SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS PLANNED. BUT where, and when?
Sophie felt a clutch of panic each time they approached a station. All through the two-day train journey to Calcutta she half-consciously braced herself for a sudden jolt, a juddering of the carriage, a thunderclap of gunfire that spelled disaster. Yet there were no ominous dreams, no warning visions. Rocked into a half-doze by the train’s motion, she watched the vivid green Bengal landscape flow past the window in soft yellow autumn light. Paddies and wheat fields swept by, lakes filled with hyacinths, mango and tamarind groves, white plumes of kash grass flowering along the tracks, until she was thrust into the clamour and confusion of Howrah Station.
Christmas approached, but it was not like other Christmases Sophie had known. A year ago she had been little more than a tourist, fascinated by India’s strangeness, only half-aware of its dangers. Now those dangers were a part of her daily life. How could so much have happened, in so short a space of time?
Once again the house on Park Street was decorated with palm branches and poinsettias, the sitting-room mantel lined with Christmas cards, the spicy scents of Mr. D’Souza’s baking wafting from the kitchen; but for Sophie and Alex, there were few holiday excursions. A year ago Calcutta’s crowded streets had been dangerous for well-off Indian businessmen. Now everyone was in danger, Indian and English alike, and while the conspirators remained free, no street in the city could be thought safe.
Deprived of her usual pre-Christmas outings to the New Market and Flury’s Confectionary, indignant at missing out on pantomimes and winter picnics at the zoo, Alex grew bored and restless. Jeannie tried to explain that the war made this year different, and Alex must try to be patient, for children in Europe were suffering far greater hardships than any she could imagine.
Meanwhile, Sophie pored over a map of Bengal, fixing in her mind’s eye the location of the scattered towns. Might the conspirators strike at Siliguri, because it was a railway terminus? Darjeeling, because of its English population? No, she decided. Calcutta almost certainly would be the target. The British might have moved their Indian capital to Delhi, but Calcutta was still the City of Palaces, the enduring heart of the old Raj. Somewhere in that timeless zone where everything has happened and is happening, and is about to happen, a clue waited for Sophie to stumble upon it. But how was it possible that the lives of so many people depended on an ability she could neither control nor explain?
She turned again to meditation, to the chants and visualizations Alexandra had taught her, to the exercise of formless contemplation.
Imagine a garden. See all the different kinds of flowers, their colours and forms. See the trees, how high they are, how they are grouped together, the shapes of their branches, the patterns of their leaves. See in your mind’s eye every detail of the garden. Now watch the flowers lose their forms and colours, until they crumble into dust and vanish. See the leaves drop from the trees, the branches shorten, withdraw into the trunks, until the trees themselves are merely pencil strokes, and they too vanish. Then take the stones and soil from the ground, and make even the bare ground vanish. Now all idea of form, of matter, has been removed from the mind, and gradually one attains the sphere of boundless consciousness.
But through the long hours of meditation all that came was a nagging sense of wrongness, a vague unease that was like the perpetual miasma rising from the river marshes.
Sophie, reading in her bedroom, heard someone go to the front door. There was a murmur of conversation in the hall, then Alex’s excited voice: “Major Bradley, I thought you were never coming to visit.”
Sophie put down her book, smoothed her skirt and tidied her hair, then went to the sitting room to greet this unexpected visitor.
Major Bradley’s ginger mustache was as fiercely waxed as ever. He was no longer leaning on a walking stick. “I had a sudden mind to invite myself to tea,” he was telling Alex. “I’ve heard that your Mr. D’Souza makes the best currant scones this side of Simla.” Then turning to Sophie, “Miss Pritchard, how well you look!”
Jeannie appeared from her office. “Major Bradley, how lovely to see you!” Though she was smiling and her tone was light, Sophie could see the tension in her face.
“Alex,” said Jeannie, “will you run to the kitchen and tell them we have a guest for tea? And ask Lily to make you presentable. Major, do please sit down.”
With Alex out of the room Jeannie asked simply and without preamble, “Is there news?”
The major nodded, with a discreet glance in Sophie’s direction.
Jeannie had gone very pale. One hand gripped an arm of her chair. She said, “Whatever it is, Sophie must hear it too.”
Sophie’s heart began to race.
“It would seem,” said the major, “that we can all breathe a little easier.”
Jeannie leaned forward, her eyes widening. “Why? What has happened?”
“What has happened,” said Major Bradley, “was a police raid earlier this morning that took over three hundred conspirators into custody.”
So many? And as though aware of Sophie’s startled thought, the major said, “There’ll likely be more arrests once this lot has been interrogated. And I don’t doubt there’ve been some innocents swept up with the guilty. But the conspiracy is broken.”
All these past weeks Sophie’s life had revolved around the imminence of disaster, her mind obsessed with a single daunting and improbable task. She had felt like an ill-prepared student facing an incomprehensible exam. Now, suddenly, she was told the test was cancelled. With that crushing weight abruptly lifted from her shoulders, life, with all its possibilities, could begin again. And she thought, Alex will have her Christmas after all.
Nine days remained till Christmas. Alex’s first wish, before the promised pantomime and Zoological Gardens picnic, had been to visit the museum. Today it was not the elephant skeletons she had come to see, but Darius. They found him in his cramped office at the end of a gallery in the Zoology Department.
“Miss Memsahib Sophie! And the little Memsahib! Do come in!” He swept some papers from the seats of his two wooden chairs so they could sit down.
“What a fright you gave us all!” said Sophie. “We were afraid we would never see you again.”
“I cried and cried,” said Alex solemnly.
“My dear Alex, I am so sorry to have worried you!”
“But it’s all right now,” said Alex, and added, graciously, “I forgive you.”
Sophie asked, “Were you really quite unhurt?”
“I was deaf as a post for a bit when the bomb went off — but no real damage done. I had the very good luck to be in a carriage farther forward. I fear there were others who fared less well.”
Darius took them to see the new exhibit of rare Indian butterflies, and told them about the preparations for the Zoological Survey of India, which was to officially begin next year.
”We must be off,” Sophie said presently. “I promised Alex we’d go home the long way round, by the Maidan, so we could see the Christmas fair.”
“Then if I may, I’ll walk with you,” said Darius. “I think the streets are not as safe as they once were for English ladies on their own.”
Today the Maidan was gaudy with flags and streamers and scattered with white canvas booths. Sophie and Darius followed Alex as she darted in excitement from booth to booth, exploring the food and flower and bird-sellers’ stalls, the fortune tellers’ booths, the games of chance. There were costumed dancers, drummers and flute-players, a merry-go-round, a regimental band on the bandshell, a coconut throw. Best of all, at one end of the Maidan, there was a travelling circus with acrobats and tightrope walkers, and a patient old elephant giving rides to children.
“The village fetes we had at home in England were just like this,” Sophie said. “Except for the elephant, of course.”
Sophie was well aware of the curious, or openly disapproving, glances from the English ladies who crossed their path. What was in their minds as they observed this young Englishwoman and English child in the company of a young Indian man — an Indian in western dress, who quite clearly was not a servant? Let them wonder, Sophie decided. What they thought was not her concern.
They had come to the foot of the Ochterlony monument at the north end of the Maidan, a fluted Islamic column soaring over one hundred and fifty feet from its pseudo-Egyptian base and crowned by a Turkish dome. Darius asked Sophie if she had ever climbed the two hundred and eighteen steps of its spiral staircase to the top.
Before she could reply “Not yet,” Alex interrupted: “I have. Papa took me.” She added with a meaningful look, “It was quite exciting, Sophie. You can see all over the city.”
“It sounds as though you’d like to go again,” said Darius.
“Oh yes, please.”
“If Memsahib Pritchard will agree to accompany us.”
And Sophie, grateful after weeks indoors for the chance of a small adventure, echoed Alex — “Oh yes, please!”
Hot and out of breath, they emerged on a balcony at the top of the monument. Sophie had a moment of queasiness, seeing the gulf of air beneath her and the whole of the city spread so far below. But the floor was steady under her feet. She took a deep breath and held firmly to the rail.
“Calcutta is not one city but two,” Tom had told her when she first arrived. She gazed down over the pale domes of Fort William, the English church spires wreathed with river mist, the stately public buildings of Dalhousie Square massed around their glittering pool, the broad green grassy spaces, the grand colonial houses in the leafy south. Nearer to hand, five huge cranes rose on their latticework legs over the still unfinished Victoria Monument, their booms etched against the sky.
And beyond, in the backstreets, beneath the untidy jumble of rooftops veiled by the smoky air, was that other Calcutta, with its many thousands of mysterious, unknowable lives.
She stole a glance at Darius’s sharply defined, hawk-nosed profile. Alex’s Prince of Persia. What did she know of Darius’s life, of his Bombay childhood, his family? What did she know of his private thoughts, the life he led when he was not at work in the Museum? Perhaps he was engaged to be married, as Indian men of his age so often were. He too was mysterious, unknowable.
She took one last look before they turned to descend, her gaze travelling across the vivid green expanse of the Maidan, from the mazy back streets to the white marble edifices of the Raj. With the conspiracy crushed, the plotters arrested, her career as a spy was over before it had properly begun.
Yet why could she not dispel this lingering sense of unease?