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the air outside the open windows had not yet cooled to the lusciousness of evening. “Almost all the
women in the Raj had their little pills and potions and a woman like Rose more than most. I
remember that her traveling satchel rattled and clanked like a great group of brass bells whenever I
would venture to move it. Ah, that satchel. She wouldn’t let it out of her sight.”
“So what do we make of that?” Rayley said thoughtfully. “If she had been relying on
opium in some form ever since the fifties she was almost certainly an addict of the highest order by
the time she died. Would her doctor confess to providing the opiates if we manage to find him?”
“We can find her doctor in the snap of a finger,” Tom said. “He is no doubt a member of
the Byculla Club, that small circle, and he will confess, I venture, with great alacrity simply because
he will not see it as a confession. There are two groups of people who look upon drug addiction
without shame, my dear detectives, and that is the very rich and the very poor. They discuss their
medications openly, while middle class citizens might hide the needle or the pillbox. If Rose
Weaver’s laudanum was given to her by a doctor, then I would venture she took it as casually as you
might take a bicarbonate of soda. And I would further venture that she was not the only person in her
household who was an addict.”
“I know I said we might follow a thread of assumption,” Trevor said with a sigh. “But
let us not spin it out for miles. Whyever would you say all that?”
“Did you see how much alcohol was consumed last night at the Byculla Club?” Tom
asked wryly. “Even I was given pause. And it was all of them – young, old, male, female – the
whole lot drinking with a steadiness that would put a group of cavalry officers under the table. We
all were feeling the effects by the end of that so-called cocktail hour, while the members of the Club
merely proceeded into dinner and took up another round of pegs. I would bet my pocket watch that
the entire Raj is riddled with alcoholics and addicts.”
“You don’t have a pocket watch,” Trevor said.
“Quite right. Then I shall wager yours.”
“Tom’s observations are sound,” Geraldine said. “I have never known women who
drink like these women drink…not then and not now. And the pills… Rose was not the only one of
the chaperones whose satchels were rattling, I assure you of that.” She looked at Trevor with a
serious expression. “I believe it starts because they are all so very bored. So much leisure, you
know, without even the duties of motherhood to distract them, since the squadrons of nannies and the
British boarding schools lift their children from their arms at almost the moment of birth. It is as if
they are trapped eternally in a railway station, waiting for a train which never seems to arrive. And if
one’s entire day is filled with nothing but sitting about the house or the Club, why not have a glass of
wine with luncheon, or a bottle? Why not have a bit of opium to distract the mind as well as soothe
the body?”
“It happens in London too,” Tom said. “Among a certain class. And I daresay the
doctors are especially lax when a patient is the age of Rose Weaver. It is not ethical, I know this,
Trevor, so don’t you glower like that at me. But it is expedient. A woman comes to her physician, full
of vague complaints, and it is all too easy to sedate her – and thus silence her - and tell yourself that
you will deal with the effects later. But of course, if the patient is in her seventies, the doctor likely
believes that he will never have to deal with the effects. Even if she becomes dependent upon the
medication, the odds are she will die of something else first.”
“That’s all very well,” said Trevor. “But why would you say that Rose was not the only
addict in the household?”
“Two reasons,” said Tom. “Addiction is frequently shared by spouses or family