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where the bodies of so many victims had been thrown and a few scattered plaques reporting the deeds
of various martyrs. Roland Everlee first among them.
But Michael Everlee did not appear distressed by this mention of his father’s fate or by
the fact that the man on the other side of the table was so old and so drunk that he was all but
shouting. Rather he seemed quite pleased to have an excuse to no longer have to converse with a
clever woman, for he turned in his chair to more squarely face the man and answered, “No, Sir, this
time I travel on behalf of my other father. My stepfather, that is. Anthony Weaver. I have no doubt
everyone here tonight joins me in grieving the injustice he has suffered. Is still suffering, I should say,
for he sits even now in a common jail without a shred of true evidence brought against him.”
The table, already subdued, fell into a complete hush. People stopped eating. Eyes
flitted back and forth. Throats were cleared. Emma, her gaze falling upon a pink orchid directly in
her line of vision, suddenly grasped what Everlee had been insinuating and turned the color of the
flower.
And there’s the bell, thought Trevor. We are off to the races at last.
But he was wrong, for the topic of the Weaver arrest was dropped as quickly as it was
raised. Evidently while the members of the Byculla Club were quite comfortable discussing murders
which had happened thirty-two years in the past, they were far less at ease discussing an event which
had occurred two weeks ago.
“But you must go to Cawnpore while you’re here,” said the loud man, speaking a bit
nervously, like a host trying to save a dinner party that was about to run off the rails. “Lay flowers at
your father’s plaque. Tour the grounds so you can get a notion of what the memorial will look like
upon completion. It shall be glorious, I assure you.”
“Nothing has been the same since the mutiny,” said another man.
“Yes,” said another. “For it splits all time in half, does it not? The years before the
rebellion, the years after. We shall never sleep so sound again.”
“Mutiny? Rebellion?” bristled yet another, an angry voice from the far end of the table.
“Call it what it was. A slaughter. The Great Slaughter. For to use words like ‘mutiny’ or ‘rebellion’
implies that the savages had just cause. That there was some political imperative which required
them to murder unarmed women and children.”
At this last and most strident outburst, Trevor instinctively looked about to catch the eye
of Rayley, but of course the man wasn’t there. He was left to draw his own conclusions, based on the
reactions, or lack thereof, of his fellow diners. It appeared that rants about the mutiny – or rebellion,
or slaughter, or whatever term that particular speaker preferred – were a common occurrence at the
Byculla Club. A subject like the murder of Rose Everlee Weaver, while undeniably exciting, was a
bit too close at hand, which is why Michael Everlee’s provocative comments had gone unanswered.
Each person at the table was likely still sorting it out in his or her own mind, mulling over the levels
of guilt or innocence, and the scales of public opinion had not yet settled.
` But the mutiny? Dozens of women and children hacked to death and thrown into a
well? There was only one way to feel about that, so the subject was safe ground. So safe that each
speaker at the table undoubtedly knew his own lines, like an actor in a play. As for what the Indians in
the room thought, Trevor couldn’t hazard a guess. Each servant stood behind his appointed chair,
staring straight ahead impassively. They either didn’t understand what was being said around them,
or, more likely, had heard it so many times before that they had grown numb to the subject. Numb
even to the sound of their people being described as “the savages.”
“True,” said a voice. “The words one uses to describe something do matter. In