by Gigi Pandian
I had to get out of there before my imagination started to rival Nadia’s.
A side exit from the courtyard led to a smaller street that would lead to the waterfront of the Thames River. The waterfront street would lead to the Embankment tube stop. As I walked out of the courtyard, I continued to snap a photo every few seconds.
The sidewalk on the street was almost as crowded. This route wasn’t going to be as helpful as I thought. I needed somewhere more remote. After a few more steps, I had an idea. Stone stairways were the most direct routes to the waterfront. The university and Somerset House were set on the high ground overlooking the river, on the same level as Waterloo Bridge. The Embankment and adjoining gardens were level with the river.
I weaved through the crowd, snapping more photos. I caught the briefest glimpse of a breathtaking view of the city before ducking into the maze of stairs leading down.
The stone stairway was quiet and deserted, as I had thought it would be. It was, in fact, exactly what I had expected. I hadn’t counted on what that meant. The noise of the camera shutter clicking became louder in contrast to the quiet. Too loud. I took my hand off the shutter.
I was alone in the dusty concrete enclosure. I didn’t see another soul as I rounded the curve onto the first landing.
I did, however, hear a sound.
Footsteps crunched on pebbles behind me. Someone was approaching.
Why was someone following me? What good could it possibly do them? They didn’t actually think I had the bracelet with me, did they? Surely my life hadn’t become like a paperback thriller where people dropped like flies because the bad guy thought they knew something compromising. Nothing had happened on the plane. Nothing would happen now. Right?
Alone on that solitary alley of stairs leading down to the dark river, I wasn’t so sure.
I increased my pace, half-running to the street below. I snapped two shots with the camera as I flew down the rest of the stairs.
Rounding the last corner that let out onto the street, I ran straight into an anorexic woman sucking on a cigarette for dear life. On second thought, she was sturdier than she looked. I was the one who fell down.
My camera strap tangled around my wrist. The strap had kept the camera from bouncing away from me along with my bag. But it hadn’t saved the camera from the brunt of the fall. I wouldn’t be taking any more pictures of my pursuer.
I scrambled up and walked hurriedly off after apologizing to the woman, barely taking time to dust off my bruised knees. I didn’t feel the sting. The smoke from the woman’s cigarette had pushed all other thoughts from my mind except one.
Could Lane be following me?
The idea was preposterous, surely. But then, so was this whole escapade. I couldn’t imagine what Lane could possibly gain by following me. If he was concerned about my well-being, he could innocently propose that we stick together. He didn’t have to sneak around.
The more I thought about it as I hurried down the Embankment, there was no reasonable reason for Lane to follow me. The only thing that made less sense was his grand conspiracy theories. The theories he had been trying to shove down my throat.
I whirled around on my heel. No Lane. Nor was there anyone who looked familiar. There was one way to know for sure if it was him.
I stepped to the edge of the road and hailed a black cab. I felt the soreness of my knees as I stepped inside.
“The British Library,” I said.
I didn’t have time to stop at the lockers. I dropped my bag on the floor outside of the reading room and hoped for the best. I hurried up and down the stacks. My palms grew clammy on my second sweep of the room.
Lane wasn’t in there.
Chapter 15
I walked frantically along the edges of the reading room, making sure I hadn’t missed Lane. Nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to me. An agitated academic searching in vain for documents wasn’t an uncommon sight.
Lane could have needed a coffee break. It was possible. He’d been tired, after all. There could be any number of reasons why he wasn’t there. It didn’t mean he was the one following me. But in his absence, there was no way to be sure.
Giving myself a moment to collect my confused thoughts, I leaned against a pillar underneath the wall of paintings.
That’s when I saw him.
Lane sat at a large table in a smaller room, separated by glass doors, off to the side of the main reading room. It was a room used for viewing oversized documents like maps.
I watched him through the glass for a few moments, letting my relief sink in. It looked as if he hadn’t moved in hours, except for scribbling in the notebook that lay open in front of him. Several items in addition to the notebook lay flat on the table. His glasses slipped down his slender nose as he looked down at one of them, deep in thought.
Lane gave a nearly imperceptible startled jerk of his body as I opened the glass door to enter the small room. He looked up and readjusted his glasses.
“What’s up?” he asked in a low voice.
“I’m being followed.”
Lane’s face darkened as he looked out into the main room.
“He’s not there now,” I said. “I hopped in a cab.”
“Did you see who it was?”
“It was more of a feeling.”
“But you’re sure?” He kept glancing between me and the room beyond.
“Yes, I’m sure. This wasn’t one of our theoretical conversations in San Francisco. There was someone watching me.”
“Where did it start?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. It must have been when I left here.”
“But how could—”
“You found it!” I exclaimed, pointing at the object in front of Lane on the table.
It was my bracelet. Only it wasn’t.
I hadn’t noticed it immediately because the ruby piece was only a portion of a lively, colorful painting of dozens of people in a festive royal court. Mughal courts would have looked like a lot of fun if I hadn’t known that the women were most likely part of a harem.
One corner of the painting was highlighted more than the rest. Set slightly apart from the other subjects, a fair-skinned woman wore a thick armlet of gold and rubies clamped to her upper arm. The shape of gold and rubies was the same as the one Rupert had sent me.
The painting had the effect of making the ruby piece look unworldly. Leaning over the table to get a closer look, I could see why scholars thought it wasn’t real. The gems seemed too large to be real.
The armlet dwarfed the other pieces of jewelry that adorned the girl and the people around her. It looked as if it could be a symbol, much like when rulers of high stature were depicted standing on a globe.
“It’s one of them,” Lane said.
“Who is she?” I pointed at the stunning woman. I wondered if she had been as beautiful in real life as she looked in the painting.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Not yet. That’s the trouble with the destruction of original documents.” He spoke in a quiet voice I hardly recognized. His eyes held an intensity that stunned me.
“Wars,” he continued. “Infighting. Poor record keeping. Most of all, the simple ravages of time.”
As he spoke the words, I shivered. He spoke with a prepossessed authority. If I were the type of person to succumb to romantic fancy, I would have been convinced he had been there himself.
“The artifacts we’re left with,” he continued, “are imperfectly understood at best.”
“And we,” I said, “put the pieces together.”
My statement shook him out of his reverie. He had the faintest smile on his lips as he looked down at the corner of the painting. When he looked back up at me, his eyes were back to their usual veiled countenance.
I took a last look at the painting before stepping toward
the door.
“Wait,” he said. “Where are you going?”
“You said you hadn’t figured it out yet,” I said. “I’m leaving you in peace to finish working.”
“But what about—”
“I lost him,” I said.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to go off on our own.”
“That’s a nice opinion,” I said. “It doesn’t happen to be mine.”
Lane stood up. I was already at the door. He took a step forward toward me, but stopped and looked at his materials strewn about the desk. There was no way he could follow me out.
“See you tonight,” I said with a wave.
“Jaya—”
“Be aware of anyone suspicious,” I said as I walked through the door.
I glanced back to make sure Lane hadn’t followed me out of the side room, then stopped to check in with Jeremy at the main reading room desk. He said he’d found enough possible references that I could spend the rest of the summer going through the archives, which he added was fine with him. The place could use a breath of fresh air. I told Jeremy I’d be in touch, then went in search of my bag, which I found where I had left it outside the reading room.
I checked to see if my camera would turn on. No luck. Instead, I found a thirty-minute photo shop. I handed over the memory card and asked for prints.
I drank a large coffee around the corner while I waited, then ordered another one after picking up the photos. Tucked in the back corner of a Pret A Manger cafe, I drank syrupy coffee and flipped through the pictures.
Most of the photos prominently featured sky or sidewalk. No one in a suspicious-looking broad hat or trench coat jumped out in any of the shots, though in one a man was in fact wearing a trench coat. In another, a pair of bright red sneakers in the crowd reminded me of something Rupert would have liked. He had a similar pair before. I had always found them a bit showy for men’s shoes, but he was quite attached to them.
I sipped my coffee, feeling unsettled by this newfound sentimental bone in my body. I flipped through the photos one more time before giving up and heading back outside.
As I walked down the street, I realized I hadn’t felt the sensation of being followed since I’d hopped in the cab. I took a deep breath of not-so-fresh air. Without any other ideas, I walked back to the hotel.
I had left a “do not disturb” sign on the door to my room. Everything appeared to be exactly as I’d left it. I had left my extra pair of shoes a few inches inside the door, leaving only enough room for me to slip out. Unless the tooth fairy had let herself in, nobody had entered the room.
I found my music player at the bottom of my bag and slipped on my headphones. I found a soothing tabla track and lay down on the bed for a nap. I set the alarm so I’d have enough time for a run and a shower before dinner.
At the appointed meeting time, I made my way down to the lobby with wet hair and a growling stomach. I found Lane already waiting for me. He was seated in a worn yet regal high-backed chair at the window. He was leaning back in a relaxed pose, an unlit cigarette in his hand. He faced the window, but he must have sensed my presence and turned his head.
“You could have waited for me outside so you could smoke,” I said.
“I didn’t think that would be a good idea,” he said. “I’m being followed, too.”
Chapter 16
I instinctively backed away from the window.
“He’s not here now,” Lane said, watching my maneuver. “I lost him at another hotel before coming back here.”
“Did you see who it was?”
“I think so,” he said. “Normal-looking guy. Fair skin. Brown hair. Not especially tall. Nothing distinctive. He didn’t try to approach me. He hung back. Can you sit down? You’re making me nervous.”
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”
“If I’m right about who it was,” Lane said. “There’s a chair right here, you know.”
“I have too much energy to sit. What makes you think you can’t be sure?”
“He didn’t seem to know what he was doing,” Lane said. “It made me wonder if it was just some weirdo. I don’t think so, but—”
“See if he’s in here,” I said, handing him the stack of photos.
“Great picture,” he said, holding up an out-of-focus picture of a crooked phone booth.
“I couldn’t very well let him see I was taking pictures.”
“Hmm.”
“Do you see him?”
“How am I supposed to recognize anyone in these pictures?”
“It’s a lot better than what you got: ‘Average guy, average hair, average everything’.”
“I lost him, didn’t I?”
“So did I. It wasn’t hard to do.”
“Actually,” Lane said, “I don’t think you did. He only followed me after you came back to the library.”
It took me a moment to recover my voice. “But I caught that cab.”
“Twenty pounds says the first cabbie we ask has been given the order to follow another car at some point in his career.”
“But—”
“How else do you think he was back at the library to follow me?”
I sunk into the plush chair next to Lane. It was stiffer than it looked. At least my bruised knees didn’t feel as sore as I had feared they might.
“I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever figure this out,” I said, looking out the lobby window. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“One piece at a time,” Lane said, easing his lean body out of his chair. He offered me his hand. “I spotted a decent-looking pub down the street. I’ll buy you dinner and fill you in on the rest of what I found at the library.”
Slinking into back corner tables was becoming all too common. I didn’t think twice about it when Lane led us to the farthest table in the back room of the Prince Alfred pub. Probably because the pungent smell of hearty bar food made my knees weak.
“I found her,” Lane said, resting his elbows in satisfaction at the edge of the table.
“The woman in the painting?”
He nodded with that rare giddy look I was coming to recognize.
“It’s Nur Jahan,” he said.
The name was familiar.
Lane’s eyes were locked on mine. I could see the excitement in them. Searching through all the dead ends, he’d found what he was after. I understood, and he knew that I did.
A waitress stepped out from behind the bar and set two glasses down on our table with a clunk. The spell was broken.
Who was I kidding? It had probably never been there in the first place.
“Nur Jahan?” I said, studying the bubbles in my gin and tonic.
“She was Jahangir’s favorite wife.”
“Oh, his favorite wife.” I met his gaze. “Are you going to tell me another great Indian love story to supplement my underdeveloped appreciation for the love story of the Taj Mahal?”
“You have a lot of contemporary biases for a historian.”
“I don’t have to agree with what they did to understand it.”
“He’s in the history books as one of the most powerful rulers of all time,” Lane said. “And it’s widely accepted that he was addicted to drugs. To the point of incapacity. Nur Jahan did a lot of the ruling while Jahangir was in power. She was a great deal ahead of her time as a feminist. I’m surprised you don’t know more about her.”
“She wasn’t the one who signed the agreements with the East India Company. An unnamed woman in the corner of a painting couldn’t have come that far. Even if she did get to wear some jewels. But they both lived before things got really interesting. Ask me anything from the militarization of the Company at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 through the major turning point for British India at the Sepoy Uprising of 1857. I can answer the
question blindfolded. I can also do pretty well with any information having to do with the British Raj leading up to Indian independence another century later, in 1947. Interesting about those dates, isn’t it?”
Two heavy plates, heaping with hot food, clanked down onto our table. The scent of beer batter and vinegar was heavenly.
“Everything the Mughals possessed had to go somewhere after they lost power,” Lane said. “Jahangir and Nur Jahan lived during the opulent height of the Mughal Empire. There are lots of more prominent paintings of Nur Jahan.”
“Then why wasn’t she identified in the painting you found today?”
“I’m getting to that,” Lane said. He paused to start on his meal.
He was enjoying the drama of his delivery, I could tell. He savored the mushy peas on his plate more than was necessary. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing my impatience. I turned back to my own fish and chips.
“This particular painting wasn’t well documented in general,” Lane said. “Remember, it’s not uncommon. Jahangir subsidized hundreds of artists during his reign. Some notes put together by a non-contemporary scholar suggested that the woman was Nur Mahal. I didn’t put it together right away. Not until I found the date attributed to the painting. 1611.”
“I don’t get it. What’s special about that year?”
“Nur Mahal didn’t become Nur Jahan until 1616.”
“Of course,” I murmured. “He changed her name.”
“You know how their names worked.”
“None of these names were their birth names. Jahangir means Great Conqueror of the World. His real name was something like Selim, right? What about Nur Mahal?”
“I had to look it up to find the details,” Lane said. “When they got married, Jahangir named her Nur Mahal, meaning Light of the Palace. As their love—and her power—grew, he renamed her Nur Jahan: Light of the World.”
“Those dates also explain why she wasn’t featured more prominently in that painting you found.”
“What’s especially interesting,” Lane said, “is that once she was married, and featured more prominently in paintings where she’s identified, I couldn’t find a single instance where she was wearing your rubies.”