• EIGHTEEN •
“INDIA, IN THEM DAYS, was like ’eaven and ’ell tossed into a stone kettle and boiled. Still an’ all, everyone was dyin’ to get into it—the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, and yes, the English, too, all clawin’ away at one another to be top dog. To say nothin’ of the Mohammedans and the Moghuls what were tryin to ’ang onto what was rightly theirs.
“More wars than you could count on all your toes and fingers put together, fought over a country full of snakes, elephants, lions, leopards, tigers, rivers, mountains, monsoons, and malaria.”
“But why?” I asked.
“Business,” Alf said. “Agriculture. Tea and timber. Rice. Coffee and cotton. Opium.”
“Ah,” I said, as if I understood. “Who won?”
“We did, of course.”
“At the Battle of Plassey?” I asked, trying to be one jump ahead of him.
“Among others,” Alf said. “That was just one of ’em. One of the best, though. Bengal, Trichinopoly, Pondicherry, Coromandel … they don’t make names like that nowadays.”
He got up from the table and, opening a kitchen drawer, pulled out two handfuls of cutlery—a dozen knives, forks, and spoons, which he dumped with a clatter on the tabletop.
“The Black ’ole of Calcutta,” he said, sitting himself down again. “You must have ’eard of that?”
“No,” I said.
“ ’Undred and forty-six Englishmen packed into a cell no bigger than your butler’s pantry at Buckshaw. June. ’ottest month of the year. Next mornin’, no more’n twenty-three of ’em left alive.”
I tried for a moment to imagine myself opening the door of Dogger’s pantry and having a hundred and twenty-three dead bodies come tumbling out onto the kitchen floor, leaving another two dozen or so poor human beings cringing terrified in the shadowy corners. But I couldn’t. It was unthinkable.
“ ’Eat somethin’ awful,” Alf went on. “No air. It’s murder, plain and simple. What do you do?”
“Revenge?” I asked. It seemed to me the logical answer.
“Revenge is right!” Alf said, slamming his fist down onto the tabletop, causing the cutlery to jump.
“ ’Ere’s the Bhagirathi River,” he said, quickly placing a knife. “And ’ere …” positioning a salt shaker, “is Suraj-ud-Dowlah, the last Nawab of Bengal. The enemy. He’s nineteen years old and ’as the temper of a cobra with a festered fang. ’As an army of fifty thousand foot, eighteen thousand horses, fifty-three pieces of cannon, and forty Frenchmen to work ’em.”
Alf had suddenly come to life. It was easy to see that he was as passionate about British military history as I was about poisons.
“Over ’ere, to the west, is Clive, with the Thirty-ninth Regiment. Robert Clive. Not even a military man by profession, when you come right down to it. ’E’s a bookkeeper. A bookkeeper! But ’e’s a British bookkeeper.
“But for all that, ’e once marched his men to battle through a storm—thunderin’ and lightnin’ to beat blue blazes. Natives thought ’e was some kind of a war god.”
Alf sighed. “Those were the days, those were.
“Now then, at Plassey, he’s got thirty-two ’undred men and nine guns. It’s the monsoon season. Rainin’ cats and dogs again. Outnumbered more than fifteen to one. What do you suppose ’e did?”
“He attacked,” I said, guessing.
“Too bleedin’ well true ’e attacked,” Alf said, swiveling a sugar spoon and hopping it across the table. “Suraj-ud-Dowlah took to ’is ’eels on a camel.”
He swept the spoons and forks of the Nawab’s army off the table and onto the floor.
“I’ll wash up later,” he said. “Five ’undred dead. British losses? Twenty-two dead and fifteen wounded.”
I let out a low whistle. “How could that be?” I asked.
“Nawab didn’t keep ’is powder dry,” Alf said. “Can’t fight with wet powder.”
I nodded wisely. “Very interesting,” I said. “Whatever became of him?”
“The Nawab? ’e was executed about a week later by ’is successor.”
“And Clive?”
“Slit ’is own throat years later in London.”
“Ugghhh!” I said, even though I was interested.
“I suppose you’re wonderin’ why I’m tellin’ you all this,” Alf said.
“Just a little,” I admitted.
“Because,” Alf said, watching carefully to see my reaction, “one of them officers of ’Is Majesty’s (that’d be George the Second, mind) Thirty-ninth Regiment of Foot was an ancestor of Mrs. Ridley-Smith.”
I sucked in my breath. “Mrs. Ridley-Smith? The magistrate’s wife? Jocelyn’s mother?”
“One and the same,” Alf said. “Funny old world, i’n’t it?”
“But how do you know that?” I asked.
“Old Beatty told me. ’e was gardener at Bogmore Hall, man and boy, for sixty years or more. I worked ’long-side him as a lad. Just a nipper, I was, but old Beatty enjoyed ’avin’ someone to rattle off his stories to. A great storyteller, was old Beatty. Put a lot of trust in ’im, the Ridley-Smiths. The magistrate brought ’im out to India to see to ’is garden. Up-country from Calcutta, it was. Marvelous flowers, old Beatty used to say. Bleedin’ marvelous.”
“Just a minute,” I said. “I’m confused. Was Magistrate Ridley-Smith in India?”
“When ’e was a young man. Some kind of district magistrate. Met ’is wife out there. Ada, ’er name was. ’Er family ’ad been in India for donkey’s years. British, of course, but they’d been there for generations. Jocelyn was born while they were out there.”
“And his mother?”
“She died.”
“She died when he was born?”
“So old Beatty told me.”