The Golden Monkey Mystery E-Book

Piu DasGupta

• Herausgeber: Nosy Crow Ltd
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 212

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

A thrilling adventure set in the jungles of India from the Waterstones Children's Book Prize shortlisted author of Secrets of the Snakestone. A lost monkey. A cursed jewel. A race through the jungle… When Roma stumbles upon a rare golden monkey, she vows to return it to its hidden home in the Himalayas. But the path is riddled with peril: ruthless bandits, prowling beasts, and the sinister power of the Snakestone – a jewel that stalks her dreams. To make matters worse, Roma is forced to travel with Max and Arabella, two pampered children who seem more trouble than help. Only a mysterious map offers a chance of success – but with every step, pursuers of the Snakestone draw closer. Can Roma unlock the map's secret before the jungle swallows them whole?

Leseprobe

i

ii

iiiFor my mother, Sarah DasGupta, née Ivattiv

vWho in this world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Illusion is the first appearance of truth

Rabindranath Tagore, Chitra

vi

vii

viii

1

“Halt!” The tip of a knife blade brushes the baron’s chin.

The baron is not afraid.

“Who goes there?” The temple guard squints through the darkness at the intruder. His voice quivers enough to tell the baron that he is young and inexperienced.

“It is I, Baron Henri Le Vandale!” The baron draws his sword. The blade catches the moonlight. “Let me pass, and you will come to no harm.” 2

The baron glances over the guard’s shoulder. A fire glows in the temple courtyard. At the far side towers a statue of Brahma, the four-headed one, all-seeing and all-knowing. He is squatting upon a giant lotus flower. The statue is shrouded in shadow save for a single gemstone the size of a hen’s egg in Brahma’s central forehead. It gleams in the firelight with a strange greenish-yellow light.

The guard trembles. The baron pushes past, thrusting him aside and striding forward towards the statue.

“HALT!” The guard rushes to stop him.

But it is too late. The baron leaps on to the statue’s plinth and stretches to his full height. He reaches above the god’s stony gaze to grasp the yellow gem. Pulling a penknife from his pocket, he slides it behind the metal prongs holding the jewel in place. The gem falls from its setting into the baron’s outstretched hand.

“STOP!” The guard has reached the statue. He stands trembling, looking up at the baron, eyes bulging with terror.

The baron grins. “It’s nothing, my dear fellow. All in a night’s work for Henri Le Vandale.”

The guard points a warning finger at him. “Be very 3careful, foreigner. That is the Snakestone, the sacred stone of Brahma, the all-seeing and all-knowing. Its curse will fall upon any presumptuous mortal who dares lay hands on it. For your own sake, put it back!”

The baron roars with laughter. “Dear fellow, you’re taking this far too seriously. What good is this splendid jewel doing in this lonely temple, with nobody but yourself for company? Far better for it to be seen and admired, which it will be, once I’ve sold it for a thousand francs to a member of royalty. So don’t trouble your head about the Snakestone, or whatever you call it. I’ll be giving it a new lease of life.”

Chuckling to himself, the baron leaps down from the plinth. He swats the guard aside like an annoying mosquito and strides out of the temple into the darkness of the forest.

The guard falls on his knees before the statue. “Brahma, the Lotus-born, arise in vengeance!”

A hush falls on the forest. The chattering of birds and monkeys is stilled. From the swift-footed chital deer to the lumbering elephant, all creatures fall silent as their eyes turn to the temple on the hill.

Pouf!

The fire in the courtyard goes out. A chill wind stirs the leaves of the banyan trees. 4

“Brahma, all-seeing and all-knowing, arise in vengeance!” Once again, the cry rings along the marbled temple corridors and echoes through the branches of the trees.

There is a rustle and a soft, slow creak. Limbs long immobile grind stiffly into action. Roused from centuries of slumber, the eyes of the statue jerk open.

5

One Hundred Years Later

Roma awoke with a start, eyes wide, shivering and soaked in sweat. She jumped up and looked around. Bed, desk, candle – all gone. Before her, a dense undergrowth of bushes, twisted ferns and tall bamboo. Flame-coloured orchids glowed in the darkness.

Two of the orchids blinked. Not orchids, a pair of red eyes. A bright green pit viper glared at Roma from the shadows.

The viper growled sleepily. She must 6have woken it. The snake swayed for a minute and slithered grumpily back into the undergrowth.

Roma peered around. How had she got here, to the edge of the jungle? A trail of footprints in the dust leading back to the huddle of school buildings gave the unwelcome answer. As did the red scratches on her legs.

She had walked here herself. In her sleep.

There was a sharp stabbing pain in her leg. Roma bent and pulled a thorn out of her calf. It was long and hooked, the type of jungle thorn called “wait-a-bit”. Because if you get caught in them, you have to wait before you can extract yourself from their cruel grasp.

That dream again.

The forest, the moonlit temple.

The statue of Brahma, with the great hole in its forehead where something had been ripped out.

A huge gemstone on the forest floor, winking and flashing in the moonlight, vanishing the moment it was grasped.

The dream that had haunted her for so many nights.

Roma plodded back to the schoolhouse. A chill wind blew. She pulled her night shift tightly round her. Despite the heat during the day, it was still cool after sundown on these summer nights around 7whose edges the approaching monsoon prowled like a waiting tiger.

At the school gates, under a peepal tree, a lean, wizened old man in a dhoti with grey hair twisted into a topknot was standing on his head.

“Good morning, Goswami Dadu,” Roma said to the old man politely.

The upside-down face of the old man grinned back. “Good morning, Roma.”

“Does your head not ache, Goswami Dadu?” Roma frowned, remembering the old man had been in exactly the same position outside the school gate the previous morning. Goswami Dadu was a travelling yogi, following the spiritual life. Villagers would leave him offerings of food in return for prayers.

“No headache at all.” The old man smiled. “Being upside down is good for you. Inversions allow the body to purge impurities, building strength, calmness and clarity of mind.” He wiggled his feet. “Besides, we see many things, when the world is inverted, that we would not see the right way up. The red scorpion that just scuttled across the ceiling of the porter’s lodge, for example. I must warn Abhijeet.”

“Eeek!” Roma carefully skirted the lodge where Abhijeet, the porter, nodded sleepily. She waved 8goodbye to Goswami Dadu and slipped through the gates. Crossing the leafy school compound, she slunk back to her dormitory, tiptoeing past the snoring figures in charpoy beds to slip into her own.

But she couldn’t sleep. Daylight was beginning to filter through the drawn shutters, so Roma slid back out of bed and pulled on her clothes. Heading out of the dormitory, she padded down the deserted school corridor to the room next door. The one place where she knew she would find peace.

The school library smelled of mildew and magic. Shelves crammed with dusty tomes glowed pale gold in the dawn seeping through the shuttered windows. Roma made for the big writing desk in the middle of the room and pulled a sheet of letter paper out of the drawer. She began writing in a neat spidery script:

The Library

Miss Oliphant’s School for Young Ladies

Kalabon Forest,

Bengal

Monday,

27th June 1881, 6 a.m. 9

Sir Horatio Bancroft-Pratt CBE,

“Westward Ho!”

5 Chowringhee Square,

Calcutta

Dear Sir Horatio,

I am writing to you as a pupil at Miss Oliphant’s School for Young Ladies with a burning desire to become a doctor. Of course I am aware that this path is barred to persons of the female sex. But I beg you to consider some exceptional circumstances in my case:

1. I have read and am familiar with current works on anatomy, physiology and herbology, including your own excellent book, “Tusks, Tigers & Tea: Selected Animals of the Indian Subcontinent”.

2. I recently exploded a mango using molten salt, measuring the effect on my pulse rate of the blast. Damage to the school laboratory was unintended and accidental.

3. I have read and can recite by heart “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” by the much-respected scholar Mary Wollstonecraft.

4. I have demonstrated the cross-lateral control mechanisms of the brain by testing the difficulty of 10various bodily actions. For example, the near-impossible feat of drawing a circle with one’s foot at the same time as writing one’s name.

5. I have it on the good authority of my father that a soothsayer predicted me to be a boy in the womb. The unfortunate occurrence of the opposite was an aberration of nature and not my fault.

Finally, I should like to draw your attention to an observation of the great Greek physician Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine. Namely, that where the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love for humanity. Surely there could be no better example of this love than to reveal the secrets of the healing art to the female sex?

Your humble admirer,

Roma Moreau

Roma blotted the letter carefully and put the pen back in the inkwell. Rising from the table, she padded over the rush matting to the glass-fronted bookcase. She pulled open the door and took from the shelf a large leather-bound volume. Tusks, Tigers & Tea: Selected Animals of the Indian Subcontinent by Sir Horatio Bancroft-Pratt CBE. 11

On the first page was a portrait of Sir Horatio himself. A large red-faced man with a bushy beard and eyebrows that sprouted like hedgerows. Sir Horatio was Roma’s hero. He had travelled all over India, discovering miraculous cures and healing potions from plants and animals. Then he had retired to found the Bengal Medical College, a pioneering medical school.

Roma dreamed of going there someday, but women were not allowed at the Bengal Medical College, nor any of the schools that prepared for its entrance exam. And Papa wasn’t of a mind to help her get the rules changed.

“Medicine and adventure are not for women, Roma,” he would say, ruffling her hair. “Miss Oliphant’s is the proper place for young ladies. Leave the blood and dirt to the men.”

So Roma was left to vent her frustration by causing minor explosions in Miss Oliphant’s small school laboratory.

Roma flipped through the pages of Sir Horatio’s book. Pictures of brightly coloured animals and birds danced past. Bengal tiger, cloud leopard, black bear. Roma called this book The Bestiary. It was her favourite book. Even better than her second-favourite 12book, Lectures on Phrenology with an Analysis of Parts of the Cranium by the Reverend Jeremiah Boggis. When she reached a particularly large full-colour illustration, she stopped flipping the pages.

A small wrinkled black face with beady eyes peered mournfully out at her from a golden cloud of fur. The golden leaf-eating monkey. The rarest monkey in India. A species on the verge of extinction, only to be found in one mountain range, hidden near Darjeeling in the wild Himalayas. A creature so rare as to be a legend, worshipped for its almost magical powers: the ability to warn of the presence of snakes, and its apparent immunity to disease.

Sir Horatio Bancroft-Pratt had dedicated his life to finding the breeding grounds of the golden leaf-eating monkey, in order to study it and discover the secret of its mysterious immunity. He had failed, and had declared in his retirement speech at the Bengal Club that it was his one great regret over a long and splendid career.

Roma flipped back to the beginning of the book, which contained a fold-out map: a large map of India, with the habitat of every species Sir Horatio had encountered on his travels labelled. All, that is, except for the golden monkey. For this, there was only 13a question mark in the region of the Himalayas near Darjeeling. There was also a picture of fish swimming beneath waves along the coastline:

The picture was based on a drawing in an ancient Indian scroll. But, as Sir Horatio noted in his introduction, it made no sense. The golden monkey was not an aquatic animal, so could not possibly live in the sea. What did the picture mean? Did it contain a clue of some sort to the monkey’s breeding grounds? It was impossible to tell. Roma had never been to the Himalayas, but she had listened to her father talk about his adventures there. Hair-raising treks on the trail of poachers. Watching the orange sunrise strike the snow-capped peak of Mount Kanchenjunga from 14the summit of Tiger Hill. One day, she had decided, she would witness this breathtaking sight for herself. Why, perhaps she might even discover the secret breeding grounds of the golden monkey and the source of its immunity! They’d have to let her into medical school then.

Roma slipped the book into her satchel. Nobody would notice it had gone missing. She would study the map later. She went back to the desk, sat down and began to reread her letter.

A sharp hiss in her ear cut Roma’s daydream short.

“Ha! What have we here?” a snide voice whispered.

Roma jumped up from the desk and spun round. A slim girl with long black hair and her lip curled in a snarl stood before her, hands on hips. Roma turned back to the desk to grab her letter. But she wasn’t quick enough. It had already been snatched away.

15

“Stop!” Roma tried to grab the letter. But the girl neatly put out her foot, tripping her over. Roma fell to the floor, landing on her bottom with a hard smack.

“Sarala, give it back!” She heaved herself up from the ground.

But Sarala was grasping the letter in her fingers. Her eyes narrowed as she scanned the contents. “What’s this?” The snarl became a smirk. Sarala turned to the dozen-odd huddled figures that had appeared in the doorway of the library. “A letter to the honourable Sir Horatio 16Brancroft-Pratt, petitioning to be allowed to train as a doctor!”

A titter arose from the assembled girls. Sarala smiled pityingly at Roma. “Everybody knows women will never be doctors. Who are you kidding?”

“Give it back!” Tears of rage welled in Roma’s eyes. She reached out again to grab the letter, but Sarala brandished it above her head, out of reach. She continued to read it, a broad smile spreading across her face wider than a hyena’s grin.

“Oooh… And it gets juicier. Roma admits it was she who caused the explosion in the school lab!” Sarala’s eyes narrowed to slits. Her voice dropped to a shocked whisper. “So it was you, Roma Moreau, who exploded that mango two nights ago and left the laboratory splattered with squashed fruit?”

There was a collective gasp in the corridor. Twelve pairs of eyes, saucer-shaped in horror, fixed on Roma.

“Give it back!” Roma felt her face flush hotter than a chapati in a pan.

But Sarala was holding her sides laughing, tears rolling out of her eyes. “Ha ha! Petitioning Sir Horatio Bancroft-Pratt to let you go to medical school! What a joke. You’re just a freak, with those mismatched eyes of yours. Forever chasing the ridiculous dream 17of medicine rather than the sensible one of finding a future husband. No mother, and a father who never visits. Nobody likes you.”

The words cut Roma like a surgeon’s scalpel. Without her having any say in the matter, her fist flew out and boxed Sarala’s ear. The blow barely touched the other girl, bouncing off the expensive gold earring that dangled from her ear. But Sarala’s mouth opened as wide as a railway tunnel and a screech as loud as an express train came out.

“Owwwww!!!!! She hit me!!!!!!!!!!! Owwwww!!!!!!!!”

A crowd of girls surrounded Sarala. Within minutes she was being escorted out of the library, brandishing the letter triumphantly.

“I think Miss Oliphant will be most interested in this,” Sarala called as the girls trooped down the corridor. They disappeared in the direction of the headmistress’s office.

The bell rang for breakfast.

“Well, that was a pretty stupid thing to do, if I say so myself.” The cat on the windowsill regarded Roma with unblinking eyes. He twisted his handsome head and began to lick his back carefully, pink tongue flicking in and out of the dense black fur. 18

“Sarala didn’t have any business looking at my private correspondence.” Roma jutted out her chin and glared at the cat defiantly. She didn’t mention the thing that had made her snap. Sarala’s reference to her being motherless, and the father who never visited. She looked down at the blotted exercise book in front of her. She had just written, for the ninety-third time, the line:

I must not explode mangoes in the school laboratory or hit people.

But it was impossible to fool Birala. Birala was the only animal who talked to Roma. Or seemed to talk. But he only did it when they were alone. Sometimes she wondered if he was really talking to her, or if she was imagining it.

“It was a stupid thing to do.” The cat had finished grooming himself and was arching his back, tail stuck in the air. “Of course it’s only natural that you are sensitive to references to your mother’s demise and your father’s … preoccupation with business matters. But you make things worse for yourself by boxing people on the ear. The cunning cat pauses before he pounces.” He looked at Roma, green and blue eyes 19gleaming with silent reproach.

Roma glowered at the cat. She was running out of time to write her lines because she had spent the first half of detention writing a second letter to Sir Horatio:

The Detention Room

Miss Oliphant’s School for Young Ladies

Kalabon Forest,

Bengal

Monday,

27th June 1881, 12 p.m.

Sir Horatio Bancroft-Pratt CBE

“Westward Ho!”

5 Chowringhee Square

Calcutta

Dear Sir Horatio,

Following my letter this morning, here are some more factors to take into account for my petition to be admitted to medical school:

1. I have proved that soft flour is better for making chapatis than hard flour for those with a delicate digestion. This is due to the relative size of the gluten strands. 20

2. I am cultivating a colony of South Asian shamuks, or snails, in the school shed to observe their reproductive rates. The fact that some of them escaped and consumed the moong beans growing in the school vegetable patch was not my fault.

3. I have made a hen’s egg bounce twenty inches high after submerging it in vinegar for forty-eight hours. This demonstrates that I have a sense of humour, essential as a coping mechanism to process the horror and trauma of a doctor’s job. And also to help protect against burnout and emotional fatigue.

4. I have beaten Aditya Sen at St Aloysius’s Boys’ College three times in the inter-school mental arithmetic challenge. (The third time he cheated.)

Your humble admirer,

Roma Moreau

The time spent composing the letter meant that Roma was behind in completing the required one hundred lines. She dipped her pen in the inkpot and continued writing. “Leave me alone, all right, Birala?

Get on with your cat life. I don’t interfere with your affairs, so don’t meddle with mine.” Birala, being a cat, could not of course shrug his 21shoulders, but he rippled his haunches in a way that Roma felt would have been a shrug if he could. “You’re deluding yourself, young lady. Women won’t be allowed into medical school anytime soon. And even if they were, your papa would never let you pursue such a course. You’re scratching at a door that will never open.”

“Papa will let me go to medical school eventually. He just needs to be persuaded. I’ll work on him when he finally gets back from hunting down that robber queen, Devi, or whatever her name is.” Roma clutched her fists into two tight balls, digging her nails in her palms. She missed Papa more than she cared to admit. The image of her father rose up before her. He was clad in breeches and safari helmet engraved with his insignia: two skeletons sitting back to back. She scowled at the cat. “Famous bounty hunters have important business to attend to, you know. Naturally he is busy.”

Birala shook his head. Or at least Roma thought he shook his head. Birala and Roma agreed on almost nothing, but somehow got along. A fact that Roma rather liked, remembering the words of the wise Hippocrates, that opposites are cures for opposites.

Roma had been drawn to Birala from the moment 22she laid eyes on him. The day that, six years ago, she and the black kitten had both arrived at Miss Oliphant’s school. The boarding school was an eccentric outpost, founded by Miss Oliphant after a failed engagement. It was intended to educate native and colonial children – the offspring of tea planters and professionals of modest means. Roma had rolled up at the school in a battered bullock cart the same day as Birala landed on the headmistress’s doorstep.

Perhaps Roma was drawn to the cat because they had both been abandoned. Or because, like her, he didn’t fit in. Like Roma, Birala, too, had heterochromia – different-coloured eyes. But in Birala’s case the difference was striking: one eye a vivid blue, the other a clear green. Roma’s heterochromia was subtler – her left eye a misty sea grey, the right obsidian black. The colour difference was only clear on close scrutiny and easy to miss at first glance.

Roma had always been proud of her heterochromia. Especially after she had read up about it in Bartholomew Payne’s Treatise on Aberrations of the Mammalian Oculus. It made her feel rather special to know that her eyes were the product of a rare genetic variation.

“It’s understandable that you would wish to go to medical school, especially after what happened 23to your mother.” Birala’s voice was kinder now. “But it won’t happen. So you’re putting your paw into a river with no fish.” Birala licked his paws slowly and deliberately, as if to emphasise the point.

Roma bit her lip. “Let’s drop the subject, if you don’t mind.” She bent her head back over the exercise book and wrote down two more lines, digging the pen into the paper so hard that it tore:

I must not explode mangoes in the school laboratory or hit people.

I must not explode mangoes in the school laboratory or hit people.

“Suit yourself,” Birala said huffily. Crouching on all fours, he gathered himself into a concertina and jumped off the windowsill. Then he padded across the school yard to the bamboo fence separating it from the jungle, tail waving in the air like an angry bottlebrush. Soon he had disappeared into the blackness of the forest.

Tears pricked Roma’s eyes. Ma. The ma she’d never known. Ma, who had died in childbirth, which need not have happened if only a woman doctor had been available to deliver the baby. She dipped her pen in 24the inkwell, turned back to her letter, and added at the end:

PS: Permitting women to be doctors would save the lives of literally thousands of women among our countryfolk, many of whom refuse the attentions of a male doctor out of modesty. For example, my mother Nilima died in childbirth, which could easily have been avoided had a female doctor been at hand. Including my own sadly deceased mother who passed away in childbirth due to no female doctor being available.

Such women often die needlessly from non-fatal causes, which could easily be averted if a female doctor was available.

In the distance over the school compound, the bell rang for the end of morning break. Pupils flowed back into the school from the playground in brightly coloured saris or pinafore dresses.

Roma sighed with relief and put down the pen. Detention was finally over! She picked up the pages of useless copying and put them on the teacher’s desk. The first class after morning break was French, a lesson from which Roma was excused. This was 25because she already spoke French perfectly, having a French father. Perhaps she could take a stroll and observe some of the forest animals. A viper, like the one she had seen in the undergrowth earlier that morning. She could collect some of its venom to test its medicinal properties. She picked up her field notebook and left the empty classroom, wandering into the dirt schoolyard.

The pages she had been writing lay in a neat pile on the teacher’s desk. All one hundred lines copied. Save for the last three lines, where Roma’s attention had slipped again:

I must not explode mangoes in the school laboratory or hit people.

I must not explode mangoes in the school laboratory or hit people.

No other woman must die.

No other woman must die.

No other woman must die.

A banyan tree spread over the courtyard, throwing welcome shade over the dusty playground. Roma crossed the yard and perched on a rickety wooden bench on the edge of the thick jungle that 26circled the schoolyard.

“Roma, my child, what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” A squat figure waddled past. It was Champa, the school cook. She was puffing and panting from the effort of hauling a sack of rice across the yard.