The Ruby in the Smoke, Page 4

  - She stopped and read it again. Herself! And a ruby -

  A hundred questions rose suddenly like flies disturbed at a feast, and filled her head with confusion. She closed her eyes and waited for calm; then opened them and read on.

  In 1856 I, George Arthur Marchbanks, was serving with the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, the 32nd Foot, at Agrapur in Oudh. Some months before the outbreak of the Mutiny I had occasion to visit the Maharajah of Agrapur in company with three of my brother officers, namely Colonel Brandon, Major Park and Captain Lockhart.

  The visit was ostensibly a private one for the purpose of sport. In fact, however, our main purpose was to conduct certain secret political discussions with the Maharajah. The content of these discussions need not concern this account, except in so far as they contributed to the suspicion in which the Maharajah was held by a faction among his subjects - a suspicion which led, as I shall show, to his fate during the terrible events of the following year.

  On the second evening of our visit to Agrapur, the Maharajah gave a banquet in our honour. Whether or not it was his intention to impress us with his wealth, that was certainly the effect; for I had never set eyes upon so prodigal a display of splendour as that which met us that evening.

  The banqueting room was set about with pillars of marble exquisitely carved, and bearing at their capitals representations of the lotus-flower, lavishly covered in gold leaf. The floor we trod on was set with lapis lazuli and onyx; a fountain in the corner tinkled with rose-scented water, and the Maharajah's court musicians played their strange, languid melodies behind a screen of inlaid mahogany. The dishes were of solid gold; but the centrepiece of the display was the Ruby, of incomparable size and lustre, which gleamed at the Maharajah's breast.

  This was the famous Ruby of Agrapur, about which I had heard a good deal. I could not help gazing at it - I confess that something in its depth and beauty, in the blood-red liquid fire that seemed to fill it, fascinated me and held my attention, so that I stared more than was strictly polite; at all events, the Maharajah noticed my curiosity, and told us the story of the stone.

  It had been discovered in Burma six centuries before, and been given in tribute to Balban, King of Delhi, from whom it had descended to the princely house of Agrapur. Throughout the centuries it had been lost, stolen, sold, given in ransom countless times, and had always returned to its royal owners; it had been responsible for deaths too many to list - murders, suicides, executions; and once it had been the cause of a war in which the population of an entire province had been put to the sword. Less than fifty years before, it had been stolen by a French adventurer. He, poor wretch, thought to escape detection by swallowing it, but in vain: he was torn open while still alive, and the stone plucked warm from his belly.

  The Maharajah's eyes met mine as he recounted these tales.

  "Would you care to examine it, Major?" he asked. "Hold it close to the light, and look inside. But take care that you do not fall!"

  He handed it to me, and I did as he suggested As the lamplight fell on the stone, a strange phenomenon took place: the red glow at the heart of it seemed to swirl and part like smoke, to reveal a series of ledges and chasms - a fantastic landscape of gorges, peaks and terrifying abysses whose depth was impossible to plumb. Only once have I read of such a landscape; and that was in a work on the delusions and horrors of opium-addiction.

  The effect of this extraordinary sight was what the Maharajah had predicted. I swayed, suddenly struck by the most dizzying vertigo. Captain Lockhart caught my arm, and the Maharajah took back the stone, laughing; and the incident was passed off with a joke.

  Our visit ended shortly afterwards. I did not see the Maharajah again for a year or so, and then only in the course of the horrible event which forms the climax of this narrative - an event which has brought me more shame and unhappiness than I would have imagined possible. May God (if there is a God, and not an infinity of mocking demons) grant me oblivion and forgetfulness; and may it come soon!

  The year which passed after I first saw the stone was a time of omens and portents - signs of the terrible storm which was about to break over us in the Mutiny, and signs which, to a man, we failed to read. On the horrors and savagery of the Mutiny itself it is not my present concern to dwell. Others more eloquent than I have told the story of this time, with its deeds of heroism shining like beacons amid scenes of hideous carnage; it is enough to say that, while hundreds did not survive, I did - and so did three others in whose destiny the Ruby continues to play a large and commanding part.

  I pass on now to a time during the Siege of Lucknow, not long before its relief by Havelock and Outram.

  My regiment was garrisoned in the city, and...

  Sally looked up. The train had drawn into a station - she saw a sign saying CHATHAM. She shut the book, her head filled with strange images: a golden banquet, hideous deaths and a stone that intoxicated like opium... "Three others" had survived, said the Major; her father and herself, she thought at once. And the third?

  She opened the book again - only to shut it hastily as the carriage door opened, and a man got in.

  He was jauntily dressed, in a bright tweed suit, with a gaudy pin in his cravat. He lifted his bowler hat to Sally before sitting down.

  "Afternoon, miss," he said.

  "Good afternoon."

  She looked away, out of the opposite window. She did not want conversation, and there was something about this man's familiar smile she did not like. Girls of Sally's class did not travel alone; it looked odd, and invited the wrong kind of attention.

  The train steamed out of the station, and the man took out a packet of sandwiches and started to eat. He took no more notice of her. She sat still, gazing out at the marshes, the city in the distance, and the masts of ships in the docks and shipyards far off to the right.

  Time passed. Eventually the train drew in at London Bridge Station, under the dark smoky canopy of glass, and the sound of the engine changed as the steam hissed and echoed among the calls of the porters and the clanging of the jolting carriages. Sally sat up and rubbed her eyes. She had fallen asleep.

  The door of the compartment was swinging open.

  The man had gone, and so had the book. He had stolen it and vanished.

  Chapter Five

  THE CEREMONY OF THE SMOKE

  She leapt up in alarm and sprang to the door. But the platform was crowded, and the only things she remembered of the man were his tweed suit and bowler hat - and there were dozens of men wearing just the same...

  She turned back to the compartment. Her bag lay in the corner where she had sat. She bent to pick it up - and then noticed, on the floor under the edge of the seat, a few sheets of paper.

  The book had been loosely bound - they must have fallen out, and she had let them drop in her sleep, and the thief hadn't noticed them!

  Most of them were blank, but on one there were a few lines of writing, continued from a previous sheet. They said: ... a place of darkness, under a knotted rope. Three red lights shine clearly on the spot when the moon pulls on the water. Take it. It is clearly yours by my gift, and by the laws of England. Antequam haec legis, mortuus ero; utinam ex animo hominum tam celeriter memoria mea discedat.

  Sally, who had no Latin, folded the paper and put it in her bag, and then, sick with disappointment, set out for Mrs Rees's.

  Meanwhile, in Wapping, a sinister little ceremony was taking place.

  Once a day, on Mrs Holland's orders, Adelaide took up a bowl of soup to the gentleman on the second floor. Mrs Holland had discovered Matthew Bedwell's craving very early, and, never slow to take up an opportunity, found her venomous old curiosity powerfully aroused.

  For her guest had fragments of a very interesting story to tell. He was delirious, alternately sweating with pain and raving at the visions which crowded in from the dirty walls. Mrs Holland listened patiently; supplied a little of the drug; listened again, and provided more opium in exchange for details about the thing
s he said in his madness. Little by little the story emerged - and Mrs Holland realized that she was sitting on a fortune.

  Bedwell's tale concerned the affairs of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents. Mrs Holland's ears pricked up when they heard the name Lockhart; she had her own interest in that family, and the coincidence astonished her. But as the tale came out, she realized that this was a new angle altogether: the loss of the schooner Lavinia, the death of the owner, the firm's unusually high profits from their China trade, a hundred and one things besides. Mrs Holland, though not a superstitious woman, blessed the hand of Providence.

  As for Bedwell, he was too helpless to move. Mrs Holland was not quite sure that she had extracted all the knowledge that lay fuming in his brain - which was why she kept him alive, if he could be said to be living. As soon as she decided that the back bedroom was needed for some other purpose, Death and Bedwell, who had missed each other in the South China Sea, could finally keep their rendezvous in the Thames. A convenient address, Hangman's Wharf.

  So now Adelaide, having ladled a quantity of warm greasy soup into a bowl, clumsily hacked a slice of bread to go with it and climbed the stairs to the back bedroom. There was silence inside; she hoped he was asleep. She unlocked the door and held her breath, loathing the stale heavy air and the damp chill that struck her as she entered.

  The gentleman was lying on the mattress with a rough blanket up to his chest, but he was not asleep. His eyes followed her as she put down the bowl on a nearby chair.

  "Adelaide," he whispered.

  "Yessir?"

  "What you got there?"

  "Soup, sir. Mrs Holland says you got to eat it up 'cause it'll do you good."

  "You got a pipe for me?"

  "After the soup, sir."

  She did not look at him; they both spoke in whispers. He raised himself on one elbow and then struggled painfully upright, and she stood back against the wall as if she had no substance at all - as if she were a shadow. Only her huge eyes seemed alive.

  "Give us it here," he said.

  She took him the bowl and crumbled the bread into it for him, and then went to the far wall as he ate. But he had no appetite; after a couple of spoonfuls he pushed it away.

  "Don't want it," he said. "There's no goodness in it. Where's the pipe?"

  "You got to eat it, sir, 'cause Mrs Holland'll kill me else," said Adelaide. "Please..."

  "You eat it. You could do with a feed," he said. "Come on, Adelaide. The pipe, girl."

  Reluctantly she opened the cupboard which, with the chair and the bed, was the only furniture the room possessed, and took out a long, heavy pipe, jointed in three sections. He watched intently as she fitted it together, laid it on the bed beside him, and cut a small piece of brown gum from a lump in the cupboard.

  "Lie down," she said. "It sends you off quick now. You gotta lie down else you'll fall."

  He did as the little girl said, stretching out languorously on his side. The chilly grey light of the fading afternoon, struggling through the grime on the tiny window, gave the scene the sombre colour of a steel engraving. An insect crawled lethargically across the greasy pillow as Adelaide applied a lighted match to the lump of opium. She passed the drug, transfixed on a pin, to and fro across the flame until it began to bubble and the fumes soaked outwards. Bedwell sucked at the mouthpiece; and Adelaide held the opium above the bowl, and the sweet heady smoke was dragged into the pipe.

  When it had stopped smoking, she lit another match and repeated the process. She hated it. She hated what it did to him, because it made her think that under every human face there was the face of a staring, dribbling, helpless idiot.

  "More," he mumbled.

  "There ain't no more," she whispered.

  "Come on, Adelaide," he whined. "More."

  "One more then."

  Again she struck a match; again the opium bubbled and fumed. The smoke poured into the bowl like a river disappearing underground. Adelaide shook out the match, and dropped it with its fellows on the floor.

  He breathed a long sigh. The fumes were thick in the room now, making her feel dizzy.

  "D'you know, I haven't got the strength to get up and leave?" he said.

  "No, sir," she whispered.

  A strange thing happened to his voice when he was in the opium trance; it lost the rough sailor's edge and became refined and even gentle.

  "I think about it, though. Day and night. Oh, Adelaide... The Seven Blessings! No, no! You fiends - devils - leave me -"

  He was starting to rave. Adelaide sat as far away from him as she could; she dared not leave, for fear Mrs Holland would ask her what the gentleman had said, and yet she feared to stay, for his words brought nightmares to her. The Seven Blessings - this phrase had come twice lately, and each time with terror.

  He stopped in mid-sentence. Suddenly his expression changed, and became lucid and confiding.

  "Lockhart," he said. "I remember now. Adelaide, are you there?"

  "Yessir," she whispered.

  "Try to remember something for me - will you?"

  "Yessir."

  "A man called Lockhart ... asked me to find his daughter. A girl called Sally. I've got a message for her. Very important... Could you find her for me?"

  "I dunno, sir."

  "London's a big place. Perhaps you couldn't."

  "I could try, sir."

  "Good girl. Oh, dear God, what am I doing?" he went on helplessly. "Look at me. As weak as a baby...What would my brother say?"

  "You got a brother, sir?"

  The light had almost gone now; she looked like a mother by the bed of her sick child, seen through the distorting haze of opium. She reached across and mopped his face with the filthy sheet, and he seized her hand gratefully.

  "A fine man," he mumbled. "My twin. Identical. The same body, but his spirit's all light, Adelaide, while mine's corruption and darkness. He's a clergyman. Nicholas. The Reverend Nicholas Bedwell... Have you any brothers or sisters?"

  "No, sir. I ain't got any."

  "Your mother alive? Your father?"

  "I ain't got a mother. I got a father, though. He's a recruiting sergeant."

  This was a lie. Adelaide's father had been anonymous even to her mother, who herself had vanished a fortnight after the birth; but Adelaide had invented a father, and formed him in the image of the most splendid and gallant men her stunted life had ever seen. One of these swaggering figures, jaunty little pill-box hat cocked, glass in hand, had once winked at her as he stood with his fellows outside a public house and laughed loudly at some coarse jest. She hadn't heard the jest. All she had retained was an image of male, heroic splendour, falling suddenly into her dark little life like a shaft of sunlight. That wink had begotten a father upon his own daughter.

  "Fine men," muttered Bedwell. "Fine body of men."

  His eyes closed.

  "Go to sleep, sir," she whispered.

  "Don't tell her, Adelaide. Don't tell her about - what I said. She's an evil woman."

  "Yes, sir..."

  And then he began to rave again, and the room filled up with ghosts and Chinese demons and visions of torture and poisoned ecstasy, and abysses yawned sickeningly below. Adelaide sat in the darkness holding his hand, and thought.

  Chapter Six

  MESSAGES

  Since the death of Mr Higgs, life at the office had grown dull. The feud between the porter and Jim the office-boy had petered out, the porter having run out of hiding-places and Jim having run out of penny magazines; he had nothing better to do that afternoon, in fact, than to flick bits of paper, with an india-rubber band, at the portrait of Queen Victoria over the fireplace of the porter's room.

  When Adelaide arrived and tapped on the glass, Jim took no notice at first. He was busy improving his aim. The old man opened the window and said: "Yus? What d'yer want?"

  "Miss Lockhart," whispered Adelaide.

  Jim heard, and looked up.

  "Miss Lockhart?" said the porter. "You sure?"
/>
  She nodded.

  "What d'you want her for?" said Jim.

  "Never you mind, you weevil," said the old man.

  Jim flicked a scrap of paper at the porter's head, and dodged the frail blow aimed at him in return.

  "If you got a message for Miss Lockhart, I'll take it," he said. "Come out here a minute."

  He took Adelaide to the foot of the stairs, out of earshot of the porter.

  "What's yer name?" he said.

  "Adelaide."

  "What d'yer want Miss Lockhart for?"

  "I dunno."

  "Well, who sent yer?"

  "A gentleman."

  He bent closer to hear what she said, becoming conscious of the aroma of Holland's Lodgings about her clothes, and of dirty child about her. But he wasn't fussy, and he had remembered something important.

  "Did you ever hear," he said, "of something called The Seven Blessings?"

  In the past fortnight he had asked that of all kinds of people - except Mr Selby; and he had always got the same response - no, they hadn't.

  But she had. She was frightened. She seemed to shrink inside her cloak, and her eyes became darker than ever.

  "What of it?" she whispered.

  "You have, ain't yer?"

  She nodded.

  "Well, what is it?" he went on. "It's important."

  "I dunno."

  "Where d'you hear of it?"

  She twisted her mouth and looked away. Two clerks came out of their office at the top of the stairs and saw them.

  " 'Ere," said one of them. "Look at young Jim courting."

  "Who's yer lady-love, Jim?" called the other.

  Jim looked up and released a jet of language that might have blistered a battleship. He was no respecter of clerks; they were a very low form of life.

  "Cor, listen to that," said the first clerk, as Jim paused for breath. "Such eloquence!"

  "It's the delivery as I admires most," said the other. "It's the inhuman passion as he puts into it."

  "Inhuman's the word," said the first.

  "Shut yer bum, Skidmore, and give yer face a chance," said Jim. "I ain't got time to waste listening to you. 'Ere," he said to Adelaide, "come on outside."

  To the rousing whistles and jeers of the two clerks, he took Adelaide's hand and dragged her roughly down the corridor and into the street.

  "Never mind them," he said. "Listen - you got to tell me about The Seven Blessings. There's a man died in here because of that."