The Sultan's Tigers

by Josh Lacey

  7

  I liked the sound of the gold. And the necklace of pearls as big as eggs. Was this why Marko was so desperate to get his hands on these “historical documents”? Had Horatio stolen some of these treasures himself? Or given a clue to where they could be found? Or was Marko really just interested in these letters as historical artifacts? There were only a few sheets of paper left in the box. I must be close to the heart of the mystery. I pulled out the next letter.

  13 or 14 May 1799, I am not sure of the precise day, Seringapatam.

  My darling wife,

  I am abed. Forgive my weak hand, I have little strength. My limbs are drained of blood. My head is full of noises. The wound has worsened. I have an infection. That is what the doctor tells me. He could devote only a few moments to my cause. He has a hundred patients to see this morning, a hundred more in the afternoon, and there will be five hundred more still requiring his attention, their strength fading while they wait.

  My dearest Susanna, my beloved wife, I would give anything to be beside you now, away from this forsaken place.

  The flies are buzzing around me. A vulture circles overhead. Sergeant Fordham took a shot at him just now, but the round came straight back down to earth. Even if he had hit the vulture, its place would have been taken at once by another. They are everywhere hereabouts.

  I am rambling. I must be to the point. I have not the time to waste.

  My beloved wife, I must tell you one thing of great importance.

  I was planning to keep it entirely to myself. But I may not be here for much longer. Better that you should know than the secret joins me in my grave.

  Do you remember I wrote to you before about Tippoo’s throne? I believe I said the eight tigers vanished and no one knows where.

  My dearest wife, I lied. I know the whereabouts of those eight tigers. Seven of them have been taken by friends and comrades. I shall not transcribe their names here in case this letter falls into the wrong hands. I should not wish to incriminate them. I hope their fate will be happier than mine.

  The eighth is mine. I do not have it on my person. I have hidden it in a safe place. I had been hoping to bring it home and sell it. With the proceeds, my sweet wife, we could have lived happily on a farm of our choosing. But I shall not see Cornwall again, nor Southampton, nor England, nor even tomorrow.

  Two days after the battle was done, word came around that Wellesley would be searching the men’s baggage for loot. Gold and silver, spoons and vases, all would be ignored, but awful punishments would befall anyone who was found to have secreted Tippoo’s own treasures.

  The next morning, I borrowed a fine horse from Hobson and left the camp at dawn.

  I rode to the north. The roads were poor. I passed several small groups of men who gazed on me without fear or respect. Had I been afoot rather than riding a fine mare, they would surely have murdered me.

  I had no notion of where I was headed, but I stayed on the same path, heading northwards all the time.

  When the sun was directly overhead, I knew I must turn back soon, if I was to make the camp by nightfall.

  I might have ridden twenty, or I might have ridden thirty miles, it was not easy to know. The landscape was so hilly and the roads so rough that any accurate figure is beyond me.

  I cast about for a hiding place. I did not know what I was looking for. I knew simply that I must find somewhere that would hide an object for a few days till the hullabaloo had died down.

  I had seen three villages, but no farms, no fields, nothing like the ordered landscape of Hampshire that you know so well. This is a harsh country, filled with spiny trees and unscaleable boulders and prickly grasses. Snakes and lizards and other strange creatures lie in wait for unwary travellers, scuttling into the shade if they perceive you as a threat.

  I saw a small hill which appeared not only uninhabited but unexplored. The Hindoos do not share our love of clambering up mountains simply to admire the view.

  I spurred my horse and rode as far as I could, then dismounted and roped her reins to a tree. I continued on foot, stopping every few paces to catch my breath. I could see the scrubby landscape stretching for many miles behind me. The heat was brutal. A shimmering haze hid the horizon.

  To my astonishment, I found a small shrine on the top of the hill. Someone had indeed been here before me. India is full of such places. The Hindoos have the strangest love of bizarre gods.

  This pagan shrine was no more than a few golden bricks built around a hole in the ground. A dried-up well, perhaps, or a shelter from the sun, over which some Hindoo had placed this shrine and come to worship one of his strange gods.

  I had already wrapped my tiger in my second-best shirt. Now I pushed aside the bricks and lowered myself into the hole.

  I found a place there to hide the tiger. No one will find him. No one but you, my sweet wife.

  I had not intended for you to retrieve him. I had hoped merely for the tiger to be safe there for a few days. Once the fear of looting had been forgotten, I could ride north and pluck him out again.

  I should have sailed home to Southampton and handed him to you, my love. We would pick the rubies and diamonds and emeralds from his skin and sell them to the jewellers in Mercy Street and earn enough guineas to buy ourselves a small farm, where we might spend the rest of our days in quiet happiness. But my intentions have been dashed by the yellow pus now seeping out of my skin. The wound is infected. The contagion is spreading.

  If Entwhistle were still here, I should ask him to bring the tiger to you himself, but he is buried already. His successor, Fordham, I do not trust, nor another man in the army, neither.

  I shall give this letter to Captain Hobson. I have told him it is full of nothing but matters of love, and I must hope his curiosity does not lead him to break the seal.

  I do not know how you will achieve it, my love, but you must bring yourself to India and find this tiger and use him to save yourself from poverty. He waits here for you. His jewels will guarantee the future of you and Thomas and Charlotte. With him, you will not suffer too much from my loss.

  I cannot guarantee he will be there, of course. Someone may have found him. But I buried him well. And deep. I hope he shall remain undiscovered till you have a chance to dig him up.

  Give my sweet children a hundred kisses every day from their father, and tell them how he loved them, and how he missed them, and how much he wished to see them.

  I shall seal this letter now. Hobson has promised to visit me today. I shall make him swear to keep it on his person and deliver it into your gentle hands himself.

  If you are reading these words, my dear Susanna, then I shall have been buried here, in the Hindoos’ soil.

  Please remember this: as I slipped away, I had only thoughts for you.

  Your beloved husband,

  Horatio Trelawney

  8

  So: now I understood what Grandpa had been selling. And now I knew why Marko was here.

  These letters must be worth a lot more than two thousand euros.

  I was pleased to discover that Horatio was a real Trelawney. I’d been worried from his letters that he might be more like my dad than my uncle. But now I knew he was as crafty as the rest of us.

  Did Dad know about him? Or Uncle Harvey? If not, why not? And how had my grandfather discovered these letters? And, more important than anything else, where was the tiger?

  If it had been rescued by Susanna or her kids or some other member of my family, wouldn’t I have heard about it? And wouldn’t we have been a bit richer?

  A single sheet of paper was all that remained in the treasure box. It looked like a page torn from a notebook and was scrawled with a few words.

  I would rather live two days as a tiger than two hundred years as a sheep.

  Tipu Sultan.

  Jaragami.

  Sotheby’s Sale of 18th-century Indian and Islamic Art —3 March 2011—1.9m.

  The paper looked modern. The writing, too. I guesse
d it was my grandfather’s.

  But what did it mean?

  Tipu Sultan must be Tippoo Sultan, the guy they’d been fighting in India. But who or what was Jaragami? Who or what was Sotheby’s? And what about 1.9m? What was that?

  It had to mean one point nine million.

  Didn’t it?

  Was it true?

  Could these letters really be worth two million dollars?

  Of course they could. A two-hundred-year-old tiger covered in jewels—that couldn’t be cheap.

  Two million.

  And Marko had offered me two thousand.

  He could get lost.

  I should fly to India and get the tiger myself.

  But how?

  I didn’t have any money. How could I buy a flight? And what would I do when I got there? Like I said, I didn’t know anything about India apart from the names of different curry dishes, and they wouldn’t get me very far.

  Maybe it didn’t matter. India was just a country, right? It couldn’t be too difficult to get around. Maybe I could borrow some money from Mom and Dad. I’d pay them back when I was a millionaire.

  They’d never say yes.

  Even if I stole some cash and used Dad’s card to buy a plane ticket, I wouldn’t know what to do once I got to India.

  And what about Marko?

  What if he was watching me? He’d see me walking out the door and grab me before I’d gotten anywhere near a plane, let alone as far as India.

  So what was I going to do?

  9

  “Diamonds,” said Uncle Harvey.

  “Just wait,” I said.

  “It gets better?”

  “Much better.”

  “Good.” He reached for the next letter in the pile, unfolded the crinkly browned paper, and started reading.

  I’d already told him about the tiger, but he wanted to read the whole story for himself.

  I had told him about Marko, too. Listening to my story of a thief breaking in to the house and tying me to the chair, Uncle Harvey had smiled. I suppose he thought I was joking around, trying to make my life sound more interesting than it actually was, taking revenge for the fact that I’d missed out on lunch. His smile got wider when I told him about the two thousand euros. Then I produced the book of letters and the smile was suddenly wiped from his face, replaced by an entirely different expression. I don’t know what it was—greed? excitement?—but he glanced at the door to make sure it was closed, then told me to carry on.

  Once I’d rattled through the rest of the story, he asked to read the letters. I said he could—on one condition. Whatever happened, whatever we made, two thousand or two million, we would split the proceeds fifty-fifty.

  “We’ll talk about money later,” my uncle said. “Let me see the letters first.”

  “You can only see them if you agree about the money.”

  “I can’t agree to anything till I’ve seen the letters.”

  “Fine,” I said and folded my arms. “No deal.”

  “Oh, come on, Tom. You trust me, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “There isn’t a problem. I just want you to agree to a fifty-fifty split.”

  “What about expenses?”

  “You’ll have to pay mine now, because I don’t have any money, but I’ll pay you back as soon as I get my share.”

  My uncle hesitated for a moment and then nodded. He had nothing to lose. He held out his hand for the letters.

  As he raced through them, he kept glancing at me, his eyes gleaming, as if he really hadn’t expected to be having this much fun today.

  I paced restlessly up and down Grandpa’s bedroom. I could have gone through the letters myself, pointing out the juicy details to my uncle and filling in the gaps in the story, but he wanted to see it for himself. If he was going to join me in this escapade—if he was going to put up the cash for us to go to India and track down this tiger—then he had to be sure he wasn’t wasting his time and money.

  I couldn’t have gone there myself. I didn’t have a credit card. I knew nothing about India. But with my uncle’s help, I could get there and find the tiger.

  And earn a million dollars.

  I stared out of the window at the gray mountains and wondered why Grandpa hadn’t gone to India himself. Was he too old? Or didn’t he have enough money? Something must have stopped him. I would have loved to know what. I would have liked to know how he discovered the letters, too. Had he always owned them but never bothered reading them? Or had he suddenly uncovered them, searching through an old box of junk, and seen immediately what they were worth?

  Somehow he must have discovered the value of these letters and made contact with Marko and arranged to sell them. I wondered what price they had actually agreed on. Marko must have been lying about the two thousand euros. He would have thought he could cheat me. Grandpa wouldn’t have been so easy.

  A voice came from the other side of the room: “Tom, it’s time to go.” Dad was standing in the doorway, his arms folded.

  “Go where?” I asked.

  “The hotel,” replied my father. “We’ll have supper there, then go to bed and carry on here in the morning. Harvey, where are you staying?”

  “I don’t know,” said my uncle.

  “I can ask at the hotel if they have another room.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll be fine. I’ll just sleep here.”

  Dad shrugged his shoulders. “Whatever you like.” Then he turned to me. “Come on, Tom.”

  “I’d rather stay here too,” I said.

  “We’re coming back in the morning,” said Dad. “You can chat with Harvey then.”

  “He can stay if he wants to,” said Uncle Harvey.

  “That’s sweet of you,” said my dad. “But we don’t want him running off to South America again.”

  “I promise you, Dad, I am not going to run off to South America.”

  “I know you’re not. But even so, you can come and have supper with your mother and me.”

  “Why can’t I stay here? I don’t want to have to share a room with Jack and Grace. He snores and she’ll spend the whole night texting. They won’t want to share with me, either. It would be better for everyone if I stayed here.”

  “Where would you sleep?”

  “On the sofa downstairs.”

  “It won’t be comfortable.”

  “I don’t mind. I can sleep anywhere.”

  “I don’t think it’s a very good idea.”

  By the way he said it, I knew he was wavering. With a bit more pressure, he might just crumble. He was probably still feeling guilty for banning me from Grandpa’s funeral lunch. With any luck, I could play on that guilt and get what I wanted. I put on my best wheedling tone of voice. “Oh, come on, Dad. You know it makes sense. Jack and Grace will sleep much better. The room in the hotel won’t be big enough for all three of us. Please, Dad.”

  Dad looked at his brother. “Will you look after him?”

  “He’s much more mature than I am.”

  “Sadly that’s true,” said Dad. He thought for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. “If Mom says yes, I don’t see why not. Come and talk to her. You’re probably right about the room. Grace has been complaining about it already. She’ll be happy, anyway. Good night, Harvey. See you tomorrow.”

  “Night, bro.”

  I followed Dad downstairs and we talked to Mom. I could see she didn’t like the idea of me staying with Uncle Harvey, but she couldn’t find any reason to say no. I fetched my bag from the back of the car, said good night to Jack and Grace, promised Mom and Dad that, yes, I would behave myself and, no, I wouldn’t stay up too late, then said good night to them too and hurried back upstairs.

  10

  Once Uncle Harvey had read all the letters, he placed them carefully on the bed and smiled at me. “It’s a great story. I like the sound of Horatio. I’ve heard of Tipu before, but I never knew much about him. And Welles
ley, of course. You know who he is?”

  “The general in charge of the army.”

  “Yes, but do you know who he became?”

  “No.”

  “The Duke of Wellington. Heard of him?”

  “Yes. He was, um . . .”

  “Oh, come on, Tom. You must have heard of Wellington.”

  “I have. I just can’t remember who he was.”

  “You’ve heard of Wellington boots?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re named after him. And the battle of Waterloo? Wellington against Napoleon? You know who won that, don’t you?”

  “Wellington,” I guessed.

  “At least you know that much,” said my uncle. “I really would have been shocked if you hadn’t. You should read some books. Learn about history. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’ as the man said.”

  “Which man?”

  “Santayana.”

  “Who?”

  Uncle Harvey just laughed. Then he pulled out his phone and tapped the screen.

  “What are you doing now?” I asked.

  “Searching for information.”

  “About Wellington?”

  “No, not about Wellington. About these tigers. Oh, it’s so slow! The reception here is terrible.”

  He moved to the window and pointed his phone at the sky.

  “Here we go,” he said after a minute or two. “Ah, yes. This is the business.”

  “What is it?”

  “A press release from Sotheby’s.”