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“I can only assume that Rose lied yet again to Roland? Told him that the doctors were
wrong and she was now somehow magically with child?”
Weaver nodded. “He came rushing up to me one morning at the Club on a wave of
jubilation. A miracle had occurred, he said. He and Rose were to be parents at last.” He coughed.
“I was appalled, of course. She had never discussed this plan with me. But when I confronted her
about it later, she was all laughter and light. It was her way to make sure she stayed in India, she
said, and she could claim to lose the baby at some point in the future. Miscarriages were common in
women her age, after all, especially in a region with such abysmal health care and unsanitary
conditions.”
“Forgive me,” Geraldine said. “But I am struggling to understand the sequence of
events. You and I became engaged, just as you say, quite by accident. But then you decided that you
liked me, that I was to be somehow the vehicle of your salvation, and Rose became jealous. At the
same time, the threat of mutiny was rising and officers were sending their families back to England in
droves. Rose saw it as the chance to get rid of me. I was packed off to England, while she concocted
a false pregnancy to both give herself an excuse to both remain with you and to keep poor deluded
Roland at bay. If he believed this late-life baby to be his one chance at fatherhood I’m sure he would
not dream of touching her and risking a miscarriage. The story, up to that point, does make a sort of
cruel sense.”
Weaver nodded. “And you told it wonderfully well.”
“But then there really was a child? The faked pregnancy somehow resulted in a real
son?”
Weaver coughed again. “Ah yes, Michael. He was both the complication of some plans,
and the solution to others. Rose thought of it, of course. She was the one who thought of everything.
In the confusion following the mutiny, no one stopped to count the months of a gestation. There were
so many dead and missing and such a complete breakdown of communication all across the
subcontinent. Rose said that if she was not merely a widow, but a widow with a baby, that she would
receive double the pension, and double the sympathy as well.”
“And there would be double the incentive for the two of you to marry quickly. Claiming
responsibility for your fallen comrade’s fatherless boy. Rather touching. But if you were truly
already beginning to have doubts about Rose…why did you play into her fiction?”
Weaver looked at her, his blue eyes misty with memory. “Cawnpore changed everything,
Geraldine. Changed us all. There were events that – Your Detective Abrams? I trust he told you
everything?”
“He said that you had spent a lifetime sickened with regret that you could only save two
of the children while the rest were left to perish with their mother and Roland.”
“That is what he said?” Weaver gave a shaky exhalation. “He is a good man, your
Jewish detective.”
“The finest I have ever known,” Geraldine said. “Well, one of the two finest. You
needn’t look at me like that. You aren’t the other.”
“I daresay I am not.”
“Is this the end of your story?”
“Not quite.” Weaver took yet another sip of tea. “As I said, the confusion following the
mutiny played into our hands. No one asked precisely when the child was born and if Michael was a
bit too sizable a baby to have been the result of Rose’s feigned pregnancy, this trivial fact did not
merit much mention in those dark days, when not even the Viceroy could hazard a guess of how many