She said in a rush: ‘Will I be required to give evidence?’
‘I’m preparing a written submission.’ He gave her a tight smile. ‘I’m not sure it would be advantageous to call you for questioning.’
‘But you will present our case?’
He gave a tight smile. ‘Frankly, Mrs Whyte, I’m not sure I have a case to present.’
Chapter Thirty
Asha
Cook found a new position. An Anglo-Indian family, recently settled in Port Blair and amused to tell their friends: our cook was in service with the deputy commissioner, you know, the one who was poisoned to death.
The salary was less, Cook said, but what to do?
Asha walked into the kitchen to find him on his knees, rifling through cupboards. He pulled out dishes and bowls and ladles and wrapped them, one by one, in newspaper and packed them into wooden cases. He hummed as he worked.
‘You can lose that look.’ He turned, a carving knife in hand. ‘Good things, nah? Expensive things. No point in waste.’ He wrapped up the knife and slotted it down the side of the case. ‘Sahib is expired, may the gods bless him. And don’t tell me she’ll be needing them, not where she’s bound.’ He chuckled. ‘She won’t be needing anything.’
Asha left him and trailed back up the staircase to the upper storey. However much polish Bimal rubbed into the tables, the rooms had died since they became empty. The spirit of the house was flown and the space held nothing but sadness in it.
She ran a hand along the top of the planter where her mistress liked to read. A strand of her brown hair was still caught there in the wicker. It shone in the low light, which pressed through the shutters.
In Isabel Madam’s bedroom, she opened the wardrobe, fingered the finely stitched clothing, then turned to the dressing table and slid open the top drawer. Jewellery was packed neatly in boxes. Silver bracelets and gold ones too and necklaces with precious stones, which used to sparkle on her mistress’s bare neck in the lamplight. She knew every piece. She had cleaned and polished them for months. She hesitated. She was owed wages, wasn’t she? She thought of Cook’s words: she won’t be needing them, not where she’s bound.
In his office at the back of the restaurant, Amit held up first one piece and then another. His eyes bulged behind his spectacles. The light, catching the fine gold and silver chains, sent filaments of sunshine across his desk.
‘Are you become a common thief, child?’ He didn’t look at her, he looked at the jewellery as it twisted in the light. ‘What would your dear baba say?’
‘Can you sell them?’
He shrugged. ‘They’d fetch a lot.’
He spent time arranging the jewellery on the papers in front of him. The chains. A bracelet. A necklace set with a single turquoise. Then the fancier, grander pieces with multiple stones. Rings set with rubies, even a diamond.
After admiring them for some time, he lifted his eyes to her face and said softly: ‘I won’t sell them. It’s a very wrong thing.’
Her cheeks became hot. She scooped up the jewellery and pushed it back into her pockets.
‘I need money, Amit-ji. I want to go back to Delhi. I want to become a teacher.’
‘A teacher?’ He considered her for some moments in silence, peering at her through his spectacles. ‘I will arrange everything. I will give you money also, for your passage and food and all. But leave the jewellery, child.’ He hesitated. His eyes became solemn and sad. ‘For whatsoever deeds you have done here in Port Blair, may the gods forgive you.’
The trial was almost over. Soon, the verdict would come. Once she heard it, she would sail from that place. But before that, she needed to see her mistress. She needed to be certain that she suffered, as her baba had suffered and Krishna-ji too.
In return for rupees, Amit’s friend, the guard, granted her a mercy visit, a chance for the loyal maid to comfort her beloved mistress. That might be arranged, he said as he pocketed the cash.
The smell of the jail stabbed deep in her belly, the sour stink of despairing men, packed close together. She stopped to catch her breath, pulled her dupatta closer round her face. Last time she came here it was to visit Krishna-ji, desolate in his cell. It seemed a long time ago.
The guard led her through the gates, then along a dim passage, dotted with cells and stopped at last beside a heavy door.
‘If she kicks up a fuss,’ he whispered, ‘you’ll have to leave.’
Asha shrugged. She was here now. The rest was in the hands of the gods.
He peered through the spyhole, then drew back the bolt, turned the key and opened the door. She slid through the narrow gap.
The room stank. The shabby cot, the slop bucket, the rickety chair and table were as dismal as those she had seen in Krishna-ji’s cell.
Her mistress lay on the cot, her eyes closed. Her hair, once so neatly groomed, hung about her neck in rats’ tails. She wore a prison dress, a rough piece of serge, which bunched around her slim waist. Asha thought of the fine clothes hanging in the wardrobe at home, clothes that she had stitched and brushed and hung.
Her mistress opened her eyes and sat up.
‘Asha?’ She seemed lost for a moment. ‘Is it morning?’
‘Yes, madam.’ She said it without thinking, then cursed herself. She was a prisoner now, no longer her madam.
Isabel Madam blinked, stared around her. ‘I was dreaming. Dreaming about you, Asha, and here you are.’
For a moment, Asha didn’t know what to say. She wanted to enjoy power over her enemy. She expected Isabel Madam to rail against her, even to strike her. In fact she looked pitiful. Stripped of her finery, of her rank, she looked tired and broken.
Isabel Madam lifted her legs over the side of the cot and set her feet on the floor. Her movements were slow and careful. She arched her back, stretched her arms.
Asha thought: Why care for your body when it has so little time left in this world? Soon it will rot in the ground. Like the bodies of those I loved.
‘Tell me. Why were you the mistress and I the maid?’
Her mistress looked surprised, then sad.
‘I don’t know, Asha.’ She nodded thoughtfully. ‘There’s no justice in this world, is there?’
Isabel Madam picked up the one chair, set it near the cot and, with a twist of her hand, invited Asha to sit. It was the way she seated her guests, all those days ago in the old life, for afternoon tea.
Asha sat down, then watched Isabel Madam settle again on the cot. The mattress was threadbare and sagged under her weight. Isabel Madam set her hands in her lap. Her fingers were thin. Her wedding ring fell forward to her knuckle and she pushed it back with an automatic movement.
‘I’m glad you came.’ Her cheeks were hollowed but her voice was calm. ‘I wanted to see you.’
Asha narrowed her eyes. It was a trick. Harden your heart against your mistress, Krishna-ji had said.
Isabel Madam said: ‘You did it for your father, I suppose?’
Asha glanced at the cell door. No one knew she was here, only Amit’s friend.
‘For my baba, yes. And for Sanjay Krishna-ji.’
‘Sanjay Krishna?’ She looked surprised. ‘You knew him?’
‘I loved him.’ She paused. Isabel Madam’s eyes were fixed on hers, alert. ‘Those letters he sent you? I was bringing them.’
‘But how?’ She looked puzzled. ‘How did you know him?’
‘In Delhi. You Britishers martyred his uncle, that same man who saved me from the slum and sent me to school. Sanjay Krishna protected me when my baba was sent away to prison for so many years. For what? For serving his master, only. He was a simple man, a good man.’
Isabel Madam looked dazed. ‘So much I never knew.’
‘I ran with him, when he escaped.’ She pointed to her chest. ‘I did that. I hid in the jungle for so many weeks and fed him, tended him, tried to save him.’ She paused, remembering the bitterness of his death. ‘Until you hunted him down.’
Isabel Madam
slowly nodded. ‘When you disappeared. That was it, was it?’ She spoke in a low voice. ‘I see now.’
They sat in silence for some time. Isabel Madam’s eyes settled on her hands, composed in her lap. Her forehead tensed in a frown.
‘You hated my husband. I see that, Asha. We did a great wrong, to you and your baba.’
The room blurred and swam. Asha blinked, forced her mouth into a tight line. Harden your heart.
Isabel Madam spoke slowly, choosing her words with care. ‘You’re a clever girl, Asha. I always knew that.’ She paused. ‘You poisoned him. I understand. But why pin the blame on me?’
Asha mastered the corners of her mouth at last and tried to smile. ‘You don’t know, do you? My baba and me also, we were of so little consequence, nah? Crushing an ant under your shoe and walking on without a thought.’
Isabel Madam’s face was puzzled.
‘Your sweeper, all alone, with a baby daughter to care for? He never stole money. But your mama and baba dismissed him just the same. With no reference, he had no hope of another job. That is your justice, madam. The justice of Britishers. Now you understand.’
She walked to the door, banged on the wood for the guard to let her out. She didn’t look again at Isabel Madam. She imagined this as her moment of triumph. In fact, her chest was tight with a suffocating sadness, a pressure she could hardly bear.
Chapter Thirty-One
Isabel
The sky was black that night. Isabel sat on the cold floor, her knees drawn up to her body and her back hard against the door of the cell. She fixed her eyes on the high window. A fragment of darkness was framed there. She imagined dissolving into it and becoming nothing.
Tremors ran through her legs, making her feet judder against the ground. She slid her hands to the floor. It was rough with fragments of grit and grainy to the touch. Death rushed towards her. She felt its coldness, smelt its rotten breath in her face. Not feeling. Not being.
She put her hands to her face and felt the sharpness of the bones, the hollows of her cheeks and eyes. How could it be? It was nonsense, all nonsense. She saw it all so clearly but there was nothing she could do to save herself. Asha was too clever. She was caught fast.
She pulled herself to her feet and started to pace, back and forth across her cell. Justice. How could there be no justice? She banged the flat of her hands against the door until they smarted. The warm wood shivered in its frame. She tipped back her head, opened her throat and screamed. The cry, shrill and other-worldly, echoed round the walls and flew back to her. She slumped back to the floor, sank her face in her hands and wept.
Edward was in Port Blair. He wanted to see her. If she closed her eyes, he was almost there with her, in that bleak cell. His arms tightened round her. His fingers touched her hair. His body, pressing down on hers, smelt warm and close as they clung to each other in the death hut, their last night together.
The pain sat with her for a long time. Slowly, even as she still sobbed, her thoughts began to shift and expand. Rahul and Sangeeta were there. Asha and her father. Sanjay Krishna and the condemned men, chained like animals in the hold of the ship. The prisoner on hunger strike, a man whose name she never even knew, locked in a cell like her own until force-feeding caused his death.
She shifted her position on the hard floor. Memories from childhood crowded round. Her father when she was a child, lifting her onto the back of her first pony and leading her round the paddock and joy so intense that it overwhelmed her. Her mother, resplendent in a feathered hat, presiding over the tea tray in the drawing room, while outside the monsoon threw puddles across the verandah. She blinked against her palms. It was finished for her, this life, but the disgrace would haunt her parents for years to come.
The night was still. She thought of the Mission hut on Car Nicobar, where the calls and caws of the jungle sounded constantly and the air shimmered with the slow, thick breathing of women, generation huddled against generation.
She thought of James, that solemn boy, who crossed the boundary between this world and the next. He entered the realm of his ancestors and returned to rejoin the living, cauterised by knowledge.
But most of all, she thought of Edward. His gentle, strong presence each evening, as they sat side by side in the darkness, watching the dying fires and the Nicobarese gathered round them. She shook her head. He would be ruined. It was her doing. She would go to her death knowing it.
They would force him to take the witness stand and he would speak the truth, of course he would. He was not a man to lie before God. He would confess his feelings for her, for the wife of a fellow officer. They committed adultery. He would admit it, how could he not? His own reputation both as a man of honour and as a man of God would be destroyed. The prosecution would hound him. He would be left with the knowledge that, in admitting his feelings, he would also, in the eyes of the court, confirm her motive for murder and send her to the gallows. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until the darkness spangled.
Her legs ached from sitting. She got again to her feet, strode back and forth through the faint ladders of shadows drawn on the floor by the barred window, light and shade, light and shade. She would hang. The walls shrank around her. That already seemed certain. But there might yet be a way of protecting him.
She drew the rickety chair to the table and reached for pen and paper. In the half-light, barely able to read the words on the page, she began to write.
Afterwards, her body exhausted, she sank again to the floor and watched for some hours the soft changes in the sky as the night receded.
The jungle stirred and woke and a chorus of birdsong broke the silence. This routine breaking of the day seemed a phenomenon of such great beauty that she felt ashamed to think of all the dawns that she had never risen to witness and all the days she had squandered, little realising how few remained.
Mr Scott lifted his eyes from the papers in his hands. His face was hard with curiosity.
It was Sunday. She had to beg the guard to summon him and Mr Scott had looked cross when he finally arrived.
‘You do understand what this means?’
‘I am of perfectly sound mind.’ She gazed at him levelly. ‘You will agree with that, I hope?’
He narrowed his eyes, set the document to one side and considered her at length. ‘This furious argument with your husband. It was all about your friendship with Sanjay Krishna, you say.’
She nodded. ‘That’s why I went to the Nicobar Islands in such haste.’ She hesitated, swallowed. ‘My husband found out about my letter to Mr Krishna, as Mrs Copeland and Mr Barnes both testified. He was furious. It remained an issue between us, even after my return. That’s why I administered the poison. I couldn’t bear the arguments any longer.’ She paused, then added with some force, ‘Any suggestion that my relationship with Mr Johnston was improper is nonsense. Nothing but malicious gossip.’
‘I see.’ Mr Scott’s eyes never left her face. ‘Mrs Whyte, do you wish to die?’
Her eyes followed the fragments of flaked lime on the floor. ‘No sane person wishes that.’
‘But you state quite clearly here that you murdered your husband in cold blood. You leave no room for leniency.’ He pressed forward on his hands and pushed himself to his feet. ‘When it comes to sentencing, Sir Philip will have little choice.’
Her hands clasped each other in her lap, turning her wedding ring in an endless cycle. ‘I understand.’
He crossed to the cell door.
She said: ‘The prosecution will be satisfied, I assume?’
‘I imagine so.’
On the far side of the door, the bolt scraped back. Mr Scott hesitated. ‘I’m curious, Mrs Whyte. What made you change your plea at this late stage?’
‘I want to leave this world with a clear conscience.’ She steadied her breath. ‘That’s all.’
When Sir Philip entered the courtroom on Monday morning, his expression was grim. Isabel fixed her eyes on her hands. Edward might
be there. She couldn’t bear to see him.
The prosecution lawyer read her confession to the court. His voice was strong and his delivery theatrical. The men and women of Port Blair strained forward to listen.
Afterwards, the guard prodded Isabel to her feet.
Sir Philip’s eyes were cold.
‘Mrs Whyte, is this your own confession, given freely and fairly?’
‘It is.’
‘You have changed your plea to guilty?’
‘That is correct.’
He sighed. The room fell silent as he reached for his black cap. His stern voice echoed through the room.
‘Isabel Whyte, I find you guilty of the murder by poisoning of your husband, Jonathan Whyte. I sentence you to be taken from this place and hanged by the neck until dead, so help you God.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
Asha
It was dusk. The fisherman curved forward, then pulled back, tightening the muscles along his arms and legs, forcing the rowing boat through the waves with urgent strokes. He was elderly and his teeth were stained red from chewing betel.
At first, the salty breeze across the water was pleasant but as the setting sun sent red streaks across the dark expanse of sea, it became chill. Asha wrapped her shawl round her head and shoulders.
‘Bas, madam. Far enough, nah?’ He sat, resting his forearms on the gathered oars, and waited as she twisted round and looked back at the black water. Beyond, further down the coast, the lights of Port Blair shone. Waves slapped against the wooden sides of the boat, rocking them. Below, an endless volume of water threatened oblivion.
‘Thik hai.’ She nodded. ‘It’s fine.’
He lit a bidi and smoked, his eyes gazing vacantly across the water.
She opened her bag and put together her offerings. She prepared each with care, taking a broad green leaf, adding a pat of ghee, rolling a strand of cotton into a wick and embedding it deep in the ghee, then, finally, placing in the leaf, beside the ghee candle, a bright-yellow flower which, until an hour ago, grew wild in the bushes close to the shore.
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