Dark Road to Darjeeling

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  He set his jaw, as if to challenge any contradiction.

  “Very well,” I said, waving my hand. “You say you have no business with the White Rajah. He entices men into gambling and intoxicants.”

  “Intoxicants? Now I am intrigued,” Portia said.

  “A solution of cocaine, specifically,” Brisbane told her. “He has kept the good doctor rather well supplied.”

  “As a doctor, I should have thought Llewellyn could keep himself supplied. There is no law against that sort of thing,” she observed.

  Harry seemed relieved to have the subject diverted from his nocturnal wanderings. “Opium in its various forms might be a simpler matter,” he put in, “but anything more esoteric would be difficult to come by. I cannot imagine how the White Rajah could arrange such things.”

  “I can,” Brisbane said grimly.

  “God help her,” Portia said, “but it appears Lucy has chosen even worse the second time than the first. Has he any money or family?”

  I took a deep draught of my whisky to avoid explaining to my sister that the White Rajah, in fact, had family in this very room.

  Harry answered. “We do not know anything much of him here in this valley, but I daresay he has connections somewhere. We will hope for the best for Lady Eastley’s happiness. Many a woman has been the making of a man,” he added.

  He lifted his glass to their happiness and as he drank off his toast, I realised that Lucy Eastley had just become my husband’s stepmother.

  “I will go,” Brisbane said suddenly. I blinked at him, not entirely certain if the whisky had sharpened or blurred my vision. But he seemed resolute. “Perhaps there is time yet to stop it. If Lucy is not a good rider, I may be able to catch them up before they reach Darjeeling.”

  I followed him to our room where I watched as he flung a few necessities into a bundle just small enough to fit into a saddlebag. I flinched as he tucked the howdah pistol into his belt and slid a knife into his boot.

  “Precautions only,” he said with a froideur I did not like. “There are still a few brigands on the road into Darjeeling, but I do not expect trouble.”

  “I have reconsidered. I do not want you to go,” I said suddenly. “Lucy Eastley is a stupid girl. If she does not know he is only marrying her for the Eastley fortune, she deserves him.”

  He pulled on an oilskin coat. “The weather may turn in a day or so. Mind you watch the sky if you go out,” he said.

  “Will you take Plum?” I asked, knowing well enough what the answer would be.

  “No. There is still possibly a murderer at large here, and I will have you kept safe,” he told me. I did not argue. I merely sat upon the bed, holding my knees.

  “This is the first time we have been parted,” I told him.

  “You left Calcutta without me,” he pointed out. There was no softness in his manner toward me, nothing that I could seize upon to bring him close to me again. I regretted our quarrel, deeply. But I could not bring myself to speak first to make it up with him, and with no olive branch from him, matters stayed as they lay between us.

  “I will return in a few days. A week at most,” he informed me. “Be safe.”

  He paused as if he would kiss me. His eyes held my gaze, then dropped to my mouth. And then he was gone, quick as the snap of a conjurer’s cape. It was done then, I told myself coolly. He had taken himself off to pursue his father, and I was left to continue the investigation into Freddie’s death on my own. Something good and fine that had bound us together had been broken, and such things were seldom mended. I roused myself and took out my notebook and began to write.

  During my ruminations, it occurred to me that although I had not been correct about the object of Lucy’s affections, I had certainly plucked a nerve when I had confronted Harry about his late-night activities. Broaching the subject with the man himself had yielded no results, but it occurred to me that with a little deft handling, I might be able to unearth the information I wanted from another source.

  I went in search of Miss Cavendish and ran her to ground turning out the linen cupboard.

  “I am so glad I found you,” I told her truthfully.

  She counted under her breath for a moment, then put a tick mark in her linen book. “Thirty-nine pillowslips. There ought to be forty-five,” she murmured, and I wondered guiltily where Brisbane had got the linen for his disguise.

  “I am certain they will turn up,” I said, rather mendaciously. “May I help? If you count, I can tick things off in the book. It will be so much faster.”

  In truth, it would save her mere seconds, but perhaps she wanted company, for she handed me the linen book and the pencil and began to count washstand covers.

  “I was terribly startled at the news of Lucy’s elopement,” I told her.

  Her lips thinned and her hands stopped moving. “I feel somehow responsible,” she said shortly.

  “You? Whatever do you mean?”

  She held her mouth tightly, as if trying to hold back the words, but they burst forth in a rush. “I introduced them on the ship. He was so kindly and so harmless, I thought. And she was so unhappy. I thought they might amuse one another, innocently, of course. With such a difference in their ages…he is old enough to be her father!” she exclaimed, pursing her lips in disapproval.

  “I am quite certain you have nothing with which to reproach yourself,” I told her firmly.

  She was not mollified. “I would like to believe you, Lady Julia. But it does not escape my attention that Lady Eastley was your relation, and a far nearer one to you than I. Perhaps you and Lady Bettiscombe and Mr. March will feel that I have been derelict in my duty at introducing her to a person to whom I myself had not been properly presented. He did not even provide me with a letter of introduction,” she finished on a high, strangled note.

  She reached for a stack of towels, the keys jangling at her belt.

  “Miss Cavendish, Lucy Eastley is quite old enough to make her own decisions about whose acquaintance to cultivate and where to present her affections. Besides, one does not normally rely upon letters of introduction in so informal and confined a setting as a ship. I myself shared a table at dinner with a dentist,” I added, hoping to offer her some comfort.

  Instead she looked aghast. “A dentist! Oh, my.”

  “Precisely. But he was a very gentlemanly fellow, and we had the most interesting discussion about stamps one evening. He is an amateur philatelist and I promised to send him some postage stamps from our more exotic travels. He was thoroughly delightful, and I should never have made his acquaintance were we not thrown together on board the steamer. I suspect it was precisely the same for you.”

  “It was,” she replied with some relief. “I was travelling alone, you see. I was feeling very low as I had not been able to persuade Freddie to return with me, and I so hated to disappoint Father. I am afraid I rather seized upon the friendship of anyone who was kind to me.”

  She applied herself assiduously to the counting of tea towels then and I gave her a moment to compose herself.

  “And now it transpires that that fellow is a debaucher, providing games of chance and insalubrious drugs to people like poor Dr. Llewellyn. You would think a character so defiled would leave its mark upon the face,” she said stoutly.

  “It does not work that way, unfortunately,” I told her, thinking of the most accomplished jewel thief I had once known. She had the face of a chocolate box Madonna and larceny in her heart.

  “Indeed it does not. I do not mind telling you I was deceived in Lady Eastley as well. She gave me no indication that she was betrothed, nor that she intended to leave this valley so soon…so soon—”

  She sniffed hard, holding back emotion.

  “Emma’s loss has been a difficult time for you,” I sympathised. She withdrew a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose resoundingly.

  “Yes, well, we all have trials to bear.”

  “And uncertainty can only make the situation worse,” I p
ut in gently. “It must be a terrible strain upon the nerves not knowing what will happen.”

  I meant the birth of Jane’s child and the infant’s affect upon the disposition of the estate, but Miss Cavendish clearly had other matters upon her mind.

  “It seems as if everything is breaking down,” she said, her hands twisting in a bundle of clean antimacassars. “The old ways, the good ways, are being flung aside, and soon the rules will no longer apply and a man will think he can marry just anyone.”

  There was a sudden brittleness to her movements, and I realised she had been holding in a tremendous amount of worry over more than just the birth of Jane’s baby.

  I said nothing for a moment, my mind working furiously to assemble the pieces.

  “Harry,” I said suddenly, feeling the familiar rush of certainty when a deduction had fallen into place. “He has been courting someone unsuitable.”

  Her lower lip trembled, but she did not weep. She merely blinked hard, holding back the violent emotion within herself.

  “I suppose you would think her suitable, your own marriage is so unorthodox,” she said, although not as unkindly as she might have.

  “I do think that sometimes the rules might be bent for exceptional people,” I hedged. There were a handful of candidates for Harry’s potential bride, and I nocked my arrow towards the likeliest. “It is Miss Thorne, is it not?”

  “She is a half-caste,” Miss Cavendish said sharply. “Her blood is impure, neither fish nor fowl.”

  “Surely that is not her fault,” I said gently, thinking of the mesalliance that had resulted in her mother’s birth.

  Miss Cavendish gave me a piercing look. “No, but neither is it something to be spoken of openly. Such things used to be kept quiet, within the family, as they belonged.”

  “But in so small and remote a place, you cannot expect there would not be talk. This valley is no different to any tiny village in England. Everyone here must know everyone else’s secrets, or at least a fair few of them.”

  “They talk about him,” she said, pressing a loving hand to a piece of embroidery at the end of a pillow slip. “Father was a good man, no matter what you might think of him, no matter what others might say. He treated his pickers fairly, and what happened with Miss Thorne’s grandmother, well, that was an aberration. It says nothing about the man himself,” she told me, lifting her chin defiantly.

  “Of course not,” I soothed.

  “He paid to support his daughter, and when she died, he gave money to Miss Thorne for her education.”

  “Why not to Lalita as well?” I asked before I could stop myself. “And Naresh?”

  “Naresh has a gift for growing things. He will rise to be head gardener here in time, and that is an excellent prospect for any young man,” she said firmly. “Lalita was brought up to be a cook, like her mother. It is all she has ever wanted, and she is content it should be so. She and Naresh know their places. Miss Thorne was different, right from the beginning. She announced when she was three that she wanted an English name, so her father told her she could call herself Elizabeth. It came to my father’s notice, and he began to take an interest in her. When he discovered she was an unnaturally bright girl, he made arrangements for her to be educated formally. He thought she could teach, perhaps in a good school in Calcutta.”

  “But she could not stay away from this valley,” I put in.

  Miss Cavendish grimaced. “From this valley or from the Peacocks?”

  “You think she has designs upon the estate?”

  Miss Cavendish put her head to the shelf, resting it for a moment. When she lifted it, her nose was rimmed in pink, rather like a rabbit’s. “I do not know what to think. I only know that she means trouble. And that sooner or later, everything here must change. Oh, why must it change!”

  At that, Miss Cavendish thrust a bundle of linen into my hands and fled the cupboard, a harsh sob breaking from her throat as she left. I sighed and began to count out bedsheets, wondering if I would ever learn to govern my tongue.

  The Nineteenth Chapter

  Mother, I shall weave a chain of pearls for thy neck with my tears of sorrow.

  —Chain of Pearls

  Rabindranath Tagore

  After luncheon I decided to pay a visit to the Pennyfeathers. I longed for a tête-à-tête with Miss Thorne, and I had little doubt I could pry information out of her now that I knew her secret. With the Pennyfeathers themselves excluded from Freddie’s murder on the grounds that they had not realised he had taken the incriminating album, I hoped to narrow the field of possible murderers. Harry still held the likeliest position in my mind, and perhaps a visit with his intended bride could winnow some facts that would aid me in my investigation.

  Lalita opened the door to me, and I greeted her warmly. “Lalita, I have not had the chance to compliment you on the delicious food you provided us after Miss Phipps passed.” The funeral baked meats had been extraordinary. Miss Cavendish might not approve of native cuisine, but Lucy had had no such scruples, and the result had been a table laden with scrumptious things that managed to be neither entirely British nor entirely Indian, but rather the best parts of both.

  She bowed her head, smiling. “I am pleased to have given pleasure, memsa.”

  A sudden horrifying thought struck me. “Lalita, before Lady Eastley departed so hastily, she did pay you, did she not?”

  “Oh, yes, memsa. Memsa Eastley was quite thorough about such things.”

  “Excellent. I wondered if Miss Thorne might be about today. I wanted to speak with her.”

  “Alas and alack, she is abed today and quite unwell. I fear she can see no one.”

  “Really? I am so sorry to hear that. What ails her?”

  “A terrible and ferocious headache,” she said promptly.

  “Perhaps I might see Miss Primrose then,” I told her.

  She bowed her head again and asked me to wait. After a moment she returned. “Miss Primrose is in the studio with the memsa.”

  I had hoped to find Primrose alone, but I followed Lalita obediently.

  “Lady Julia!” Cassandra cried. “I am so glad you have come. I have just today mounted your photograph and must know what you think of it.”

  She had clearly been in the midst of a session, for Primrose was standing, fully-draped this time in deepest black robes and holding a papier-mâché sword. “Mama, are we quite finished?” she asked in a bored voice.

  “Yes, yes, I have quite enough poses of you as Andromache,” she said, flapping a hand. “You may change.”

  Primrose disappeared behind the screen, but not before she had unpinned the shoulder of her robes, permitting them to slip to her waist.

  “Is she not a glorious example of young womanhood?” Cassandra asked, smiling at her daughter. “Sitting ripely in the first flush of maturity, so nubile, so fresh!”

  She would have enthused awhile longer, I feared, so I set a deliberate smile upon my lips. “You said you have my photograph?”

  “Ah, yes!” She went to the workbench and returned with a stiff pasteboard frame. Within it was the image of Portia and me, draped in Grecian robes and clinging together, the silk birds dotted artistically. It ought to have been silly and overly sentimental, but it was not. Something about the image was deeply affecting. There was genuine affection there, and a ribbon of grief running through the devotion, as if we had weathered storms together, but had been propped by our affection for one another.

  Portia was my prop, I reflected. She had supported me through my widowhood, guiding me to become the woman I was, encouraging my relationship with Brisbane when I would have let the affair drift along like a rudderless ship. She was my rock, my bulwark, and as I looked at the beautiful face of my sister, I felt sudden tears prick my eyes.

  To my horror, Cassandra Pennyfeather saw them as well. She put a long, slender arm about my shoulders. “You feel it, do you not? The soul that I capture in my work? I am an artist, Lady Julia. There is no human emotion I
fear.”

  “Including desire?” I asked.

  The suddenness of the enquiry might have thrown anyone less self-possessed. But Cassandra merely laughed. “Do you mean the photographs I took of Primrose? The album has turned up then—what relief! Those photographs were some of my best work and I was frantic when they went missing.” She cocked her head, an amused smile curving her lips. “They were art, Lady Julia. Surely you must appreciate that—a woman of the world, of such experience!”

  “Surely you can appreciate the unorthodoxy of the images,” I returned.

  She shrugged. “What is orthodoxy? What is the norm? What is acceptable? As I say, I am an artist. I reject such things. They are bourgeois. And I have taught my children to reject them as well, as much as I have been able,” she added. She gave me a rueful smile. “My husband is a modern man, but even he does not share my ambition to be an iconoclast.”

  “You could hardly expect him to,” I pointed out. “He is a clergyman after all. Orthodoxy is their stock in trade.”

  She laughed again. “Too true. Ah, here is Primrose!” The girl had emerged from the screen, dressed in her more conventional clothes, but with her hair still unbound. It fell almost to her waist, rippling and lovely.

  “Primrose understands me,” Cassandra said. “She knows what it means to feel deeply about things, so deeply that one cannot bury it beneath layers of whalebone and starched taffeta.”

  Primrose gave her mother an indulgent smile. “You are lucky to have one another,” I told them truthfully. “My mother died when I was very young. I should have liked to have known her.”

  Cassandra returned the photograph to the bench then and Primrose turned to me. “You saw the photographs that Mama took? What did you think of them?” she asked, almost challengingly.

  “They were lovely and shocking, and in the wrong hands they could be very dangerous.”