‘How did it come to this, Albert? How, damn it?’
Albert didn’t have any answers. He’d tried warning the army about the potential problems associated with the grease the soldiers were using for their guns. Grease made from animal fats — beef or pork, prohibited by the Hindu religion. His pleas ignored as preposterous by those higher up the chain of command. Now they were reaping what they had sown.
Staying behind had been in vain. Nothing he’d done had changed the course of history. How many people would still die in this mutinous and unnecessary war?
‘We must deal with them by the harshest means. The deaths cannot go unpunished,’ the Viceroy said.
Albert almost spoke, to warn against inflaming the tensions, but held his tongue. There was nothing he could do now. He’d been unable to change any events leading to the mutiny in Cawnpore and the subsequent atrocities. Are the affairs of yesterday set in stone, meaning no one can alter history? If all he’d achieved was saving the lives of a handful of men, was that more significant than his family? More important than the life he’d abandoned?
‘I’m sorry, Sir, but I need to go out for a short while? I have a personal issue.’
The Viceroy stared at him.
‘A personal issue, Lester? After mutineers murdered hundreds of our women and children, throwing them into a well to rot? Where is your head at?’
‘My head is with my wife and child, Sir. An hour, that’s all I need.’
The atrocities had wounded the Viceroy, and he sighed. ‘You’ve waited till now to tell me about a family, Lester? You are a dark horse. An hour, then I need you here.’
Albert hurried from the room with one thought, was it too late to go home?
The Carving
Albert Lester hailed a palanquin and hurried back to the storage sheds. Leaping from his seat he searched for the mysterious carver. Something told him that the carver was more than a whittler of wood. Albert couldn’t have been any more specific if anyone had asked him, but he knew the carver was more.
‘Hello?’
No answer. The yard was empty, the workmen as absent as the summer rains. It wasn’t only the courtyard which stood vacant, the doors to the warehouses gaped open, as if screaming in shock at the atrocities committed in India.
Albert took half a dozen steps towards the unlocked door. Was it only yesterday he’d been here, preparing a final inventory for shipment? An inventory as worthless as the paper he’d written it on. The ink wasted.
Beyond the open door the rats still scuttled into dim corners, and beetles scurried from sight, but the mahogany furniture and the ivory sculptures and the silverware and the eclectic pieces he’d collected over several years had vanished. Packing straw littered the floor where cartons had once stood. Nothing remained.
Backing out, he checked the rest of the warehouses. All empty. It wold have taken a huge number of men, and a concerted effort to clear every shed of its contents. He couldn’t recall what had been inside the other warehouses, but they had been hives of activity — a pottery production line in one, basket weaving in another, a spice trader at the far end, with similar small family-run businesses in the others.
Albert wandered around the hand-packed earth, his thoughts in disarray. A tuneless whistling reached his ears, and he turned to see the carver sitting cross-legged under the tree, whittling away at a piece of wood.
‘What happened here?’ Albert asked.
The carver shrugged, his scarred face showing no sign of subterfuge.
‘Did the carter take everything?’ Albert suggested, the idea popping into his mind. It was a possibility that the carters had misunderstood his instructions. It wouldn’t have been the first time a courier had got it wrong.
With a possible solution under his belt, Lester shifted his focus, his heart rate returning to normal. The carter must have taken everything.
‘Yesterday you mentioned my daughter. How did you know about her?’
The carver ignored him, concentrating on his wood in his hands, whistling a peculiarly familiar harmony, but one which sat tantalisingly on the periphery of Albert’s memory.
‘My daughter?’ he persisted, raising his voice.
The carver paused, laying the half completed piece on the ground before rummaging through the basket at his side. He laid an assortment of ornaments at Albert’s feet.
‘Choose the one you think she’d appreciate the most.’
Albert stared at the carvings, taking in the detail of a carved horse complete with bridle and ornate saddle, a pair of decorated recumbent elephants, a sleeping tiger, a coiled cobra just lifting its hooded head, and a peacock fanning its feathered tail.
‘I asked you a question.’
‘History won’t change while you choose,’ the carver replied, his hand caressing his cheek. ‘Most people pick the horse, especially for a daughter.’
‘She’s not that sort of daughter,’ Albert replied.
The carver lifted the cobra, examining the miniature lifelike creature, before returning it to the basket. Likewise, he packed away the elephants and the horse, leaving only the tiger and the peacock.
‘Which one is your daughter then? Pick one. But choose the right one. Time is not on our side.’
In turmoil, Albert started stuttering a response, a retort to the effrontery of the Indian carver, but his words faded away, like a mirage across the parched desert. And his shoulders slumped forward. He had no daughter, not anymore. His daughter was a grown woman, forging her own path now. Buying a carved toy was akin to giving a rattle for an eighteenth birthday present, too little, too late.
‘Pick one, Mister Lester. Quickly. The troubles are coming.’
The troubles. Rape, murder, mutiny and misunderstandings, the precursor to the end of British rule in India.
‘The tiger. Sarah is more a tiger. She’s never been a peacock.’
‘The right choice,’ the carver replied, packing away the peacock, leaving the sleeping wooden tiger. ‘Time to go, there’s nothing more you can do here. You are a good man, Mister Lester. Sarah is lucky to have you as her father. Keep the tiger with you, and you will always be able to find India should you need her.’
Before Albert could register the use of Sarah’s name, the carver had ambled away, his basket swinging from one arm, once again whistling the maddening familiar tune as he vanished around a sharp twist in the road.
‘Sarah. He said Sarah,’ Albert muttered. He almost went after the man, but there wasn’t time. The Viceroy needed him back. They had a mutiny to quell, and Albert had to be there to make sure more lives weren’t being lost through stupidity and egocentric decision making.
As Albert bent to retrieve the carved tiger, he hummed the same tune. A song he hadn’t heard for many years, the title coming to him as he plucked the tiny tiger from the ground — Time of the Season by English rock band The Zombies. And it was that song he was humming the moment he disappeared. Vanishing from sight, from India.
LIVERPOOL
The Officer
Clifford Meredith wiped at the watery windows and peered out. The snow had finally stopped, coating everything with a beautiful white mantle, not that the bitter Customs man recognised the beauty in that. He only saw a freezing world outside which would disrupt his journey home. Turning his back, he lumbered over to the fireplace. This wasn’t his office, his was a grimy hole on the other side of the warehouse where the stench from the wharves pervaded every nook and cranny even in the cold weather. This office belonged to his superior, to the man who had the role Meredith thought was his by right. His supervisor was an imbecile who hadn’t bothered coming in to work today. That wasn’t how you ran one of the country’s busiest ports.
Clifford Meredith didn’t view the sideways shift to Liverpool Port as a demotion, he lacked that level of awareness. In his warped self-obsessed mind, he’d viewed it as an alternative track to the rank he believed he was due. He was cognisant they’d shifted him because of his investigation in
to the business dealings of Williams and Kurdi, but his being in Liverpool instead of London didn’t mean he’d forget about the investigation and how those two men were defrauding the Crown of its rightful revenue. He’d see justice, he still had his fat fingers in all sorts of pies, and had favours he could call in.
Meredith rubbed his hands in front of the flames and surveyed the room. This office would suit him well. He’d change a few things, but for the most part the government issue desk was suitably intimidating, the rug large enough to cover most of the floorboards and the framed visages of the former Port Collectors added a level of import to the room. Those he’d keep. The bookcase held shipping ledgers and copies of the legislation they operated under. It had been years since he’d opened one; he didn’t need to because he knew the law like the back of his hand. Meredith knew what was right and what was wrong. Just as he knew Williams and Kurdi were having a laugh with the concessions they were claiming on the rubbish they were importing from India. He spent almost every waking moment imagining their faces as they locked them up for fraud, or treason, or the hundred other offences he suspected them of. It was his favourite day dream. A knock on the door of the office interrupted his reverie.
‘Come in.’
A clerk with a shiny polished head and a Rumpelstiltskin beard entered the office, a pile of manilla folders under his arm.
‘Put them there,’ Meredith barked as the clerk made started towards the fireplace.
With hands blue with cold, the clerk placed the folders on the desk, mouthing his feelings towards Meredith’s back.
‘Off you go, the dirty buggers won’t declare their shipments on their own,’ Meredith said, waving him away before returning to the lovely enveloping heat of the fireplace. He shook his head at the laziness of the staff here. Imagine the cheek of the clerk, wanting to laze away by the fire? He tried to remember the man’s name. When he was finally in charge, the lazy git with the foreign name would be the first one fired. God knows how he was ever let into Britain. What was it? Skaky? Satkey? No, he remembered now, Shaskey, Paul Shaskey. Polish maybe or something foreign, anyway. Only good English men should work for Her Majesty’s Customs. The man was probably a spy or else he was letting all his foreign cronies in. He looked shady. Shady Shaskey, yes, that’s how he’d remember him. And Clifford Meredith laughed, ignoring the files waiting for his attention. It wasn’t his desk after all, so someone else could deal with them.
The Warehouse
Clifford Meredith stopped in the doorway of the cavernous warehouse, clipboard under his arm, picking at his teeth with his free hand. The man beside him rattled off the items on the manifest attached to his own wooden board.
‘And it’s all from India then?’ Meredith asked, wiping his fingers on his black uniform pants, adding to the pattern of unidentifiable stains already there.
‘Yes, Sir. All of it. It shows the consignor as Williams and Ye Ltd.’
‘Ye? That’s not an English name. That’s a heathen Chinese name. I want every nook and cranny searched. Every drawer, unroll every bolt of cloth. And if you find even one stick of furniture not listed on the manifest, you come tell me,’ Meredith said, his face a picture of glee.
Here he was, at the arse end of England, and like a gift from God himself, he’d stumbled across another company owned by those thieving, underhanded conmen—Williams and Kurdi. Although they now seemed in cahoots with an oriental. Meredith was certain there’d be evidence of smuggling this time, irrefutable evidence. Perhaps even collusion with a foreign power? Could Williams and Kurdi, and this mysterious Ye, be part of a plot against their glorious Queen? Meredith got quite carried away with his fanciful dreams and the litany of potential offences the traders could have committed, so didn’t notice the look of contempt on the clerk as he sauntered out in high spirits.
Meredith’s glee warmed the cockles of his heart. A goods days work done, so now he could reward himself with some afternoon delight. Being sent to Liverpool had been a blow, but it wasn’t all bad. Liverpool had its attractions, attractions which were much more affordable than they had been in London. It was just as well, as he had a healthy appetite. Given what he’d achieved today, a long lunch, followed by some slap and tickle was more than well deserved.
The ladies at the Cheshire Cheese in Newton Lane were his personal favourites. He’d come to this decision after trying dozens of the local establishments. Some he’d never deign to step foot in again, after some lacklustre experiences, whilst others wouldn’t have him back again, not that he gave them much thought—it was their loss. But the fare at the Cheshire Cheese far surpassed the other brothels around town. What he liked best was being shown into the front parlour adorned with framed photographs of the girls on offer. He had his favourites but still examined the portraits in case there were any new offerings. For two shillings, he had a room to himself for half an hour, and it even included a glass of gin.
Meredith made his selection and lounged with his gin on the couch for someone to summon the girl from wherever they waited. A newspaper abandoned on the table lay open on an essay decrying brothels. Meredith smirked. The newspapers were full of do-gooders trying to have prostitution and brothels abolished, claiming that they were dens of inequity, frequented by sadists, and populated with girls of disrepute. He’d never come across any sadists, neither in London nor Liverpool. He’d seen plenty of acquaintances coming and going from pleasure houses, more so in London than here, but then he was new to the city. No, he believed that the reformers wouldn’t get very far in their protests on this issue.
‘Welcome back, Mr Meredith,’ came a sweet voice from the doorway. ‘The usual?’
‘A little extra today, Josephine, as I have cause to celebrate,’ Meredith said, tossing a handful of coins to the woman, where they disappeared from view.
‘You’re my first customer since we done up the room,’ Josephine replied, her hips swaying more than what was natural as she encouraged him up the Georgian staircase.
Meredith wondered how the Cheshire Cheese could improve upon the erotic plaster tiles which graced the surround of the fireplaces in the brothel. He delighted in examining the different tiles in each of the rooms, more for entertainment than for motivation, although the tiles had provided some inspiration in the past.
Upon entering Josephine’s room, Meredith felt punched in the gut, such was his visceral reaction to the sight in front of him.
Josephine clapped her hands, mistaking Meredith’s stunned silence and his gaping mouth as wonderment.
‘Isn’t it glorious? Closest I’m likely to get to India,’ she exclaimed, blonde curls bobbing in time to her petticoats.
The room was an ode to the colourful chaos of India, with exotic sari’s hung on the walls, the old English furniture replaced with hideous carved monstrosities, and gilt and brass everywhere. Someone had even painstakingly painted the ceiling in reds and greens and a gold leaf pattern, complete with peacocks in corners. To Meredith it was as if rioting mob of Indians were let loose in the room, vomiting colour everywhere.
‘How… where… the brass? Is this Indian?’
‘How did you guess? How smart to know that this was from India! Imagine what it must be like there. I follow the magazines, and I know everything about it, all the girls do. Have you been there?’
‘Where did you get it from?’ Sinclair asked, trying to run the numbers in his head. His two shillings didn’t seem like such a bargain if this was what they spent it on.
He ripped a red sari from the wall, eliciting a scream from Josephine, which she stifled as he shot her a furious look.
‘If you don’t like it, we can move to another room? I’ll find an empty room. It’s a quiet time of the day. You’ve already paid… it seems a waste to-’
‘Is this filth what you’ve spent my money on?’ Meredith screamed, the irony lost on him that he’d paid for a service and what the brothel then did with that coin was of no concern of his. ‘Where did it come from, this…
this foreign rubbish?’
Josephine inched closer to the door. ‘I don’t know. There was a catalogue, and we all chose something.’
‘Bring me the catalogue,’ Meredith snarled, ripping down another sari, before bundling it up and tossing it into the fireplace, now sans its decorative erotic tiles. The flames licked at the gold ribbon edging the red silk before devouring the fabric.
Josephine vanished from the room, hiking her petticoats up as she ran, but hate clouded Sinclair’s eyes so much, that her tiny little ankles and shapely legs held no attraction, and rage fuelled him as he ripped the Indian sari’s from the walls as though he was ripping the clothes from the bodies of the men who’d forced him from London and had ruined his life - Robert Williams and Samer Kurdi, the filthy traders bringing in heathen rubbish from India.
Running footsteps echoed down the hall, it wasn’t just Josephine coming towards the room. A cluster of painted faces crowded the doorway, accompanied by gasps of shock. The burly handyman-cum-security guard barged through the twittering girls, before grabbing Sinclair by the scruff of his neck.
They manhandled Sinclair from the ruined room, and marched past the onlookers, and before he knew it someone threw him down the front stoop. From his ignominious position on the ground, he looked up at Josephine.
‘Here’s your catalogue. I’ll keep your coin as payment for the damage you’ve caused. Don’t come back,’ and she slammed the door.
Meredith reached into the gutter for the grubby pages. After wiping away the dirt, the words Williams and Kurdi emerged, the blackness of the ink fuelling his rage. They would pay for this.
The Box
Meredith returned to his lodgings, barging past all and sundry, oblivious to the frigid pall over Liverpool. The revenge in his heart kept him warm. The grubby catalogue thrust deep in his pocket burned through his coat, scorching his skin, tainting him by its proximity. But he was nothing if not efficient. He planned to comb through the catalogue the harlot Josephine had given him, comparing it to the manifests he had filed away for Williams and Kurdi, the files for the shipments he knew about, before they’d deviously changed their importing name. He’d have to pull the records for Williams and Ye now and compare those too. Oh, what a merry dance he would lead them on. And after that, he may just lend his name to the side of the reformers. It was about time someone taught those sneaky whores a lesson or two. They shouldn’t go unpunished for stealing from men like him. He’d heard the rumours that the girls worked in pairs, one distracting while the other did the thieving, and it aggrieved him. Yes, he’d write to the papers, support the cause. Religious righteousness overcame him, soothing him as he considered his course of action. But first a nap, snuffing out the dark underbelly of Liverpool was most taxing.
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