The only other people who knew the facts were Father Joseph Ambrose, whose Evangalactic Orphanage depended for its financial well-being on Peggy Rhodes’s largesse, and the pander Edgar Wood, who was tragically hit by a car in a Long Island country lane fifteen months after his return from New Delhi, and was killed outright. Peggy herself did not return to the United States. She bought a town house in Lower Belgrave Street, SW1, from a straitlaced English lady who was escaping the permissive society of late-sixties London and immigrating to Falangist Spain in search of a country with a little more discipline. In the years that followed the Grey Rat became a figure of fear in the street, snapping at noisy children playing on the pavement, complaining about the freshness of the produce at the greengrocers, calling the police when the noise from the Plumber’s Arms, the pub across the road, became too loud, knocking on her neighbors’ door to accuse them of blocking her drains by putting tampons down the toilet and refusing to accept their argument that their property did not share drainage facilities with hers.
She began to wear men’s clothing: loose corduroy pants and white linen shirts. She hacked at her wiry hair and left it to do as it pleased. In the season she went to the grouse moors and shot copious numbers of birds. She smoked heavily, drank scotch and soda, became a single-digit-handicap golfer and developed a fondness for gambling, spending many evenings at the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square playing baccarat and chemin de fer. She knew that her divorce had damaged what was womanly in her but did nothing to mend what was broken. In spite of what she had done, the lengths she’d gone to in order to acquire a child, in spite of the strangeness of her actions, she became a careless, negligent mother, whose relationship with her adopted daughter was, at best, vague, who began to believe that she had made a terrible mistake, because whenever she looked at her adopted daughter she saw her own humiliation made flesh, she imagined Max and Boonyi making love and her husband’s seed wriggling toward the ruthless, desperate egg. So India was handed over to a series of nannies (none of whom lasted long, for Peggy Rhodes had turned into an intolerant, choleric employer), and began to run wild.
By the age of seven the young girl was becoming a problem child, a savage, kickboxing playground scrapper who seemed, at times, like a creature possessed by demons, and a vicious biter, who caused at least one serious injury to a classmate at her exclusive Chelsea girls’ primary school. On two occasions she came close to being expelled for “unacceptable behavior.” The first time expulsion was threatened, however, she immediately and somewhat alarmingly changed her ways completely, adopting, for the first time, the cool, restrained, disciplined persona that would become her preferred disguise throughout her life. She became solemn, nonviolent, still, and her transformation scared her classmates into something like reverence, gave her the electric charisma of a leader. The mask slipped only once, just before her seventh birthday, when she assaulted the school bully, a sadistic eleven-year-old thug named Helena Wardle, hitting her on the back of the head with a large grey stone. Helena was known to the staff as a girl whose behavior was often brutish, and who had a habit of accusing her victims of bullying before they could accuse her, so when she ran to the school matron with a cut head, India, who claimed Helena had fallen and hurt herself accidentally, was given the benefit of the doubt, especially as her lie was verified by several of her classmates, who all disliked Helena Wardle as heartily as she did.
There was no denying her dark hair, her un-English complexion, the absence in her face of any trace of Peggy Rhodes’s genes. Three days before her seventh birthday the troubled girl found out she was adopted, discovered it by plucking up her courage and asking, after her injured victim had started a playground whispering campaign. Peggy Rhodes had flushed angrily when challenged, but had given India an answer of sorts. I’m very sorry, the Grey Rat told her, but, hmmm, hmmm, I don’t know the name of the woman who bore you. Hang it! I believe she died shortly after you were born. The identity of the father is likewise not confirmed. You must-eh? hah!-stop asking these questions. I am your mother. I have been your mother since the first days of your life. You have no other mother or father, there’s just me, I’m afraid, and I will not have these blasted questions. So she was trapped inside a lie, far away from the truth, held captive in a fiction; and within her the turbulence grew, an unquiet spirit moved, like a giant coiled serpent stirring at the bottom of the sea.
The event that would shatter the cocoon of the lie in which she lived took place some months later, in November 1974, when there was a notorious, bloody murder on Lower Belgrave Street, in the house at number 46. An English aristocrat named Lord Lucan, estranged and living apart from his wife Veronica, entered the family home in the evening of November 7 wearing a hood, and, in the basement kitchen, murdered his children’s nanny, Mrs. Sandra Rivett, probably mistaking her, in the dark, for his wife. He went upstairs and in spite of the presence in the house of his three young children assaulted Lady Lucan violently, forcing three gloved fingers down her throat, then trying to strangle her, gouge out her eyes and bludgeon her on the head. She was a tiny woman, but she grabbed his testicles and squeezed, and when he crumpled in pain she escaped. She ran down the street and burst into the Plumber’s Arms crying murder. Lord Lucan escaped, abandoning his car in the port town of Newhaven, and was never found. He left behind several notes to friends, many of them financial in content, and several large gambling debts.
John Bingham, “Lucky” Lucan, was the seventh earl. The third earl of Lucan had acquired his own bad reputation 120 years earlier. During the Crimean War, the third earl was the man responsible for ordering the catastrophic charge of the Light Brigade. This was during the battle of Balaclava. Curiously enough, the woollen hood worn by his murderous great-great-grandson was of the type known as a balaclava.
On the morning after these events a police officer rang the Rhodes household’s doorbell and asked if anyone had heard anything unusual the previous night. India had been asleep, and Peggy Rhodes said she had heard nothing. When the story broke in the evening papers, and everyone knew about Lady Lucan’s run to safety, India wondered how Peggy could have failed to notice something, considering that it was an unseasonably warm evening and their sitting-room windows had been opened wide; and, after all, the Plumber’s Arms was right across the street. Later the police returned to ask Peggy if, as a fellow member of the high-roller Clermont Club, she had known Lord Lucan. “No,” she said, “I knew him by sight, but he wasn’t particularly a friend.” India had heard her mother speak more than once about her “chums,” Aspinall, Elwes and Lucky, yet now she was lying to the police, why was that. She afterwards learned that her mother wasn’t the only liar in the story. One widely held view was that the upper class had closed ranks to protect one of their own behind an aristocratic version of omertà, the Sicilian code of silence. But India heard Peggy sobbing hard at night. John, oh John. She drew no conclusions. She was only seven years old. A few days later the police issued a statement criticizing Lucan’s set for being unhelpful to the inquiry and pointing out that withholding information in a murder case was a criminal offense, even if the withholders were millionaires and aristocrats. But India had forgotten all about Lucky Lucan by then, because two days after the murder Peggy Rhodes had come to her in her bedroom at night, her eyes red-rimmed from weeping, and said, “There are things I must tell you, yes, yes. Hum! Ha! Things you ought to know.”