Getting to Government House
Shirley, quite composed, is waiting by the gangplank with his bags when Margaret and Esperanza emerge. “We shall have to walk to Government House, I think,” he says. “It isn’t far; I’ve a map of the city here. I have asked the mate to find us some porters. In the meantime, shall we investigate a ship to Panaji, or perhaps look around the bazaar?”
(They read the newspaper while they wait for their baggage. News is that a young man named Davies—no relation to Lady Hester—accompanying Ellipsoid Lady Bonnet was shot and killed in Damascus; assailant unknown.)
Shirley has been chuckling quietly over the London society page in a later edition when Margaret hands him the article. Immediately all trace of laughter is gone. “How dreadful. In pace requiescat. Could have been Addison himself; no way to be sure. Poor Lady Bonnet; she must be sadly distressed.”
“Oh, yes. But Shirley, what puzzles me is why he, rather than she, was the target. And in a fashion that was neither immediately fatal, nor really often fatal at all. Since his assailant was able to walk right up to him for the assault, one presumes he could have simply shot the young man in the heart. Oh, dear, this sounds terribly callous, and I don’t mean to be so, but it simply doesn’t make sense.”
“No? Consider,” Shirley answers, coolly analytical. “Inept physical assaults. A false protest. A non-fatal wound. If the intent is only to scare us off—perhaps even to see who can be scared off—it makes perfect sense. I am not beyond imagining that poor Davies’s death was, from the point of view of his killer, a complete accident.”
“Or,” says Margaret slowly, “if the purpose is to slow us down. Lady Bonnet stayed in Damascus until the young man succumbed to his wound; had he had a lengthy convalesence, I suspect she would have stayed with him throughout. Certainly if Esperanza were injured, which G-d forbid, I would remain with her until she was well enough to travel again.” She would do the same for Shirley, but will leave him to infer it. If it isn’t stated overtly, he can’t very well object.
“Lady Bonnet was ahead of everyone but our favorite Peer of the Realm,” Shirley responds, dodging the dangerous subject. “If the attacker was Addison, I daresay he couldn’t catch up with that yacht any more than we have.”
“Well, the greater his lead gets, the better off he will be when he reaches the point that he can no longer travel by sea. From that vantage, Lady Bonnet would be exactly the one he would most wish to delay. It doesn’t necessarily have to be Addison himself, either. It could be one of his agents, or, for that matter, someone else altogether. It falls far too closely into the pattern of attacks upon Ellipsoids to be ignored, but you are correct; we are hypothesizing without sufficient data.”
Shirley shakes his head. “I genuinely can’t suspect Lord Percy. No, not because he is a fellow Ellipsoid; something else bothers me. Every description I have read in the Times of Nicholas Finnegan mentions how cheap he is. Lord Percy throws money around like water; I cannot imagine him asking that expenses be spared. And perhaps I am merely showing my naivete once again, but I cannot imagine any of the other Ellipsoids so much as contemplating this. I lean more and more toward believing the instigator of this madness outside the race.”
“Perhaps so. On the other hand, it may be only the times that is characterizing Finnegan as ‘cheap,’ or it may be that Finnegan was himself hired by the person behind all this. No, I am inclined to agree that Lord Percy is unlikely to be behind this, but my reasoning is different. First, travelling at the speed he is, it would be enormously difficult for him to coordinate what is clearly a clearly-conceived plan. Second, given his stated opinion of the women competing, he would hardly consider it necessary to slow Lady Bonnet down. He is too convinced of his own Divine superiority as a Man.”
Shirley suppresses a smile—no, a grin. “Indeed.”
(They agree that to avoid Addison and any assassins he’s hired, they will travel from Bahrain to Madras in disguise: Shirley as an Anglo-Indian, Margaret as his wife from Home, Esperanza as their daughter.)
Margaret wishes to avoid anyone who might be inclined to aim a firearm anywhere in their collective vicinity. “I can shoot well; my brother made sure of it when I went hunting with him. But I’ve never tried to shoot a human being, and I would much prefer not to put to the test whether I can bring myself to do so.”
Shirley stares at her in surprise, catches himself staring, shakes his head to break eye contact. “I must understand from this that you are actually carrying a gun.” Margaret cannot quite read either approval or disapproval from him.
“Yes,” she responds very quietly “I am. It was at my brother’s insistence; in fact the weapon itself was his parting gift as I left on this journey. He could have prevented me from undertaking the competition by declining to provide funds for me to do so; instead he extracted the promise that I would not only be careful, but would travel armed. But, as I say, I have never used it, and I do not know if I can. Shirley, I do not want to know if I can. The prospect terrifies me. I am not sure which would be worse; to be in a position to prevent harm to myself or someone near me and be unable to, or to discover that I could destroy a human life. I pray I never have to make that decision… and that if I do, that I will decide aright in the split second I shall have.”
Shirley digests this new information over a long minute, countenance grave. “I am sorry. I cannot help you,” he says finally. “For myself, I believe with Socrates that it is better to suffer evil than to do it. For that reason I have never gone armed, even when good judgment suggested I do so. I dislike the weighing of one life against another; it is why I could not prosecute capital cases. And yet—to protect a friend—”
“Yes, exactly.”
He sighs. “All I can do is set you free as regards my own person. As far as I am concerned, you do not own a weapon. You need not use it on my behalf, ever.”
“Thank you. I truly appreciate that. But,” and she shakes her head, biting at her lip, “you cannot free me from the decision, should it come to that. You might be able to deal with my decision, should you be threatened and I hold my hand, but ultimately, I must be able to meet my own eye in the mirror.”
“I know that,” he says, quietly and with pain. “It is why I cannot help you.”
“No,” she tells him. “You have already helped me. You have freed me to make my own decision, by telling me that you will not think less of me if I am, in the end, unable to hurt another even to protect you. Beyond that, it is my own responsibility. You know, I should be used to this. I wait upon life and death every day as a physician… but there, I am sworn to do no harm. This? We will hope we can avoid the violence, and ourselves slip through the net we help set for Addison. We can cross the Rubicon when we come to it.” She shakes herself, as if shaking off the somber mood. “For now, just look. Have you ever seen such wonderful things? I suggest we check in at Government House, then return to do a little shopping and locate a ship for Panaji.”
“I am right behind you,” says Shirley, neatly folding up the newspapers. “If I must stay behind a while at Government House, don’t make a fuss, please—you know why—but likewise, do not feel that you must stay with me. We can meet at the stationhouse on the dock—or in some establishment nearby, if you would prefer to wait out of public sight; only tell me where.”
“Actually, I would prefer to wait at Government House. I shall wait outside in the lounge if I cannot remain with you; I have embroidery, or I can catch up on the Times. I truly would prefer not to wander the bazaar without an escort, fascinating as it is. I would also prefer to obtain a referral either from our host here or from the Harbormaster as to a reliable captain to approach for passage. I must admit, I am approaching this entire competition on the theory that the tortoise will likely do better than the hare in the end.” She chuckles a bit.
“If I were Mahometan, doctor, I should say fate had some hand in our travelling together. I spent two days in London after the race started tracking down information at the embassies. I ought to have done it beforehand, of course, but a case of mine ran several days longer than I thought it would. Remington, of course.”
Margaret scans the wharf. “Has the mate gotten a porter to take our trunks up yet, do you know? I admit I have been paying such close attention to the bazaar, I rather lost track.”
“I don’t see mine at the top of the gangplank, and I heard a bit of yelling a minute ago. I think our things have been collected. If we do not hurry, they will arrive at Government House before we do.”
“Then by all means, let us go. We can talk as we walk.” She takes his arm. “Esperanza, is all well? Do you need any assistance with the parcels?” And turning back to Shirley “You don’t have to be Mahometan, counselor. I have several patients who are Jews from Poland and Russia. They have a word, ‘Bashert,’ which they translate as ‘fate’ or something that was meant to be. I am sure I don’t understand quite all the connotations it has for them, but that is the essence of it. By whatever name, it does seem to have intervened in our case, doesn’t it?”
“Rather. Or I should think you would be the other side of the horizon by now. I do not know how I could possibly have been more offensive, but for all it availed me I might as well have complimented your hat.”
“Pish tosh. Whether people call me ‘tenacious’ or ‘stubborn’ depends on which side of the argument they’re on.” Margaret give him a look he has no trouble interpretting as friendly exasperation. “I can tell you how your attempt backfired, counselor, and since it is far too late to correct the error, I shall. Your timing was amiss. By the time you chose to be offensive, it was far too clearly an attempt to induce me to leave you for My Own Good.” Shirley can actually hear the capital letters in her voice. “But if you wish to convince me that my presence is unwanted and unwelcome, you should not first propose plans for a joint charitable venture with such patent enthusiasm. By the time you attempted to offend me enough that I would leave, I was more irritated at your attempt at noble self-sacrifice than offended at your characterization of my behavior… s I believe I made clear to you. You might as well give over the attempt, you know. You’ve made three tries, now. Honour should be satisfied.
“Besides,” she adds, “what sort of friend would I be if I vanished at the first whiff of disagreement?”
“I would hardly know,” Shirley answers ruefully, swiveling his head to follow the progress of a woman in a fantastically ornate embroidered caftan liberally bespangled with gold coins. “Friendship is not one of my strong suits. After Elizabeth died and I went to school, I was so busy and so—so disoriented, I suppose. I never quite got around to rebuilding a circle of friends. So put it down to ten years’ near-solitude, if you will. But ‘satisfying my honour’—I don’t think I quite deserve that, Margaret. Is it so hard to believe that I like you? Is that not enough to explain my concern?”
“I am sorry. It was a reference to an expression that my brother uses so often I thought it must be common in the legal profession, regarding an attempt to save a friend from an ill-advised course of action: ‘Once for common decency, once for friendship, and once for honour.’ As far as Arthur is concerned, three times is sufficient.” By that point Margaret is shaking her head slowly, with a little smile. “Shirley, Shirley, whatever shall I do with you?”
“Leave me be. I am hopeless, Margaret.” At best, he is half-kidding. “You yourself spoke of facing your own reflection in the mirror. I have not had much luck at that, lately. That did play a considerable part in what I said on shipboard. Not an extenuation, I know—but an explanation of sorts, perhaps.”
She lets it pass without any more comment than a raised eyebrow, which he doesn’t see. “There is a great difference between me and Jimmy, you know. He was too young to know what sort of fire he was playing with, and too desperately poor to turn down the chance to make some money however risky—and I have said repeatedly that you cannot take sole responsibility for his ultimate fate.”
“I know it. But this is the first time I have ever caught myself in a negligence. And with such results! I know I have taken this too much to heart, I know I am worrying too much. Worst of all, I doubt the constabulary would have moved an inch had I told them—Jimmy did not hurt me; there was no crime, none. Even so. I am doubting my own judgment as never before, which makes me perhaps too eager to put everyone possible out of its reach.”
“I am an adult. You’ve made the risks I take abundantly clear, and I have thought about them and reached a considered decision. Furthermore, you had been professionally responsible for Jimmy’s welfare at some point in his life; I daresay that never quite ends, even when the case at issue is resolved. But you are not responsible for me; indeed, I have been at pains to make it clear to you that you are not responsible for my decisions, once you have shared what information you have.”
“Well, that is why I responded to the story of your past as I did. It was so clear, just from the way you told it, that after you lost your family you had cut yourself off completely from your former life, and that you would not have been secure enough in your new one to gather friends. You may not dwell on it, and a good thing that you don’t, but you are so accustomed to facing your difficulties alone that you cannot envision anyone in their right mind choosing to share in them. I assure you, I am as much in my right mind as anyone who would undertake such a competition as this!”
“Which means you are incurably mad, of course. No, you are right; I do expect to extricate myself from my own predicaments. The defendant enters a plea of guilty, Your Honour, and begs the clemency of the court.”
She grins. “I have no idea if you will consider it clement, but I sentence you to reconcile yourself to the notion that you have found a friend, whether you were looking for one or not.” She laughs a little, then sobers. “I do believe you like me, counselor, as I know that I have already come to treasure our friendship. And if that was intended as an apology, I accept it.” She looks up impishly. “And if it wasn’t, then I accept the explanation.”
“Then call me Shirley, won’t you? #8216;Counselor’ is very cold, and not at all accurate.”
“With great pleasure. I’m sorry; I did not realize it was inaccurate. As for cold… well, it seemed that you were trying to set a distance between us. Put it down to a touch of pique… you really did succeed in being offensive, if not in sending me over the horizon.” She is smiling; Shirley may be an idiot in spots, but he is not dense, and her point has been made.
“I know I did, and I am sorry for it. As for ‘counselor’—I wouldn’t dare try, not now.”
Suddenly she turns and nods at a fantastically ornamented sedan chair coming up the road toward them. “Shirley, Esperanza, will you look at that! It looks like an illustration out of the Arabian Nights!”
“My word. That wouldn’t last ten minutes on an English country road.”
“Not at all. It doesn’t look all that comfortable, either; it looks as if it would sway horribly. I wonder who rides in such a thing?”
“I rather think we are not supposed to know. Must get stuffy inside those curtains.”
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