Lhaten glanced curiously at Christopher once more, then left.
Christopher sipped his tea. It tasted vile. He put the cup down and quaffed the cholapeg in a single swallow. It wasn’t much better.
Outside, the girl had stopped singing. The sound of men and animals from the bazaar had grown duller. An afternoon silence had fallen over Kalimpong. Christopher sighed as he put down the chipped whiskey glass. He was back.
Mishig, the Mongol trade agent who had sent the messages to Calcutta, had disappeared. According to George Frazer, the British Agent, he had returned to Kalimpong briefly, then left without warning about ten days earlier. Frazer told Christopher what he could about the monk who had brought the original message out of Tibet.
He was called Tsewong. It seemed that he had battled his way over the Nathu-la pass, down through Sikkim, and almost to the outskirts of Kalimpong before collapsing from exhaustion. According to the report received by Frazer, he was found on the roadside by a passing farmer on the fourteenth of December feverish, delirious, and near to death.
The farmer had brought him on his cart to the orphanage, where the Reverend John Carpenter and his wife had cared for him until the Mission doctor returned from a visit to a nearby village. The doctor had advised against Tsewong’s removal to the Presbyterian Hospital and had remained at the orphanage all that night. The monk had died the next morning, apparently without saying anything intelligible.
Before handing the body over to the Tibetan agent, who was to arrange for his cremation, the doctor had searched the man’s pockets or, to be precise, the pouch formed by the fold of his robes, in which Tibetan men carry their personal possessions.
In the pouch, apart from the normal accompaniments of a lama - a wooden teacup (also used as a bowl from which to eat tsampa), the traditional metal water-bottle, normally hung from the sash, a yellow wooden rosary of one hundred and eight beads, a small gau or talisman-box and some medicinal herbs the doctor found a letter written in excellent and idiomatic English, asking ‘whomsoever it may concern’ to provide the bearer, Tsewong Gyaltsen, with every facility, since he travelled as the personal emissary of a Tibetan religious dignitary identified only as the “Dorje Lama’.
A second paper had been folded into the same packet as the letter: it contained only five lines of writing, but was in Tibetan and could not be deciphered by the doctor. He had thought it best not to give either the letter or the paper to the Tibetan Agent along with the monk’s other possessions. Instead, he showed them to Frazer, who had the paper translated by his munshi. It turned out to be very simple: instructions on how to find the Mongol Trade Agent Mishig.
One thing nagged at Christopher’s thoughts while he made his way to the
orphanage in accordance with Lhaten’s directions: if the monk Tsewong
had been dying when he got to Kalimpong, and if he had in fact died the
morning after his arrival at the Knox
Homes, how on earth had he managed to convey Zamyatin’s message to Mishig? Had someone else taken the message on his behalf? If so, who?
The orphanage, like the church beside which it was built, looked as if it had been transported bodily, like the palace in “Aladdin’, from the Scottish lowlands to the place where it now stood. Here in Kalimpong, not only did the Christian god reveal himself in open defiance of the myriad tutelary deities dwelling in the mountains above, but Scottish Presbyterianism ranged itself against the questionable mores of the unredeemed masses of India below.
Although the rest of Kalimpong luxuriated in a cold winter sunlight that seemed to have been bounced off the gleaming white slopes to the north, the Knox Homes and the pathway that led up to them were sunk in gloom, as though the very stones of the building rejected all but the grey est and most melancholy of lights.
The path was lined with thick, dark green cypresses that seemed to have stepped straight out of a painting by Bocklin. Everything was steeped in shadow not merely touched or etched by it, but steeped in it, tormented by it. The Reverend Carpenter had brought more to Kalimpong than Presbyterianism and God.
The pathway led directly to a short flight of steps that in its turn led to a heavy wooden door. There was nowhere else to go. Feeling Catholic and English and travel-stained, Christopher lifted the heavy brass knocker and announced himself loudly to the hosts of Christendom within.
The door was opened by an Indian girl of about fifteen, dressed in what he took to be the uniform of the Knox Homes: a dark grey dress fastened at the waist by a black leather belt. There was nothing welcoming about her face or her manner. The slight trace of a Scottish accent alerted Christopher to the possibility that she might now carry in her soul more than just a trace of Calvinist iron.
“Would you please tell the Reverend Carpenter that Mr. Wylam, about whom Mr. Frazer spoke to him recently, has arrived in Kalimpong and would like to see him at his earliest convenience.”
The girl looked him up and down, clearly disapproving of what she saw. In the Homes, the girls were taught of cleanliness, godliness, and chastity, and the half-shaven man on the doorstep looked very much as though he were deficient in all three. But he spoke like an English gentleman and carried himself like one.
“Yes, sahib. May I have your card, sahib?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, ‘but I’ve just come out from England. I haven’t had time to have my cards printed yet. Would you please just give the Reverend Carpenter my name and message?”
“The Reverend Carpenter is very busy today, sahib. Perhaps it is better you come back tomorrow. With your card.”
“I’ve just told you. I don’t have a card, young lady. Now, please do as I ask and give my message .. .”
At that moment, the young lady was precipitately displaced in the doorway by a thin, Presbyterian-looking woman in her late thirties or early forties.
“I am Moira Carpenter,” she said in a polite Edinburgh accent that would have crushed glass.
“Do I know you?”
“I regret not, madam,” Christopher said.
“My name is Wylam, Christopher Wylam. I understand that Mr. Frazer, the Trade Agent, spoke with your husband concerning me last week. Or so I was given to understand before I left Calcutta.”
“Ah, yes. Mr. Wylam. How good of you to call. I was expecting . ah, someone different.”
When Moira Carpenter said ‘different’, she meant exactly that.
She fitted her surroundings as though, by an act of simultaneous decree in the mind of John Knox’s dour and unsociable God, they had been brought into existence in one and the same cosmic instant: dark things set down in the Indian sunlight, as though to hamper it. Like someone in perpetual mourning, she wore black a long dress without the vice of trimmings or ornament, more a cage for the body than a fabric for the soul.
A mother if that is not an unsuitable use of the word to dozens of destitute Indians, she had herself given up trying to have children at the age of twenty-eight. Her womb, she had been candidly informed by doctors at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, was just not up to it, and the four deformed foetuses she had theretofore delivered into immediate oblivion had borne the doctors out. At the heart of her, something was broken, something that neither doctors nor prayers could fix.
As a Christian woman whose duty in life lay in the replenishment of that pool out of which the good Lord would one day choose His elect, she spoke bitterly of her loss. She sought reason for her failure in a sense of her own sinful unworthiness. But privately, she rejoiced in her barrenness, for she had never had much liking for children and none at all for the turgid conjugal act that necessarily preceded their procreation. She had never understood why the Lord had not thought of a quicker, less embarrassing, and more sanitary method.