The Empress of India (24 page)

Margaret looked around, but did not see the little round-faced jadoogar.

“Mr. Sutrow is in our cabin with a sickness of the stomach,” Demartineu told her, correctly interpreting her visual search of the deck. “He believes that it is the result of something he ingested, and feels sure that some beef was inserted in his lamb curry. I feel sure that he has the sickness of the sea, since it began shortly after we left port and ceases not. But he insists that he is a good sailor and never suffers from the sickness of the sea. But, as he has never been to sea before, I do not understand how he can be so positive of this.”

“You’ve been painting, I see,” Margaret said.

“Painting?” Demartineu looked startled. “Why do you say that?”

Margaret pointed to the professor’s shirtsleeve, which peeped out from beneath his jacket on the outstretched arm. “Slight traces of brown paint on the cuff of your white shirt,” she said. “I could think of more complicated explanations, but the simplest is that you’ve been painting.”

Demartineu looked down at his sleeve with an expression approximating horror. Then his face cleared. “Ah, now I see,” he said. “Yes, I have been horribly remiss. Painting some props—props? Yes, that is the word—that we will need for the act. Captain Iskansen has requested that we perform for the passengers some evening. It will be a change
from large women singing about birds in gilded cages, I think. I should have rolled up the sleeves for the painting,
hein
? But it so un-British, the rolling up of the sleeves, that I could not bring myself to do it whilst on a British ship. I will change the shirt after the lunch. If I return to the cabin before the lunch, the groanings of Mr. Sutrow will put me off eating entirely.”

Margaret shook her head. “Poor man,” she said. Whether she was speaking of Mr. Sutrow or Professor Demartineu wasn’t clear, but the professor didn’t ask.

After a moment Demartineu stood up. “So nice,” he said vaguely, and then moved off farther down the deck, to where he could enjoy his cigarette without offending.

Margaret returned to her reading until, some minutes later, a voice interrupted her.

“I say,” the voice said. “If it isn’t Miss St. Yves.”

It was a voice she recognized, but had never expected to hear again. She looked up. Did her heart beat faster? Perhaps. “Well!” she said. “You do get around. Pray tell me, who are you today? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

The young man who was not Lieutenant Peter Pettigrew, carrier pigeon officer of the Seventh Foot, was standing at the foot of her chair looking sadly down at her. What he was sad about, she couldn’t tell. “Today, surprisingly, I’m Peter Collins,” he told her. “The name my mother knows me by. But I don’t know how long it will last. I may feel another name coming on anytime now.”

“Try taking asafetida,” she suggested. “I believe it is indicated in cases of this sort.”

“Thank you,” he said, sitting down on the chair next to her. “Perhaps I shall.” Then he suddenly leaped to his feet again. “I say,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t mean, that is—do you mind if I take this chair?”

She thought of replying, “Not at all, where do you intend to take it?” but decided against it. “Please, sit down,” she said instead. “We can’t have you hopping about.”

“Good,” he said, lowering himself back into the chair. “I’ve given up hopping about in favor of reeling, writhing, and fainting in coils.” Peter signaled to a passing deck steward, and ordered a pot of tea and two cups.

“How nice of you not to ask me if I desired any tea,” Margaret said sweetly. “I do so hate having to make decisions.”

“Would you like some tea?” Peter asked. “Or must I drink the whole pot myself, using both cups, just to prove I wasn’t being unbearably rude?”

“That would be rude,” Margaret told him.

Peter sighed a deep sigh. “There I’ve done it,” he said. “Whenever I find myself feeling, ah, fond of a girl, I behave in an unbearably rude manner toward her, thus relieving myself of the necessity of trying to ascertain whether she might possibly develop a fondness of me, given sufficient passage of time.”

Yes, her heart was beating just a bit faster. “How clever of you,” she said. “Tell me, if it isn’t rude of me to ask, what are you doing here? On the
Empress,
I mean. When last I saw you, you were hunting the wily Phansigar. Don’t tell me there are Thuggee brigands lurking about the ship?”

Peter laughed. “Not s’far as I know,” he said. “No, I’ve been called back to London by the Foreign Office.”

Margaret looked at him quizzically. “I didn’t know you worked for the Foreign Office,” she said.

“Neither did I,” Peter admitted. “But when your boss says to you, ‘Here’s your steamship ticket and one pound two shillings thruppence for expenses. You’re to report to Whitehall,’ you pocket the kale and board the bloom—er, boat.”

“How exciting!” said Margaret. “Perhaps they’re going to appoint you prime minister.”

“I’m afraid I’d have to turn it down,” Peter told her. “I haven’t the requisite wardrobe.”

Margaret laughed. “Is that the only reason?”

“Why, of course,” Peter said. “Aside from that I’m eminently qualified. I know nothing about anything, and am prepared to give you my opinion on any number of subjects at the drop of a topper, with complete conviction and an air of ineffable authority.”

“I’ve often thought that those were the qualifications for many high government offices,” Margaret agreed.

A short, pudgy Indian steward in ballooning white pantaloons and a white steward’s jacket that hung loosely over his narrow shoulders appeared, set up a small portable table in the space between the two deck chairs, and went away. A minute later he reappeared and covered the table with a teapot, two cups, a pitcher of cream, a sugar bowl, and a plate of scones; and then went back for crocks of butter, two kinds of jam, two small plates for the scones, silverware, and linen napkins. Then he took three steps backward, as though retreating from royalty, bowed three times, and attempted to scurry off down the deck. He had barely taken four steps when he doubled over as though in sudden acute pain, stumbled to the rail, and heaved up whatever had been in his stomach.

Peter grabbed one of the napkins and crossed to where the steward was clutching the rail. “Here,” he said, handing it to the man. Margaret, who had come up behind him, stayed tactfully silent.

The steward wiped his face, coughed, gagged, coughed again, and stood up weakly. “Dank you, sor,” he said.

“Are you going to be all right?” Peter asked, looking the man over critically. “I think you’d better go lie down for a bit.”

“No, dat’s fine, sor. I feel better now.”

“Seasick?” Margaret asked sympathetically.

“No, mo’om. Is something going about with the crew. Maybe onetwo dozen boys are sick even now. Maybe something bad was eaten.”

“I see,” Peter said. “Sorry.”

“I be all right now, sor,” the steward said, and staggered off down the deck.

Peter looked thoughtful as they returned to their seats.

“What is it?” Margaret asked.

“I don’t know,” he told her. “Nothing, I hope. Nothing beyond a mild case of food poisoning. Bad curry, perhaps.”

“Don’t be mysterious,” she said. “It makes me nervous.”

“If there’s anything to tell you,” he said seriously, “I promise I will.”

“Thank you,” she said, sitting back down and taking up her book.

“Tea?” Peter asked, hefting the teapot.

Margaret nodded and Peter poured. “What are you reading?” he asked.

She showed the book to him. “It’s a generally annoying English-Hindi phrasebook,” she said. “It assumes that one knows things that one, or at least I, don’t. I am trying to increase my knowledge of the language, but this book imparts its information grudgingly and with an air of cringing superiority.”

Peter smiled. “A Uriah Heep sort of book?”

“That’s it. Always wringing its hands and apologizing, but you know that in the dark heart of its innermost pages it’s sneering at you.”

“Say,” Peter said, “does that ‘increase your knowledge’ mean that you do speak Hindi?”

“That would be an exaggeration,” she said. “I can speak and understand simple phrases—on the level of ‘Please, I would like to acquire a healthy camel for the transportation of household goods’—if simply and clearly spoken.”

“I can see how useful that would be,” Peter commented.

“Tell me,” she asked, “did you find out who that man was?”

“Man?”

“On the floor. In the viceroy’s office.”

“Oh. Yes, we found out who he was.”

“Was he English?”

“British, actually. He was a Scot.”

“Poor man.”

“I don’t know—he might have liked being a Scot.”

Margaret’s face flushed. “I didn’t mean—”

Peter raised a placating hand. “I know. I’m sorry. That wasn’t very funny. Yes, poor man. His name was MacCay. Ian MacCay. He was one of us—a DSI officer.”

“Why was he dressed up like a native?”

Peter shrugged. “Some of our chaps do that on occasion. It’s not exactly encouraged, but it’s da—deucedly useful. Gathering information firsthand, don’t you know. MacCay was Anglo-Indian. Grew up somewhere in Rajputana, I think. His father was something-or-other with the railroad. In his youth MacCay probably dressed like a native until he went back to Britain for school. Spoke Hindi better than he spoke English.”

“Why had he come to see the viceroy? And why in native dress?”

“That we still don’t know. Perhaps he had no access to his normal garb. Perhaps he had no way to get the stain off his hands and face. Perhaps he had no time. He must have run across something of interest, and it must have been both important and urgent enough for him to have not taken it up through the regular channels. But as of when we left, there had been no signs of anything out of the ordinary happening in the native population. Of course, we aren’t exactly sure where in the vastness that is India he had been practicing his little deception.”

“It’s frightening to think that a man could be murdered right there in the viceroy’s office,” Margaret said. “It makes one feel, not unsafe exactly,
but as though the entire world were not as stable and orderly as one has been led to believe.”

“It is,” Peter agreed, looking suddenly serious. “It’s more frightening to consider the possible messages that MacCay might have been trying to convey.”

What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men
.
—John Milton

T
he Empress of India,
white smoke billowing from its red-and-gold-barred smokestacks, steamed into Bombay Harbor early in the morning of the fifth day after leaving Calcutta. Here it would fill up its coal bunkers, debark a few passengers, unload one bit of cargo and pick up another, embark a few passengers, restock on fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat, and refill the fresh water tanks. Here it would allow the passengers who were going on to England to go ashore until four o’clock the next afternoon—with a very stern warning, writ large on a sign by the gangplank put up by the chief purser’s chief assistant:

 

Those passengers intending to recommence their journey who do not encompass the return of themselves to the ship by the four o’clock in the P. M. hour of the morrow may be discomfited by the passage onward of the steam vessel Empress of India without the presence of themselves

 

Here it would get replacements for about thirty of the native stewards and deckhands who had to be put ashore, still in the throes of acute distress from the curious incident of the epidemic among the crew. Here the ship and its precious cargo was guarded by a ring of British gunboats, a gaggle of local constables, a brigade of the Bombay Heavy Infantry, and a company of the Khairpur Light Horse, an all-native regiment with both British and Indian officers. Here the enigmatic Dr. Pin Dok Low and his associates boarded the ship.

After seeing that their trunks were properly stowed in their second-class cabins—there was nothing available in first class, not even when the request was accompanied by the suggestive clinking of a couple of gold sovereigns—they went off to discover the route to the dining room, the location of the storeroom holding the gold, and the whereabouts of Professor James Moriarty. Locating the gold was no problem; everyone aboard knew where it was, and everyone knew all of the secrets concerning how it was kept and guarded—some of them even true.

“It’s down belowdecks in a special vault,” explained the Artful Codger, as he and his two companions huddled around a table in the Second-Class Gentlemen’s Smoking Lounge. “Anybody can go see it anytime when the ship’s at sea, see; but not now because the ship ain’t yet at sea, if you see what I mean.”

“You’re making me see-sick,” Cooley the Pup groaned.