She thought for a moment. “The old soldier at our wedding who had a chest full of medals?”
“He was a colonel of the Royal Bengal Fusiliers. When we clamored for war stories, he’d tell us that an army marched on its stomach—wars were won and lost less on tactics and strategies than on the soundness of the supply chain. So when I went on safaris with my godfather, I always took it upon myself to oversee logistics,” he said, smiling a little. “It was quite heady for the youngest of five sons to finally feel in charge of something.”
She was struck dumb with a harebrained realization—harebrained because she should have seen it long ago: He had been the one in charge of their household.
She’d known very little of the complex inner workings of a household. During their brief marriage, however, the house had run like a charm. Her clothes and shoes were kept in perfect shape. The carriage pulled up outside the front door every day just as she got ready to go to the hospital. Dinner appeared every night—always with something she liked—without her having ever consulted with the cook, without her even knowing what the cook looked like.
Even after she’d barred him from her bed.
After he left, however, dinners became too rich, the coachman sometimes drove half drunk, the housekeeper complained constantly about the maids and their followers, and piles of correspondence were left for Bryony to deal with. At that time she’d been in a daze and had taken the various ways her household had fallen apart as merely additional symptoms of her own broken life.
When the truth was he’d taken very good care of her during their marriage and she’d never known it or appreciated it.
Her compact, delicious weight atop him. His name on her lips. Her hips, soft and pliant under his bruising grip. His body, straining off the camp bed, emptying into her in desperate pleasure.
Amazing what a man thought of, looking at a fully clothed woman who did nothing more provocative than sipping her tea while gazing thoughtfully into the distance.
For the thousandth time he wished he’d just met her. That they were but two strangers traveling together, that such lovely, filthy thoughts did not break him in two, but were only a pleasant pastime as he slowly fell under the spell of her aloof beauty and her hidden intensity.
There were so many stories he could tell her, so many ways to draw her out of her shell. He would have waited with bated breath for her first smile, for the sound of her first laughter. He would be endlessly curious about her, eager to undress her metaphorically as well as physically.
The first holding of hands. The first kiss. The first time he saw her unclothed. The first time they became one.
The first time they finished each other’s sentences.
But no, they’d met long ago, in the furthest years of his childhood. Their chances had come and gone. All they had ahead of them were a tedious road and a final good-bye.
“Who are those?” she asked.
He looked in the direction she indicated: a band of turbaned, musketed men in the distance, coming toward them.
“The Khan of Dir’s levies,” he said. “They keep peace along the road.”
The Khan of Dir was under obligation to the government of India to maintain the road to Chitral, though the regular posting of levies along the road probably also served as a reminder of force, for the khan’s chumminess with the British did not endear him to his subjects. In fact, they seemed to despise him altogether for being a puppet of the distant government whose unwanted influence stabbed through the heart of their mountain fastness.
Leo signaled for tea to be offered to the levies. “Ask them about the situation in Swat,” he instructed Imran.
When the levies had taken to the road again, Imran came to offer a summary of the news. The miracle man’s fame had grown substantially in Dir in the week since Leo had first heard of him. People talked about the imam at breakfast, lunch, and dinner and debated his chances of success at tea.
Leo wasn’t convinced that the imam was anything but a charlatan. But most charlatans, or most small-time martyrdom-seekers for that matter, didn’t have people avidly talking of their deeds one hundred and fifty miles away in this kind of terrain.
“Should we worry?” Bryony asked him.
“For now, no. We will keep a close eye on the situation. If and when we receive any solid evidence of danger, any solid evidence at all, we will stop and wait out the trouble.”
She nodded, and reached for a piece of the tea cake.
He watched her.
Her blue-black hair, spread like the cape of Erebus. Her skin, as bare as a beggar’s coffer, as fresh and soft as that carpet of asters upon which he would love to place her, her mouth warm, her body sweet and yielding. No past. No future. Only that eternal, glorious moment, unstained by shame or regret.
She intercepted his gaze. Color rose in her cheeks. And he was a smoldering heap of ruins.
“Eat.” She pushed a piece of tea cake into his hand. “You need to eat more.”
Will you be in India for much longer?” she asked, as she took out his queen rook.
He returned the favor by eliminating her king bishop. “Probably not. I’m going back to Cambridge.”
They were at the confluence of the Dir River and the Panjkora River. It had been a long day. But when she’d lingered at the table after dinner, he’d asked her if she wanted a game of chess and she, pleasantly surprised—once defeated, no man had ever come back for another game with her—had readily agreed.
She looked up at him. He was in his shirtsleeves, sprawled on the folding chair, if it was possible for a man to sprawl while maintaining a perfectly straight back. The two of them were enclosed in the intimacy of a lantern’s sphere of light, beyond the faded gold edge of which was a darkness as thick as walls. Beyond that, in the night, there was only the sound of the rivers—the dishes had been washed, the mules fed, the coolies put to bed.
“I hear you already have a house in Cambridge.”
“My godfather gave it to me years ago, before we were married. I’ve never lived in it. Will and Lizzy used it while Lizzy studied at Girton. Now that they’ve moved back to London, the house is empty again.”
“What is it like?”
“The house? Smaller than our house in London, but prettier. It has a back lawn that abuts the bank of the Cam and a good number of cherry trees. In spring, when the trees are in bloom, it’s a lovely sight.”
“You sound glad of it.”
“It will be good to be in Cambridge again—I’ve been away far too long. But I’m not exactly looking forward to equiping another house.”
That was something else she had not appreciated, the enormous task of fully outfitting a house. He’d taken care of all of it.
“No more globe-trotting for you?”
“The wanderings of youth must end at some point.” He placed a fingertip on top of his queen bishop, considering, but moved his queen knight instead. “When I’m a wizened old professor at Cambridge, and can barely climb up to the podium to lecture, I will think back to the frontiers of India—and life’s strange paths that had led me here—and remember that this was where the wanderings of my youth ended.”
His eyes were on the game. She allowed herself to stare at him: the way the lamplight danced upon his hair, hair the color of coffee, a deep, dark shade that was black except in the strongest sunlight; the firm ridge of his nose; the fine shape of his mouth.
“Have you always wanted to be a Cambridge professor?” She urged a pawn forward. So many questions, she thought. So many things she did not know about him.
“Not just any professor: the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.” He placed his chin in his palm. “I thought you’d be impressed by it.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “So it was a fairly recent aspiration.”
“No, since always.”
She blinked. “But I thought you said …”
The flame of the lantern swayed. Light and shadow chased across his chiseled cheekbones
. There was a stillness to him, a resignation almost. Her heart ached.
He smiled slightly. “I’ve wanted to be the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics since I was eleven. And I thought at that time that you’d be impressed by it.”
She chortled, out of confusion. “When you were eleven, why would you care what I thought of what you were going to do when you grew up?”
“I cared. And when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and maybe even seventeen.” He advanced his queen knight some more.
“What do you mean, exactly?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just that I have loved you, even when I was nothing and no one to you, when you didn’t know my name and barely knew my face.”
She stared at him, not understanding his words at all. He’d loomed so large in her heart and her imagination for so long that it was difficult to grasp that he could ever have been nothing and no one to her.
A lanky boy sitting down on the stone bridge beside her. A tied handkerchief opening to reveal tiny, bright red cherries. The cherries were cool as the morning air and tartly sweet.
“Any fish biting?”
“No.”
“Have you ever thought about what if your father doesn’t let you study medicine?”
“He will. Or he can go to the Devil.”
“You are a strange girl. More cherries?”
“Yes, thank you.”
She shook her head. Where had that come from? She recalled so little of her adolescence—long, blurred years of monotony, waiting impatiently for the day when she could leave Thornwood Manor and her family behind.
The day she at last departed for medical school, her carriage stopped halfway to the train station. A young boy came up to the window and gave her a handful of wild-flowers.
“Good luck in Zurich.”
“Thank you, sir,” she’d said, perplexed, not quite sure who he was.
When the carriage started again, she turned to Callista. “Was that the baby Marsden? What a strange child.”
What had she done with those flowers? She had no recollection at all.
Music. Bright lights. Lady Wyden’s country Yule ball. She was reluctantly home from Zurich and medical school and reluctantly in attendance. He was her partner in the quadrille that opened the ball, fifteen, and already as tall as she.
“Octavius, is it?”
“Quentin.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. You look beautiful, by the way. I think you are the loveliest lady here tonight.”
He’d loved her, in those years when she’d thought of him as little more than an embryo.
“You were a child,” she said slowly, still in shock. “You were an infant.”
“Old enough to despair of ever being grown-up for you.”
“It doesn’t make what you did with Mrs. Hedley any less reprehensible.”
“No,” he agreed quietly. “It only makes everything more terrible.”
Silence, as the implication of everything she’d lost slowly began to sink in.
“If only you’d told me …” she murmured.
She would not have been so quick to abandon their marriage, as if it were a burning ship.
“I could say the same,” he replied. “If only you’d told me.”
She had a sudden vision of herself as a wizened old physician, her hands too arthritic to wield a scalpel, her eyes too rheumy to diagnose anything except measles and chicken pox. The wizened old physician would very much like to drink tea next to her wizened old professor, chuckle over the passionate follies of their distant youth, and then go for a walk along the river Cam, holding his paper-dry, liver-spotted hand.
How ironic that when they’d been married, she’d never thought of growing old with him. Yet now, years after the annulment, she should think of it with the yearning of an exile, for the homeland that had long ago evicted her.
Bryony had imagined the Panjkora Valley to be like the Chitral Valley, wide and flat and well populated. But the Panjkora Valley was, if not precisely a gorge, not much more than a watercourse. The population seemed mostly concentrated in tiny lateral valleys nourished by smaller rivers and streams that fed into the Panjkora.
Still there were villages along the way and in every village they passed, Leo sent the guides to ask about the situation in Swat. Rumors were as plentiful as microbes in a slum. The men the guides talked to all knew of the deeds of the Mad Fakir, as he was admiringly called in these parts.
The Mad Fakir could not be harmed by bullets; the Mad Fakir had legions of heavenly hosts at his disposal, to be called upon once he commenced his glorious and holy battle; the Inglisi, all the Inglisi, would be swept away before the new moon.
She didn’t know quite what to make of all the rumors. Was there some germ of truth to them or were they wholesale fiction? The population of Dir seemed more entertained than fermented, despite all the excitement generated by the supposed miracles of the Mad Fakir and his grandiose promises to drive out the English.
In the end she mostly ignored the rumors. They were too outlandish and too comical, when she already had so much upheaval inside herself.
They were traveling faster now. In no time at all they would reach the Swat River. And then, Nowshera, where the train would carry her to Bombay, to the next P&O steamer out of India.
She did not want to say good-bye to him. She didn’t know what she wanted, for the road to go on and on, perhaps, for them to exist outside of their normal lives, in this bubble, removed from both the past and the future.
Not that they weren’t already existing outside of their normal lives. Germany, America, India. She had not set foot in England except en route to some place ever further away, to escape what could not be escaped.
She envied him his firm decision to return to Cambridge. She could not go back to the New Hospital for Women and simply resume her former life. She’d sought peace and serenity in her days abroad. She had not come away with either.
As the elevation of the land decreased, the weather had become warmer, sometimes uncomfortably hot in the afternoon. Leo, correspondingly, had adjusted their pace to include more rest for both men and beasts.
Bryony, for one, was glad to spend a few minutes in the shade of an apple orchard, her much-swaddled person given a chance to cool. Corsets and petticoats were all very well for never-warm England, but here on the Subcontinent they made about as much sense as a five-legged chair.
She fanned herself a few times with her new hat. He’d produced it again in the morning to ask if she would like it, as the sun was certain to become harsher the further south they traveled. And she’d gratefully accepted.
“I thought you were impervious to weather,” he said. He was seated under the tree closest to her. Tiny apples hung from the branches overhead, such a pale green they were almost white.
“I thought so too. But as it turned out, I was impervious to weather as long as weather did not exceed seventy degrees. The heat does not bother you?”
“Not so much.” He turned his face toward the powder blue sky. “I suppose it’s because I’m enjoying my last hurrah in exotic, sunny places before spending the rest of my life in drear old England, where it never stops raining and the mercury never goes above sixty-five.”
His traveling clothes were made of puttoo, a Kashmiri homespun wool that was perfect for the variable weather in the mountains, but the last thing from fashionable. His hair was imperfectly groomed. His boots had taken quite a punishment. His face showed the cumulative fatigue that came of months of incessant travel, followed by a severe illness, followed again by travel—there were shadows under his eyes, and the beginning of crow’s feet at the corners. And even though all about them it was green, voluptuous summer, there was a solemnness to him, a quiet that made her think of snow-blanketed winter.
He’d never been further from the gilded, angel-kissed youth. And never more beautiful.
Across the river, on the opposite edge of the
valley, a man herded a flock of goats up a hidden footpath toward a deodar forest at the top of the slope—the hills and ridges here, though still rugged, were nowhere near as lofty or fearsome as those they’d passed earlier in their travels. She watched the goats’ bleating progress, until they disappeared around an outcrop.
“Are you returning to Cambridge straightaway?” she asked, without quite looking at him.
“No.”
“Oh,” she said, still not looking at him. “Why not?”
If he did, they would be travel companions for at least another three weeks. He could not manage it. To look upon her and know that he’d lost her through his own misdeed—love had become a thing of nails and spikes, every breath a re-impaling, every pulse a bright, sharp pain.
“I need to go to Delhi first, to wait for my luggage to arrive from Gilgit. I also want to see Charlie and the children again one more time before I leave India.”
For him and Bryony it was good-bye and farewell come Nowshera.
“Well, say hello to Charlie for me. He called on me twice when I was in Delhi but I was never home to him.”
Poor, conscientious Charlie.
“Is there any chance you will stay in London for good this time? Or will you be setting out for Shanghai after two weeks?”
She plucked at her skirt, a sturdy, dun-colored garment made especially for riding astride, with buttons and buckles for holding the extra lengths of the skirt on either side up and out of the way when she was not in the saddle.
“Shanghai has a terrible climate. San Francisco is much better. Or New Zealand, perhaps—I hear it is beautiful.”
The pain was almost blinding. He had done this to her. Once she had been one of the finest doctors in all of London, now she was a nomad whose life had shrunk to one tent and two steamer trunks.
“It’s time to stop, Bryony. Don’t keep running away.”
“I don’t know that I can stop.”
“Give it a try. Stay in London for some time. It would make your father happy.”
Not Quite a Husband Page 11