The Jasmine Wife

by Jane Coverdale

  They married on the day of their planned departure, in the church Sara had attended for nearly seventeen years, knowing a few hours later they’d be together for the rest of their lives.

  She took a furtive look at him through her silk veil, hoping for a look of reassurance, as she was almost overwhelmed with sudden feelings of doubt. Though, when he felt her eyes upon him, instead of a returning smile, he seemed to visibly pull himself together, straightening his shoulders and swallowing hard.

  Her heart sank. It seemed to her that Charles was steeling himself for something unpleasant, something he must endure, and see it through to the end at all cost.

  A screeching note from the organ made her jump, and her stomach gave a sickening lurch. It came to her in a blinding flash. She may not love him after all! And perhaps he didn’t love her! And was already regretting his choice even though he’d just spoken the words, “I will” in an almost inaudible shaky murmur.

  When it came her turn to speak she hesitated, caught between a desire to make a run for the open door of the church and a yearning to cling to the man who offered her a lifeline to a new world.

  She glanced around in a frantic effort to find an answer, but saw instead the face of her aunt, alarmingly pale, though smiling bravely, and her uncle, nodding furiously at her with a tight grimace on his lips, clearly willing her to get it over with.

  She must have responded, as the final words, “I now pronounce you man and wife”, were uttered at last, but Sara, at the threshold of what she felt every young woman must desire, instead of feeling the expected rush of joy, felt an overwhelming sense of doom.

  Then, as she turned to walk down the aisle towards her new life, her aunt seemed to haul herself to her feet as she reached out to the new bride for a congratulatory kiss, swayed a little, then, grasping the folds of Sara’s gown in her fingers, fell in a crumpled unconscious heap at the feet of the bride and groom, clutching a torn piece of silk from the wedding veil.

  The illness was serious, and inevitably fatal. When her aunt begged her to stay to help nurse her it seemed unfeeling to do otherwise and, even though she expected Charles to protest, he was remarkably accepting about the prospect of travelling to India without his bride.

  “In some ways it’s a good thing,” he said as he tried to reassure her.

  “My house is a mere bachelor’s hut and this small delay will give me a chance to find you something more suitable, and you can brush up on your Hindi. Tamil will be beyond you, I feel. But Hindi will come in very useful in dealing with the servants. Also—” he gave her a furtive glance “—my position demands my wife be well dressed. Lady Palmer entertains on a regular basis and you’ll be expected, as my wife, to make a bit of a splash.”

  “Oh …” Sara blushed as she looked down at what was meant to be her going away outfit, an ill-fitting mustard-coloured dress which did nothing for her complexion, adorned with oversized leg-of-mutton sleeves too tight under the armpits.

  All her clothes had been made by her aunt’s dressmaker, a lady who specialised in a style that had died out in Paris at least twenty years before, despite still flourishing amongst the vicars’ wives and spinsters of Hampstead, and any suggestion that poor Miss Blunt might be exchanged for someone more modern was quickly suppressed.

  Though her fears about the suitability of her clothes seemed trivial compared with the cruel reality that Charles would be leaving her any moment, her husband but not a husband, not till they spent a night together under the same roof.

  In an agony of misery she threw her arms around his neck, unwilling to let him go. There was no question of his staying; he’d extended his leave already and was anxious to return to his duties.

  He reached up to remove her arms from his neck, gave her a final brief kiss, then hurried away without looking back, while she flung herself down on the settee and cried as though her heart would break. To be so close to freedom, then to have it taken away, was almost more than she could bear.

  Later, when her tears were exhausted and she felt nothing but an empty despair, she’d climbed wearily to her feet and made her way upstairs to the sick room.

  Chapter 2

  The shoreline moved closer still, and the mirage formed into a blinding reality. They would be there soon. Sara pulled a mirror out of her bag and examined the clear light topaz eyes squinting back at her. They appeared unimpressive in that harsh white glare, but she knew they would be lovely again once she was in a softer light. Her eyes were the only feature on her face she wouldn’t change, and the rest of it she found more acceptable now, with the miraculous clearing of her skin and an equally miraculous dramatic weight loss.

  The first small signs of improvement had come soon after the marriage ceremony. She had lost at least fifteen pounds in only two months, forcing her to buy a completely new wardrobe, and her doctor pronounced her excess weight and her skin condition as being based in nervous tension, hinting it was not unusual for single women to improve in looks with the marriage state.

  She didn’t tell him that, even though she was a wife, she was still technically a virgin, and perhaps the real reason for the improvement was she was no longer made to feel ashamed whenever the subject of marriage was mentioned.

  After being at sea for eight weeks, including a further month spent in the Canary Isles due to having to mend a split mast, where she’d gorged herself on fresh fruit and vegetables, the almost constant faint rash around her nose had miraculously disappeared. Then the fine red bumps on her cheeks and forehead had faded completely, revealing a surface with the fresh even tone of rich cream.

  Her true beauty however, lay in her bone structure, a beauty that would last long beyond the freshness of youth. Without the excess weight, her face became more refined, making her eyes appear much larger. Her posture had always been good, and her straight back and long neck gave her elegance, far from the clumsy girl of her youth.

  Though it was the new shape of her once heavy eyebrows that gave her the most pleasure. Never could she have imagined such a small change could have produced so dramatic an improvement to her face. The mysterious ritual of threading, performed by an Arab woman in a tent in a Canary Isles market, had turned her shaggy brows into a blackbird’s wings, giving her face a striking new beauty. Now she secretly plucked them to keep their shape, knowing her aunt would be horrified had she known, believing a lady must learn to live with her imperfections, and any thought of artifice was vulgar in the extreme.

  Sara had no such feelings as she smiled at her reflection and smoothed her skin with a cautious finger. She hoped fervently the hated rash had been banished forever, though; it seemed the further she travelled from England, the healthier and lovelier she became.

  Her much improved looks were a novelty still, and sometimes she found herself studying her face in the mirror for longer than necessary.

  Though, as time wore on, she trained herself not to think too much about her new-found charms, but secretly enjoyed the long slow looks men gave her as she passed them on her walks around the deck of the ship.

  She snapped the mirror shut and slipped it back into her bag. While she’d been dreaming, the shoreline had drifted closer still. The clear blue waters had changed to a dirty yellow, and the once vague outline of the distant bank had turned into buildings set amongst tall waving palms and enormous trees spreading their branches along the baking paths like engorged pythons.

  Some of the structures were prosperous and ornate, more bizarre, romanticised reflections of their respectable English cousins, while others, mere piles of other people’s cast-off rubbish and the fallen branches of coconut palms, were turned into little caves to huddle under for a moment’s respite from the merciless sun and the endless mass of humanity.

  Towering over even the grand buildings of the British were the temples, shimmering through the damp heat, many storeys high, barbaric and mysterious, intricately carved with unlikely gods and decorated with gaudy impossible colours and gold leaf. There were
dozens of them, punctuating the tropical landscape every few hundred yards and soaring towards the heavens like the wild and fantastic imaginings of a dream, monumental and overwhelming.

  Remembered snatches of whispered stories of ancient and primitive rituals carried out in the dark recesses of the temples crept back into her mind, making her shiver: stories too horrible to be spoken of out loud, used as a weapon by the servants when she was naughty, to frighten her into good behaviour.

  Sara stared out towards the shore, her eyes squinting in the fierce sun. There, rising and falling with the motion of the waves, something floated on the surface of the water.

  She peered over the side of the ship, then reeled back, shaken and drained of colour. Afloat in her funeral bier, a woven basket lined with a mass of faded flowers and wrapped in white gauze, slept a perfect child of a few weeks old.

  A loving hand had placed the fragrant flowers around the halo of the child’s head and over the little body, before releasing it into the sea. An unwanted girl, perhaps, who’d died conveniently, but had clearly been loved by someone in her short life.

  The child floated past, an image of unbearable loneliness at the beginning of her journey. Sara’s eyes followed the little voyager, smarting with painful tears till the yellow water turned deep blue again, and for a brief moment she was comforted by this.

  Then her stomach lurched, and for a moment she thought she was going to be sick. She clutched the rail and squeezed her eyes till she saw stars, praying with a sudden fervent superstitious fear, to crush the image lingering in her mind.

  She began to pace again, now with a more urgent step. It seemed they would never reach land and the shore was further away than ever.

  Then, slowly, as she watched, the scene before her sprang to life. A tree swayed in the gentle breeze, and the thousands of coloured dots moving along the shore evolved into human beings.

  Children began to play, running back and forth on childish missions. Thin wisps of grey smoke rose from the cooking fires where women sat, draped in vivid saris, their movements impossibly elegant for such humble everyday tasks.

  Then the first sounds, laughter and shouting in Hindi, and Tamil, and music, a strange off-beat medley to western ears. There was a procession somewhere.

  The handful of European passengers appeared on deck one by one. Already there was a distance between them, making it clear their relationships had been held together almost solely by the confines of the voyage.

  Secretly, Sara intended to keep few of her promises of undying friendship if she could help it, though, much to her regret, with Cynthia Palmer there might be no choice.

  Sara watched Cynthia with mixed emotions as she moved through the crowd on the deck, languid and unhurried, smiling her goodbyes, her white toy poodle, recently bought in an elegant pet shop on the Rue de la Paix, clutched in her small gloved hands, stopping now and then to speak to a friend, her voice hardly ever raised above a quiet murmur. Sara crushed a pang of rising irritation. If only she could believe in the value of such self-control it would have made her life so much easier.

  A sweet young girl’s voice, heavily laced with the rounded vowels of the well brought up, called out her name, and Sara looked up with a start from her daydreaming.

  “Cynthia, how fresh you look. How do you do it, in this heat? I’m melting already.” Her voice sounded false even to herself, and she wondered how Cynthia could not fail to notice it.

  But then, Charles had made a point of how important it was for her to become friends with Lady Palmer and, even more so, her daughter Cynthia. She recalled his words in his letter: “I’m sure you’ll become as fond of them as I am for, as we often say in our little community, it’s impossible not to love Cynthia and her mamma.”

  Sara was fairly sure she didn’t love either of them, and at times positively disliked Lady Palmer, though she was clearly outnumbered.

  Cynthia was as pretty and fragile as a Dresden figurine, though it soon became clear her fragility was misleading, disguising an unbending core combined with a steely determination, at least when it came to having her own way. Though there was never any need to exert any pressure when it came to getting what she wanted; it seemed to happen naturally, as though it was always meant to be.

  She had a habit of grasping the arm of the person she wished to beguile, holding them rigid, like a fox with her teeth on the neck of a rabbit, but, as a kind of compensation, she held them under the impression they were the only person in the world worth knowing. When she wished to move on, her small white hand would relax, releasing her captive, now limp with admiration, and left with a desire to be singled out by her again as soon as possible.

  Though, when away from her mother and alone with Sara in her cabin, they could spend almost happy hours together as each girl talked of their hopes of the future with their respective husbands. Cynthia’s intended would join her in Madras in a few months’ time, where they’d be married before returning to Europe for their honeymoon and a new life in England. She’d met her fiancé William when he’d stayed with her parents in Madras and he’d fallen in love with her then. His health was precarious though, and more than a few months in India was dangerous for him. Cynthia’s face would take on an almost childlike radiance as she spoke of her husband’s country estate and her hopeful future away from the hell of India. It was at these times Sara could sympathise with the girl, knowing from personal experience how painful it was to be trapped and powerless, and at the mercy of another person’s demands.

  Her mother, Lady Palmer, was a big woman with coarse sallow skin, large features and a passion for extravagant clothing, who seemed constantly astonished to have given birth to such a fair and dainty child. Her main concerns, apart from her daughter, in whose life she took an almost unnatural interest, were the comings and goings of Madras society and all who moved within it. She set the standards of behaviour and it was up to everyone else to observe and follow, and woe betide anyone who didn’t.

  “I expected Charles would have married one of the girls at home …”

  Lady Palmer had scrutinized Sara shamelessly through her lorgnette. “Personally, I saw no need to look further than our little community, and there were many girls I thought more than suitable for him to marry.” This was said with such an air of wounded outrage Sara had laughed aloud, then said, “Well, why didn’t he then if they were so suitable?” causing Lady Palmer to glare in return.

  “It’s no laughing matter, my girl. Marriage is a serious business.

  However,” she conceded, “I’m sure dear Charles had his reasons. Indeed, I do believe at one time he might have asked Cynthia. Charles always seemed to pay her such particular attention, and we are so very fond of him.” She frowned, as though recalling past times. “We’ll miss him to balance the table at dinner. He was always so useful as a single man.”

  Sara could only laugh, knowing with a sure instinct nothing she could say would alter Lady Palmer’s behaviour. Her role was supposed to be to endure and smile, but so far she had only questioned and scowled.

  Their relationship was bordering on disastrous but, just in time, a small voice in Sara’s head had cautioned her to be careful. All those years in an English boarding school had taught her it was vulgar to express what one really thought, and she would give Lady Palmer another chance, for Charles’s sake.

  Sara sat in the longboat, waiting to be taken ashore. She’d been there for some time, wilting in the stifling glare of an unbearable heat with the muddy waves slapping with an uncomfortable violence against the sides of the boat. She was jammed between a fat matron holding a bird cage containing a fast wilting canary and, on her other side, a fretful seasick child, all due to a dispute as to whether Cynthia’s poodle should or should not be caged for the trip ashore. The purser was insistent it should be so, and Cynthia was equally insistent that it should not be. The other passengers were becoming increasingly irritable at the long delay, though Sara was almost thankful for the wasted time as
it put off the inevitable a little longer.

  She scanned the indistinct mass of faces on the distant shore, her stomach a tight knot of nausea, not knowing if her misery was due to anxiety or seasickness. Was Charles there amongst the crowd, staring out to sea, perhaps regretting his choice of bride or, worse, lying dead somewhere from an all-consuming tropical disease, as her uncle had often predicted? Was she abandoned before even beginning to be a wife? It was impossible to know. Charles was a poor correspondent and during the space of the fourteen months since she’d seen him last he’d written perhaps only half a dozen letters. In vain she’d scanned them for the passionate declarations of love she so longed for. But the contents of his notes were usually about the terrible state of the weather or graphic details of the outbreaks amongst the various castes. She wondered sometimes if he was trying to put her off coming at all, but at the bottom of the page there was his usual declaration, “Love Charles”. That one word kept her hopes for future happiness alive.

  At last, Cynthia made her way to the head of the ladder leading down to the longboat, her poodle in her arms and a self-satisfied smile on her face. She had won, as she knew she would.

  A group of Indian workers, hired to help the passengers with their luggage, hovered around the launch, their fragile boats rising and falling with an uneasy violence at each surge of the waves, and it seemed must be thrown into the dense yellow water any moment. They watched the passengers with anxious eyes as they jostled for position. Charles had written the region was in the grip of famine and it was clear these men were hungry … hungry with a desperation that made them careless.

  Halfway down the ladder the dog began to struggle, being all at once aware of being poised above water. She made a frantic attempt to hide her head under her mistress’s arm, thinking in her dog mind that if she couldn’t see the danger then it wasn’t there. Her struggles became more frantic, the dog’s hard little legs working with a mindless terror, clawing for a more secure foothold against the shiny silk of Cynthia’s gown.