A Very Pukka Murder

by Arjun Gaind

  “It wasn’t long before Michael and I came to care for each other deeply. Even then, I was so surprised when he asked for my hand. I had always considered myself too old for him; I was nearing thirty, for God’s sake, almost an old spinster, and I had no dowry to speak of. And so, I refused him. But he was so persistent, the dear, sweet boy. He kept pestering me, time after time, until, in spite of my fears, I finally decided to accept his proposal.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Oh, it was fate, I guess. Fate always puts an end to dreams, doesn’t it?” She shook her head, stiff with sorrow.

  “Michael had our future together all planned out. He was to travel out to Calcutta where he had managed to secure a sinecure with an indigo trader, and I was to join him after some months, once he had made the requisite arrangements for us to be wed. After his departure, I waited and waited for almost seven months for him to send for me, but instead, one day the letters just stopped. Naturally, when I did not hear from him, I started to worry and decided to follow him out to India. My employer, while sad to see me leave his service, was kind enough to arrange passage for me to come out to Calcutta. Why, he even provided me with a modest dowry, just a few pounds, but it was a princely gift for someone as impoverished as myself, a veritable fortune.”

  She shivered; no doubt recalling the rigors of the journey out, those dreadful weeks spent sweltering through the tropics in a tiny cabin in steerage, being dreadfully seasick each time the ship wallowed through the waves.

  “When I got to India…” she swallowed a groan, the strength to speak suddenly deserting her.

  “Let me guess,” Sikander said softly, finishing her sentence for her. “You found that he had married someone else.”

  Jane nodded dully, as mechanical as an automaton. “Yes, some grasping little ninny he met here. She was the nineteen-year-old niece of the planter with whom he was employed. He had jilted me for her without a second thought, and when…when I confronted him, he laughed at me.”

  Her slender frame shook with a barely repressed outrage that was still potent even after the time that had passed. “After all his promises, all his declarations of undying affection, the only apology he was willing to make was the offer to pay my passage back to England if I left quietly, without making a scandal.”

  “You could have taken him up on his offer,” The Maharaja countered, “gone back and started anew. Perhaps found another suitor.”

  But even as he said those words, he knew that she could never have done something like that. She was too proud. Even though he had spent barely a few minutes with Jane, he could not imagine her playing the broken-hearted lover, or the tragic spinster. No, just like Helene, she was a survivor, the sort of person who had to make her own way in the world, even if it meant having to work as a servant.

  “There was nothing for me back in England.” Jane’s face sagged with barely subdued anguish, confirming his suspicions, as if she could tell exactly what was going through his mind. “Besides, I had felt a higher calling.”

  “You mean to say…?”

  “Yes,” she intoned reverently. “I decided I would give myself up to the service of the Lord and take the most solemn of vows. I was lucky enough to find a place with the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. You may know us by our common name, the Sisters of Loreto.”

  Sikander nodded, recognizing the name. They were an old order known particularly for their fine English-language schools for girls.

  “Once I had completed my novitiate, I was sent out to teach, first at Darjeeling and then at Tara Hall in Simla, where I resided until last year, when I was selected to accompany a group of sisters here to Rajpore to attempt to establish a parish school.”

  Sikander recalled the mission. The Sisters had petitioned Ismail Bhakht to fund an English school for orphans in Rajpore, but the proposal had floundered when the Major had interfered, as usual, and insisted the school be only for white children, as a result of which the blessed sisters had been forced to return to Simla empty-handed. All except Jane it seemed, he thought, who had decided to break with her vows and stay on in Rajpore.

  “What happened to make you decide to leave the convent?”

  Once again, Jane seemed reluctant to answer him. Instead, she blushed, unconsciously beginning to rub at her arm, an instinctively habitual gesture, kneading the flesh of her wrist with one calloused thumb. Sikander’s eyes could not help but be drawn to this absent-minded motion. He noticed an old scar on her forearm, a jagged cicatrice that curled around her bony wrist like a snake devouring its own tail, and suddenly, it became clear to him why she had left the Church. She would have had no other choice if she had tried to take her own life. The Catholics frowned mightily upon attempted suicide, and they would have forced her to leave.

  “Let us just say the Mother Superior suggested I would be happier elsewhere pursuing another vocation,” she said, noticing the direction of his gaze. Self-consciously, she pulled down the sleeves of the nightgown to hide her scars. “They felt I was not suited for the cloistered life. Conveniently enough, while we were here in Rajpore, I was lucky enough to be apprised of the Major’s need for a housekeeper, and when I met with him, he offered me the position very readily. Personally, I thought Rajpore would be a pleasant change, and thus I accepted his offer. I had nothing to go back to really. I had grown weary of teaching, and Calcutta reminded me too much of Michael. As for England, well, all that was left of England was a faint and half-forgotten dream.”

  With that avowal, she lapsed into a pensive silence. Sikander sat back and considered Jane’s story. It seemed believable enough, but his inner cynic refused to be silenced, thinking that somehow it was half-hearted, filled with far too many holes. His earlier intuition that there was far more to her relationship with Major Russell than she was admitting now returned ten-fold. Could their involvement have been more intimate than that of an employer and a housekeeper? Or was this a case of unrequited affection? It was an old enough story—a broken-hearted spinster with no prospects fastens onto to an aging and lonely bachelor like a limpet, with the intent to wed him. Yes, that made far more sense. To the untrained eye, Jane did not seem the cold, grasping sort, but Sikander could tell there were hidden depths beneath the hapless facade, a ruthless reserve, a streak of steel beneath her fragile exterior.

  Sadly, before he could explore these suspicions in any depth, Jane raised one weary hand to rub at her temples, stifling a yawn.

  “Forgive me, Madam,” Sikander apologized, reminded that she was unwell. “I did not mean to tire you unduly. Perhaps it would be best if you were to retire for the night.”

  Jane shook her head. “Oh no, Your Majesty, this exchange has been most therapeutic. I was feeling exceedingly melancholic, but speaking to you has quite lifted my spirits.”

  “I am glad to be of service.”

  She gave him a hopeful smile. “If I may, can I beg one more favor, a minor imposition?” Eagerly, she beckoned toward the piano. “Play me something happy…Please!”

  Sikander very nearly refused. It had been years since he had played for anyone but himself, but as he glanced at Jane, he felt an inexplicable affinity towards her, an empathy which made him decide to break from habit. Wordlessly, he crossed to the piano. Closing his eyes, he began to play, a simple but extraordinarily moving piece that had been one of his mother’s favorites, Chopin’s Nocturne in C Minor. He knew it so well it came to him almost effortlessly, his fingers dancing back and forth as if they had a life of their own.

  As always, he lost himself in the ebb and fall of the chords, until Jane chose to let out a soft moan. His eyes snapped open, Chopin’s ephemeral spell broken, to find that she had come to stand uncomfortably near him, poised just behind his seated form, so close in proximity that he could smell the soap on her skin, a fresh, almost virginal odor that made his stomach seize up in knots.

  “That was breath
taking,” she murmured, arching her slender neck as gracefully as a swan. That was when he noticed the bruises, a ring of old welts, already blue, surrounding her slim neck like a macabre necklace, as if she had been choked recently.

  “Did the Major do that to you?” Sikander gasped, shocked.

  Even as he whispered those words, a shudder wracked through Jane’s slender frame. Her fingers scrabbled desperately at her robe, plucking at its collar, eager to hide her wounds from sight. Abruptly, something seemed to splinter inside her, a vital mechanism coming awry, and to his chagrin, she began to weep, a brittle paroxysm so inexorable that it seemed as if she were having a breakdown.

  Sikander found himself rendered entirely helpless by such an effusive display of grief. He would have liked to reach out to try and comfort her, but his dislike of physical contact made him cringe with embarrassment. Instead, he clenched his fists, digging his nails into his palms so hard he thought his fingers would snap apart.

  “Come on,” he said, trying his best to seem diffident, “let us go and have another drink, shall we? That should make you feel better.”

  Jane’s only reply was a groan. “Oh, what’s the point of it? What have I left to live for?”

  “That’s the thing about life, my dear,” Sikander said, giving her a tragic smile. “Just when you least expect it, something interesting always manages to turn up.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  In spite of Sikander’s best efforts to cheer her up, Jane’s mood remained persistently dolorous.

  He tried in vain to convince her to accept another glass of champagne, hoping it might dispel the morbid humors that seemed to have her in their grip, but she declined, begging instead to be allowed to retire for the night. Ever the gentleman, Sikander found that, in spite of his fears for her well-being, he really had no choice but to oblige. However, he did insist on escorting her up to her suite personally, paying no heed to her objections.

  Once he had ensured that she was settled in comfortably, he bid her good night, and returned to his study, where he helped himself to a fresh draught of absinthe. It had been his hope to try and rekindle that transcendent state of clarity to which had been so close before Jane had intruded upon his contemplations, but this time around, regrettably, the rhapsody proved elusive. One glass became two, and two four. Slowly, the level of spirit inside the bottle dwindled, but still the answers he so fervently desired continued to elude him.

  Finally, Sikander could bear it no longer. His patience at an end, he staggered to his feet and tugged sharply at a nearby bell-pull to summon Charan Singh.

  The Sikh took some time to appear, and when he did show up, his turban was in disarray, his beard sticking up in untidy clumps.

  “It is the middle of the night, Sahib,” he said with weary indignation. “Why aren’t you in bed, like a normal person?”

  “Stop complaining, you dozy old fool, and have a carriage made ready. Nothing ostentatious, just a one-horse calash, and I will not be requiring a driver. And before you insist, no honor guard either. I am going incognito,” he explained with a suggestive wink. “Today, I am not the Maharaja of Rajpore. I am just another punter looking for a bit of a good time, that’s all. No tamasha and no fuss, do you understand?”

  “And pray tell, Sahib,” Charan Singh retorted with a scornful sneer, “where exactly is it you are intending to go at this ungodly hour?”

  “As it happens, my good man,” Sikander replied, unfazed by the Sikh’s priggishness, “I have decided to pay a visit to Mrs. Ponsonby.”

  Charan Singh let out a mortified gasp. Most everyone in Rajpore had heard of the infamous Mrs. Ponsonby, although the majority of well-mannered people preferred to pretend that they had not. She was, for lack of a better term, the city’s most renowned procuress, as much of a Rajpore institution as Ismail Chacha himself. Predictably, this announcement that Sikander intended to call upon such a notorious madam left Charan Singh, who was as straitlaced as a Brahmin, utterly perturbed, causing his bushy eyebrows to rise upwards so far that they seemed to disappear entirely, crawling under the hem of his turban in barely restrained shame.

  “It is not proper for you to patronize an establishment of such low repute,” he said primly. “If it is female companionship you desire, I can make more discreet arrangements.”

  Sikander interrupted him in mid-rebuke with a curt wave of one hand. “Enough! Just go and get my carriage ready.”

  As he had expected, Charan Singh chose to illustrate his disapproval by taking an abominably long time to carry out this simplest of chores. More than an hour trickled by before suitable transportation was ready, an expanse of time which Sikander spent pacing back and forth restlessly, halfway to wearing a hole in the Abusson carpet underfoot. In the end, it was nearing dawn by the time he finally managed to embark from the killa, not in an unremarkable calash as he had requested but rather atop a sleek two-horse phaeton so conspicuous that it rather defeated any hope he harbored of maintaining anonymity.

  Overhead, the first frigid rays of daylight had just begun to discolor the gloom of night. Rather than taking the Hathi Darwaza, the Maharaja decided to take the Kashmiri gate to the east, and skirt the native town altogether, thus avoiding the rush of the early morning vegetable mandi. His destination was some five kilometers distant, near the northern edge of the Silent Lake, a handsome estate whose boundaries were lined by a towering stone wall. Beyond this imposing fortification, which could only be entered through a massive twelve-foot iron gate topped with wickedly curved spikes as sharp as scimitars, a winding gravel driveway led to an imposing Georgian mansion that would have been more at home in Lincolnshire than amidst the desolate backwoods of Rajpore.

  From a distance, Mrs. Ponsonby’s Academy seemed to be the residence perhaps of a prosperous boxwallah with more money than taste. The truth was somewhat more picturesque. The academy was, for lack of a better phrase, Rajpore’s most exclusive brothel. Although to call it a mere brothel, Sikander thought with a wry smirk, was to do it a grave disservice. There were cathouses aplenty in the red light district that bordered the Cantonment, from the cheapest chaklas frequented by laborers and sepoys who fulfilled their carnal itches with hennaed, syphilitic one-anna whores in the shadows so that they did not have to gaze upon each others’ weary faces, to the Anglo-Indian bordello near the Railway Station where visiting boxwallahs stopped for a few moments of carnal pleasure with mulatto courtesans well versed in the ways of love. But Mrs. Ponsonby’s was special, its fame so widespread that patrons came from as far away as Lahore to enjoy the rare treasures it offered. Compared to the lowly tawaifkhanas of the old city, it was a veritable palace of pleasure, Elysium, Swarga, and Jannat all rolled into one, populated only by goddesses so delectable they put celestial houris to shame, and from whose seductive eyes a single wink could break a man’s heart, not to mention his bank account.

  What made the academy so singularly irresistible? It was the fact that Mrs. Ponsonby’s was the only place north of Bombay where a man could go in search of that rarest of things in British India, the brief and fleeting taste of pearlescent white flesh for sale. Here, for the right price, the eager angler could find English girls who had come to India searching for fortunes only to have their hopes dashed, and green-eyed Irish widows whose husbands had died fighting the Boers, tall Russians who had strayed south of the border and French runaways from Chandernagore, silver-skinned Circassians from Armenia and pale Jewesses from Damascus and, if rumor was to be believed, even a sloe-eyed courtesan from the Middle Kingdom, with feet as tiny as rosebuds.

  All these exotic creatures had one thing in common—they were all exceedingly exquisite and excessively expensive. In Madame Ponsonby’s stable, there wasn’t a single flower whose attentions could be purchased for less than fifty guineas, a veritable fortune to most of India’s citizenry.

  As a result, her clientele was very, very exclusive. There were no journeym
en at the academy, no boxwallahs looking for a quick romp, only the crème de la crème of British India, lured by the promise of white flesh, coming in eager droves to sample the wares on offer and only too willing to pay whatever exorbitant prices Mrs. Ponsonby chose to charge.

  Amongst her regulars, she counted no less than six Maharajas, a dozen peers of the Empire, and even an ex-Viceroy, not to mention the assortment of well-heeled zamindars who saved for years to earn a single night in the arms of any of her wards. Why, Sikander’s own grandfather, the Burra Maharaja, had been one of the place’s most fervent patrons, and it was right here that he had come to an unseemly end, suffering a ruptured ventricle while enjoying the company of a trio of acrobats from Rangoon.

  It was to the portals of this fabled institution that Sikander directed the phaeton, bringing it rattling to a halt outside the front foyer, a pillared portico with ornate cornices that was vaguely Greek in origin by way of Calcutta Revivalist. The durban, a shaven-headed wrestler by the looks of him, came scurrying forward, no doubt to tell him to move along. Sikander leaped down, flinging the reins at him with indolent nonchalance.

  “Keep it nearby,” he said, tipping the man with a handful of coins he pulled randomly from one pocket. “I will be back shortly.”

  It must have been a handsome gratuity indeed, because the durban almost fell over in his haste to reverse direction so that he could hold open the door for Sikander.

  Inside, the Maharaja found himself amidst a parlor so sumptuous it would have put most palaces to shame. Everywhere he turned, he was greeted by an excess of brocade and tuile and gilt, an inundation of French Baroque so garish it was almost blinding. On the left, a gilded arch bordered by ornate pilasters revealed a sweeping mahogany staircase that led upwards to the upper floors. On the right, another arch led to a vast banquet room, teeming with gentlemen gamblers come to try their luck at the multitude of games on offer. Of course, the dog races or cockfights which were so popular in the Cantonment were not to be seen here. No, Mrs. Ponsonby only offered the most refined games of chance, from the long standing Vingt-et-un table where fortunes were won and lost with each hand, to baccarat and hazard, and even that most American of pastimes, five-card stud.