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“Truly? I am surprised.”
“The running of a girls’ school, Secretary-General, is not the unalloyed joy you seem to
think it is. At times through the years my solitude has been almost unendurable. So I have made
friends with the bottle.”
“But I did fund this school,” he blurted out after her, as she rose and went to the small
cabinet where she kept her malted scotch. “And I drove past it almost every day. Not with Felix, of
course, my regular boy. But any time I had a private coach I would direct the driver, just here, see that
tree at the top of the road? I think I wanted to assure myself that you…”
He broke off, unsure of what to say next. It seemed almost as if they were the only two
human beings left in the world. Where were the girls from the school? he wondered parenthetically.
It was so silent here under the portico, looking out at her great garden. The only sound was the distant
tinkling of the bells that lined the erotic wall.
She has covered the profanity of the wall, he thought, but she has not silenced it.
“I was your benefactor,” he said in a weak conclusion and then gulped the scotch she had
handed him. It was not a fine one. No, not fine at all. Some cheap, inferior brew and it burned his
throat. “I was that anonymous donor who sustained your work, over and again throughout the many
years. If you had known that, would have still tried to poison me?”
She shrugged. “It was the elephant, you know.”
Rough or not, he took more of the scotch. “The elephant?”
“The tile in the hearth with the five-legged elephant. I remembered so little of your
home. How long was I there, before you and Rose decided that I must disappear?”
Weaver shook his head. “I don’t know. Only a few weeks.”
“Only a few weeks,” she echoed, staring out into the sun. “And I was undoubtedly in
shock, having seen all that I had seen. But that elephant with five legs – such a whimsical mistake by
the artist, just the sort of thing a child might notice and remember.“ She looked at him now, directly in
the eyes for the first time. “I never knew your name, of course. Never knew the identity of the man
who would have so happily abandoned me and my baby brother to certain slaughter. Never knew
what became of him, or your wife, or of the kind Indian who scooped us up when you ran, who
carried us to the cart and forced you, against your will, to drive us out of that burning barnyard. I
might never have known that you married Roland Everlee’s widow, that the two of you were still in
Bombay, or that you had raised Michael as your own son. Never would have put any of it together at
all - that is, without Adelaide.”
“But that was just another way I tried to help you,” Weaver blurted out, wiping sweat
from his brow. “When Rose said she wanted an English nurse, I hired one from your stable, a girl
who might have otherwise been a financial burden to you all your life. If you recall, I sent a note -“
“I do recall the note,” Leigh Anne said. “And we shall add your hiring of Adelaide to
your long list of saintly acts. But she was a special girl, an unusual one, and she had to be treated in a
certain way. So on the first day of her employment I escorted her to your house – It was Sang who
greeted us and something in his kindness…”
She shook her head, as if to erase the memory. “I cannot say that seeing the house is
what did it, or even seeing Sang again. Something in the situation struck me, but I never would have
put it all together without Adelaide. Soon after she began attending your wife she came home one day
telling me about a tile in one of the bedrooms. Telling me it had an elephant with five legs… “ Miss
Hoffman laughed, not with bitterness for once, but in genuine delight. “Adelaide has a child-like
mind, Secretary-General. She came to us from a brothel where her mother sold her virginity when