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inclinations…Oh, do not misunderstand me. I am like Jonathan Benson, the very soul of discretion,
and still they found means to mock me.” He stopped pacing and turned to face Davy. “But now it all
is clear. For I am not the son of the great Roland Everlee or even his pale echo, Anthony Weaver.
No, not at all. I stand before you the youngest child of some middling officer who most likely
managed to get himself killed the first day of the mutiny.”
But with this the obvious thought finally dawned and Everlee cocked his head. “My
older sister,” he said. “Why would they take her to the orphanage and not me?”
“She was too old to be passed off as a blood child,” Davy said. “It seems your mother -
pardon me, I mean Mrs. Weaver – had concocted some fiction about being with child before the
mutiny began. She didn’t want to be shipped back to London with the other ladies.”
“A fictional pregnancy? But surely her husband… Or her doctor…”
“Husbands can be hoodwinked and doctors can be bought.”
Everlee grimaced and resumed pacing. “That’s no surprise. Apparently anyone or
anything can be bought in Bombay. So Rose had concocted this story to allow her to stay close to her
lover, Weaver?
Davy nodded, taking note of how quickly “mother” and “father” had become “Rose” and
“Weaver.”
“Apparently,” he said. “Weaver has confessed that they were prepared to announce an
equally false miscarriage in due time.”
“Ah,” said Everlee, his nimble politician’s mind grasping the implications at once. “But
then came the uprising, and Roland’s death, and the unexpected boon of two children. The girl quite
the wrong age but the boy just about perfect to carry their fiction to fruition. For a widow holding the
hero’s child in her arms is an even more pitiable figure, is she not? And the man who steps in swiftly
to marry her and raise that child, even more admirable? I was not kept because I was loved. I was
kept because I was useful. The truth is sometimes a bitter pill to swallow, is it not, Officer Mabrey?”
“Sometimes,” said Davy, but he would have described the truth as being more like one
of the elephants he had seen at the waterfront. A cumbersome thing, which has to be prodded into
motion. But when it finally begins to move, then Davy knew that the unchecked truth could rapidly
become a danger, stumbling through the square and injuring any number of innocent bystanders.
“What became of my sister, Officer Mabrey? Tell me. For you know her story, I can see
it in your face.”
Davy hesitated, genuinely unsure of what to do next. Two souls had made a lasting
impression on his young heart. One was Trevor, with his notebooks and microscopes and
fingerprinting kits and – most of all - his insistence on the truth. The truth at all costs, even when it
was painful and inconvenient. The other was his mum. Davy could see her standing out in their
scrappy little yard, pinning a wet sheet to a sagging clothesline and saying, “Kindness, love. It’s what
matters most in the end.”
Everlee was prepared to accept that his sister was Adelaide, not Leigh Anne. In truth he
and his sister were very much alike - both had risen through their wits and tenacity to the top of the
heap, even if her heap was an orphanage for half-breeds and his heap was Parliament. But instead he
had been quick to assume his sister was a woman who had found herself a total outcast, someone who
had spent her entire life fitting in neither here nor there.
He accepts it, thought Davy, for he too has always felt like an outcast. In this whole
tangle of good and evil, it is Adelaide and Everlee who are somehow a pair.
Davy considered the man before him. He was a thoroughly unpleasant creature on many