Deliberately, I exhaled. “There are half a dozen East India Company soldiers in the village sent by Mr. Sack, ready to raid the premises—it’s time this was ended.”
Conversely, her eyes burst now to life, as if I had turned up a gas lamp.
“Are there?” she said softly.
“Yes, so you see—”
“Then you are correct, Miss Stone. It is time this was ended.”
Garima Kaur’s voice was a scalpel, and a small wound in the rational world opened; I had assigned many characteristics to her since that morning—brilliant, vengeful, and ruthless all figured prominently.
Not once had I suspected her mad.
“You cannot mean to fight them,” I pleaded. “The people you care about will be hurt, maybe even killed, and the wars are over, you cannot bring the battlefield to England and expect—”
“How came you to be here?” she interrupted, swinging the long knife in a lazy, expert circle around her index and middle fingers before palming it again.
“I think you killed David Lavell.”
She laughed. “Remarkable. What else do you think?”
“I think that John Clements was in love with you, and when his colleague Mr. Sack received a taunting letter from Sardar Singh, I think . . . I think he suspected you were the one behind it. All those years he trusted you, fed you information without realising that’s what you wanted him for. And I think when he concluded you had stolen the trunk, and had finished Lavell, I think he confronted you, and you poisoned him in his rooms in London.”
Her mouth worked again, but now pain warped the derision, and she paused before speaking. It was an expression I knew well and, though kissed by madness thanks to my mother, I did not think I lived in its embrace as Garima Kaur did, that obsessive desire to right the single great wrong which has swept your life off its course. We could have been sisters otherwise, for our propensities; we could have been friends.
Her silent shock confirmed my suspicions, albeit superfluously—I had only to recall the single thread connecting the dead men to know I was right.
Mr. Sack was the one who had first stimulated my interest, when he had said of John Clements, He was low over the project, over his lack of progress. Then he saw an old love of his briefly, and he sank further into melancholy. Honestly, Miss Stone? I believe he took the soldier’s way out.
Half a clue is as useless as none at all; but then I recalled a scrap of conversation which illuminated a dark landscape.
Poor old Johnny, with that puppyish way he had about him, Mr. Thornfield had said to Mr. Singh the night I had eavesdropped on them. Remember when he used to sniff around your secretary as if she were Cleopatra?
Garima Kaur, of course, was that secretary—a woman loved by a British political she used and despised, a woman capable of copying her employer’s penmanship and imitating his voice even in a language she loathed, writing, Your Company has raped my entire culture in systematic fashion. Mr. Singh had remained in Lahore throughout the First Sikh War guarding Sahjara, I was certain, for it fit all I knew of him, but his secretary—the loyal princess with the accomplished knife hand—had made at least one delivery to David Lavell in Amritsar, and she had left him with a gash through his neck.
“I think you may have tipped Jack Ghosh as well,” I mused, “but I’m not entirely certain of that. Did you?”
“Yes.” She had recovered her poise, though the sunken pits of her pupils were glassy. “I contacted him through Clements—he was staying in the village. I waited until Sardar and Charles were guaranteed to be absent, and then I sent him word they were away from home.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“To be rid of him. I could have finished him for us. And to be rid of you.”
“I don’t . . .” I faltered. “God in heaven. Why should—”
“I removed the jewels from Sardar and Charles’s keeping, yes, having heartily approved their taking them.” Her voice was as smooth as a river stone and twice as cold. “They were keeping it unguarded, in a child’s trunk. I was on my way to meet Sardar when I glimpsed Sack leaving the house in a sort of ecstasy. Sahjara confirmed she had shown him her dolls—I was forced to act quickly. I buried the trunk in the depths of the warehouse the Thornfields shared with Sardar, wedged between cracked jades and silks from poor dye lots, where no one would ever look. When Ghosh took Sahjara . . .” She directed a series of guttural curses in an unidentifiable tongue at the sloped ceiling. “They ran off like puppies, did not tell me what was troubling them, or I could have given them the trunk. Her mind was forever altered, and I love that little girl as if she were mine. How could I not vow to kill Jack Ghosh? I waited for years, until the perfect opportunity arose. I meant to do it with my own blade—after he had finished you, of course, but that did not go as planned.”
“Yes, but as for myself—”
“I said, I love that little girl as if she were mine!” she screamed.
The air turned to ash between us—thick and hot in our throats, as if a volcano had erupted.