The Strangler Vine (34 page)

Blake slumped in his chair. He looked extremely unwell. Sir Theophilus called for the bearers, and I prepared to follow.

‘Not you, Lieutenant Avery,’ he said. ‘No. I want you to tell me everything, from the beginning.’

It was one of those warm, dry February days that nevertheless hinted at the burning heat to come. The sky was the blue of a washed-out cloth, and the river dark and shiny. On its far side one could see the grand mansions of Garden Reach. The ghats were chaotic, crowded and dirty as always, but the smell of fish was less pungent today and there was a good breeze up the Hooghly. The tender had arrived to take the passengers from the wharf down the Hooghly to the deeper water off Sagar Island, where
The Marchioness of Blandford
, a 900-ton East Indiaman, waited for them. The helmsman fussed about with the ropes, impatient to be off, but some travellers were still awaited, and so we stood on the ghat, eking out the last moments on land. The trunks had gone off earlier that morning, so there was little to carry. There were several grizzled elderly gentlemen, presumably taking retirement; and a couple of younger men going home on leave. Some four or five ladies in flounced dresses and puffed sleeves waited in their carriages until the last moment. Their small children ran about, pursued by breathless ayahs and bearers.

The day after our audience with the Governor General, I attended Mountstuart’s funeral. There were hundreds of mourners. I should not imagine that above three or four had ever met him. The Governor General spoke the oration, describing a man I did not recognize, and a death which bore no relation to what I had seen. But I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that Macnaghten and Collinson
were right: much though I disliked it, the secret would have to be kept, order must be maintained.

It did not prevent the surge of anger as I listened to the Governor General’s words and knew he knew that he lied. And so I had decided that, whatever happened, I would resign my commission and return to England, as Blake planned to. It was arranged that we would travel down the Ganges by boat to Calcutta as it would be a great deal less exhausting than the land journey. Thence we would take an Indiaman for England.

I did not share Blake’s radical opinions, but I felt a loyalty to him which I could not easily explain, and whenever I thought about Mountstuart, I felt an anger that made me wish to break all the familiar bonds of conduct and obedience. It was particularly difficult whenever I was asked about our time with Mountstuart. This happened a great deal, for I was constantly approached by officers and civilians wanting to shake my hand, drink my health or invite me to dinner. Pretty young women appeared from nowhere to congratulate me. They wanted to hear about the tiger hunt and Mountstuart’s last stand. I must admit that even as I replied uneasily to their questions, it was pleasant to be so feted. Yet all was increasingly cast into shadow by my worry about Blake, who was still very weak.

In the days after the meeting Blake rallied, his wounds knit and he became stronger, but he was very silent. I was sure he blamed himself for Mountstuart’s death and, I surmised, a great many other things too, and I wished to tell him he was wrong. By the end of the week, however, he had sickened with a fever. I hoped it was one of the familiar sweats to which old hands were prone, but the surgeon said the source was Blake’s hand, and it must come off. Blake refused to countenance the notion, though I begged him to relent, and I feared perhaps he wanted to die. I watched him grow weaker and weaker, though we bathed the wound thrice daily with ghee and Sameer found dried wormwood in the bazaar which we gave him for the fever. The surgeons were not impressed, but I was a hero now, and so my demands were met, with ill-disguised scepticism, it must be said. Eventually Blake passed into unconsciousness.
For a day he could not be roused at all. Then he woke, very weak. I was summoned to his bed and he said that whatever happened to him, I should stay in India.

I protested, but he said, ‘Don’t take me as your example, Avery. The world is the way it is, and if you can it’s better to live comfortably with it than bump along against it. Don’t throw away your chances before you’ve had them. I think you would not regret some more years here. I know there’s little for you in England.’

I told him I would not think of it.

He was very frail for several days afterwards, but then began to improve. We took the boat to Calcutta a few weeks later, taking our leave of Sameer, who, following certain interventions on our parts, had been granted a prolonged leave to return to his village, and a place in his old regiment where other members of his family still served.

In Calcutta, Blake began to prepare for his departure and fought off all attempts to make a hero of him. He did his best to disappear from our story altogether, though he never showed any disapproval of my enjoyment of our celebrity. When asked about how we saved the Rao, or his discovery of Mountstuart, or the days of pursuit, or our final encounter with a notorious Thug leader, he would smile gnomically and fall silent. Not that our reluctance to speak of the subject made any difference. Just as Theophilus Collinson had said, Mountstuart’s end seemed to collect rumour and myth, no matter what the official accounts described.

Some days after we arrived in Calcutta I went to a dinner where an elderly man came up to me, took my hand, fixed me with a steady look and said quietly, ‘I know the truth about Mountstuart’s end, sir. I know what you have struggled against.’ Seeing my anxious look, he drew me close, put his mouth to my ear and whispered, ‘Freemasons!’

I haunted Blake’s house in Blacktown, telling myself I was ensuring he convalesced properly, but really because there was no one in Calcutta with whom I felt as at ease. He was arranging pensions for his retainers and tying up old business. I would witness the tail-end
or the beginning of some unlikely farewell: a well-to-do half-caste widow with a brood of orphans; a tearful Irish rope-maker; a feverish red-faced captain shaking his hand with an intensity that seemed a little excessive; a native moneylender who was keen to let me know he shared with Blake a love of Persian poetry.

All the time, however, I pondered what Blake had said about staying on. Truth be told, despite all that had taken place, part of me wished to stay in India, to see more and do more. My homesickness, meanwhile, had almost gone. I still thought often of Louisa and of the places I loved, but more often I remembered how difficult it had been between my father and myself. I thought of how unimpressed the wider family would be if I returned now. What I would do to put food in my mouth, I had no idea. In my wilder moments I imagined being in London with Blake, but I had only to envision what an impossible pair we should make, to see it for the fantasy it was. Besides, I knew that it would be hard enough for Blake to find his feet in London, and I had not been made for cities.

Something else had taken place too. Among the notes and letters I had received on returning to Calcutta was one from Helen Larkbridge.

‘
My dearest William
,’ she wrote,

Will you allow one who holds the warmest and liveliest memories of you to let you know with how much excitement and pleasure we have learnt of your extraordinary adventures, and to congratulate you on your even more extraordinary bravery? It seems an age since you left Calcutta, so determined, so grim-faced, so ill-used in the loss of your dearest friend. How I wish I had overcome my own maidenly weakness, had braved your stern and steely manner, had thrown off the dead hand of convention, and had offered you the comfort and the tender words that were in my heart. I cannot tell you how much I regret that I did not.

 

If you can find a moment, a tiny space, among the many far greater and more important demands now made upon your society, perhaps you might consider calling upon me? It would be so very good to see you again.

 

I sign myself, your affectionate friend,

 

Helen Larkbridge

 

I had been been told that Helen had ‘come to an understanding’ with Lieutenant Keay. That is to say, she was all but engaged to him, though he had returned for the time being to Benares. I could not, however, resist calling on her.

She had been lodging with a rather grand merchant family who spent a good deal of time on their estates near the Governor General’s mansion at Barrackpore, giving her the run of their Calcutta mansion. When I arrived one cool, bright afternoon, I found her alone but for the servants.

‘William!’ She smiled, but cautiously, and held out a gloved hand. I kissed it and looked up. She was transfixingly pretty. She wore a dress of soft sprigged muslin, and about her the air seemed scented with jasmine. ‘I can hardly believe it is you!’

‘I too.’

After that we sat awkwardly for a while, I asking dull questions about Calcutta acquaintances, she answering as animatedly as she could. After a while, there seemed little left to say.

‘Perhaps I should go,’ I said.

‘No!’ she said. She drew her hands together. ‘William, I feel as if I do not know how to speak to you. You seem so … so battle-hardened, so far away from Calcutta foolishness. Please, I have a confession to make. I fear it makes me seem very forward. I should say at once that Lieutenant Keay and I have an understanding, but I felt that if I did not conspire in some degree I should never manage to speak to you properly.’ She looked over at me, quite serious. ‘I gave out that I was not receiving today, and I sent my chaperone across town to pick up some pills for a headache. And now I feel quite a fool.’

I laughed. I was bemused. I thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps we might start again,’ I said.

‘We shall have some tea,’ she said, and clapped her hands. She ordered me to tell her the story of my adventures, and I told the version I had become accustomed to telling, and she listened and laughed and gasped, and I thought how enormously pleasant it was to have my story listened to by a lovely girl who knew me, at least a little. She seemed to understand when I wished to stop talking of it,
asking about Blake instead. And when I had finished, she said, ‘And so you are torn between staying and going.’

‘Yes, I feel my duty pulls me in two directions. I do not know what to do.’

‘For my part, William,’ and she looked down blushing, ‘though I have no right to say it, I should rather you stayed.’

I left, once more hopelessly smitten.

Two weeks after we returned to Calcutta, Collinson made good on the first part of his promise, regarding Frank Macpherson’s reputation. It was suddenly widely known in Calcutta that he had been dreadfully misrepresented, and his affairs had been confused with a recently deceased former Company officer called Francis McFierson, a man of shady reputation who, quite apart from being vastly in debt, had been drummed out of his regiment for theft and embezzlement and was thought to have died somewhere north of Delhi. The papers he was supposed to have taken turned out to have been accidentally mislaid within his department. It seemed remarkably unconvincing and thin to me – and still did not explain his murder – but everyone about me seemed to find it perfectly plausible. Blake, meanwhile, found the moneylender to whom Frank had apparently owed so much. At first the man had claimed to know nothing about the matter. Then, after a certain pressure was brought to bear, he had admitted that a gentlemen at the Secret and Political Department had offered to overlook certain irregularities in his affairs if he would claim, and substantiate with documents, that Frank Macpherson – a man he had never met – had been considerably in debt to him. Such fraudulent claims carried the threat of a prison sentence and ruin, and the moneylender was extremely anxious to keep secret his part in it. So there seemed little doubt that Buchanan had had a hand in Frank’s death. Blake believed he must have stumbled upon the real reason for our journey, and Buchanan had feared he might tell me. Of Buchanan himself, we had heard nothing.

Meanwhile, opportunities dropped into my lap. My lieutenancy was confirmed, and I had been offered two posts: one in a cavalry regiment going north with the Governor General, or another keeping an eye on the independent state of Gwalior, both of which I
initially refused. I had also discovered on arriving in Calcutta that Lieutenant O’Keefe, to whom I was so disastrously in debt, had succumbed to the cholera only weeks after Macpherson had died. He had left no dependents, a pile of IOUs – which were judged void – and a cache of valuables won from idiots like me. He had not been much liked, and our messmates had gone about religiously returning his winnings to their former owners. I thus recovered my father’s pocket watch and ring.

Some days later the Rao’s tigerskin arrived for me, along with two tightly wrapped packs that Sameer had sent from Mirzapore. I had not expected to see them again. Inside were my books, much battered and in some places reduced almost to pulp, and the Rao’s bag of gems, which I had all but forgotten. I knew I should hand them in to the Company treasury, but something stopped me. Call it dishonesty, greed if you like, but I baulked at giving the Company all it would have of me. I asked Blake what to do.

‘Keep them,’ he said. ‘As restitution. For Macpherson’s sake, for Xavier’s, for the Rao’s. Or what you will. But don’t give them to the Company. It’s had plenty from you.’

Discreetly, Blake turned a couple of my stones into cash. I paid the last of my debts, bought three fine shawls of the best quality and a pearl necklace, and sent them, and a long letter, home to my sister. I ordered a complete set of Mountstuart’s works from England, all the back issues of Mr Boz’s
Pickwick
s, and decided to consider myself a man of means.

When I told Blake I was thinking of staying, he nodded. He said it was a good decision. Afterwards, however, I could not shake the feeling that I was betraying him, nor the perception that when he left there would be only one other person – Helen Larkbridge – on the whole continent of Asia whom I trusted or cared about.