Untitled (18 page)

   So far breakfast—and dinner the evening before—has been punctuated with these moments, though up until now Mina has waited for this young woman to raise her head before addressing her again. But this morning she has this young woman to herself.

   "Then I will take you under my wing—for at least as long as you are here. Of course"—she takes a sip of tea—"we need to make plans for you."

"Oh," says Victoria, "Henry and I had plans—"

   "Now you need to make new plans. I don't mean to be brutal," she says, setting down her cup, "but you must consider what you will do. Do you intend to stay in England?"

   "Oh—" Her voice catches. "Oh, I don't know about that. I don't know a soul here." She bows her head again to stare into her plate.

   "Victoria, we are your family. Henry would have wanted us to care for you, and we will provide any sort of help that you need. If you don't want to stay, we'll arrange for you to return to India. Nothing could be more simple." There are crumbs on the tablecloth in front of her and she pushes them together with the ends of her fingers. "Why don't you explain again the nature of your circumstances before your marriage? Surely there must be someone you can go to."

   "I was living with my aunt," she says miserably.

   "And she would take you in again?"

   She nods, then tugs a handkerchief from her pocket. Her cries sound like coughs, and her shoulders tremble. Her crying doesn't last long. Then she sits up straight with her handkerchief wadded into her hand. "How can I go back? When I left I was a bride—"

   "You have to live somewhere. Naturally, you don't have to decide yet, and you can stay here for as long—"

   "Oh yes," Victoria says. "I think that will be for the best. For the time being. I will stay here."

   Mina gives her a gentle smile. "Of course."

   Of course. For either this young woman is really as helpless as she appears, or she has intended all along to find herself a home and an income by playing the bereaved bride. She could even, Mina thinks, have been put up to this. She doesn't appear to be the calculating sort—but isn't that the perfect disguise? Deceptions only work if they are convincing.

   From the mantelpiece a clock strikes the half hour, and Mina glances at it. Still time, she thinks, before they should leave, and then there will be the round of shops—hairbrushes and underclothes and shoes to replace all that were lost, then another visit to Mortimer's, for Victoria this time. She lowers her own head a little and keeps her voice soft to say, "Is your aunt a hard woman? Is that why you are reluctant to return to her?"

   Victoria's lips part in surprise, then she catches herself and bites the bottom one. "It's difficult to depend on someone for everything," she says. "And she is a woman with strong opinions."

   "Did she approve of your marriage to Henry?"

   "Henry?" She hesitates, and her eyes slide from Mina's face to the table to her own lap. "No," she says at last.

   "I'm surprised. What could she have found to disapprove of ?"

   The widow's face is a little pink now, and she picks up her fork and gathers the last grains of rice into a pile. "He didn't quite meet her expectations."

   "She must have had high expectations indeed if a man like Henry was beneath them."

   Victoria's fork scrapes against the plate, then she lets it drop with a clatter. She leans so far over it that for a moment it looks as though her hair is going to touch the remains of her breakfast. "I'm feeling a little unwell," she murmurs. "I think I'll lie down before we go out."

   "As you like." Mina pushes back her chair. However, the young widow is quicker and reaches the door before she can, and takes off quickly up the stairs.

   This is not grief, Mina tells herself. This is something else entirely.

       
A
low, dirty sky hangs over the city. There will be snow today. Robert can feel it as he steps into the hansom, where he sets down his bag on the seat beside him. Already his hands are cold, despite his new gloves. He tucks them into his pockets. He should have worn a scarf, he should have picked out a thicker pair of trousers, but somehow the widow's arrival has set everything at odds, and here he is, hunched against the cold.

   The driver clucks his tongue and the horse moves off. The tall houses of Cursitor Road slide past. When he was a boy they seemed like walls of monstrous proportions. He remembers running away from Nurse one day and these houses looming over him. He couldn't find his way home—they looked so much the same. So in the end he'd chosen one with an aspidistra in the window, though he knew that there was something different about the house, that it was not home, and had knocked anyway. Luckily it had been the Eliots' house and they'd sent a maid to take him back. And at home—Henry, sitting at the small table upstairs in the nursery, eating seed cake. Eating two slices, since Nurse, in her wisdom, had taken the slice off the plate laid for him and made him watch as Henry ate it. It had taken him a long time, and soon he'd had trouble swallowing it—but he'd finished it all, every crumb, for it was his duty to help punish his little brother.

   Henry. Gone now. Henry, who'd always been one for playing it safe because he'd believed Nurse's warnings about what happened to little boys who ran ahead or disobeyed or let their hands explore the parts of their bodies that were
dirty
. He'd taken a job in the civil service because what could be safer than a government job? Then India—a surprise until Robert had realized that out there an Englishman could be more than he ever could in England. A clerk who'd have lived in a terraced house with a maid-of-all-work in London could afford houseboys and—what had Henry called it?—a
khansamah,
while an administrator like Henry could live like a prince. He'd have felt it was his due—he'd always had that about him, that sense of the world being there to serve him.

   Hardly has the cab turned the corner when it comes to a halt. Angry voices, a horse's frantic whinnying. A carriage and a hansom are caught up, the two drivers shouting into each other's faces while around them the traffic gathers.

   He sits back with a sigh. What, he wonders, did Henry think of him, going where he needed for his research—to university, to Paris. Had Henry sensed a flatness to his own work? Had he wanted something more than to oversee the paying out of pensions, a job that, after all, many a man could have done? In his last few letters he'd written about how his predecessor had started a successful system that he'd continued, using thumbprints to identify which men had been paid and which had not because, with so many Indian men with the same name, and his officials overwhelmed by the numbers of pensioners, it had become evident that the system was being abused. One man, he'd said, was found to be collecting eight different pensions, and might never have been caught if not for having to leave his thumbprint as a receipt of payment. Surely, Henry suggested, this system could be used in Britain. Were fingerprints not the ideal way of matching a man to his name, with no possibility of mistake?

   He'd had to write back to explain—without a system to classify fingerprints, the vast numbers of records would be nothing more than a gigantic haystack through which officials would have to search. Galton had tried to develop such a system, but so far to no avail. It was the same problem presented by photographs—they were easier to take than Bertillon's precise measurements, of that there was no doubt. The trouble was, what did one do with all of the photographs—or all of the fingerprints—to make them usable? Monsieur Bertillon's system for anthropometry, with its drawers filled with cards classified by head sizes, arm lengths, and so on, meant that a person's data could very quickly be matched with an existing card, and any alias therefore uncovered. It had galled him—he had devoted his life to anthropometry only to have Henry think he was the one to understand the complex process of identification. Now he is sure that his annoyance must have seeped through his explanation, and his curt delivery of the news that Mother was failing. For why else would Henry not have told him about his engagement to Miss Dawes?

   The hansom jolts forward, stops again, then sways as his driver climbs down behind him. Robert pulls his watch from his pocket. He is going to be late.

   He brings his hands to his face and breathes on them. Maybe Mina is right. A woman possessed of a little knowledge and sufficient cunning would not find the deception a difficult one. The opportunities presented by the loss of the S
tar of the Orient
might have been more of a temptation than a woman of few scruples could resist. After all, Henry would have had no reason to hide the fact that he was returning to visit his sick mother, or that she might not live long. He might even have mentioned his life insurance, for he was always keen to encourage others to be as careful with their arrangements as he was with his own. For a woman in straitened circumstances that money could mean freedom from a life of penury and humiliation. Plus, one could not overlook the fact that Victoria had been found on the shore next to his body. Henry, facedown in the surf, by her account, and dead. After the three-week journey from Bombay, she'd have known who he was, would have known of his circumstances. Maybe she'd have known more than that. Enough to pass herself off as his widow.

   Yet if Mina is wrong—if she is wrong, then this woman who has already been through so much does not deserve their suspicions.

   He sees Victoria again as she was during dinner. Her thin neck bare and bent over her plate, her nervous way of blinking, the flush that crept up her face when she drank the glass of wine he insisted she take to bolster her spirits. A mouse of a woman, he thinks now. Does that explain why her answers were so short? Or why, when he enquired—delicately, he thought—how she and Henry had met, she'd said merely that everyone in Bombay knew everyone else, that everyone was thrown together? Or why, when Mina gently commented how romantic it must have been to have married so quickly, and so quietly, she'd looked down into her wineglass? Yes, she'd said, she supposed it was. When next she looked up a fragile smile had twitched across her lips, then fallen away.

   He'd caught Mina's eye and given a shake of his head, so slight he doubted if even Cartwright had noticed. Mina raised her eyebrows before reaching for her glass, and even though she asked a few more questions about Henry, he knew she was only holding in her curiosity for his sake. When Victoria had excused herself after dessert and the two of them had moved to the drawing room for tea, Mina had sat forward so they could not be overheard through the door and said in a low voice, "It's not that we
must
doubt her. But have you noticed how little she's told us? There's something not right, I'm sure of it." He'd had to admit that yes, it was odd—the fact of her marriage to Henry that they'd heard nothing of, the fact that she said so little when given every opportunity to convince them of who she was. The fact that she arrived with little more than the clothes she was wearing when the ship foundered, and so could not offer proof of her story.

   Perhaps he should make enquiries. It would not be so difficult— there must be someone in Bombay he can write to for information, and if the English community is as tight as Victoria has described it, her engagement to Henry could not have been a secret. If necessary, he could even ask for proof of their marriage, for there will certainly be a record of it.

   He leans to one side to see up the road into the knot of traffic, but instead his attention is caught by the hansom's horse lifting its tail and letting soft, steaming pats of manure drop to the ground. A little way up the street stands his driver on the edge of a crowd, looking on with his hands in his pockets as a man with a florid face swings his fist at a coachman in red livery. "Driver," Robert calls out. "Driver. Get me out of here. There must be a different route."

   It takes some time to attract his attention, and when he does it takes even longer to extract the cab from the tangle of carriages, carts, and omnibuses blocking the road and to turn it up a stinking alley that, the driver assures him, is the only shortcut available.

   Half an hour later Robert takes the stairs up to the offices of the British Institute of Anthropology two at a stride, his bag knocking against his legs. But he discovers to his annoyance that not only is Sir Jonathan not waiting for him, he is not in the office at all.

   "Not here?" he says to the secretary. "I don't understand. He requested a meeting at half past nine."

   The secretary is a rather hunched young man with hair slicked down firmly from a middle part. He daintily licks one finger to leaf through an appointment book on the desk. "Well," he says, "it appears you cancelled the appointment a few days ago. Sir Jonathan is in another meeting this morning."

   "I would remember if I'd cancelled our meeting, and I assure you—"

   Beside them the door opens, and for a moment he imagines it

must be Sir Jonathan, that the morning will not be wasted after all. A rather dapper man with a small moustache and glasses glances from him to the secretary and back. "Oh dear," he says, "I hope I have not intruded onto some delicate matter."

   "Merely some confusion over Sir Jonathan's schedule, Dr. Taylor," says the secretary.

   "Again?" He stands there leaning slightly forward, as though he is about to lift himself high onto his toes. "This must be the third time in a fortnight, Stallybrass. Someone needs to set their house in order." He gives the young man a wink.

   Stallybrass gives a weak smile that barely lifts the corners of his mouth. "Sir Jonathan is meeting with the steering committee. Perhaps you have some idea if he is likely to be detained the whole morning."

   "The steering committee?" He turns to Robert. "I am afraid that if you hope to see him you will have a long wait." Then he lowers his voice. "They do tend to get into things rather."