The Mountain of Light

by Indu Sundaresan

  A few minutes later, all the mail had been packed into the Indus’s after hold; the mail carriages withdrew, people flapped their handkerchiefs in the air, and the ship’s band stopped playing as the crew took their places.

  The dockhands wheeled away the gangplanks and untied the moorings, flinging the ropes back onto the deck. The Indus gave a long, musical hoot with her foghorn, the paddles moved, crunching through the water, and the pilot guided the ship out of the harbor.

  • • •

  The night skies were enormous over the lone ship cutting her way through the Arabian Sea, spread out from horizon to horizon, the stars a pale blue glitter of diamonds strewn with a careless hand. There was no wind, not even a whisper of one, as Mackeson walked up and down the deck. Mary Booth’s little hand was tucked under his arm; her head came just up to his shoulder. He could smell a whiff of jasmine in the glossy ringlets of her dark hair. They were alone on the forward deck, far from the sole lantern swinging from a post, circling its pool of light below.

  “What does your brother do, Miss Booth?” Mackeson asked. He walked slowly; in the last week his knee had become more swollen, uncomfortably tight in his trousers.

  She turned gleaming eyes up to him. “He used to work at Lattey Brothers.”

  “The Calcutta auctioneers? Used to, you say?”

  Mary moved a little apart. Her lids fell over her eyes, and she picked at the lace on her sleeve. When she spoke, her voice was low, and Mackeson had to lean over to listen. “They . . . someone accused him . . . of taking one of the Ganesha idols, a small one, from the sixteenth century. It was part of the East India Company’s booty, spoils of war I think from the conquest of a small kingdom in the south, somewhere in the Madras Presidency.” She looked out to the sea, her profile rigid. “He didn’t do it, Colonel Mackeson. Tom’s a man of great integrity and honor; the very thought of being suspected was too much for him. And so . . . we left.”

  Mackeson had met Thomas Booth at the dinner table that had been assigned to the first-class passengers on the very first night of the passage, and had taken an almost instant dislike to the man. He had been impeccably dressed, too foppish by far, with a care for detail that a finicky woman would take. His coattails had been brushed, his collar was pristine without a rim of sweat, his hands clean, his nails cut freshly, the gleam of a gold chain connecting his watch fob to the buttons of his ruffled shirt. His skin had been too white for Mackeson’s comfort, as though he had spent his time in Calcutta under the shade of a parasol during the day, emerging only at night to show his face. And, he didn’t sweat. To Mackeson, who had stewed in perspiration all through his years in India, this was the ultimate folly for a man. Booth’s voice was not all that manly either; he had a mincing way of speaking, not quite opening his mouth fully, the words seeming to escape from one corner or the other. And though long grooves cut their way on either side of his lips, Mackeson had never seen him smile.

  He had compared the two of them—brother and sister—seated side by side, and seen similarities in their manner of eating, of wiping their mouths at the end of each mouthful, in their dark coloring, hair and eyebrows, but what suited Mary Booth merely looked comical and unbending in Thomas Booth. Mackeson wondered if Mary had not been able to marry—if indeed she had never received a proposal at all—because of her brother. Not just for his behavior but because Tom Booth had after all been only a clerk, a minor one, at the auction house in Calcutta, and they would not have had entry into the Government House parties or the balls held in the regimental messes.

  So he had walked away with one of the goods entrusted to his master, he thought. Mackeson made a pretense of adjusting his belt and felt for the bag hanging from it. There, underneath his hand, solid and comforting, was the outline of the Kohinoor diamond.

  He looked at Mary Booth, still gazing into the waters, her nose and mouth outlined by the stars behind her, and felt a sudden yearning to put his arms around her and bury his face in her hair. He had heard stories about shipboard romances, how quick they were, how you could find yourself married at the end of two or three weeks, the captain officiating, and then find yourself in gentle regret for the rest of your life.

  And if he had to be honest with himself, Mackeson had to admit he was terrified of going to England, a land he had left as a boy, of meeting his sister in Cornwall after forty years. What would he say to her? It would be cold, and damp, the nights long and dark in winter, no incessant shriek of the crickets outside his window.

  He had grown up in a mining town, and he could remember his father’s grimy face at the dinner table, the way he hacked off bread from the loaf, his drunken sleep every night, a bottle of grog rolling under his chair below his inert hand. Mackeson already missed India, and knew, even before he set foot on English soil, he would be returning to his regiment or his civil duties—there had been a letter for him at Bombay, promising a posting to Peshawar. Where would Mary Booth fit into all of this? The women of his zenana near Calcutta were enough for him.

  The dinner bell rang.

  “Shall we go back in, my dear?” he said, and his manner had changed, no longer the lover. He saw a flash of hardness in her eyes, an understanding as she nodded. Perhaps Mary Booth had indeed tried very hard to get married in India, and she hadn’t succeeded after all, and it was, just perhaps, no fault of her brother’s.

  An hour later, seated at the dinner table, Colonel Mackeson thought that they were all a sorry lot. Captain Waltham had stopped by his cabin on the first morning and murmured that everyone at that table had bought their tickets in the last few days before the voyage, and he had showed him the piece in the Bombay Herald, and the news in the other paper of the Medea’s fire. “It cannot be a coincidence, sir,” he had said. “I would caution you to be careful with the Kohinoor.”

  Mackeson had stared at him, bemused. So much for Lord Dalhousie’s immense secrecy and all that plotting to take the Kohinoor out of the Punjab.

  “Perhaps,” Captain Waltham suggested, hesitantly, “you could turn it over to me and I will place a guard around it. I could not, sir, guarantee its safety if I don’t have charge of it. And I think you’re seated at a table, all of whose occupants know of the diamond traveling with you.”

  “My dear Captain Waltham,” Mackeson had said softly, “you know nothing for certain, except for your instructions. Whatever . . . needs to be taken safely to England, it is left in my charge. I am the one to guarantee its safe arrival. But, we talk too much, and the walls are miserably thin. I suggest that you do not come to visit me again; it will cause too much chatter, raise too many questions.”

  “As you wish.” Captain Waltham had given him a short bow. But he had lingered on. “I must tell you, though I don’t see how this can have any bearing on . . . ah . . . the matter at hand, but the mail in the hold was ransacked a few nights ago. The boxes were broken open, the letters strewn around—it has never happened before.”

  “Which ones?” Mackeson had asked. “The Falmouth boxes?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  Because it had been a green box Mackeson had taken into the after hold when the mail guard had bumped into him and fallen down. “Is anything missing?”

  “There’s no way of telling, sir. The mail comes onboard sealed and locked—we are never sure of the contents.”

  Now Colonel Mackeson sat at his dinner table and looked around at his companions. One of them was a thief. The Booths, brother and sister, were there. A young stripling called Martyn Wingate, who would not say what his business was, or why he was going to England. He had been born in Bombay, had lived there all of his life, and into his English slipped the guttural sounds of Hindustani every now and then. Lady Anne Beaumont, Mackeson knew well, and had heard of for many years, although he hadn’t met her yet. But she was the local nuisance, wealthy, uncaring of proprieties, living among the natives like one of them, traveling about the countryside without a male escort—an English one that is. And yet, when she came
to one of the capitals of the presidencies, she was accorded all the privileges of her rank, and entered the drawing rooms clad in lush silks and damasks that had somehow survived her travels. She was wearing one of her silks this evening, in pale green, trimmed with velvet, and around her neck glowed a string of tiny emeralds, with one stone as a pendant of a shocking size. “From the Maharajah of Jagatpur,” she had said carelessly. “He was such a splendid little man, with a palace full of jewels.”

  Mr. Huthwaite sat back in his chair—his girth would not allow him to come any closer to the table—and smirked at everyone constantly, his collar tucked under his thick neck. His talk was, as was to be expected, pious and unrestrained, full of Major this and Captain that, and Colonel this, who had contributed to his church-building fund, and of the natives who listened goggle-eyed to the word of God. He also drank too much.

  The dinners aboard the Indus were abundant. Soups made the same morning, boiling in the great big cauldrons of the belowdecks kitchens—oxtail, shrimp and cinnamon, duck with chillied walnuts. This was followed by a salad of some sort, and they had been long enough at sea that the chickpea and smoked fish salad stuffed into tomato halves had given way to various bits of unidentifiable vegetables trapped in trembling aspic. A whole roast pig was brought in on most nights and carved at a large “sideboard,” which was the top of the grand piano. The pig had been slaughtered just the previous night, and the meat was fresh and tender. There was curry to follow—braised quail, or duck served with a shikari sauce, which was the sauce of game hunters in India made of claret, wild mushrooms, black and cayenne peppers, and catsup. Or a proper duck curry with cardamom and cloves ground into ginger and garlic and fried in ghee. The desserts evanesced on the tongue, and all, invariably, were forms of pudding. The Madras Club pudding was a mixture of sponge cake with rum, raisins, suet, bread crumbs, and honey boiled in a mold and served with a Madeira sauce. The rice and sago pudding had whipped egg whites to make it fluffy. Canned fruit was served with pats of coconut pudding.

  And every course came with its own liquor. Pale ale at the beginning of the meal with the soup. Champagne with the salad. Wine with the pork. Madeira with the curry. Port and sherry with the dessert, and coffee, at the end, laced with whiskey.

  Mr. Huthwaite drank it all; his glass was never empty.

  The eighth person at the table was a young woman with five children, Arabella-Catherine Hyde. Her quarters were in first class. Her children were in second class with their governess, a tired girl of nineteen who had come to India only to find her betrothed dead of cholera, and who had to return home to England because in the meantime her father had died and her mother had forbidden her to bind herself to any other man in India. This—working for Mrs. Hyde—was the only way she could pay for her passage.

  Arabella Hyde was pretty, vapid, her head as empty as her whole being seemed to be. On the first night, Lady Beaumont had leaned over to Colonel Mackeson with the story that “the Hyde woman had to leave India, ran away with another chap, you know, the quartermaster of all people, and came back to her husband. He’s shipping her home to England. It’s a divorce.”

  Captain Ramsay, also at the meals, was surprisingly quiet and watchful. He was taking his responsibilities seriously, Mackeson thought with some amusement. They had come up with a system for safeguarding the Kohinoor, especially during bathtimes. All the first-class male passengers were called at the same time, so Mackeson went up to the deck in his long underwear, a towel wrapped around his middle, and stood on the portside grating while a crewman doused him with buckets of salt water he had pulled out of the Arabian Sea. A quick rubdown with his towel, and he was back again in his cabin, where Multan Raj waited patiently, his clothes laid out on the berth. Captain Ramsay sat on the Kohinoor diamond meanwhile and also waited for him to return. Mackeson put the diamond into his steamer trunk, locked it, and hung the key around his neck while bathing, and left Lord Dalhousie’s nephew sitting on top of the box with the strict injunction that he was not to get up even for a second.

  When Multan Raj had dressed him, pulled on his socks and shoes, and left the cabin for his own quarters belowdecks, Mackeson unlocked his trunk and took out the Kohinoor, put it back in the bag, and hooked it onto his belt again. At night, he slept with the pouch looped around his wrist, a pistol under his pillow.

  Once, he had asked Multan Raj what he thought of the voyage.

  “The ship rattles more belowdecks, Sahib. I fall often out of my hammock at night,” he had said. Then, concerned, “I do not mean to complain.”

  Colonel Mackeson looked at him affectionately. His old bearer had disappeared one day in Lahore, into the dust, never heard of again. And Multan Raj had come to him, specially recommended by Lord Dalhousie, who knew of, or knew someone whom Multan’s relative had served. That had been three years ago. Multan was Hindu, not Sikh, and could have had no allegiance to the court of the old Maharajah Ranjit Singh, else Mackeson might have been hesitant to . . . take him along on this journey.

  “Are you looking forward to being in England?” he asked.

  “Will you be there long, Sahib?”

  “I don’t think so,” Colonel Mackeson said, buffing the buttons on his shirt with a muslin cloth. Soon, Multan was standing in front of him, performing that duty. “I could not live anywhere other than India, Multan.”

  The servant’s hand stopped and then went on, slowly. “You will go back then, Sahib.”

  “Yes, I will,” Mackeson replied.

  All of the servants stood behind their masters or mistresses during the meal in the saloon of the Indus—just as they did in India. The waiters whisked in and out, between the chairs and the attendants, served the dishes, and left. The rest was done by each personal table servant. In India, there had been different staff for each duty, including accompanying the master and his wife to dinners at other homes. Here, on the Indus, the P & O had restricted servants to one per person, and so Multan Raj stood behind Mackeson’s chair during dinner, filled his glass when he wanted, took his plate away before the waiter could come.

  The dinner was cleared eventually, coffee brought in; there was lemonade for the ladies if they wanted. The saloon crew moved the tables to the edges of the room and rolled the grand piano to the center. A few ladies sat down to play, some couples danced, slip-sliding on the polished wooden floor; the servants stood with their backs to the walls, watching, waiting to be called upon.

  Colonel Mackeson leaned back and lit a cigarette. He was tired; it had been a long, hot day. He had come to the realization that he didn’t want to go to England, and so, he couldn’t get to England fast enough. And the Kohinoor, now that everyone seemed to know of it, was a bigger burden than he had expected. Perhaps, he thought, he ought to ask for a guard of some sort from Captain Waltham, but where to put the jewel, how to safeguard it unless he was there all the time? It was difficult to maintain the sort of vigilance Lord Dalhousie expected, and perhaps would have been equal to with his ceaseless energy, and his conviction that the Kohinoor belonged to the Queen. Colonel Mackeson did not quite believe in that; oh, he did, in the English part of his heart, but not in the, much larger, Indian one.

  Just then, turning her glittering gaze upon him, Arabella Hyde tilted her well-shaped head and said, “Oh, Colonel Mackeson, all this stealth is so very exciting. But are you going to let us go our own way without even a little glimpse of the Kohinoor?”

  Mackeson drew smoke in the wrong way, coughed, and said, “I beg your pardon. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The others at the table had turned to look at him intently, speculation in every eye. Mary Booth had a faint, grim smile upon her face; her brother looked like a bloodhound that had just scented prey on the breeze, all quivering attention. Mr. Huthwaite was not smiling anymore; he had his hands upon the table, and Mackeson had not noticed before how gross and large they were, like the paws of an unruly bear. How did he turn the pages of the Bible when he read out of it ever
y Sunday? Martyn Wingate had surreptitiously brought out a little notebook and was making scrawls across the page, ink splattering over the table’s white linen.

  Ramsay rose. “It’s time for bed, I think. For me, at least. Colonel, a nightcap at my berth?”

  “Yes, of course.” Colonel Mackeson got up hurriedly.

  Lady Beaumont, who had been watching and listening, smoke twirling out of her fist, spat out a piece of tobacco and said, “Why all the playacting, Mackeson? Show us the diamond, and we’ll let you be.”

  At that moment, Colonel Mackeson felt something slip down along his thigh and come to a soft, tinkling rest on the floor, on the inside of his right boot. He glanced down, and the Kohinoor diamond lay there, half under the folds of the tablecloth, half in the light, worth a fortune in the world in which he lived. He froze. The cloth bag had come undone somehow. He could have put his foot on the stone to cover it, but Indian superstition was so ingrained in him, he could not step upon something that was revered and that gave life—a book, paper money, coins, food, a diamond.

  He took a deep breath and bent down. Someone kicked his ailing knee, hard, and he went crashing onto the floor, a film of pain blurring his gaze. Everyone at the table rose and came rushing up. There were offers of help, arms appeared to raise him, and he found himself sitting in his chair, bent over in excruciating pain. He could feel the skin on his gouty knee expand and surge. Colonel Mackeson looked around desperately, tried to tell Ramsay to search for the Kohinoor, but the young captain’s face swam out of focus in front of his eyes.

  He fainted.

  • • •

  The vans were lined up for the passengers when the SS Indus put to port outside of Suez. A message had been sent from Alexandria that the SS Oriental had already arrived and was waiting on the Mediterranean for the passengers from India, so the travelers disembarked with a small carpetbag each for the next three days of travel and sent all the rest of their luggage on the procession of camels, some two thousand of them, that waited in patient lines, their jaws moving rhythmically.