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telling them so many stories that I am like one of those excavation sites in Egypt or Pompeii, stripped
layer by layer of anything valuable I have to yield.”
Geraldine smiled and moved toward the settee. “Knowing you, Anthony, I rather doubt
that. You have always known how to hold something back.”
“Just so,” he said, joining her. “The best of my secrets have all been saved for you.”
***
The Bombay Jail
10:40 AM
Rayley burst into the jail cell. “So here we go at last,” he gasped. “The fingerprints of
Adelaide and Leigh Anne Hoffman. Surely one of them will match those on the glass.”
Davy looked up. “They raised no resistance?”
“Not as much as I would have guessed. Adelaide is terrified of anything new, but the
Hoffman woman….I get the sense she understands the jig is up.” Rayley looked around the small
cell. “Where is Tom?”
***
Bombay Jail Infirmary
10:40 AM
“Rose was never actually pregnant, you see,” Anthony was saying. “Of all the lies
which were told in the year of the mutiny, that is the one, in retrospect, which seems the most
pivotal.”
Tom, who sat unobtrusively in the corner taking notes, noted that Weaver’s voice was
calm. Good. He had hit the dosage right. Enough to dull the man’s pain but not enough to render him,
in his own words, “nonsensical.”
“Rose was not pregnant,” Geraldine echoed with a pensive frown. “I don’t know why I
didn’t consider that possibility. I knew, of course, that the reason she had journeyed from India to
London in the first place was to consult with doctors there. She never confided the exact nature of her
ailment, but it was obvious she was nearing forty and had never borne a child.”
“The physicians in London told her that motherhood was impossible,” Weaver said.
“You traveled with her, in both directions?”
Weaver winced with memory, even though everyone in the room was aware that far
worse confessions were likely coming. “I accompanied Rose only at Roland’s insistence. She felt
guilty over not having given him a son and Roland feared that if the news from the London doctors
was discouraging, as would likely be the case, she might collapse. He did not want her to be alone.”
“But yet, he did not go with her himself.”
“He was Secretary-General of the Presidency in a time of growing unrest. You know
Roland. All duty. I was expendable.”
Geraldine’s expression did not change. “You and Rose were lovers, even then?”
Another spasm crossed Weaver’s face, but it was less intense this time. “We became so
while we were in London. When the doctors told her that she was likely barren, she was of course
inconsolable…”
“Which didn’t stop you from trying to console her.”
Weaver leaned toward her. “The story I must tell you, Geraldine, is not a pretty one.
But I believe that if you can bear to listen, and if I can bear to tell it, that it may bring peace to us