Chapter 10
Ultramarine is a strange and rare color: beyond sea blue, even beyond the deeper blue artists call marine blue. When my mother included ultramarine in her paintings, which was rarely, she would use her thumb to crush small balls of pure lapis lazuli into powder, wet the powder with drops of water from a glass or with her own saliva, and then, using strong, sure jabs of her palette knife, mix tiny amounts of that overpoweringly strong tone—ultramarine—into the seascape or skyscape on which she was working. In the slightest excess, it’s disturbing, unbalancing. In just the right amount, it’s the most beautiful color in existence.
T he suites in the Hotel Mount Everest are actual suites, which include sitting rooms with overstuffed Victorian furniture. Our corner suite has tall windows looking both southeast to the buildings of Darjeeling staggering down the hillside beneath the hotel, and when we part the drapes, glimpsed through ever-shifting clouds, high mountains with snowy, moonlit peaks rising like ramparts to the north and northeast. “Which one is Everest?” I ask the Deacon in reverent tones.
“That stubby low-looking little peak to the left center…the one you can’t really make out,” he says. “The closer giants like Kabr and Kanchenjunga block a good view of Everest from here.”
There is a bedroom for each of the three of us in this roomy suite, and…most wonderful of all…feather beds.
Jean-Claude and I would be happy to sleep late this next morning—when will be the next time we’ll be sleeping in feather beds?—but the Deacon, fully dressed down to the thumping lug soles of his alpine boots, ruins that plan by banging on both our doors, opening them, waking J.C., then stomping into my bedroom, throwing wide the heavy drapes to let in the high-altitude sunlight, and rousting me out just as the sun is rising.
“Can you believe it?” he snaps as I sit groggily on the edge of my wonderfully comfortable and warm bed.
“Believe what?”
“He wouldn’t let me in.”
“Who wouldn’t let you in where? And what time is it?” My tone is surly. I am surly.
“It’s almost seven,” says the Deacon and goes into J.C.’s room to make sure he’s also getting up and dressed. By the time he returns, I’ve splashed soapy water from a basin on my face and under my arms—I’d taken a long bath the previous night before going to bed, actually falling asleep in the hot water—and now get into a fresh shirt and trousers. I have no idea how one should dress for this surprisingly posh Hotel Mount Everest, but the Deacon is in twill trousers, mountain boots, a white shirt, and linen vest, so evidently one doesn’t have to dress formally to go to breakfast here. Still, I pull on a tweed jacket and knot a cloth tie. Even if the hotel is so informal as to tolerate the Deacon’s mountain-climbing attire, one has to doubt that Lord Bromley-Montfort will be.
“Who wouldn’t let you in where?” I repeat when we meet again in the hallway. When the Deacon is truly angry, his lips—already thin—become an even thinner line. This morning they have all but disappeared.
“Lord Bromley-Montfort. He has closed off the whole wing just down the hall from our suites, and he has that sirdar Pasang and two other oversized Sherpas standing in front of the doors, arms folded across their chests—guarding the doors, Jake, as if it were a bloody harem in there.”
The Deacon shakes his head in disgust. “Evidently Lord Bromley-Montfort is sleeping late this morning and does not wish to be disturbed. Even by the climbers who have come thousands of miles to risk their lives to find the body of his beloved cousin.”
“Was he beloved?” asks Jean-Claude as he joins us by falling into line on the surprisingly narrow stairway.
“Who?” snaps the Deacon, obviously still distracted by being turned away from Lord Reggie’s suite.
“Young Lord Percival,” says J.C. “Cousin Percy. Lady Bromley’s wastrel of a son. The fellow whose frozen corpse we’ve come to find. Was young Percy beloved by Darjeeling’s Lord Bromley-Montfort…by his cousin Reggie?”
“How the devil should I know?” barks the Deacon. He leads us downstairs to the large breakfast room.
“I suggest we get a good breakfast,” I say so there’ll be no more Deaconesque snarling. India has certainly brought out the dark, impatient side of our friend, one we’ve never seen before. It’s been my conviction during the months that I’ve known Richard Davis Deacon that he would choose his own beheading before allowing himself to commit an emotional scene in public.
I will very soon find out just how wrong I’ve been about that.
The long breakfast room is empty except for a table that has been set for seven. The same manager who’d greeted us in the middle of the night leads us to that table and sets five menus down. J.C. and I sit on one side of the table, the Deacon opposite us, and we leave the chair to my right at the head of the table and the one to the left of the Deacon empty. I’ve expected a British buffet, serve-yourself upper-class sort of breakfast, but evidently that’s not how the Hotel Mount Everest is going to feed us. The five menus set down suggest that Lord Bromley-Montfort and someone else—perhaps Lady Bromley-Montfort—may be joining us. This is not exactly a Sherlockian-level deduction, but then, I’m still groggy with sleep and without my morning coffee.
After twenty minutes of waiting for them—mostly in silence save for the sounds of our stomachs rumbling—we decide to order. The breakfasts are very English. Jean-Claude orders only muffin-biscuits and black coffee—a large pot of black coffee. The clerk/waiter pouts. “No tea, Monsieur?”
“No tea,” grunts J.C. “Coffee, coffee, coffee.”
The clerk/waiter nods dolefully and shuffles closer, looming over me, pen poised again. “Mr. Perry?”
I should find it unusual that he remembers my name from our checking in during the night, but then again, other than Lord and Lady Bromley-Montfort and their retinue, we seem to be the only three people in the hotel. I’m hesitating because I’ve had trouble in England finding breakfasts I can really enjoy, and this menu is most definitely English.
The Deacon leans my way. “Try the Full Monty, Jake.”
I don’t see it on the menu. “The Full Monty?” I say to the Deacon. “What is that?”
The Deacon smiles. “Trust me.”
I order a Full Monty with coffee, the Deacon orders the same with tea, Jean-Claude again mumbles “Coffee,” and the three of us are alone in the long room again.
“Not much business these days in the ol’ Mount Everest Hotel,” I say as we wait.
“Don’t be naive, Jake,” says the Deacon. “It’s obvious that Lord Bromley-Montfort has rented the entire hotel so that our meeting here today can be private.”
“Oh,” I say, feeling stupid. But not so stupid that I don’t ask, “Why would he do that?”
The Deacon sighs and shakes his head. “There goes our attempt to keep a low profile and to pass through Darjeeling without really being noticed.”
“Well,” I persist, “if Lord Bromley-Montfort cleared the place out so that we could meet this morning…where is he? Why keep us waiting?”
The Deacon shrugs. J.C. says, “Evidently English lords in India prefer to sleep late.”
Our breakfasts arrive. The coffee tastes like slightly warmed ditchwater. My breakfast plate is heaped so high with fried foods that bits keep slopping off as if trying to escape; the heap includes half a dozen burned-black pieces of bacon, at least five fried eggs, two gigantic pieces of fried bread slathered in butter, some sort of semi-ambulatory black pudding, fried tomatoes crouching next to grilled tomatoes, a row of sausages bursting through their burnt-fried skins, fried onions dolloped here and there at random, and a heap of leftover vegetables and potatoes from the previous evening’s dinners now all shallow-fried and jumble-piled together: bubble and squeak, I know the jumbled part of this mess is called. I hate bubble and squeak.