“I am certainly hoping to win the Gold Cup at Ascot,” the Marquis replied.
“Will I be able to see it?”
The Marquis turned to look at her and she knew that this was something he had not considered.
“Please – let me,” she pleaded. “It would be – so exciting to see your horse first past the Winning Post.”
“Actually,” the Marquis said, “I had not thought of your being there.”
He looked at Peregrine and they both realised that it would be a mistake for Kistna to be seen at such a fashionable gathering. There might well be someone present who had met Mirabelle in Italy.
She looked from one man to the other and was aware that there was something passing through their minds that she did not understand.
“Am I – doing something – wrong?” she enquired nervously.
“No, of course not,” the Marquis said. “It is just that I had not considered taking you with us to Ascot and it is something I must think about before I agree.”
The way he spoke told Kistna that it would not be an easy decision for him to make, although why there should be any difficulty about it she could not follow.
More easily than either the Marquis or Peregrine she was aware of the difference in her own appearance.
In fact every day she was at the Abbey she was becoming more like the girl who had come confidently from India to England, thinking that while it might be different she would soon find a way of looking after herself and eventually her younger sister as well.
Because she had been so happy in her home life, Kistna had never known fear, either of people or of living.
It was only when Mrs. Moore had come to the orphanage that she found herself trapped in an appalling terror that she could find no way of escape from.
To begin with she could not leave her sister to try to earn her own living in the world outside.
Then, when little Indira died, Kistna had not the willpower or stamina to break away, besides which she had a feeling that Mrs. Moore would not have allowed her to go.
She had thought that all that lay ahead of her was death – a slow, humiliating, agonising death from hunger, cold and misery because she must watch the children suffering and dying around her.
Then like a miracle everything had changed and it seemed to her as if the Marquis was the Archangel Michael lifting her from the darkness into the light.
It was the light that she had left behind when she had been taken from the warm sunlight of India into the fog, the mist and cold that she found in the orphanage.
At night when she had lain with only a threadbare blanket to keep out the cold, she had tried to imagine the sun beating down on the roof of her father’s bungalow.
She had seen the flowers which her mother loved so much brilliant in the small garden and felt the warmth percolating through her starved body, so that she felt as if she was part of the sunshine that turned the river whose name she bore to gold.
Because she had been brought up in a world that was beautiful wherever she looked and wherever she went, it was the ugliness of the orphanage apart from everything else that seemed to eat into her very soul.
The ugliness of the chilly rooms, the broken beds, the dirty floors and her terror of Mrs. Moore with her face flushed with drink and her voice screaming abuse and the children with their protruding bones and tattered ragged clothes.
Finally there was the ugliness and pain of hunger and the tears of helplessness and despair.
Kistna would remember how much her father had loved beauty and especially the beauty he had found in India.
It was in fact a desire to discover a new land, one to which his mind and heart had been drawn long before he saw India, that had made the Reverend John Lovell volunteer for Missionary work in a country where the evangelical fervour of reformation had not yet been known.
The gentlemen of the East India Company had not originally intended to govern India, but merely to make money there.
This they had done very effectively in the eighteenth century, gradually assuming more and more responsibility until in 1813 the Company’s trade monopoly with India was abolished and for the first time public opinion in England began to have some direct effect upon British administration.
The East India Company had hitherto forbidden Christian Missionaries to come to India, but, with the Crown appointing a Governor General and the Board from Westminster having ultimate authority, the ban was lifted.
The Reverend John Lovell had learnt the previous year that this would happen and it was one of his relatives in the East India Company who suggested to him that here was a country where he would find Missionary work preferable to being an underpaid Curate in England.
“You may not convert many of the heathens,” his relative had said, “since the Indians are religious enough in their own way not to want any alien faith. But you will have a good time and it will certainly widen your horizons.”
John Lovell had jumped at the chance of going abroad, especially to the East and, while he was considering it there was another reason, a very personal one, which forced him to make up his mind quickly and to leave England towards the end of the year 1812.
He was therefore first in the field and, when the next year the company ban on Christian Missionaries was lifted, they swarmed in in their hundreds to look with horror at the wickedness they found in this enormous and strange country.
The savagery, the hideous customs of widow-burning, infanticide and religious extortion, persuaded them they had to fight a crusade against the devil himself.
But they found, what John Lovell had already discovered, that the religious faith of the Indians was so deep-seated and an intrinsic part of their very breathing that Christianity had no appeal and no attractions to offer a people who believed every sin or virtue in this life was punished or rewarded in the next.
The Reverend John in fact made very little effort to convert those who believed fervently in one set of Gods into embracing another faith.
Because he was an extremely intelligent man he found that the history of India and its different castes fascinated him.
Instead of being a teacher he became the pupil.
It was doubtful if he ever made a convert, but because he was sincere and because the Indians knew that they could trust him, he made friends in every sect and caste from the Untouchables to the Brahmans and from the lowest sweepers to the Maharajahs.
Kistna therefore, as she grew up, met an amazing variety of Indians and learned through her father to recognise the differences in their beliefs and creeds as well as their characters and outlook.
To the other English whom they met first at Calcutta and later when they travelled up country, anyone with a coloured skin was a ‘native’. But to the Lovells they were people and each was more fascinating than the last.
Although they did not realise it, John Lovell and his wife were like the first pioneers of the East India Company, who had developed a trading policy and had little interest for anything else.
They had no wish in those first years to convert the Subcontinent, which would have seemed a preposterous ambition.
They had treated the native Princes with respect and often affection and tolerated the religions of the country. Often they were men of aesthetic sensibilities who responded sensuously and appreciatively to the beauty of India.
Kistna could remember her father standing and gazing at a sunset or across the silver river to the desert beyond and saying with a reverence in his voice,
“Could anything be more beautiful, more a part of God?”
She felt that he found the God in whom he believed in the exquisitely carved Temples, in the chanting of the pilgrims as they bathed in the Holy water of the Ganges, in the flight of the birds and even perhaps in the chattering of the monkeys in the blossom-covered frangipani trees.
Everywhere there was beauty. Then from that and the love that had been so vital and inescapable in her home, she had come to
England and misery.
Now she had found again at the Abbey, what her father had always sought – beauty.
She would stand in front of the Marquis’s paintings entranced by the loveliness of a sunset by Turner, while the rich colours of a Rubens made her think of the silks, satins and jewels worn by the Maharajahs.
Her mind would thrill to the mystic mythology of a Poussin and the spiritual perfection of the Italian Masters, who had portrayed the Madonna in countless different paintings.
Kistna could remember that she had seen that same expression of sanctity on the faces of the Indian women when in their colourful saris they would kneel in the dust before a wayside shrine or scatter flower petals in the incense-scented Temples.
There was beauty too, she thought, not only in every room inside the Abbey but in the green Park with its huge ancient oak trees and in the lake, where the swans who moved over it looked like ships in full sail.
Above all in the Marquis himself.
Never had she imagined from that first moment when she had seen him standing outside the door, that any man could look more handsome, more commanding and more magnificent.
He made her think of the Governor Generals she had seen bowling through Calcutta in a high-wheeled gilded barouche with foot-grooms running beside it and with an escort of Cavalry behind.
She had thought then that nothing be more dashing or more impressive.
But the Marquis exuded the same atmosphere of power and authority just by being himself. At the same time, omnipotent though he appeared, his kindness made her want to cry.
‘How could any man be so wonderful?’ she asked herself, as she touched with gentle fingers the fine lingerie trimmed with lace which Madame Yvonne had sent from London.
Never could she imagine that she would know such softness against her skin or feel as if she was wrapped in a silken web woven by fairies.
‘He is wonderful! Wonderful!’
She found herself repeating the same sentence not once but a dozen times every day.
Because she wanted to please him she strove to do everything he asked of her and do it well, if not even exceeding his requirements.
‘How could I be so fortunate or so blessed as to become the Ward of such a man,’ she asked, ‘who lives like a King and is certainly a King among men?’
She liked Peregrine Wallingham and she knew that, if the Marquis had not been there, she would have been impressed by him.
He teased her and laughed with her and she thought him charming and good-humoured, but the Marquis was sublime and God-like.
Watching him riding a horse she knew instinctively that he was a better rider and a better horseman than any other man could be.
So she tried desperately hard to ride as he would wish her to do, so that she would be a worthy companion and he would be proud of her.
There were so many rules to remember and so many small points of etiquette that apparently were of importance that sometimes Kistna felt despairingly that she would fail not only the Marquis but herself.
When she made mistakes, she would lie awake at night wondering how she could have been so stupid and feeling ashamed that she should have failed his demand for perfection.
Sometimes she thought of her future, but nothing for the moment seemed important except the present.
Because it had a dream-like quality it was impossible to think ahead, except to hurry in dressing, changing and getting through the darkness of the night so that she could see the Marquis again.
“Your hair certainly has new life in it, Miss Kistna,” Mrs. Dawes declared one morning.
“Are you sure?” Kistna asked.
“It’s a fact, miss,” Mrs. Dawes replied.
She was brushing out the long length of Kistna’s hair and seeing it spring out from the brush, each hair charged with a separate life of its own.
“Yes, it is better,” Kistna agreed, “it really is!”
“And so are you, miss,” Mrs. Dawes answered. “I said to Ethel only yesterday, ‘Miss Kistna’s growing real pretty now she has some flesh on her bones. You mark my words, she’ll be a beauty before she’s finished!’”
Kistna bent forward to look at herself in the mirror.
‘Is that possible?’ she wondered, and if she was pretty, even perhaps beautiful, would the Marquis notice it?
She had been too miserable and hungry at the orphanage to worry about what she looked like. Now in the beauty of the Abbey, with the Marquis’s grey eyes on her, she longed desperately to look like her mother.
There was no doubt that her mother had been beautiful and not only in her husband’s eyes, who adored her.
As Kistna had grown older, she had been aware that every Englishman who had come to their house would look at her mother and then look again with an expression that she grew to recognise first as one of incredulity and then of admiration.
It was almost as if they said aloud,
“How, here in India, married to an obscure Missionary, could one expect to find such a beautiful woman? And one who apparently is content with what must be a very restricted life?”
Sometimes they would further a casual acquaintance by calling again and again at the small poor bungalow, arriving in luxurious carriages that belonged to the Governor with servants wearing the flamboyant red and white uniforms affected by the servants of the Raj.
They would start by being a little condescending and a little patronising only to find incredibly that the beautiful Mrs. Lovell, while polite and listening attentively to what they had to say, was not the least interested in them as men.
It was then they became more insistent and very much, Kistna would think, more sincere.
If her father came home while they were there, she often thought that it should be impossible for them not to understand why her mother did not press them to stay or to come again.
When her father’s footsteps sounded on the verandah, her mother would jump to her feet and her face, beautiful though it had been before, seemed to have a new radiance that made it impossible not to watch her.
“John!”
She would breathe the word and her eyes would be shining.
Then she would run across the poorly furnished room to her husband and, even though they had been with each other only an hour or so before, his arms would go round her and he would hold her against him.
It was as if they had been re-united after a long passage of time and Kistna, when she was old enough, began to understand that every minute they were not together did in fact seem to them a century of emptiness and frustration.
‘That is love,’ she had said to herself, ‘and it is unbelievably beautiful.’
It was love she missed at the orphanage and, because there was no love, there was no beauty.
Now, at the Abbey, it was hers again, perhaps not the beauty of the love her father and mother had known, but at least the kindness and understanding of two men who apparently found her interesting and to whom in gratitude she poured out the emotions she had been deprived of and starved of for three long years.
“How do I look, Mrs. Dawes?” Kistna asked that evening.
She had put on a gown that had only arrived at midday from London.
It was white, embroidered with silver thread, and Madame Yvonne had hidden her thin arms under voluminous sleeves of diaphanous gauze speckled with silver and had draped the neck with the same gauze that shimmered in the light of the candles when she moved.
There was a velvet ribbon at the neck on which was attached a little spray of silver and white flowers and there were the same flowers for her hair from which ribbons fell down her back and were a further clever disguise for the sharpness of her bones.
“You look real pretty, Miss Kistna!” Mrs. Dawes exclaimed. “There’s never been a young lady staying in this house as could hold a candle to you.”
“Do you mean that?” Kistna asked. “Oh, Mrs. Dawes, I do hope you are telling me the truth.”
“I can a
ssure you, Miss Kistna, I never lie, and I’m not saying a word that could not be spoken over the Bible itself!”
“I hope his Lordship agrees with you,” Kistna said almost as if she spoke to herself.
Mrs. Dawes gave her a sharp look.
Then she said in a different tone,
“I’m sure his Lordship will be pleased and soon he’ll be inviting young people here of your own age to meet you and that’s as sure as sure!”
She saw Kistna look at her enquiringly and went on,
“I expect as soon as you are well enough his Lordship will be finding you dance partners amongst the young gentlemen of the neighbourhood and you’ll find plenty of them in London.”
“I don’t want – dance-partners when I might dance with – his Lordship and Mr. Wallingham,” Kistna said.
Mrs. Dawes gave a laugh that somehow sounded affected.
“Oh, it’s young gentlemen I’m thinking of like young Lord Barrowfield who lives on the next estate. Twenty-two he’ll be next birthday and a nicer young man it’d be hard to meet. Perhaps his Lordship will have him in mind as a husband for you.”
The words startled Kistna and she turned to look at Mrs. Dawes as if she thought that she could not have heard her aright.
“A – h-husband?”
“Yes, of course, miss,” Mrs. Dawes replied. “You’re eighteen and most young ladies want to be fixed up before their nineteenth birthday. If you’re thinking there’s lots of time, then time soon passes.”
She tidied some things on the dressing table as she went on,
“Don’t you worry your head, Miss Kistna. I’m sure his Lordship has your future in mind and a lovely bride you’ll make, really lovely! It would be nice for you to be married here at the Abbey. It’s a long time since there’s been a Wedding Reception in the ballroom.”
Kistna did not answer.
She merely rose to her feet and said in a voice that somehow seemed incoherent,
“I must – go downstairs – his – Lordship will be – waiting for me!”
She did not look or speak to Mrs. Dawes again as she left the bedroom and the housekeeper stood watching her go, an expression on her face that was one of anxiety.
From Hell to Heaven Page 8