of your life.

And if he had to be honest with himself, Mackeson had to admit he was terrified of going to England, a land he had left as a boy, of meeting his sister in Cornwall after forty years. What would he say to her? It would be cold, and damp, the nights long and dark in winter, no incessant shriek of the crickets outside his window.

He had grown up in a mining town, and he could remember his father's grimy face at the dinner table, the way he hacked off bread from the loaf, his drunken sleep every night, a bottle of grog rolling under his chair below his inert hand. Mackeson already missed India, and knew, even before he set foot on English soil, he would be returning to his regiment or his civil duties—there had been a letter for him at Bombay, promising a posting to Peshawar. Where would Mary Booth fit into all of this? The women of his
zenana
near Calcutta were enough for him.

The dinner bell rang.

“Shall we go back in, my dear?” he said, and his manner had changed, no longer the lover. He saw a flash of hardness in her eyes, an understanding as she nodded. Perhaps Mary Booth had indeed tried very hard to get married in India, and
she hadn't succeeded after all, and it was, just perhaps, no fault of her brother's.

An hour later, seated at the dinner table, Colonel Mackeson thought that they were all a sorry lot. Captain Waltham had stopped by his cabin on the first morning and murmured that everyone at that table had bought their tickets in the last few days before the voyage, and he had showed him the piece in the
Bombay Herald,
and the news in the other paper of the
Medea
's fire. “It cannot be a coincidence, sir,” he had said. “I would caution you to be careful with the Kohinoor.”

Mackeson had stared at him, bemused. So much for Lord Dalhousie's immense secrecy and all that plotting to take the Kohinoor out of the Punjab.

“Perhaps,” Captain Waltham suggested, hesitantly, “you could turn it over to me and I will place a guard around it. I could not, sir, guarantee its safety if I don't have charge of it. And I think you're seated at a table, all of whose occupants know of the diamond traveling with you.”

“My dear Captain Waltham,” Mackeson had said softly, “you know nothing for certain, except for your instructions. Whatever . . . needs to be taken safely to England, it is left in
my
charge.
I
am the one to guarantee its safe arrival. But, we talk too much, and the walls are miserably thin. I suggest that you do not come to visit me again; it will cause too much chatter, raise too many questions.”

“As you wish.” Captain Waltham had given him a short bow. But he had lingered on. “I must tell you, though I don't see how this can have any bearing on . . . ah . . . the matter at hand, but the mail in the hold was ransacked a few nights ago. The boxes were broken open, the letters strewn around—it has never happened before.”

“Which ones?” Mackeson had asked. “The Falmouth boxes?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

Because it had been a green box Mackeson had taken into the after hold when the mail guard had bumped into him and fallen down. “Is anything missing?”

“There's no way of telling, sir. The mail comes onboard sealed and locked—we are never sure of the contents.”

Now Colonel Mackeson sat at his dinner table and looked around at his companions. One of them was a thief. The Booths, brother and sister, were there. A young stripling called Martyn Wingate, who would not say what his business was, or why he was going to England. He had been born in Bombay, had lived there all of his life, and into his English slipped the guttural sounds of Hindustani every now and then. Lady Anne Beaumont, Mackeson knew well, and had heard of for many years, although he hadn't met her yet. But she was the local nuisance, wealthy, uncaring of proprieties, living among the natives like one of them, traveling about the countryside without a male escort—an English one that is. And yet, when she came to one of the capitals of the presidencies, she was accorded all the privileges of her rank, and entered the drawing rooms clad in lush silks and damasks that had somehow survived her travels. She was wearing one of her silks this evening, in pale green, trimmed with velvet, and around her neck glowed a string of tiny emeralds, with one stone as a pendant of a shocking size. “From the Maharajah of Jagatpur,” she had said carelessly. “He was such a splendid little man, with a palace full of jewels.”

Mr. Huthwaite sat back in his chair—his girth would not allow him to come any closer to the table—and smirked at everyone constantly, his collar tucked under his thick neck. His talk was, as was to be expected, pious and unrestrained, full of Major this and Captain that, and Colonel this, who had contributed to his church-building fund, and of the natives who listened goggle-eyed to the word of God. He also drank too much.

The dinners aboard the
Indus
were abundant. Soups
made the same morning, boiling in the great big cauldrons of the belowdecks kitchens—oxtail, shrimp and cinnamon, duck with chillied walnuts. This was followed by a salad of some sort, and they had been long enough at sea that the chickpea and smoked fish salad stuffed into tomato halves had given way to various bits of unidentifiable vegetables trapped in trembling aspic. A whole roast pig was brought in on most nights and carved at a large “sideboard,” which was the top of the grand piano. The pig had been slaughtered just the previous night, and the meat was fresh and tender. There was curry to follow—braised quail, or duck served with a shikari sauce, which was the sauce of game hunters in India made of claret, wild mushrooms, black and cayenne peppers, and catsup. Or a proper duck curry with cardamom and cloves ground into ginger and garlic and fried in
ghee
. The desserts evanesced on the tongue, and all, invariably, were forms of pudding. The Madras Club pudding was a mixture of sponge cake with rum, raisins, suet, bread crumbs, and honey boiled in a mold and served with a Madeira sauce. The rice and sago pudding had whipped egg whites to make it fluffy. Canned fruit was served with pats of coconut pudding.

And every course came with its own liquor. Pale ale at the beginning of the meal with the soup. Champagne with the salad. Wine with the pork. Madeira with the curry. Port and sherry with the dessert, and coffee, at the end, laced with whiskey.

Mr. Huthwaite drank it all; his glass was never empty.

The eighth person at the table was a young woman with five children, Arabella-Catherine Hyde. Her quarters were in first class. Her children were in second class with their governess, a tired girl of nineteen who had come to India only to find her betrothed dead of cholera, and who had to return home to England because in the meantime her father had died and her mother had forbidden her to bind herself to any other
man in India. This—working for Mrs. Hyde—was the only way she could pay for her passage.