Ryman, Rebecca

by Olivia

  "Bridget?"

  She groped for his desk and put the tray on it. "No, Uncle Josh, it is I, Olivia." He did not speak. "Aunt Bridget has sent in some cold meat and a fresh bottle of port."

  It was only after she had lit the paraffin lamps and tidied the desk to make room for his plate and glass that he finally turned. "Sit down, Olivia."

  She did, watching him in worried silence as he walked to his chair and sank down heavily. "What is wrong, Uncle Josh? You look so . . . strange. Are you not feeling well?" There was no longer rage in his face, but what lurked in the rutted lines that radiated from his set mouth was still ominous.

  "We have had bad news from Gupta." His tone was clipped. Without paying attention to what he was doing he speared a slice of meat with his fork, shoved it roughly into his mouth and champed on it. Olivia waited while he chewed grimly through the piled meat and washed it down with a glass of port. "Our consignment of opium from north Bengal has been looted en route."

  "Looted? By thuggees?"

  "So Gupta concludes." He dabbed his mouth with the corner of a napkin, tossed it carelessly on the tray and leaned back.

  "But you obviously believe otherwise?"

  He smiled very grimly. "Yes. I believe otherwise. Gupta writes that he was badly wounded but nobody was killed. Either the thuggees are getting soft or Gupta is a bloody liar!"

  A cold prickle touched Olivia's heart. The thuggees, she had heard, were a fanatic religious band who believed they could murder by divine sanction. Until a decade ago, when John Sleeman became Commissioner for the Suppression of Thuggee and Dacoity, they perpetrated widespread slaughter across northern India using lassos to rope in victims as expertly as any cowboy on the range. The one virtue thuggees were not known for even now, when thousands had been apprehended and condemned to death, was mercy; nor had they ever believed in half measures.

  "Why should Gupta lie?" Olivia asked. "You have always considered him a loyal retainer."

  "Why?" he barked, his anger surfacing again. "For the oldest reason in the world—thirty pieces of silver! Loyalty, my dear girl, is a highly negotiable commodity among natives, more so when they close ranks against what they believe to be a common enemy, the British. Gupta is a bania, a caste loyal only to mammon. When the price was right, he reverted to type."

  "Was the opium worth much?" She did not ask who the donor of the thirty pieces of silver might be; she already had a fair idea.

  "A hundred thousand pounds in profits from Canton, if a tenth of that here. But the opium is insured." He waved it aside angrily. "What we stand to lose with those hongs is face, and credibility. In this race, time is money, and we've also lost time." He snatched up some papers to make rapid calculations.

  Olivia had learned from him already a great deal about Bengal's thriving opium trade, the only remaining and inviolate Company monopoly. With tea also thrown open to private enterprise since 1833, it was now opium—and the Company's massive land revenue collections in India—that provided its shareholders in London with their rich annual dividends. The Company supervised strictly the cultivation and sale of opium in India, although illicit trading also thrived. In theory, British merchants operated in Canton under licence from the Company, but in practice foreign traders in opium also flourished, cocking a snook at the Company's rules. Indeed, many British traders also evaded the rules neatly by taking out foreign naturalisation papers and sailing under alien flags. In the China Coast trade, opium and tea were inseparable. Even though opium was contraband in China, it was the only commodity against which tea could be purchased from the hongs, powerful Chinese merchants. Many believed, including Sir Joshua, that without these charmed twins of trade, the very Empire would be hard pressed to exist. Annual trade figures told their own story: In the last year the Company's revenue from opium was nearly three and a half million pounds sterling; in England alone more than fifty-six and a half million pounds in weight of tea had been sold. Each shipload of opium that Templewood and Ransome dispatched to Canton therefore translated into tea and, consequently, into enormous sterling profits at home and in domestic Indian markets. So Olivia could understand the extent of her uncle's fury.

  "Can the police do nothing to identify the . . . culprits?" she asked. If Raventhorne had engineered the theft, it seemed monstrous that he should be allowed to get away with it.

  Sir Joshua's laugh crackled with contempt. "Old Slocum will go through the motions, but he will discover nothing; he never does. Not one native will squeal. They never do."

  "But weren't there European escorts with the consignment?"

  "Two." His lips curled with greater contempt. "What makes you think thirty pieces of silver are unwelcome to John Company's officers on starvation wages in their army? Both claim to have been away from the scene answering calls of nature when the ambush occurred. Our own twenty mercenary soldiers naturally tell twenty different stories." He sank into an incensed silence.

  Not wishing to throw salt on substantial wounds, Olivia considered it best to steer the conversation into more agreeable channels. "How did you find Arvind Singh's note, Uncle Josh? Was it encouraging, do you think?"

  He roused himself and his expression appeared to clear. "Yes, I would say so." He adjusted his gold-rimmed half-moon glasses, opened a folder and withdrew a sheet embossed with the Kirtinagar crest. He nodded in some satisfaction as he read it through again. "Yes, definitely encouraging, I'd say. It was good of you to carry it back with you."

  "Then he accepts your proposal?"

  "Not yet, but it will come. It's too early for a full-mouthed bite, but he's certainly sniffing at the bait. He said nothing more to you, did he, by any chance?"

  Olivia had already given her uncle a fair (albeit abridged) account of her weekend. She shook her head and examined her nails. "No. But Arvind Singh didn't strike me as a man greedy for money, Uncle Josh."

  "Greed is a matter of degree. The language of money, my dear, is sweet—and Arvind Singh is as hungry to hear it as anyone. He desperately needs funds for that irrigation project. He would give his right hand to start right away, and his coal will not yield profits for years. We offer him immediate gains. Oh, he's greedy all right, only the price he wants is higher. But there's a long way to go still, a long way for us." He closed his eyes and massaged his lids with his finger-tips, suddenly weary.

  The lines of fatigue on his face were very obvious and Olivia filled with concern for him. "Aunt Bridget is right," she said gently, leaning forward to touch his hand, "you do need a holiday, Uncle Josh. A few days in Barrackpore will work wonders. I hear the fishing there is excellent."

  "Barrackpore?" His eyes shot open and he frowned. "Don't be absurd, Olivia, I can't possibly leave station now with this police investigation pending! Bridget will have to go on her own with you girls."

  Again alert, he sat up to gather a sheaf of papers and start reading. Olivia knew that she was being dismissed.

  If you do not wish to go to Barrackpore, you will not. Take my word for it. It was while Olivia was supervising the nightly ritual of having the mosquito-net tucked around the mattress on her bed that she suddenly remembered Jai Raventhorne's parting sentences to her. Quickly sending away the ayah, she sank down in a chair to think, the sick feeling inside her stronger than ever. Who better than Raventhorne could have given her that assurance? And what more substantial proof could one need of his complicity in this spiteful and petty act of vandalism?

  There were many in India, Olivia conceded to herself, who had grave reservations about the opium trade. But she doubted personally if Jai Raventhorne's aversion was based on any lofty principles of morality. His motivations were purely vengeful. Whatever compassion she might have recently felt for that miserably deprived urchin of Kinjal's tale died. However wronged he might have once been by the divinities, now he deserved only censure.

  "The trouble with cucumber is," Lady Birkhurst remarked as she nibbled a scone and avoided the sandwiches, "that it makes one repeat. Would you a
gree, Lady Bridget?"

  "Er, yes. Yes, of course."

  "Tomatoes, on the other hand, do not." As endorsement she chose a sandwich from a second plate. "At least, not that I've ever noticed. Have you?"

  "Er, no. Not at all."

  "The seeds are a nuisance certainly. They stick between the teeth, which is embarrassing at parties where they will give you those coarse bamboo splints that make discreet toothpicking such an impossibility, don't you think?"

  Trying bravely to make the best of a one-sided conversation, Lady Bridget again hastened to agree. Lady Birkhurst's marked preference for the sound of her own voice to the exclusion of others was, Olivia considered, a distinct advantage. Her single choice of topic, however—food, the passion of both her life and her conversation—was becoming dreary. They had now been at the splendid mansion on the Esplanade for almost an hour and the matter of gustatory delights or otherwise still prevailed with unflagging energy. Sitting to Lady Birkhurst's right, Olivia listened in glum silence, having long since abandoned her monosyllabic contributions as unnecessary. Her aunt, hawk-eyed and eager, sat opposite her across the low onyx-topped table with burnished brass legs. Freddie, hair slicked back and collar as stiff and starched as his face, perched on a window seat conversing in low tones with Estelle. He did not look comfortable; his face brightened only when he cast longing glances at Olivia, who carefully did not return them.

  "I am not at all certain," Lady Birkhurst was saying, suddenly deserting her favoured subject, "that I approve entirely of Freddie's domestic arrangements. He has too many servants and his control over them is deplorably inadequate." She had a habit of talking about her son in the third person even when he was present. Freddie didn't appear to mind; in fact he beamed.

  Lady Bridget looked visibly relieved to be once again on familiar, well-trammelled territory. "Oh, I quite agree that to have too many is to invite trouble." She avoided her daughter's eye. "Especially in a bachelor household." Her emphasis on "bachelor" brought colour to Olivia's cheeks, but her aunt was not to be thwarted now from the course she had charted for herself. Turning to Freddie she pronounced, "Tight control is the answer, Mr. Birkhurst. I trust you do see to that at least sometimes?"

  Freddie continued to beam. "Certainly. I give them my instructions and then, well, let them get on with them."

  "And, of course, you do keep a strict account of your daily disbursements?" Lady Bridget's eye glinted.

  "Most definitely, Lady Bridget. At least Salim, my bearer, does. On the first of the month I hand him one thousand rupees and between him and my cook, Rashid Ali, the house runs like clockwork."

  Lady Bridget paled. "One thousand rup—?" Words failed her. Picking up her fan she waved it vigorously across her face. "Dear me, dear me, Mr. Birkhurst. I run my household on half that!"

  Catching Estelle's eye, Olivia quickly averted her head to suppress her impending giggles. Estelle coughed, thrust a biscuit into her mouth—making the most of her mother's diverted attention—and got up to examine with apparently consuming interest the exquisitely appointed drawing-room with its gilded mirrors, Louis Quinze chairs, ebony and walnut cabinets, brocade drapes and finely woven French tapestries. Forced to remain where she was, Olivia merely continued to look demure in her pressed blue linen (with white belt), her lashes lowered modestly, but within her hating every moment of the pointless charade.

  Lady Birkhurst listened closely to Lady Bridget's earnest dissertation on the need for vigilance with a native staff, then snorted. "My son has very little sense of money, Lady Bridget," she commented drily, signalling for the cake stand to be passed around. "He believes it grows on trees and can be depended upon to provide two healthy cash crops a year." She raised her lorgnette and withered him with a look. "What Freddie needs is more occupation."

  Nominally, Freddie was head of his father's thriving businesses but it was known that he seldom attended his office. The Farrowsham Agency House was run very competently by a dour, canny Scotsman called Willie Donaldson, who made no secret of the fact that his theoretical superior was paid his handsome sinecure to leave well enough alone rather than participate in the firm. A much-favoured joke of Calcutta was that Freddie and Willie scarcely saw each other because the former went to bed when the latter woke up to go to work, and vice versa. But in spite of his short-comings, Freddie was astonishingly popular in station, and not only with mothers of marriageable daughters, for two reasons: He was generous to a fault and he was so good-natured that it was almost impossible to give him offence. He grinned sheepishly at his mother.

  "What Mr. Birkhurst needs," Lady Bridget said, firmly getting down to brass tacks, "is a wife."

  Olivia's eyes shut in a storm of embarrassment; Estelle's back was towards them as she gazed intently into a glass-fronted display cupboard with an arrangement of enamelled French snuff-boxes, but her shoulders shook silently. Lady Birkhurst shifted positions to swivel her lorgnette in Olivia's direction and examined her closely. "Ah yes," she murmured. "That too." Olivia simmered in silence but there was little she could do to escape the meticulous scrutiny. "I understand you are from our colonies across the Atlantic, Miss O'Rourke?"

  It was the first direct question Olivia had been asked. "Yes, Lady Birkhurst, but America is no longer a colony. We declared our independence way back in 1776."

  There was a short silence. Lowering her lorgnette, Lady Birkhurst set about polishing it briskly; Lady Bridget merely gazed out of the window as if fascinated by a crow. "Once a colony, always a colony," the baroness declared, challenging a denial. "It is a matter of principle. I take it you do miss your home?"

  "Well, I—"

  "Olivia adores to travel, Lady Birkhurst." Her aunt's interruption aborted possible further indiscretions. "Alas, like other gentlemen of achievement, her dear father can spare little time for it himself. Olivia is delighted with the opportunity to be with us for a year."

  "Hmmm." The lorgnette polished to her satisfaction, Lady Birkhurst replaced the energy thus expended by helping herself to a slice of cherry cake. Back in her window seat, so did Estelle. If there was one person in that room who was warming towards Lady Birkhurst as a kindred soul, it was Olivia's cousin.

  "The O'Rourkes live in California, but of course Sean has residences elsewhere as well, isn't that right, dear?" Olivia opened her mouth more in amazement than to issue an indignant denial, but her aunt forged ahead anyway. "Had my beloved sister been alive, she would have ensured that Olivia came out properly in a manner befitting their station. With so many other corporate responsibilities, poor Sean has little time for social conventions." She sat back and dabbed each eye with a puff of lace.

  "Quite." Lady Birkhurst nodded in sympathy, a large glass bowl of fruit now claiming her entire attention. "I was greatly disappointed at having missed the mango season this year. Caleb's health is far from satisfactory and he insists that no one can tend his carbuncles as well as I can. I'm never sure whether to be flattered or not. However," she leaned forward as if about to deliver a message of unique importance to the gathering, "what has truly caught my fancy now is a funny little thing called an alligator pear. I don't remember ever having seen any in Hogg's market. Are you at all acquainted with this quite delicious novelty, Lady Bridget?"

  "Alligator pears?" Lady Bridget was instantly alert. "Yes, I do know them. I understand they are being cultivated in the south by some adventurous army wives who secured the seeds from a passing Brazilian. Could you possibly tell me how much you paid for them, Lady Birkhurst?" The glint in her eye boded no good for Babulal.

  Lady Birkhurst looked at her son and Freddie looked blank. "Haven't the foggiest idea, I'm afraid, but I could easily find out for you."

  Lady Bridget was unlikely not to strike while the iron was hot. Nor, for that matter, to kill two birds with a single stone. "Perhaps, with your permission, I can find out for myself." She rose with alacrity. "In any case, Estelle and I have been looking forward to inspecting your kitchen house, Mr. Birkhurst. W
ould you be so kind as to lead us to it?"

  "What an excellent idea!" Lady Birkhurst looked pointedly at her son. "Rashid Ali is greatly concerned about termites. They get into everything, he says. With your own vast experience, Lady Bridget, perhaps you could give him some advice. And of course Freddie will escort you and Estelle there."

  "Oh, splendid!" Not quite sure what was happening, and looking a little bewildered, Freddie nevertheless rose to the occasion. "I'm not absolutely certain which the kitchen house is but I daresay we can sniff our way to it eventually,"

  They trooped out in single file with Estelle casting her eyes heavenward and surreptitiously extracting another biscuit for sustenance en route while Olivia's spirits plummeted downward into her dainty blue sandals purchased that morning to match her dress. She was furious with her aunt for letting her into a situation she found so utterly untenable, and waited with visible anger for the dreaded inquisition to commence.

  "Would you care for an apple, Miss O'Rourke?" Olivia shook her head. "You need to put on some fat, my dear. Your hips are far too narrow. Good breeding stock is never lean and hungry like Shakespeare's Cassius, and the secret lies in the haunches. Here." Lady Birkhurst patted her own ample derriere, and Olivia looked away. "Tell me, did the tiger shoot come up to your expectations?"

  Olivia gasped. She knew the truth about her weekend?

  Lady Birkhurst reached for a grape and placed it delicately between her teeth. "I remember my first shoot in the jungle way back in twenty-two. We never even saw a whisker of the wretched tiger, but one young cavalry officer in our party got carried away and shot a shikari in the knee. There was an almighty uproar over that. The poor man had to face a court martial, give the hunter all kinds of compensation and then be posted in some remote swamp infested with crocodiles. Ruined his engagement, too—the girl wouldn't hear of settling down in a bog. So much for true love." She bit into a second grape.