Chapter 04 Session 06 Wrap Up
Narrative Recap
The party assembled at the dusty roadside outside Cairo, joining a long caravan of camels and carriages bound for Suez under the watchful eye of Hassan al-Rashidi, a dour and experienced caravan master flanked by Bedouin guards carrying ornately engraved jezail rifles and curved scimitars. Among their fellow travelers were a fussy Reverend and his wife with trunks full of Bibles, and a blustering East India Company man named Gerald Hewitt, who was already berating his put-upon servant before the journey had even begun. Freddy and Adrien recognized Hewitt immediately as the man who had cornered Freddy in a Cairo bar to complain endlessly about the Company, and the sight of him now, red-faced and imperious, did nothing to improve their opinion. Before the caravan could even depart, Freddy found himself on the receiving end of a well-aimed glob of camel spit, setting the tone for what was to come.
Mounting the camels proved to be an adventure all its own. Emma and Georgiana took to their beasts with an almost unsettling grace, sitting tall and composed as though they had been born to the saddle, while Nathaniel found the rolling gait of the camel strangely familiar, its rhythm echoing the pitch and sway of a ship at sea. Thomas scrabbled and clawed his way up the side of his camel like a man who had never been so personally offended by an animal in his life, muttering that it was absolutely nothing like a horse. Adrien fell off entirely on the first attempt and had to be helped up by the drivers, cursing fluently the entire time. Katherine, however, had the worst of it by far — her camel seized her by the seat of her trousers in its teeth, lifted her bodily into the air, and dropped her onto the hard gravel, prompting the first and most spectacular display of profanity anyone in the group had ever heard from her. She was eventually shoved face-first onto the beast and righted with considerable difficulty, her composure in tatters and her opinion of camels firmly and permanently established.
The caravan pushed on through the scorching morning until the sun became less a source of light and more a physical weight pressing down on every living thing beneath it. They halted in the shade of stretched cloth, passing around thick, sweet coffee heavy with cardamom while the wind moved ceaselessly across the flat gravel plain and the horizon shimmered like a mirage. It was during this rest that Hewitt made his rounds, dispensing advice about surviving in India with the absolute confidence of a man who had never once questioned himself. He declared that brandy morning and night, a flannel band about the belly, and a strict policy of never bathing more than one’s face were the secrets to good health in the East, and that the monsoon was little more than a fortnight of grey drizzle. Those among the party with any medical or military knowledge recognized immediately that he was dangerously wrong on every count — that his beloved brandy had killed as many Company men as the fever ever had, and that the Indian monsoon was months of relentless deluge, not a light inconvenience. They smiled, nodded, and said nothing useful.
As night fell over the desert, the temperature plunged with startling speed, and the party wrapped themselves tight in their desert cloaks beneath a sky so clear and vast that the Milky Way spread from horizon to horizon without a single obstruction. Thomas made his way to Emma’s side with a blanket and the studied casualness of a man trying very hard to appear as though he had not planned this, and she let him sit beside her without comment. Food was passed around — unleavened bread, dates, figs, hard cheese, and couscous — while the camels shifted and grumbled in the dark. The peace was broken when Hewitt began beating his servant Rajan for spilling his liquor, and Nathaniel Holt, unable to stomach it, stepped in to intervene. The confrontation escalated quickly, with Hewitt calling out to Hassan al-Rashidi and referring to the caravan master as “boy,” a mistake that earned him a sharp rebuke and a private whisper from al-Rashidi that left Hewitt visibly pale and stammering apologies to everyone in the vicinity. Whatever al-Rashidi had said, it had achieved in seconds what no amount of public shaming could.
Around a separate fire, Freddy sat with Mancini and the brooding James Pelham, passing a bottle and listening as Mancini laid out the full scope of Hewitt’s reputation. He had abandoned a local wife and children in Calcutta without a second thought, paying off the family and walking away. Worse still, he had once forced the keeper of a desert wadi to open the emergency water reserves for his own animals during a dry season, leaving the caravan behind to arrive at an empty well — and two of those travelers had not survived to reach the next one. Meanwhile, Katherine sat by the fire sharing tea with the woman who had introduced herself as Mrs. Ashby, a widow traveling to Calcutta to settle her late husband’s estate. Katherine’s sharp ear caught something the others had missed entirely: beneath Mrs. Ashby’s proper British accent, there was an underlying inflection — a British-Indian lilt — that had no business being there if her story was true.
The following afternoon, as the sun dipped low and cast a yellowish sheen across the horizon, Georgiana recognized the signs of an approaching sandstorm and raised the alarm. The caravan drivers were already urging the camels forward at speed, and the whole procession raced for the shelter of the caravanserai at Wadi al-Tih, a fortified mud-brick structure with ten-foot walls, a central courtyard, and a brackish well at its heart. Abu Yusef, the keeper of the wadi, watched the caravan arrive from the courtyard, and Freddy, watching carefully, caught the unmistakable change in the old man’s expression the moment he spotted Hewitt among the travelers. The camels, skittish in the rising wind, refused to couch properly, and chaos erupted in the courtyard — Katherine’s camel bolted and bit her again for good measure, knocking into Adrien’s camel and sending Adrien tumbling to the ground. Abu Yusef provided water, thick sweet coffee, dates, figs, and sweetmeats to all the travelers before urging everyone into their alcoves as the storm closed in. That night, the wind screamed without pause against the outside walls, sand hissed through every gap, and the lantern flames stood perfectly still in the airless rooms.
The morning after the storm, the gate was buried in sand and the air hung thick with a yellowish haze. Thomas was already digging out Emma’s door when she emerged, and Georgiana’s door had to be freed as well. It was Rajan who first drew their attention — the servant was standing outside Hewitt’s alcove, knocking steadily and getting no response. Hassan al-Rashidi examined the lock and determined the key was still in the door on the inside. Katherine, with a piece of paper slid beneath the door and a careful hand, managed to coax the key out through the keyhole and retrieve it. When the door was finally opened, they found Gerald Hewitt lying dead on his bed, purple-faced, tongue protruding, with an obvious rope mark around his neck and his hand flung out across the overturned cup of his evening drink. Adrien examined the body and confirmed he had been strangled, though no rope had been left behind. Georgiana, searching the room carefully, found something else: the footprints pressed into the sand that had blown in under the door were too small to belong to a full-grown man.
The investigation unfolded with the particular energy of a group of people who were simultaneously very clever and occasionally very distracted. Nathaniel examined the door lock and noticed a snapped piece of black thread tied around the bit of the key, and the party worked out that someone had used the thread to pull the key through the keyhole from the outside after closing the door, locking the room from without while making it appear locked from within. Adrien, meanwhile, kept returning to the body in search of further clues, and at one point pressed down on the corpse’s distended stomach with enough force to cause it to belch loudly and sit bolt upright, sending a jolt of alarm through everyone present before it collapsed back down again. James Pelham loudly accused Rajan of the murder to deflect suspicion from himself, while Rajan protested his innocence with increasing desperation. Georgiana consulted with Abu Yusef about who held legal authority over the matter and learned that no one did — Ottoman officials had no jurisdiction over British subjects, and no one wanted the case.
The crucial lead came from Tariq, the young camel driver and nephew of al-Rashidi, whom Katherine sent Freddy to speak with. Tariq revealed, after some gentle persuasion, that he had seen a woman bringing tea to Hewitt’s room the night before and then discarding something near the well before the storm closed in. Freddy searched the area around the well and unearthed a small bottle buried in the sand, which Georgiana identified as having contained opium. The picture became clear: Hewitt had been drugged through his evening tea before being strangled, and the killer had used the thread trick to lock the door from the outside on their way out. The overturned cup on the bedside table, which no one had thought to examine, had held the evidence all along.
The party confronted Mrs. Ashby with the bottle and the thread of evidence they had gathered, and she confessed without hesitation or remorse. She was not a widow. She had never been married. Her name was Miss Ashby, and she had grown up in Calcutta, the daughter of an indigo trader whose business Hewitt had casually destroyed fifteen years ago when she was just fifteen years old — a kickback taken, a man cut out, a family ruined, and Hewitt had never given it a second thought. She had spent fifteen years waiting for the right moment, carefully plotting her path to intersect with his journey back to Calcutta. She had brewed the opium into his tea, waited for it to take hold, entered his room, strangled him with a silk cord, threaded the key back through the lock, and walked away. She handed over the cord without being asked. Here it is, she said. Keep it.
The Reverend was apoplectic, demanding that justice be served and that God’s law not be mocked, while his wife quietly patted his arm and suggested that divine justice would find its way regardless. The rest of the caravan showed considerably less outrage. Pelham looked as though a cloud had been lifted from his entire existence. Mancini watched with the satisfied expression of a man who had gotten exactly the entertainment he had hoped for. Al-Rashidi simply wanted the gate dug out and the caravan moving again. Freddy paid Abu Yusef a generous sum of Spanish silver dollars to handle the disposal of Hewitt’s body and to ensure that Rajan, now without a master, would be looked after. The servant stayed behind at the wadi, his fate uncertain but almost certainly better than what it had been. Miss Ashby, for her part, was invited to continue the journey to Calcutta — a city she knew far better than her false story had ever suggested — and she accepted without ceremony. The gates were dug free of sand, the camels were couched and loaded, and Hassan al-Rashidi got the caravan moving once more toward Suez, leaving the wadi and its secrets behind in the settling dust.