Ghost Fire Read online

  There was a sharp intake of breath in the room.

  “Naturally, the money will be provided by the directors in London. After the Courtneys’ deaths, they can have no doubt that we defended the Company’s interests beyond the demands of honor—maybe even of prudence.”

  The men in the council chamber relaxed. The siege would be lifted, London would pay, and they could return to making their fortunes. Mansur Courtney had not died in vain.

  Squires, the engineer, looked up. “And what of the children?”

  Theo and Constance sat in the hall outside the governor’s office. Theo’s eyes were swollen and dark. The hours since Mansur had slipped away from him had been a waking nightmare, replaying the horror again and again.

  Constance’s grief took a different shape. After shedding her tears, she sat perfectly still, her face pale and emotionless. She stroked the nape of Theo’s neck, the way his mother used to when he was small. It made him flinch as if he’d been burned.

  “What will they do with us?” he asked, in a distant voice.

  “I don’t know.”

  The door opened and a servant in the governor’s livery beckoned them. Theo stood.

  “Be strong,” Constance said, squeezing his hand. “I rely on you, now.”

  Theo nodded.

  They stepped into the governor’s office. Saunders ushered Theo and Constance to two chairs opposite his desk and gave them what he hoped was a sympathetic look. The boy was distraught; the girl seemed collected, her green eyes cool and poised. More than a girl, he corrected himself: the pert breasts swelling under the lace of her bodice were those of a woman now.

  Saunders wondered if perhaps he should keep her in Madras after all.

  He adopted a solemn expression. “Words cannot express my sorrow for your loss. Your father was a good man, an admired colleague and—I flatter myself—a friend. Your mother was an ornament to our society. We grieve them deeply.”

  Constance inclined her head in acknowledgment.

  “But now you are orphaned.” He leaned forward over the desk and fixed Theo with a hard stare. “What possessed you to take your sister up on the walls during such a bombardment?”

  Theo’s cheeks burned crimson. Part of him wanted to cry out, to explain: “It wasn’t my fault. It was Constance’s idea.” But he could not do that to her. “I wanted to see the battle,” he lied.

  “I hope you never see another. War is a terrible thing, not for children,” Saunders lectured him. “You have paid a dreadful price to learn that.”

  He poured himself wine from a decanter. “But now, as chief magistrate of the Presidency, I must decide how best to provide for your care and education.”

  “What are your plans for us?” asked Theo.

  Saunders surveyed him with a benevolent gaze. “You have a cousin in Calcutta, I believe, a young man named Gerard Courtney.”

  “We have never met him,” said Constance. “His father and ours were not close.”

  Saunders waved away her objection. “But he is one of the most able men in India. His father—your uncle—is Christopher Courtney. Though I should more rightly say Baron Dartmouth, now that he has claimed his ancestral title. He was the richest man in India before he retired to London. In his son’s household, you will want for nothing.”

  Suddenly his face was not friendly. “You have lived a comfortable life, my dear. I think you do not understand that the world outside our walls can be capricious and cruel—especially for those without a fortune. I will do what I can, but I cannot protect you forever.”

  That was not strictly true. He could keep Constance in Madras and take considerable pleasure from exercising his rights as her guardian. But that would not serve his greater purpose. “Unless you have any other family I might consider?”

  Constance bit her lip. Somewhere on the south-east coast of Africa had once lived her great-uncle Tom and great-aunt Sarah, with their family. But she had only met them once, as a tiny child, and she had no idea how she could find them now. The location of their settlement, in an uncharted bay on an almost uninhabited stretch of coast, had been a carefully guarded secret. For all she knew, they might be long since dead, or have moved away. And how could an orphaned sixteen-year-old girl, who had lived in India almost her whole life, make a passage to Africa with no one but her younger brother for company?

  “We will go and stay with Cousin Gerard,” said Constance, feeling the weight of the decision. She knew India, knew its rituals and the levers of influence. She would find a way to ensure that she and Theo survived.

  “A wise decision. I will arrange for your passage by the first ship to Bengal.”

  Constance fixed him with her green eyes. So frank and knowing, they could not possibly belong to a girl of her tender years. Saunders felt a tightness in his breeches.

  “What will happen to our inheritance?” Constance asked.

  “It will be placed in trust until you come of age,” Saunders assured her. “I myself will serve as one of the trustees.” He raised a hand to stop any protest. “I feel I owe it to your father. It is the least I can do.”

  He felt no guilt as he said it. Life was business, and these children were merely an asset that fate had put in his power. An asset of considerable value—and he would make sure he profited from it. By the time he had finished with Mansur’s estate, there would not be two fanams left in the Courtney children’s inheritance.

  And that was if they lived long enough to claim it. The city of Calcutta had been built on a fetid swamp. The addition of two hundred thousand souls, with all their filth and squalor, had not improved its healthfulness. A pair of youngsters, newly arrived, might not survive the winter there—let alone the long, feverish summer.

  Constance was watching Saunders with her sharp, appraising eyes. For a moment, he had the uncomfortable feeling that she could read his every thought. He dismissed the notion. She was little more than a child, a mouse in a world of wild cats.

  But still her look unsettled him. He was right to send her away. He would have enjoyed breaking her in, but business always had to come first. The boy, too. He was a model of his father: the same tousled red hair, the same handsome looks. He might be damaged now, but Saunders could see the strength growing into his face and his body. He might become a formidable adversary.

  A smile spread across Saunders’s face. He hastily rearranged it into a look of pious concern. “God speed to Calcutta.”

  •••

  Ten miles from the governor’s office, dust billowed off the road as the ox teams hauled the French artillery train toward Pondicherry. The soldiers sang lustily, despite the heat. They had bloodied English noses and were marching back richer than they had come. What else was war for?

  A black horse galloped toward them through the dust. Its rider wore a plain gray coat without markings.

  The major at the front of the column drew to the side of the road to let the artillery pass. A new commander had been dispatched from Paris, Major General Corbeil, and he wondered if the rider had news of him. It would be a fine thing to be able to present the general with this spectacularly profitable victory on his arrival. Perhaps a promotion would be in order.

  “Who are you?” he interrogated the rider. “Have you a message?”

  The rider said nothing. Fixing the major with a piercing stare, he raised a gloved hand and brushed it against his coat. The layers of dust that had coated it fell away. Underneath, the cloth was white, not gray, and as the hand swept it clean it revealed brocade and gold lace. The uniform of a major general in the army of Louis XV.

  The major swallowed and saluted. “I am sorry, Monsieur Général. I did not know.”

  The general gestured to the column. “What is the meaning of this?” His face was puce with rage. “Why are you retreating?”

  “Retreat? Monsieur, this is a victory.”

  “It is defeat,” spat the general. “Ignominious failure—a wasted opportunity. When I write to Paris, I will see t
o it that you spend the rest of your career scrubbing latrines in the fever islands. You had Madras at your mercy, and you did not press the advantage.”

  “Honor was satisfied. Six men and a woman—including an English merchant and his wife—died in our bombardment. It would have been ungentlemanly to make them suffer further.”

  Without warning, Corbeil leaned forward and slashed the major across the cheek with his riding crop. “You should have driven every English man, woman and child into the sea, or massacred them on the end of your bayonets until the ocean ran red with their blood. You should have bombarded the walls to rubble, burned their mansions and stripped the city’s carcass so bare even the rats would find no pickings.”

  The major clutched his face, but Corbeil rapped him again with the riding crop, leaving a white welt across his fingers. “Look at me when I speak to you.”

  The major’s hand came away sticky with blood and dust. He gaped at the general.

  “But have you not heard the news from Europe, Monsieur? There is no war. Our government has commenced negotiations with London to resolve the hostilities in North America without resort to arms.”

  The major wiped his cheek on his sleeve, leaving a crimson stripe across the white cloth. As the shock receded, anger and indignation swelled in his breast. He had humiliated the English, earned the French Compagnie des Indes one and a half million pagodas, and all in a war that had never been declared. He was a hero. Honor demanded he should call out the general for a duel, to avenge the insult and protect his reputation.

  But when he looked into the general’s pitiless eyes, honor did not seem so important.

  “If you will excuse me, mon général, I must keep my men moving.” The column had ground to a halt, the men distracted by the entertainment of their arguing superiors. The major grabbed a whip from one of the ox drivers and started lashing the men, cursing furiously. “Get moving. If we are not in Pondicherry by nightfall, I will flog the flesh from your backs until I can see your ribs. On with you.”

  He cantered to the head of the column as it lumbered into motion again. Corbeil watched from the roadside. A smile curled his lips. Anger was good: it served his purpose.

  He didn’t care what was said in Paris or London. Diplomats would talk, but they would fail, as they always did. In the end, France and Britain would go to war again, as they had for the last seven hundred years.

  But this time the prize would be the world itself.

  The ship’s crew didn’t see Calcutta as it came into view around a bend in the wide Hooghly River. The men were intent on their tasks, watching the sails for any shift in the breeze, or scanning the water for hidden dangers. At the stern the captain, the master and the pilot huddled around the wheel in deep concentration. The river was shallow, filled with treacherous sandbars that shifted with every storm. Along the way, sun-blackened hulks warned of the perils of straying from the shipping channel.

  The only people who could afford to admire the view were the knot of passengers clustered by the starboard rail on the quarterdeck. They were a strange society: blue-coated clerks and writers come to make their fortune with the East India Company; soldiers returning from leave; Armenian merchants chattering in their own cryptic language; women from England eager to find a husband.

  Theo and Constance stood among them. Theo strained his eyes as their new home came in sight. The imperious wall of Fort William towered over the ghats at the riverside, long and straight, stamping its authority on the twisting river. An enormous Union flag hung limp from the flagstaff, next to the church spire and the grand classical façade of the governor’s house. Elegant mansions stretched along the river front for a mile in each direction, set in splendid gardens sloping down to the water. Beyond the dockhead, big East Indiamen swung at anchor against the lazy current, while the small local craft called budgerows darted nimbly between them, their oars like centipedes’ legs.

  Constance squeezed his hand. “What do you think, Theo?”

  “It looks just like home,” he exclaimed.

  And yet it was different. Instead of the ocean surf pounding the beach, there was the slow brown river oozing by. Instead of handsome red stone, the fort was built from whitewashed brick. From a distance, it looked radiant in the sunlight, but as they came closer Theo saw it had yellowed in the damp and heat, like curdled milk. The humid air weighed heavily on him and gave him a headache. The city was indisputably magnificent, but as soon as the gardens gave out, the jungle pressed close on every side.

  A cannon fired a salute from the fort. An elephant screeched its wild cry. Theo shivered.

  “I am certain you will be very happy here,” one of the clerks said to Constance. He was a gangly man, with ginger hair and a lisp, but he had managed to secure the coveted place next to her at the rail. Ever since the ship had weighed anchor from Madras, the young men on board had attended her, like moths around a candle. If she dropped her scarf, a dozen gallant arms reached to pick it up before it touched the deck; if the level in her glass dropped a fraction of an inch at dinner, someone was on hand to refill it. Of all the commodities that the East India Company’s ships carried, few were so valuable—or so rare—as eligible English ladies.

  “I am sure it will be delightful,” said Constance, with a bored smile.

  Their arrival had brought a throng of people to the ghats in front of the fort, keen for whatever news the ship might bring. As the jollyboat rowed the passengers to the wharf, the sight lifted Constance’s spirits. The confined world of shipboard life did not agree with her, the same dull faces night after night, making the same tedious conversation over the same hard food. She wanted crowds, novelty and dancing.

  Theo, sitting beside her, wanted none of those things. Every night, he dreamed the same nightmare: his father’s hand slipping away, and brick dust filling his lungs. He burned with the shame and injustice of it. All he wanted was a chance for revenge.

  The boat bumped against the wharf. The noise from the crowd as they reached the top of the steps was overwhelming: traders and relatives asking for news, porters, hawkers and prostitutes offering their services. Theo shrank back.

  One man cut through the crowd. He was tall and handsome, with tousled fair hair and a firm stride. Through the jostling elbows and barging shoulders, he moved with ease and an unshakeable smile, as if the scene was simply a marvelous entertainment. He made straight for Constance and Theo.

  “Cousins!” he exclaimed. He kissed Constance on the cheeks and gazed at her face. His eyes were hazel, flecked with green, and already crinkled at the edges from squinting too much in the Indian sun.

  “Cousin Gerard, I presume,” said Constance.

  “Words cannot express my sorrow at the circumstance that brings us together.” He spoke softly, but the force of his words carried over the hubbub around them, as if they were alone on the dock. A tear welled in Constance’s eye. Before she could blink it back, he gently wiped it away. “I did not realize how grown-up you were,” he said. His eyes seemed to bathe her in light, warm as the sun.

  Perhaps it was the heat, or the shock of being on land after weeks at sea, or the irretrievable loss of her old life and family, but suddenly Constance felt giddy. The world spun around her and darkness speckled her vision, as if she was going to faint.

  Then Gerard turned to Theo, and the world returned. The clouds lifted, and the ground under her feet stabilized.

  “You must be Theo.” Gerard shook his hand, firm and businesslike. “Come.”

  Two dozen native porters fell in behind them to carry their baggage. Gerard offered Constance a sedan chair, but she refused with a gracious smile. “After that ship, I am grateful I can take ten paces without falling into the sea.”

  Theo observed the city as they walked. Though far younger as a city than Madras, Calcutta was already larger in every dimension. The houses were grander, the gardens more elaborate. Even the streets seemed busier, which he had not thought possible. He was seeing the city in the thr
oes of its own invention—or reinvention. Every other building seemed to be swaddled in scaffolding, either half built or half torn down to add some newer, grander design. The city throbbed with a restless, adolescent energy, which mature Madras had long since outgrown.

  Gerard brought them to a large mansion on a wide avenue near the edge of the town. A doorman in a crimson turban, with a scimitar at his side, flung open the high double doors. Three footmen appeared, each carrying a cup of sherbet, while various butlers and factotums bustled about in a chaos of orders and commands.

  “Welcome to my home,” said Gerard. He took Constance’s hand. “I hope you will soon feel it is your own, as well.”

  “I do so look forward to meeting your family,” said Constance.

  Gerard looked pained. “I fear I must disappoint you. My mother passed away some years ago while my father, as you know, has removed to London to take his seat in the Lords. I have two sisters, but they are married and far away.”

  “You live here by yourself?” marveled Theo.

  “For the time being.”

  “How old are you?”

  Gerard laughed. “Twenty-five. You think I am too young for such an estate? Perhaps you are right. But in this city life is lived to the full. Time is too short to do otherwise. Fortunes are won or lost in an instant.”

  “There is no Mrs. Courtney?” Constance inquired.

  “Alas, no.”

  “No attachments or connections that cause tongues to wag?” she probed. “If we are to live under your roof, we must know if we have stepped into the domain of a notorious rake.” Her eyes sparkled.

  Gerard grinned, sharing the joke. “If you hope to uncover a scandal, I fear you will be disappointed. There are few eligible ladies of sufficient quality in Calcutta, and the demands of business leave me little time to press my suit.” He began climbing the grand staircase, lined with portraits of his ancestors. “I am in no hurry to marry. I am happy to wait for love to find me.”