by Lyndsay Faye
“I can’t put my finger on it either,” Mr. Thornfield said quietly. “You ought to have seen her when she was thrown from Nalin. Popped up again like a jack-in-the-box, not even knowing how badly she was hurt. If she weren’t so thoroughly British—that pale elven look about her, those lustrous eyes—I’d have thought her raised north of the Sutlej. She doesn’t just carry a knife, she knows how to hold it. If I’d meant her any disrespect, I’m fairly sure she’d have made mincemeat of my bollocks.”
“She interests you,” Mr. Singh mused, and there was a twist to his tone which made me long to have seen his face as he spoke.
“Of course she does, she would interest anyone,” Mr. Thornfield retorted. “Not to mention the fact I’ve had nothing to occupy me all this while, save your company and that of a child whose every third word is horse.”
“You’ll feel better when the dead start speaking to you again.”
I had been listening with such rapt interest to the topic of myself that this shocking pronouncement startled me terribly; and further, I realised that the men had risen from their chairs and would find me with my ear to the door in a matter of moments.
“All locked up, then?”
“Snug as a noose,” Mr. Singh answered, and I heard the rattling of an iron in the grate.
Whirling towards the staircase, I made as much soundless haste as possible. My ankle felt as if a spike had impaled it, but I forced myself to limp faster.
“I can’t bear the feeling there is nothing to be done,” came Mr. Thornfield’s voice, and now they were at the threshold of the drawing room door.
“We shall consider further. Be at peace in the meanwhile.”
“At peace with both eyes open.”
“Quite so.”
They’re coming, I thought in a blind panic, and I had only made it halfway up the first set of stairs, and my ankle was ready to give way under me; getting up a staircase, it seemed, was another matter altogether than getting down. They would see me, they would know. I faced either being caught like a rat fleeing a refuse heap, or …
That is a terrible idea, I informed myself.
“Sahjara starts on the new mare tomorrow. She’s named it Harbax.”
“God’s gift,” said Mr. Singh as they neared the start of the staircase. “Excellent choice.”
“Clever little creature,” Mr. Thornfield agreed fondly. “Though Charles’s gift might have been more appropriate.”
“Even you, my friend, are moved by the will of God.”
There was nothing for it; I made an about-face, went as limp as I could, and fell down half a flight of stairs.
“What in the name of the devil!” Mr. Thornfield cried.
An inarticulate groan emerged when I had got my breath back from the wind being knocked out of my lungs. My left side was bruised, my limbs twisted, and my brain rattled into oblivion; beyond this I could not tell where I was hurt, though hurt I knew I must be. Mr. Singh was speaking urgently now, and so was Mr. Thornfield, and there were warm, careful hands on my shoulders. Then one of them shifted and a soft, thin glove with a heartbeat inside it cupped my cheek and drew it away from the carpet.
“Miss Stone! Dear God, Sardar, what has she— Confound it, Miss Stone, look at me.”
“She’s breathing steadily,” Mr. Singh’s tense voice added.
“Miss Stone, can you hear me?”
I could; I could feel him as well, feel the pressure of his fingers beneath the glove, and thought for a lunatic instant that apart from having just thrown myself down a staircase, I felt surprisingly happy. I opened my eyes.
“Christ, there you are.” Mr. Thornfield blew out the breath he had been holding. “’Pon my soul, you gave us a fright. Can you move at all? It would greatly endear you to me.”
Shifting, I found that I could, but stifled a cry when I discovered that my knee had been badly wrenched, and this time on my previously uninjured left side.
“Easy, easy now, that’s it,” he admonished, sliding a hand under my back.
“Oh God, I feel such a fool,” I gasped as Mr. Thornfield helped me to sit. “I left my book in the morning room, and I make such a horrid clamour with that crutch—I thought I could manage without.”
“You feel a fool because you are a fool,” Mr. Thornfield growled. “What in hell did you think you were about? You could have woken the whole bloody house with reveille on the trumpet for all we—”
“Mr. Thornfield,” put in Mr. Singh, his butler persona back in place, “might I suggest you help Miss Stone back to her bedroom and that you cease swearing at her? Miss Stone, what were you reading?”
“La Rabouilleuse,” I lied.
“I shall fetch it up to you with a bit of brandy.” Mr. Singh smoothly disappeared.
Mr. Thornfield was still on bended knee, glowering at me as if I had fallen down the stairs on purpose and little knowing I had done exactly that. When I raised my brows, he opened his mouth, shut it again, and composed his features by scrubbing his hand over them.
“May I?” he asked.
“I don’t think I can walk,” I admitted. “I’m sorry, sir. This grows tedious.”
“You find falling from potentially fatal heights tedious?” he returned, but now the tone was less strident, and if I painted it with my own imaginings, it might almost have been called tender.
So Mr. Thornfield effortlessly carried me up the stairs, and when my arms were about his neck, I smelled not only the cigar he had smoked with Mr. Singh but also a faint, clean sandalwood aroma which must have been the man himself, and made me think of steep hills overlooking dry plains, and the sweetness which must surely linger in the air after the monsoons have passed beyond the Sutlej.
TWENTY
I felt at times, as if he were my relation, rather than my master: yet he was imperious sometimes still; but I did not mind that; I saw it was his way. So happy, so gratified did I become with this new interest added to life, that I ceased to pine after kindred: my thin crescent-destiny seemed to enlarge; the blanks of existence were filled up; my bodily health improved; I gathered flesh and strength.
A month passed, reader, before my investigations progressed, partly because for the next fortnight I could not walk.
If you have never lain in bed in your dressing gown, your ankle and knee shrieking as you try to confine yourself to a reasonable amount of laudanum, teaching a bright, babbling girl sitting at the end of your bed by day and fretting by night why the master of the house’s spirits will be improved when the dead start to speak, then I am glad for you. I was full of restless energy which could be discharged nowhere, as if I were a kettle coming to boil lacking lid or spout, and if I had exploded, I should not have been the least surprised.
For a week I suffered, uninterrupted by any save Sahjara, a maid bearing meals which included an improbable dish of plum pudding on the day I reasoned must have been Christmas, and Mrs. Garima Kaur, who delivered poultices I suspected came from Mr. Thornfield. These smelt of sage and vinegar and worked wonders for swelling. If I had been an object of wonderment to the housekeeper previously, now I was a nuisance, for she coolly assisted me with an air suggesting my falling down stairs was in poor taste. The fact that the master of the house had not visited chafed terribly, but I supposed it would hardly be proper for him to pass the hours in my bedroom, and he seemed to harbour a horror of making un-English blunders in my presence.
Meanwhile, I wanted him to make certain blunders very much indeed.
By day I taught Sahjara, who brought me unceasing small presents ranging from orange flower cakes to bouquets of jolly red berries; by night, I imagined my employer making the sort of inappropriate advances which would have made most governesses flee the estate forthwith, and in graphic detail, complete with bare thighs and calloused fingers and the diagonal notches which rest so sweetly above the hipbones when a gentleman is in training, as I had no doubt whatsoever Mr. Thornfield was.
Then one morning when I was fidgeting in my
sheets, silver sunlight knifing through my curtains, I heard pounding steps hurtling down the corridor which could only have meant Sahjara. A knock preceded her entrance, but she did not wait for me to say “Come in,” and the words thus overlapped with her banging open the door.
“Miss Stone!” she cried, her dark eyes alight. “There’s a chair!”
I struggled to ascertain the import of this phrase.
“Charles has just brought it back in the carriage. A chair with wheels! He went to the village to get it, I think, and you’re to make yourself ready and then you can come down!”
I swiftly dressed in plain governess black with my hair pinned as tidily as my hair ever allows; no sooner had my small charge carefully tied my boots than Charles Thornfield appeared within the open door. Seeing him again after nearly a week without was a disproportionately stirring event, for I should not have cared so much over beholding a man with whom I had passed less than twenty-four hours’ time. He crossed his arms and leant against the frame, a sardonic quirk to his lips.
“Hullo, Young Marvel. Behold the Female Prodigy,” he announced. “She can tutor the pure ones, wield knives, and fall from dangerous altitudes with equal grace.”
I opened my mouth, glanced at Sahjara, and rolled my eyes instead.
“By Jove, is she trying not to swear at me in front of the child?”
He was correct, so I laughed. “Did you really find me a wheelchair, sir?”
Mr. Thornfield straightened, advancing. I have written that he was a man of medium height, not so tall as Sardar Singh, yet it seemed there was not sufficient space for him in this wide room, so great was his effect on me.
“It took rather more reconnaissance than I’d have liked, but the village physician had one in his attic, positively wreathed with cobwebs. One could scare tell it was a chair at all. Mrs. Garima Kaur has dusted it, naturally.”
“I’m so glad you’ll be downstairs with the rest of us!” Sahjara exclaimed, throwing her arms round my shoulders.
Blushing is not a habit of mine, but I am unused to raw sentiment being lobbed in my direction. As Mr. Thornfield took in this awkward scene, his ward clinging to me and then unselfconsciously racing away to do whatever Sahjara Kaur does when she isn’t on horseback, he looked uncertain whether to be delighted or dismayed, drawing a hand over the back of his neck in what I was learning to be a habitual gesture.
“She’s spontaneous,” I offered. “It means nothing, I’m well aware.”
“It doesn’t mean anything like nothing, not to anyone who knows her.” Mr. Thornfield shook off whatever uneasy thought plagued him. “I could carry the chair upstairs, but then there remain stairs when we reverse course—should we carry Mahomet to the mountain instead?”
“Whensoever you like,” said I.
Again I was lifted—respectfully, more’s the pity—by my employer. The journey, reader, was too brief for my liking; but once I had arrived at the ground floor and saw the charming vehicle, all wicker and softly curving wood painted a demure black, with carefully placed cushions, I positively glowed as I was set into it.
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this.” I looked up at Mr. Thornfield, who surveyed the results of his labours with satisfaction.
“Yes, well, do let me know if I should retain possession of it, supposing you decide to fly out the attic window.”
“No, I mean … thank you. Hardly anyone has ever bothered to take care of me.”
I paused to reflect, scarce registering that I had just confided an intimate fact to a near stranger. A list emerged:
—Agatha
—Clarke, when I was not taking care of Clarke
It may seem strange that I did not include my mother; but my mother was a butterfly’s wing, too fluttering and fragile to take care of anyone, and though we loved each other … she had left me, had she not?
Mr. Thornfield’s rough features smoothed into disbelief. “Whatever circumstance you’re speaking of, there ought to have been fifty lined up for the job.”
I sliced a look at him, unsure if he actually believed such nonsense; but he strode behind me, gripping the handles of the chair. Admittedly I might have wheeled the thing myself, but since Mr. Thornfield pushing me meant Mr. Thornfield a foot distant, I should have been a dunce to defend my independence.
“Where to, Miss Stone? I admit I had not thought so far, only feared that you were like to suffocate if you stayed in the same room any longer.”
“May we go to the morning room?”
“Think of this not as your chair but as your chariot, Miss Stone,” he proclaimed sarcastically, and I could not help but wonder whether Mr. Thornfield, on occasion, hid truth in falsehoods just as I did.
• • •
The master of the house and I forged a pattern when I was not at lessons with Sahjara; in the mornings and evenings, he would carry me downstairs so I could dine with what I was coming to understand was the family—the aforementioned individuals plus Mr. Sardar Singh—and after Sahjara had been led off to bed by Mrs. Garima Kaur, and Mr. Singh had adopted an introspective look and excused himself, the pair of us stayed up later and later and progressively later. I loved these strange sessions, for Mr. Thornfield, despite his prickliness, seemed to love them too, though it was a hard push not to blurt out What crime did you and Mr. Singh commit in the Punjab? or Why should the dead speak to you?
One night five days into my convalescence, Mr. Thornfield wheeled me into the drawing room after supper, I having confessed that good Scotch and I were not strangers, and when we were both equipped with this lovely commodity, I ventured to ask him a question. We should have been the picture of English domesticity, the firelight in Mr. Thornfield’s pale hair and I nestled into my cushions, if only I held a needle in my hand and not a glass of whiskey.
“Is Mr. Singh really the butler?”
Mr. Thornfield’s chin shot up. “By the Lord, is she actually interrogating me now?”
“He doesn’t sit with the servants at meals,” I insisted. “He doesn’t count the silver or manage your wine collection or berate the rest of the staff. I should venture to say that his only jobs are answering the door and locking the windows of a night, and those because he likes the control.”
Mr. Thornfield frowned. “Are you an inspector, Miss Stone? I shall have to look out over pinching extra kippers at breakfast and telling Sahjara lies about not being able to afford two mares for her instead of one.”
“That was a very neat way of not answering my question.”
“Oh, what’s the use—you’ve found us out.” Mr. Thornfield smiled, and this was an effortless one. “You know that Sardar and I were practically brothers growing up. The rest of the household, other than Sahjara of course, were his own servants in Lahore—we brought them with us, as he’d no wish to sack ’em all and they’d no wish to see the back of him. The man inspires affections left, right, and sideways—it’s a foul thing to watch.”
“So Mr. Singh is not a butler?” I pressed.
“Of course he is, supposing you want to keep meddling English busybodies out of our hair. But, no, you’re quite right—when Sardar vanishes, he is either studying the Guru, taking long constitutionals, or fiddling with Jas Kaur over replicating Punjabi dishes in the kitchen.”
I chuckled over my glass. “So though this is your estate, an argument can be made he is the master, since the servants are his domestics and not yours.”
“We couldn’t very well have made off with my parents’ household, could we, would’ve strained relations something frightful. You’re near to correct, but one of them—Mrs. Garima Kaur—was Sardar’s confidential secretary back in Lahore.”
This surprised me. “I thought she knew very little English?”
“Spoken like a true colonialist—didn’t matter a fig back then, there were only a pocketful of us. She probably figured it beneath her, never did warm to whites much, come to think of it. She speaks Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, and
Pashto something spectacular, and that’s all Sardar required.”
“And now she’s a housekeeper.”
“Well, what with Sardar a butler and all, she can’t be too miffed.”
Smiling, I leant my head against the cushion of my chair. “Tell me more.”
“More of what, you impudent elf?”
“Anything. Everything. Your parents survived the wars, I take it, since they still needed a staff? And why did you leave them in the first place—why study medicine?”
“Miss Stone,” he drawled, “if I did not know better, I would think I intrigued you.”
“You do intrigue me.”
I said this without a trace of guile. A British chap might have been chagrined over such an open display, but Mr. Thornfield only settled farther back into his armchair.
“Do you know, Miss Stone, that you are exceptional?”
“I have been told so, but never in complimentary light.”
Mr. Thornfield’s jaw twitched. “That was undeserved on your part, and therefore I will answer you. My parents are still in Lahore, and survived both wars without so much as a scratch. I should be proud of them if it were the done thing to be proud of privateers bleeding Company executives dry; I ought to be delighted, in fact, as it all comes to me in the end and now they have ten times the population of expatriates to drain to the dregs. Pardon, you might mistake me; I cherish my parents, but they are not suitable subjects for small talk.”
“Neither are we.”
This time he laughed freely. “Quite right, Miss Stone—if misfits cannot converse amongst themselves, then who can? Very well, my parents are brazen criminals and I elected to study medicine because I have always been fascinated by the impermanence of the human body. Does that answer your question?”
I shook my head, waiting for him to continue.
“Becoming a charlatan and a cheat never appealed to me,” Mr. Thornfield admitted. “My parents are crafty rather than malicious, but damned if I share their tastes—medicine meant studying mortality, in a sense. The Sikh holy book contains plentiful passages about flesh, and since my parents were about as interested in religion as they were in sobriety, I learnt from Sardar and his family. ‘We are vessels of flesh… . The soul taketh its abode in flesh… . Women, men, kings, and emperors spring from flesh.’ Sikhs are very—how shall I put it delicately?—straightforward about flesh. It was a comfort to me that they thought souls separate from lungs and livers, this sack of bones and blood we daily maintain, and I thought there was romance in medicine’s efforts to stave off the inevitable. This was when I was young and thick as a marble bust, you understand,” he added with a dour expression.