The Empress of India

by Michael Kurland

  As he was transcribing the clear version, Peter heard the ship’s horn sounding its doleful message of farewell to the city of Bombay. He could, he supposed, swim ashore, but that seemed a bit drastic. The next place he could leave the ship would be Suez, in about five days. The Thuggee hunters would just have to do without him for a bit longer. He thought of the telegram he’d like to send from Suez: DO YOU STILL NEED ME STOP THERE’S THIS YOUNG LADY . . .

  No, he didn’t suppose that’s what he’d actually send.

  The Empress of India pulled out of Bombay Harbor accompanied by two Royal Navy steam frigates and a motley flotilla of sailing craft. Lady Priscilla returned to her stateroom looking flushed and happy and insisted on telling Margaret all about her day’s adventures with Lieutenant Welles and the wonderfully near-sighted Mrs. Bumbery, who was much more interested in shopping in the bazaar than chaperoning her two charges.

  Curious, Margaret thought, she had no impulse at all to tell Lady Priscilla about Peter Collins, even though his image crowded most other thoughts from her brain. It wasn’t that she and Priscilla weren’t such close friends, although they actually weren’t, but that she didn’t want to share Peter with anyone, not even verbally, not yet.

  Professor Moriarty took his pince-nez from his waistcoat pocket, polished the lenses with a bit of flannel, and adjusted them on the bridge of his nose. “I think it went well,” he said.

  “You do?” Moran asked, looking around the first-class lounge and signaling for a waiter.

  Moriarty nodded. “We have planted the seed,” he said. “It will sprout and grow into a bitter weed.”

  Colonel Moran looked at his companion in feigned admiration. “My, how you do talk,” he said. “A ‘bitter weed’ indeed. And just how will this profit us?”

  Moriarty leaned back in his chair and regarded Moran over the top of his pince-nez. “You and I,” he said, “have different approaches to the world around us. Let us take, for example, the matter of dealing with other men. We both would try to persuade them to do our bidding, but you would use a blunt object atop the head, or the threat of one, where I would use superior knowledge and what the American philosopher William James would call ‘psychology.’ ”

  Moran frowned. “Is that some sort of insult?” he demanded.

  “Not at all,” Moriarty assured him. “I think what I’m commenting on is a difference in outlook. I don’t doubt your native intelligence. You made quite a good living playing cards for several years, I recall, and that demands a fine intuitive mathematical skill and a quick wit.”

  “It does,” Moran agreed. “But when possible I much prefer the direct approach. I confess it. It makes no sense to me to do otherwise.”

  A waiter with a well-scrubbed face, dressed in new and spotless whites, came to the table, bowed, scraped, groveled a bit, and took their order: gin and tonic for Moran and a cognac for Moriarty.

  “The staff has gotten a bit obsequious, have you noticed?” Moran asked. “It’s all ‘Would the sahib like this?’ or ‘Can I bring the sahib that?’ or ‘Let me brush the sahib’s jacket off, pliz’ or ‘It would be an honor for me to shine the sahib’s splended black boots.’ It’s those new people that came aboard in Bombay. And they all have this smile that isn’t a smile pasted across their faces.”

  “They were probably hired just for this passage,” Moriarty surmised, “and they hope to keep their jobs past the one trip. Even the meager pay offered by the Anglo-Asian Star line to its waiters and stewards is probably triple what they could make at home. If, that is, they could find jobs at all.”

  “Well, all that bowing and scraping—they make me nervous,” Moran said.

  Moriarty chuckled as the waiter brought the drinks, groveled a bit, and left. “Turnabout,” he said. “I’m sure you make them nervous.”

  Mummer Tolliver appeared at the table in a brand-new suit of many colors—mostly grays and greens—and straddled a chair. “Evening,” he said. “I has a favor to ask of you, Professor.”

  “If it is in my power to grant it to you,” Moriarty told him, “it is yours.”

  “What?” asked Moran in mock astonishment. “Without even knowing what it is?”

  “Mr. Tolliver would not abuse my trust,” Moriarty said. “Any more than I would abuse his. There is, after all, honor among, ah, close friends.” He turned back to the mummer. “What do you need?”

  “Well, it’s like this, Professor,” Tolliver said, looking a little embarrassed. “Have you heard as how they’re opening up the ballroom in a day or so?”

  “No,” the professor told him. “I hadn’t heard.”

  “Well, they are. They was fixin’ the floor, laying down new parquet flooring and such, and now they’re done with the fixin’.”

  “Disgraceful!” said Colonel Moran. “I shall write to the Times about it. The idea of traveling aboard a ship without a functioning ballroom. Why didn’t they put the new flooring in whilst we were at dock, I ask you?”

  “It’s taken a gang of seven men two weeks to do it,” Moriarty commented. “That’s two weeks of paying wages and keeping steam up without going anywhere, if they were to do it at dock. It’s more profitable for the company to keep the ship working while they do minor repairs.”

  “I thought you didn’t know about this here ballroom work,” Colonel Moran said querulously.

  “I like to know everything I can about everything there is,” said Moriarty. “I merely meant I hadn’t heard that they’d finished the job.”

  “They’ve finished it off near enough so’s they’re going to have a little show on the stage and some dancing after,” the mummer said. “And so I want your help, Professor.”

  “You’d better ask Moran,” Moriarty said with a chuckle and a gesture. “He’s assuredly a much better dancer than I. Have him join you.”

  Moran recoiled a few inches. “Not on your life,” he said. “I’m not a dancing master sort of gent, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’m capable of dancing quite nicely all on my lonesome, thank you very much,” said the mummer, twisting his face into the grotesque frown of a greatly insulted man. “That ain’t nohow it.”

  “Then how may I aid you?” Moriarty asked.

  “I’m going to perform a few songs at thissere show they’re putting on, and I’d be properly pleased if you’d accompany me.”

  “The professor—sing?” Moran asked. This time the astonishment was not mock.

  “On the piano,” the mummer added quickly. “I would like you to play the piano for me, and perhaps join me in a little patter; a bit of back-and-forth banter, don’t you know. Which banter we will carefully work out aforehand, o’course.”

  “Well, Mummer, what a nice thought,” said Moriarty. “It’s been a while since I trod the boards.”

  “The stage lost a great talent when you decided to become a mathematics professor, if you don’t mind my saying so, Professor,” said the mummer.

  “What do you know—who would have guessed?” asked Moran. “The piano, no less.”

  Moriarty turned to him with an unreadable expression. “I’m also a virtuoso on the bassoon,” he said.

  Moran stared at him, his mouth open. “I don’t know whether you’re putting me on, Professor,” he said. “But I reckon it don’t much matter if you want to have your little joke.”

  “No, I don’t suppose it does,” Moriarty said. “How are you doing in the distribution of our lovely Lady, Mummer?”

  “I’ve put out a smatter of the statues where they’re sure to be noticed, as you suggested, Professor.”

  Colonel Moran swirled his gin and tonic around in the glass and stared at the professor. “How’s that?” he asked. “Perhaps, as we’re this far along, you should explain just what it is you expect to accomplish with this sleight-of-statue business. We can’t switch them out for the real one, ’cause that would be stealing and contrary to the agreement.”

  “True,” Moriarty agreed.

  “We could buy th
e thing from them, if they’d sell it. That would be legal and proper. But I don’t see how having a hundred of our own is going to get us any closer to that desirable consummation. Maybe we could get them to buy a couple of copies from the mummer here, but where would that take us?”

  Moriarty looked thoughtfully at the portrait of Queen Victoria on the far wall. “What we are endeavoring to do,” he told them, “is to convince the officers of the Duke of Moncreith’s Own Highland Lancers that the statuette they call the Lady of Lucknow would be a disgraceful and improper object for them to bring back to Castle Fitzroberts. After all, their wives and children—including daughters—dine at the officers’ mess at least three times a year.”

  “But it’s been there for years,” Moran objected.

  “Ah, yes. But for those years they were in ignorance. Now their eyes have been opened. With the proper assistance they shall purge themselves of this, ah, half-century lapse in judgment.”

  Moran thought it over. “If you say this trickery will accomplish the desired result,” he said, “then let’s get on with it. I will happily watch and learn.”

  Moriarty nodded. “It stands an excellent chance of doing the job.”

  “And ain’t nohow illegal,” said the mummer. “Not as I can see.”

  Moran nodded. “And that’s what counts, isn’t it? I’ve never been overly enamored with morality, that I’ve noticed.”

  “Nor legality, either, as I recall,” Moriarty added.

  Colonel Sebastian Moran looked insulted. “I’ve never done anything just because it was illegal,” he insisted. “There has to be some monetary incentive.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE LONELY SEA

  These are much deeper waters than I thought.

  —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  An evening’s entertainment in the newly reopened ballroom was scheduled for the second day out from Bombay. Most of the entertainers had been recruited from among the passengers themselves except for a trio of sailors who were rehearsing traditional sailors’ chanties (the bowdlerized versions) and Third Officer Beagle, who was going to play the mandolin and sing doleful songs about lost love. Doleful songs about lost love were very popular.

  The highlight of the evening, according to the daily bulletin posted in various places about the ship, was to be Mamarum Sutrow in his very-first-ever public performance as “Mamarum the Great, Prestidigitator and Magician Extraordinaire.”

  Chairs were set up in the ballroom, which had a stage at one end and was used for such entertainments. Electrical footlights and spotlights had been installed to illuminate the stage, and the chandeliers over the audience also held electrical bulbs capable of being dimmed slowly until they were out. This modern electrical lighting was, for much of the audience, as much of a novelty as anything they might see onstage. After the performance the chairs would be struck and the ship’s orchestra would play for the passengers to dance far into the night.

  Most of the first- and second-class passengers and those among the ship’s officers and crew who didn’t have other duties had filled the room by seven, when the foolishness was scheduled to begin.

  The first performer was a large woman in a copious pearl-gray dress singing about her “Willie,” accompanied at the piano by a small, thin woman in black, wearing a hat with a large feather. The bobbing of the small woman’s head as she played caused the feather to come loose from its moorings and droop in front of her left eye. She blew it out of the way with a well-placed puff of air until, two bars later, it fell again. Again the puff of air, and again . . .

  The audience was soon holding its collective breath in anticipation of each fall of the feather and, when the song came to an end, rewarded the performers with rapturous applause and even some cheering from a pair of eight-year-olds at the front. The ladies were startled at this, and very pleased. The singer’s husband, who was in the audience, never dared tell her the reason for their great success.

  The sailors came next, three hearty young men singing “Hearts of Oak” and “Blood Red Roses,” with great volume and enthusiasm, and bashfully accepting their applause.

  Peter and Margaret sat in the back row next to Lady Priscilla and her subaltern suitor and watched the show with divided interest. To Margaret’s eyes, Lady Priscilla was almost bubbling with suppressed excitement, while Lieutenant Welles seemed a mite subdued and worried. Sometime while the handsome white-tied young violinist was playing Pablo de Sarasate’s “Fantasy on Martha,” with his buxom and overly made-up mother at the piano, Lady Priscilla murmured something about taking a stroll on the promenade deck, and she and Lieutenant Welles slipped out of their seats and left the room.

  “I worry about her,” Margaret whispered to Peter.

  “I would say you should worry about him,” Peter replied softly. “I think that young lady can take care of herself.”

  The next on stage was Alfred “Mummer” Tolliver in his neatly pressed red-and-white-checked suit, accompanied on the piano by Professor James Moriarty, in black tie and tails.

  Sitting on the far right, about halfway along the files of chairs, were Dr. Pin Dok Low, in his disguise as a minor European nobleman, and his two companions. When Moriarty came out and sat at the piano, Pin leaned forward in his seat and intoned, “Professor Moriarty!” as though the name itself were a curse. “The Napoleon of crime, and he sits there like a respectable citizen. The man’s gall has no end.”

  “You ain’t no slouch in the crime department yourself, Pin,” murmured the Artful Codger.

  Pin turned to glare at him as the mummer began addressing the audience.

  “Evening, all,” said the little man. “I’m going to sing for you a couple o’ songs what me father taught me. ’E used to sing ’em in the music halls ’imself, ’e did—till the ushers threw ’im out.” He struck a pose. “Maestro, please!”

  Moriarty played a few odd-sounding chords, peered closely at the sheet music on the piano in front of him, and played a few more. The mummer opened his mouth to sing—and then closed it again. “No, no,” he yelled at the pianist, “that ain’t it.”

  Moriarty pointed at the sheet music. “This is what you gave me to play, little man, and this is what I’m playing.”

  “ ‘Little man,’ is it?” The mummer staggered, visibly hit by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Straightening up, he bellowed, “I’ll have you know I’m taller than I look!” He faced the audience and assumed his singing pose again. “Let’s take it from the top.”

  Moriarty began again: the same distressing chords.

  The mummer strode over to the piano, hoisted himself up on it, and walked across the closed top until he was standing over the keyboard. He looked down at the sheet music. Then, with an exaggerated sigh, he reached down and turned the music over end-for-end. Jumping off the piano, he returned to center stage. “It was upside down,” he confided to the audience. “Let’s try it one more time.”

  Moriarty studied the newly righted sheets for a second, and then commenced playing again and the mummer listened carefully and nodded. “That’s more like it,” he said. He struck his pose, waited for a few beats, and began:

  “As we drive to the Derby in a four-in-hand, a four-in-hand, a four-in-hand As we drive to the Derby in a four-in-hand . . .”

  After the first two verses, he interrupted the lyric for a soft-shoe shuffle, which got wider and higher and more energetic every moment, until it seemed that the stage could hardly contain the little man. The man wielding the follow spotlight had trouble keeping him in its beam.

  And then the music stopped and, instantly, so did the mummer: frozen in motion, one foot in the air, one arm outstretched. After holding the pose for a few seconds, he folded himself into a bow and swept his arm out to the audience before scampering off the stage.

  “The little chap’s done that before,” Peter murmured to Margaret through the applause.

  She nodded. “He is certainly energetic.”

  Lady Priscill
a and her beau returned to their seats just then. Was her face a little more flushed than when she left? It was hard to tell in the subdued light. And besides, Margaret reminded herself, strictly speaking it was none of her business. As she had assured Lady Priscilla on the first day of this voyage, she was not her stateroom mate’s keeper.

  The lights came up briefly, and then dimmed again. And then—magic!

  A curtain toward the rear of the stage was raised to reveal the painted backdrop of an open square in an Indian bazaar, the painting so lifelike that you felt you could walk up to it and feel the hard-packed earth under your feet, touch the wooden stalls, fondle the fresh fruit on one stand, smell the dried fish on another. So lifelike that it took a moment to realize that the table against one of the stalls, covered with a variety of not-quite-recognizable objects of brass and lacquered wood and ivory, was half painting and half actual table, jutting out from the backdrop.

  Mamarum the Great came out from stage left. He didn’t look quite as short (platform shoes?) or as tubby (perhaps a girdle?) as Margaret remembered. Indeed, in his gold and white kurta with the wide red sash and pointy red shoes, he looked handsome and dignified. He bowed at the audience and several scattered people applauded for a few seconds. He smiled and stood motionless until the applause and the nervous coughs had died out. Then he reached to the table behind him and picked up—from the half that was real table, and not part of the painted backdrop—a large, ornate brass pot and held it chest-high in front of him. He put his hand in the opening and ran it about inside, to show that the pot was empty. He turned the opening to the audience so they could see for themselves that there was nothing in it. He then held the pot upside down and shook it, and indeed nothing fell out.

  Mamarum peered into the air in front of him, as though looking for something suspended there that he could see but the audience could not. Holding the pot with his left hand, he reached for this invisible object with his right and snatched it out of the air. Then he tossed it, still invisible, into the pot, where it landed with a loud clink.