Fever Quest: A Clean Historical Mystery set in England and India (The Isabella Rockwell Trilogy Book 2) (10 page)

She laid the package on the table.

“There you are, Colonel Stone.”

There was a collective exhalation of breath.

Stone’s face was triumphant.

“After this, it will be
Governor
Stone.”

There was sycophantic laughter from the men packed in
around him.

Stone’s long white fingers snatched at the paper around
the package and in a second the grey dust glittered in its brown wrapping, the
packet with seeds on top of it. He laid it on the table and held a lantern up
closer to it. The men all bent forward.

“Is this a joke?”

Stone’s voice exploded with anger and he straightened up
and seized Isabella’s braid, jerking her head back so far she could see up his
hairless nose.

“What do you mean?” she gasped, blinking through tears of
pain.

“What is this?” he said, ferociously ramming her face onto
the table next to the paper packet. “This is not the Eye of Kali!
This
is a pile of dust.”

Isabella’s cheek stung and she could barely get her words
out.

“This is the package Al Hassan gave me. I have no other.”

Stone’s face was contorted in a rictus of hate. He seized
her bag and emptied all her possessions over the red dusty ground. Two men held
her shoulders as he pawed through everything she owned, hesitating for a moment
over the picture of her mother before passing on.

“Where is it?” Stone screeched at her, pulling at her
clothes, lifting her tunic and feeling up and down her legs and through her
hair.

Her eyes filled with tears of pain and shock.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“The Eye of Kali, my beautiful diamond. You have it, I
know you have it. Your friend Al Hassan stole it, then he gave it to you.”
Stone’s voice was nearly a shriek and his face was even whiter, his hands
shaking.

It was as if cold water had poured all over her.

“That is all he gave me. I’ve never had your diamond.”

One of the men had finished making a detailed search of
her belongings and he looked up at Stone, and shook his head.

Stone snarled.

“Take her away.”

Two guards moved in next to her and Isabella realised the
punka-wallah had been right. She wasn’t going to leave this mine.

Not today.

Maybe not ever.

“So, do you agree you should have gone to Lucknow as Al Hassan asked you to?”

“Do you agree that you shouldn’t talk of things you know
nothing about?” Isabella hissed back at Livia through the bars between them.

The prisons sat at the far end of one of the disused
tunnels off Kali’s chamber, and the walls and floor were damp. Rats scampered
in full view and Isabella sat as still as she could so as not to attract their
attention. All three of the girls had been shackled at the ankle.

“You can’t do this,” Isabella had shouted at Stone’s
receding back, her head pressed to the bars.

Stone had returned to her cell, his face impassive.

“I can do whatever I want. No one passes through Golconda without my knowing. You’re hundreds of miles away from anything or anyone, and
you broke your promise. I’d say you’re in serious trouble.” He leaned so close
to her, Isabella could smell his sour breath. “No one takes me for a fool.”

“I didn’t take you for a fool.” She could hear how
desperate she sounded. “That is the only package I was given!”

But Stone’s footsteps had disappeared down the tunnel and
the only person they had seen since was a guard with a bucket of murky water
for them to drink.

Rose and Livia had been put in the cell next to hers, and
Rose seemed to be asleep, but Isabella knew she’d been crying.

“I told you not to come with me,” she muttered to Livia.
“But I’m sorry I snapped, I didn’t mean to.”

Livia looked at her.

“Don’t worry. I don’t think we’ll be here for long.”

Isabella smiled. “I wish I had your confidence.”

“Why would he keep us here? We’re not worth anything to
him. He’ll let us out when he calms down.”

Isabella shook her head. Livia still thought she was in England where laws were followed and people of her class rarely vanished. She’d told her of
their encounter in the library on the boat. She hadn’t told her of the passion
on Stone’s face as he’d spoken. The obsessiveness with which he’d ransacked her
belongings. If he wasn’t mad before, the dashing of his hopes might have pushed
him over into insanity.

“Livia, we may as well have dropped off the face of the
earth. Your parents won’t be looking here. They have no idea where we have gone
and Stone can do as he pleases. As long as he keeps the kimberlite coming, I’ll
bet the East India Company leaves him to it,” said Isabella.

“What about the Maharajah?” asked Livia, pulling her tunic
around her against the cold and damp of the walls. She was shivering.

“He’s just a boy, apparently.”

“Yet he is still on the throne?”

Isabella nodded and Rose sighed deeply and turned on her
other side, her face young and peaceful as she slept.

“Midge will try and get us out, won’t he?”

Isabella took a deep breath. “I hope so.”

Livia smiled, a funny smile.

“I know you’re thinking Rose and I must hate you right
now, but I don’t. Even if Stone sends me back to my parents, at least I will
have spent the night in a diamond mine. I might even see a real diamond one
day. That would never have happened to me in Sussex.”

Isabella smiled, grateful for the kind words.

“Thanks.” She scratched her itchy scalp covered with the
fine dust of the mine. “If only we could find one, our troubles would be over.”

Livia laughed softly, but the sound of footsteps made her
stop. They both looked up and Isabella’s heart soared, for there was Midge. He
was clean and his hair had reverted to its blond thatch; his clothes were
native and he wore the same upturned slippers as Stone. Around his neck he wore
a fine silver chain with a small uncut red stone on it.

Isabella whistled. “Get you, Colonel Midge.”

He didn’t smile.

“Who are your friends?”

“You’ve met them before. Livia and Rose from the boat?”

Midge raised his brows and then frowned. “Oh, yeah. What
you tryin’ to do? Disguise ’em?”

Isabella nodded. “It hasn’t worked very well.” She waited
for Midge to make a joke back, but none came.

“Yeah. They’re not very good, are they?”

Isabella was stung. “Well, you didn’t recognise them.”

Midge shrugged. “It’s dark down here.”

A very slight chill took hold of her.

“Are you here to let us out?”

Torchlight bounced off his hair as he shook his head.

“No. Sorry. It’d be more than my job’s worth. Stone’s
furious you tried to trick him.”

Isabella gripped the cold metal bars.

“I didn’t try and trick him. I gave him what Al Hassan
gave me. I thought that’s what he wanted. I had no idea someone had stolen the
Eye of Kali.”

Midge’s face had no expression on it.

“I suppose it was lucky he brought me somewhere that was
on your way. You might not have come at all.”

Isabella shook her head. “Please don’t say that.”

But Midge kept talking, as if the tide of anger inside him
had risen so quickly he couldn’t stop it from overflowing.

“Do you know what it was like pulling away from the dock
in that carriage with the Jefferies? We was finally in India, after having listened to you talk about it for a year, and you weren’t with me. I wondered
why I’d left London at all.”

A great wave of shame washed over Isabella, turning her
face and chest red. She looked at the ground.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated.

“I was sorry, too,” he added, moving closer to the bars,
his face blank. “But I’m not any more. I’ve got a good job here, and for as
long as I want, Stone says.” Isabella’s heart clenched. “So I think this is
where we go our different ways, Miss India. It’s nothing personal. It was – but
it’s not any more.”

Midge turned and walked away back up the tunnel,
his shadow tall and broad, like a man’s. Livia shuffled as close to her as the
bars allowed, but Isabella slumped down the wall, and laid her head on her
folded arms. Why should she have expected anything different? Her only comfort
was that it was exactly what she deserved.

There is nothing so unpleasant as the feeling of
guilt, thought Isabella. It sat around her shoulders and neck like an invisible
muffler carved from ice. Would there ever be a time when she didn’t have to
feel bad about herself?

She shivered, thinking back to the bone-aching cold of the
London streets in December; how she hadn’t eaten for three days before Midge
had offered her shelter. His sister, Ruby, had given up her own life trying to
help Isabella save Alix. Isabella hung her head. She didn’t want to think about
Ruby. Kind, trusting, loving Ruby who’d given her the hot, dripping sausages;
the only food between Isabella and starvation.

Ruby asked nothing of you, but that you take care of
Midge.

Isabella screwed up her face and clamped her hands on each
side of her head, trying to drive the thought away. It made her too
uncomfortable, like how her teeth felt when she heard knives being sharpened on
stone.

She must distract herself.

She opened her bag and took out the seeds. The packet of
powder must still be on the table where the men had argued. Isabella let the
seeds fall, one by one, onto the sodden ground of the cell. She’d never find
out what they were now.

“Miss Rockwell?” The voice was soft and unctuous.

Rose and Livia slept on, wrapped in their shabby clothes.

“Yes?”

Isabella squinted. The torchlight was low and she couldn’t
see who had spoken. A shape came closer and she got to her feet when she heard
the rattle of a key in the lock. The man standing in front of her in the gloom
was thin to the point of emaciation and he wore only a white loincloth. His
moustaches and beard grew in an iron-grey waterfall down to his chest; his
thick eyebrows were the same colour and sprouted in many different directions
beneath his white turban. His cheeks were so deeply furrowed Isabella found it
hard to work out how old he was. He had the look of a holy man who had lived
most of his life on the road eating nothing but roots and seeds, so that he
would be pure in body, as well as soul.

The cell door swung open.

“Come,” he said gesturing to her. “I must speak to you.”
Isabella glanced at the girls. “Alone.”

She tiptoed out of the cell. A few moments later they came
to the mining chamber, silent, but still lit, the brazier throwing a giant
black shadow on one red wall. It was warmer here and Isabella felt the clammy
chill of the prison start to leave her skin. The man made his way to the table
where the paper containing the grey dust still lay, forgotten. He held a chair
out for Isabella and she sat down on it. How strange he was. His eyes, now she
could see them, were a deep burning black.

He sat down next to her and reached for the paper with a
thin brown hand. His little finger had a long curved nail and he ran it through
the powder, almost lovingly.

“Who are you?” Isabella couldn’t help asking. The ease
with which he moved through the mine must mean he was someone important.

“My name is Vritra. I am healer to the Court of Golconda.”

“You look more like a sadhu,” said Isabella, surprised.

Vritra smiled. “I used to be a sadhu, but I found my
calling here.”

Isabella watched his face.

“I didn’t know diamonds were a ‘calling’.”

She and her father had a natural distrust of sadhus, who
were the travelling holy men of India. They could often be found where there
was unrest, and Isabella’s father thought they stirred up trouble, as they
moved from town to town.

Vritra looked down his long nose at her.

“I have no need of diamonds.”

“That would make you the only one around here, then,” she
muttered under her breath.

“I do want to know how you came across this.” He tapped
the brown paper wrap.

Isabella sighed wearily.

“I’ve told Stone all I know. If you want any more details
I’ll need something to eat.” She paused. “And something for my friends.” It was
not as if she had anything to lose.

Vritra raised his impressive eyebrows, but he nodded at
one of the guards who’d accompanied him, who brought over some fruit.

“Yes, I know what you told Stone, but there must be more,
such as where the powder came from. Or what this Hassan Al Hassan had been
doing before you met up with him.”

Isabella’s mouth was full of banana.

“I told you. I don’t know.” She swallowed. “Why?” She
looked at him closely. Vritra lifted his hand and licked a grain of grey dust
off his nail with a pale tongue. The crystals dissolved and the man closed his
eyes, as if in prayer. He opened them and looked at her.

“Is this
all
he gave you?” Vritra seemed so certain
there might be something else that Isabella instinctively covered her tracks.

“Yes.” She hesitated. “What else would there be? I don’t
even know what this is.” She nodded towards the powder. That, at least, was
true.

Vritra’s eyes searched hers, but she kept her gaze steady.
He looked back down at the paper.

“This is fever tree bark.”

Isabella frowned. Fever tree? Hadn’t she heard Abhaya
speak of it?

“Isn’t that the magical remedy for malaria?” she spoke out
loud.

Vritra smiled, red lips pulled back over large white
teeth.

“You are knowledgeable.”

“I was well taught,” she said shortly. “But I thought
fever tree was just a figment of someone’s imagination. No one I’ve ever met
has seen it –”

“And yet it was rumoured to exist,” interrupted Vritra.
“Odd that. And now here it is.”

“But how do
you
know?”

“I’ve been lucky enough to see it before, in Macau. A monk had smuggled some in from Peru in the South Americas. Or so he said. So we
gave it to a sailor with the malaria fevers. The fever broke and he returned to
full strength in a matter of days.”

“The fevers didn’t return?”

Isabella was incredulous. This, above all things, was the
difficulty with malaria. The person would recover and appear well, but days
later, regular as clockwork and with no warning, they would fall ill again with
fevers so high they could slip into a coma, and from there some would make
their way on to death.

Vritra shook his head.

“Not once, and we stayed in Macau for thirty days, as did
he.”

Isabella blew out her cheeks.

“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have
believed it,” Vritra added.

“And I thought it was powdered pearl,” snorted Isabella to
herself.

“Well, it is not so very different.”

“But why haven’t any of us seen it any sooner?” she asked,
thinking of the legions of British felled by malaria as soon as they arrived in
India. It didn’t matter who they were, soldiers, generals, wives, servants or
children. They all suffered the same.

“It grows in the South Americas, but priests there control
the supply. They never let any of the plants out of the country. Of course,
people smuggle it out all the time, but in India we never get to see any. It’s
so highly prized it never gets past Europe.”