I wrapped a shawl around my shoulders and tried to pray, but the words evaporated in my mind as sobs racked me. I felt very alone as I grieved for the mother I had lost twice.
So many lies resided within my family.
I couldn’t untangle the tight knots left by my grandfather and his cunning plans.
I do not understand why You would allow any of this to happen,I finally threw at the heavens. Silence answered from the God I had chosen so many years ago, though I was born in the palace of a Muslim princess and raised in the English countryside by a man who hated God.
Yet one Bible verse threaded through my soul like the faintest whisper.
Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth.
The prophet Isaiah had suffered beneath the rule of rebellious kings and dangerous political climates. His prophecies revealed the destruction of Judah, the exile of its people, and the agony they would endure at the hands of foreign powers like Babylon.
The words of Isaiah returned to me—“Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” God’s mercy was infinite, yet my own heart felt cold and unyielding.
However, I could not forgive my grandfather. I could not pretend that what he had done to Edward and me somehow didn’t matter. That it could be so easily resolved with a tepid prayer and a dash of a tear, and perhaps an apology.
Yet one question could not be denied.
If Ihadremained in India, what might have happened to me, or to Edward?
My grandmother’s letter left an edge of unease, describing unseen dangers and an unknown world that would have had me keep to the same cloistered white marble halls.
If God had a plan in any of this tragedy, I could scarcely see it for the darkness swimming around me.
Closing my eyes, I whispered another prayer and begged Him to help me find my way again.
34:Sebastian
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation.
LORD BYRON, “DARKNESS”
Three weeks after our cottage had been rifled through, an unbearable heat hung thick over Calcutta like a shroud, the sort that clung to a man’s damp skin. Even the shade beneath the punkah in the Company office did nothing to ease my discomfort. I had unbuttoned my collar hours ago, rolled up my sleeves, and still, sweat dripped down my back in slow, deliberate trails.
The ledgers lay open before me—row after row of tidy columns inked with the Company’s signature precision. I’d read through them twice already, cross-checked entries, re-counted inventories. And now, as I sat back and rubbed at my eyes, the pattern stared up at me like a serpent waiting to strike.
More crates recorded than ever reached port. More weight shipped than ever sold. And the discrepancies tied to a single location: Warehouse 14, registered to a private ledger under Julien’s jurisdiction but bearing the Sinclair crest in the margins. The warehouse on Clive Street.
I’d long suspected mismanagement. But this—this stank of something worse.
I stood slowly and closed the ledger with a deliberate thud before crossing the floor to the secretary’s desk, where I pulled out parchment and ink. How strange to think that the wastrel son who’d neglected his studies was forced to examine book after book. Ledger after ledger. My eyes burned with fatigue.
My handwriting, usually so fluid, scrawled with angry lines. But I didn’t stop to correct it. I scratched out a message, my breathing labored.
