ALEX, BUTTER KNIFE IN HAND, gazed fondly at Sophie.
“Sophie’s a heroine, isn’t she?”
Sophie, suddenly the focus of everyone’s attention, felt the colour rising in her face.
“Indeed she is,” Tom said. He smiled at Sophie across the tea table. “As clever and brave as anyone in your storybooks.”
Alex looked up from spreading mango preserve on her scone. “Daddy,” she said reproachfully, “you know I’m too old for storybooks.”
Is anyone that old? thought Sophie. But it was true, she realized with a small pang of regret. How had she not noticed? These past months while Sophie’s attention was distracted, Alex had begun to leave childhood behind.
Alex said, “I knew Sophie was a heroine when she rescued me from the kidnappers, and carried me across the swinging bridge, and she wasn’t a bit afraid.” She paused for a mouthful of scone. Then: “But why was there a bomb under the bandstand?”
Tom and Jeannie exchanged glances. Tom said, “Alex, where did you hear about a bomb?”
“Lily told me. She said there was a bomb under the bandstand, and that’s why Sophie told us to leave, and then she warned everyone, and the bandmaster stopped the bomb from going off, and everyone was saved.”
“Oh dear,” said Jeannie. Her tone was light, but Sophie could hear the tremour in her voice. “There’s no keeping anything from Lily, is there?”
“But,” persisted Alex, “why would someone put a bomb under the stand?”
“Alex,” her mother said quietly, “there are people in this world — people like the kidnappers — who don’t mind harming other people in order to get their way. And look, the teapot is empty. Would you run to the kitchen and ask them to send us another pot?”
With Alex out of earshot, Jeannie said fiercely, “I would like to live in a country where children don’t know about bombs.”
“There must be such a place,” said Tom, and he reached out to put his hand over Jeannie’s. That small gesture brought a lump to Sophie’s throat. How often her father had done just that, when her mother was frazzled and upset.
Canada, Sophie thought. There are no bombs in Canada. Her parents had planned to travel there after visiting New York. How different her life could have been, had fate not sent her to this tinderbox of a country instead.
Like Alex, there were questions Sophie needed to ask. “But why would they want to blow up the bandstand? Not everyone there was English. Indian people would have died too.”
“My dear Sophie,” said Tom, “I need hardly remind you — their object is to spread terror. They’re not particular who they kill. If this latest plot had succeeded as it was meant to — if the conspirators had seized control of Calcutta — it would not only be English blood that ran in the streets.”
Sophie thought of the Indian businessman she had seen gunned down in the middle of a busy Calcutta street, and she thought of Darius, who could have died in that train explosion along with so many of his countrymen.
“But,” she said, “I thought they meant to blow up the Victoria Memorial.”
“Oh, indeed they did,” Tom said. “That was certainly the intention. The symbolic blow against the Raj that would spark a revolution. The explosion under the bandstand was intended as a diversion, so they had time to lay their bombs in the Memorial site.”
So it seemed that after all she had saved Queen Victoria’s memorial, and perhaps for that she would be called a heroine. But how unimportant that seemed to her now. What was the Memorial but a vast perpetually unfinished marble cenotaph, a grandiose symbol of the Raj’s power? What mattered was that she had saved Alex, and Lily, and Thekong, and all those innocent, unsuspecting people at the bandstand, English and Indian alike.
But a greater question remained. “The conspiracy, the insurrection — is it really over?”
The slight hesitation in Tom’s voice did not escape her: “I think the immediate danger is over . . . ”
“But Sophie,” said Jeannie, finishing his sentence, “what you have to realize — with the world as it is, it’s never, ever, really over.”
Those words of Jeannie’s, hovering between despair and resignation, came back to Sophie a few days later upon the arrival of a letter from Sikkim. When Jeannie opened the envelope at the breakfast table, her sombre look warned Sophie that it brought unwelcome news.
“It’s from Lady Bell,” Jeannie said, when she had scanned the page, “and Sophie, I’m afraid the message is meant for you as well.”
I’m so sorry to say that we have had distressing news from the War Office about Charles’ young relative Will Fitzgibbon. Will wrote to us from England that he was likely to be declared fit by the Medical Boards and would be returning to active service. Now, sadly, we have heard from the War Office that he has gone missing in action. Charles believes that he was serving somewhere in northern France, but needless to say, they never give you the exact location.
I thought that you and Tom, and Sophie and Alex as well, would want to know. Will of course was such a help to your family in Sikkim, and he has told me how very fond he was of your lovely Sophie.
I will certainly write again at once if we have further news.
Will had been fond of her. She had read that in his eyes, in the warmth of his smile, all those months ago in Sikkim. She had read it more clearly still in the letter he had sent from Sussex.
She thought of Will’s gallantry, his courage, the generosity of his undemanding friendship. She thought of his wry self-effacing smile, and the cornflower colour of his eyes. She must not for a moment think of him lying dead in France in a waste of blood-soaked mud. But that was the image she could not shut out.
She had known that he was not fit to return to the war, might never be fit, no matter what the doctors and the generals said. But what was her small voice, against the ponderous weight of military honour?
So she had said nothing, and the chance to save him, slight though it might have been, was lost. Will had been fond of her, and she had been fond of Will. Fonder than she had understood until this moment as she fled from the table sick with grief and regret.