Keeping Bad Company (2 page)

‘Where shall I tell the driver, Miss Lane?'

More diplomacy. From a past perilous occasion, Mr Calloway was well aware of my address, but it wouldn't have improved Tom's mood to know that.

‘Abel Yard, off Adam's Mews, Mayfair.'

The landau creaked and rattled over the cobbles. It was mercifully too noisy for conversation but I was aware of Tom beside me, tense as a gun dog. At Abel Yard they both got down to help me out. In the light of the carriage lamps, I could see Tom wrinkling his nose at smells of cows and chickens wafting from the far end of the yard. At the bottom of my stairs I thanked them both, wished them goodnight and closed the door before Tom knew what was happening. I needed time. Now I was recovering from the surprise, my heart was singing out that my brother was back. But there'd be explanations and quarrelling to come, I knew that as surely as I knew the sun would rise. For my part, I wanted to know what he'd been doing at a reception in Whitehall when he should have been in Bombay. All next morning I waited in, sure that every carriage going along the mews, every footstep coming into the yard, was my brother's. By then, the desire for explanations had become a simple wish to see him again. When a knock came at the door in the yard, around noon, I practically threw myself down the stairs and flung back the door, ready to fall on his neck. This impetuosity must have surprised the footman who was standing there in a livery jacket of a strange bright brown colour, but he managed to keep his face a professional blank. I composed mine and accepted the card he was holding out to me. It had a gilded deckle edge and informed me in engraved copperplate that Mrs Benjamin Disraeli would be ‘At Home', at Grosvenor Gate, that afternoon, from half past two until half past four.

I carried it upstairs, puzzling it out. If Mary Anne Disraeli knew of my existence at all, it would be for reasons that would not have made me particularly welcome at her ‘At Homes'. So the invitation clearly came from her husband, who must want to speak to me. All too likely, it would be to pass on a message from my employers about my failure the previous evening. Not a pleasant prospect, but no help for it. The afternoon was mild and sunny so I put on my green-and-blue printed cotton dress and walked the short distance from Abel Yard to Grosvenor Gate. Mary Anne was receiving her guests in the huge upstairs drawing room. The place was a skirmish of colours, gold silk curtains, crimson carpet, chairs and sofas upholstered in yellow damask, the whole riot reflected in tall mirrors with ornate gilt frames. My hostess, in sage-green satin, welcomed me with a vagueness that confirmed my guess about the invitation. I kept apart from the groups of chatterers and waited, sipping tea and turning over the pages of a book of engravings of Italian ruins that had been left open on a piecrust table and, sure enough, Mr Disraeli appeared at my side within minutes. This afternoon he was relatively soberly dressed in blacks and greys, but his waistcoat was figured gold silk.

‘I trust you enjoyed the reception last night, Miss Lane.'

His voice and a lift of his eyebrow showed he knew very well that I had not, so I kept quiet and waited.

‘It must have been a great pleasure to see your brother again. I'm sure you had a lot to talk about.'

Was he being sarcastic? I glanced at him and realized that for once Mr Disraeli was not thoroughly well informed.

‘There's always a lot to talk about,' I said.

‘Quite so. I hope he's not feeling too nervous about giving evidence to the committee.'

I took a sip of tea, hoping to hide my surprise and probably not succeeding. It was becoming clear that whatever he wanted to talk about, it wasn't my failure of the evening before.

‘I don't think Tom's a nervous man,' I said.

‘Just as well. It can be an ordeal being questioned by a parliamentary committee, especially in the circumstances.'

I wanted to yelp out:
What committee? What circumstances?
It sounded terribly as if my brother had been recalled from India in disgrace, but surely, at his comparatively junior level, whatever he'd done shouldn't be serious enough to concern a committee of MPs. I hid my anxiety, knowing that you always got more out of Mr Disraeli if you knew a lot already.

‘I hadn't realized Parliament was so directly concerned with East India Company internal affairs,' I said.

In fact, it was a strange relationship. The vast concern that some people called John Company had grown, in around two hundred years, from a group of merchant adventurers to an organization with its own army that ran the whole subcontinent of India and much else besides. After a series of scandals, parliament had taken away some of its powers. Not enough of them, according to a lot of people.

‘The McDruggies have had some of their opium shipments confiscated by the Chinese,' Disraeli said. ‘They're yelling for compensation and war. When trade's going well, the last thing they want is Government interference. As soon as they take losses, we're supposed to sail in and save them.'

McDruggies? I tried not to let him see that I didn't know what he was talking about.

‘I don't suppose my brother's to blame for any of that.'

‘No. He's had the bad luck to be caught up in this affair on the fringes of it. Strictly speaking, it shouldn't concern the parliamentary committee. Still, when it comes to one of the Company men probably committing murder, I suppose we have to take a decent interest.'

At this point I might have given in and asked him who'd been murdered and what it had to do with Tom, but Mary Anne had spotted us and come rustling across the room, ringlets bouncing, obviously concerned that her husband had been speaking for too long to one woman.

‘Dearest, the Claverleys want to know about Vienna. Do come and talk to them.'

‘Of course, dearest. You'll excuse me, Miss Lane. We shall talk further.'

He let himself be rustled away, leaving me with half a cup of cold tea and a head spinning with questions.

I knew Tom must come that evening. I'd made everything in our parlour as ready as I could. A fire of best coal burned in the grate with the kettle on the hob and the teapot standing beside it. A bottle from the dozen of good claret a grateful client had sent me was decanted, the finest cold pie that money could buy standing on the table in case he was hungry. The cat was dozing on our new hearth rug. Mrs Martley, the very picture of respectability, knitted in her chair by the fire. My ex-street urchin apprentice, Tabby, was on duty in the yard, ready to whistle up as soon as a gentleman appeared. The whistle came at around eight o'clock, just after we'd lit the lamps. I flew downstairs and this time it really was Tom. Before he could say anything I threw my arms round him and hugged him tightly, trying to make up for those seven years of missing him. For all I knew, he was intending to carry on our quarrel from where he'd left off, but for a while at least I wanted to enjoy the sheer wonder of his being back. He hugged me in return, but with some reserve, then followed me upstairs and stood in our parlour like a stranger, holding his hat and gloves in his hand. When I introduced Mrs Martley as my housekeeper he gave her a polite nod of the head and she bobbed a curtsey. I felt like crying for the time lost but took his hat and gloves from him, made him sit in the other chair by the fire, wildly offered tea, claret, pie.

‘I'll take a glass of claret,' he said. ‘Our tea tastes fresher because we're closer to China. When you're accustomed to tea in the East, you have no taste for what they do with it in England.'

I made a clumsy business of pouring, hiding my dismay. I'd parted from a brave boy who'd been my follower and companion in adventures. I thought of us racing our ponies over logs in the woods, diving from rocks into the sea, daring each other to climb out of our bedroom windows at night and go watching foxes and badgers under the light of the moon. This young man's face and figure were rounded, his dark hair sleeked down. He seemed at least five years older than I was, rather than two years younger. When we'd parted, his voice had only just broken and his laugh was still a boy's. Now he spoke as if tea were a matter of grave policy. I couldn't tell what to do with this stranger who'd returned in my brother's place. Then, as I handed him his glass, I looked into his eyes and saw Tom hadn't gone away after all. They were still the fine dark eyes he'd had at fifteen. And, as so many times on our adventures together, the look in them told me that Tom was very worried or scared and doing all he could to hide it.

I touched my glass to his.

‘To your return.'

‘I'm not sure that it's worth toasting,' he said.

Discouraging. I poured a glass for Mrs Martley and handed it to her with a nod and an upward glance that told her to keep her promise: go upstairs and leave me and my brother alone. She went. Tom emptied his glass at two gulps.

‘Liberty, I was very surprised to find you—'

‘Never mind that,' I said. ‘What's all this about you and a parliamentary committee and a murder?'

That stopped him in his tracks. He almost dropped the glass.

‘How do you know about that?'

‘It seems to be pretty well common knowledge.'

That was hardly fair to Mr Disraeli, whose knowledge was anything but common but I wasn't ready to tell Tom about that particular friendship.

‘It was supposed to be a deadly secret,' Tom said. ‘That was why I couldn't write and tell you I was coming.'

‘So secret that you attend a Foreign Office reception with half the world there, but can't tell your sister?'

‘We were ordered to go to the reception. I suppose they wanted to see me and size me up before the formal proceedings.'

‘They being the MPs on this committee?'

A nod.

‘But why do they want to speak to you?'

‘Because I'm a witness. Except I'm not really a witness. There were no witnesses. That's the confounded thing about it.'

Those dark eyes were full of misery. I refilled our glasses.

‘You'd better tell me about it,' I said.

T
he story Tom told me took us into the early hours of the morning. It ranged the entire distance across India, from Calcutta in the east to Bombay in the west, and then a death just before dawn by some red rocks on a hill. Here it is as he told it.

‘The man who died was named Burton. He was the assistant of a merchant, Alexander McPherson. McPherson runs a company that exports opium from India to China and imports tea from China to Britain. They say he's well in with the Governor and a lot of the senior men in Calcutta. He used to work for the Company, but then branched out on his own. He's away trading in Canton half the time. He's supposed to be as rich as Croesus, built himself a house that's practically a palace, stuffed with plate and jewels. But like the rest of the opium men, he took a bad knock recently when the Chinese confiscated whole shiploads of the stuff. I've never worked in Calcutta so all I knew about him was from gossip, until he arrived in Bombay about eight months ago. It still wouldn't have been any concern of mine, except for the effect it had on the deputy head of my department, a man named Edmund Griffiths.'

Tom's voice was warm as he said the name, unlike his tone when talking about McPherson.

‘Although he's senior to me and a lot older, Griffiths and I hit it off as soon as he was transferred from Calcutta to Bombay. You'd like him, Liberty. He reminds me of father. He's spent most of his life with the Company, mostly as a local magistrate. He never cared much about money or promotion and as far as I can tell he lives on his pay. What he loves is India. He speaks dozens of the languages and dialects and even writes poetry in some of them. I've seen him joking on equal terms with a prince and hunkering down in the dust to talk to some old holy man. Of course, a lot of people in the Company don't care for that sort of thing. They call him “The Mad Griff”. Even before he joined us in Bombay, some of the older men were laughing and gossiping about him. They were wondering why he was being transferred all the way there from Calcutta. Then the story got out: he was being sent pretty well in disgrace because he'd made public threats against McPherson. And I have to tell you, Liberty, if I'd been in Griffiths's place, I hope I'd have been making threats against the man as well.'

Tom's eyes blazed and he ran a hand through his carefully combed hair, disordering it. He was beginning to look and sound more like the brother I knew.

‘Why?' I said.

‘Because the man was little better than a bandit. A long way back, in his magistrate days, Griffiths kept coming across natives who'd been deprived of their little bits of land by McPherson. The method was that he'd advance the farmers small loans, get them into debt then take over their land to grow opium. All legal, so there was nothing Griffiths could do about it, but he says it drove him nearly mad. He's never been a man to keep his views to himself, so he started trying to kick up a fuss about it, appealing to the Governor and so on. Eventually he realized it was a waste of breath. After all, who's going to worry about the opinions of some obscure employee against a man with McPherson's money and influence? So for years he kept on with his work and his language studies and tried to forget the likes of McPherson existed.'

‘So what happened?'

‘The latest trouble in China. You know the Chinese authorities don't want our opium? They keep trying to ban it, but McPherson and his like bribe the officials and get it in anyway, then just put the price up to cover the bribes. Quite recently, the Chinese have been taking a stronger line. They confiscated thousands of chests of opium, including a lot of McPherson's, and burned them. McPherson comes rushing back to Calcutta, expecting the Governor to pay compensation and send in warships. Well, the Governor's pretty powerful, but he can't do that without the say-so from Westminster.'