Free Black Diamond by Rachel Ingalls Page B

both of them would take the train to Paris, to join the Schuylers – ‘my American cousins’, as Vittoria called them. Beatrice began to remember Paul with less anger and blame. Ten years after the event, the hurt had gone. She thought of her old self as someone, like him, who shouldn’t have been taken seriously, and who was too inexperienced to behave well.
    She was happier than she had been when she was younger. She saw that she had a place in life and she liked it.
    *
    Her father had just come to the end of a stay in Palmyra and was back in Bagdad for a while, when he fell ill. The first indication Beatrice had of the fact was an official letter of condolence.
    She was certain that whoever wrote the letter must have made a mistake; people got things mixed up all the time, even names. She wrote back, and then decided that that wasn’t enough – she had to get out there and speak to the officials herself. Everyone tried to talk her out of it. They said that she wouldn’t be able to help.
    She made the journey anyway. How could she have stayed at home, when her father might be anywhere at all, and she wouldn’t know about it? He could have written to her about plans to go on an expedition: it wasn’t unknown for letters to be lost or delayed for months. He could be in danger, while some petty bureaucrat was entering his name in the wrong set of records. She remembered her father himself telling her that an acquaintance of his had had to travel all over the world as Mr Brown Gray simply because a clerk somewhere hadn’t known how to copy out the information in his papers, according to which his hair was brown and his eyes gray.
    As she moved from country to country, her father’s friends came to greet her; like cities on a map, they were dotted across the great distances she had to go. And when she neared the end of her journey, two of them, an uncle and nephew named Hoffmann, took on the local and foreign officials while she stood or sat silent nearby. Sometimes she felt compelled to interrupt, especially as people seemed to keep changing their stories. Her father, she was told, might not have been exactly ill; he might actually have been poisoned – that is, murdered. There was a woman in the case: more than one woman. And that always made for danger.
    â€˜This is ridiculous‚’ she whispered to the Hoffmann uncle. ‘My father was used to having all sorts of friendships and so on. He never left anyone feeling resentful or unhappy.’
    â€˜Perhaps a man who was a rival?’
    â€˜Much more likely to have been a poor cook,’ she said. Then, feeling just like Mrs Schuyler, she asked for information about the servants.
    His household had loved and admired him. According to them, he’d had a fever. One of them – a superstitious man – suspected that the professor had caught the disease from something he’d found when he was digging up a grave: everyone knew that it was forbidden to disturb the dead.
    She asked where her father had been buried. They were shown to a small cemetery for Christian Europeans. The Hoffmanns stood on either side of her, in case the emotion or the climate should prove too much for her. She found it impossible to believe that her father was there, in that space of earth. Could they have buried someone else by mistake? She wanted to ask to see him – just to be sure. But that would be impractical as well as shocking. Everyone agreed that the thing had happened and that he was there. Friends of friends had been at the funeral. She simply found it against the nature of the world as she knew it that he should suddenly not be there for her to talk to or to write to.
    On the return journey she began to believe in his death. Everyone she had met going out tried to comfort her on the way back. So many people had loved him. It made her feel closer tohim to hear them talk, and yet it also persuaded her to accept the fact