by Devon Glenn
Dar’s heart swelled. He had proven her grandmother right. What she and Rahul had wasn’t a summer fling—it was true love. “It’s been such a short time since we met, but I feel like you understand me,” she said. “No one else does.”
She was about to say something else when her gaze wandered to a second envelope that was peeking out of Rahul’s pocket. “Is that another letter from your mother?”
“I should open this now. We’ll have no more secrets between us.” Rahul tore off the top off the envelope, removed the letter, and skimmed its contents before reading aloud:
Your father says that we don’t have the funds to make the necessary improvements to the mill. Of course, we couldn’t put that part in the ad without the brides’ families reading between the lines and thinking that our situation was worse than it is.
In the meantime, that wretched Angus Burns has broken ground on two more mills right next to us! If you haven’t signed the contract already, your father says to take it to a lawyer to negotiate the terms.
Rahul put down the letter, his lips flattening into a thin line of concern. “That can’t be true.”
Dar put her hand on his knee. “It is true,” she said with horror. “Mr. Cummings found proof that Senator Burns had profited from the sale of his cousin’s share in the mill and was funneling the money into Angus’s next venture to avoid paying taxes. That’s what Finn was trying to show us at the séance.”
“Ah. That explains where Angus got the money for the new mills.” Rahul kicked the leg of the bed. “This is worse than I anticipated. Angus is trying to run me out of business.” He palmed his forehead and closed his eyes in frustration. “And to think, if I hadn’t been so eager to sign off on the contract, there would still be time to revise it.”
Dar’s heart sank. How arrogant she had been to think that Carl’s impatience at her séance had had anything to do with her channeling abilities: he was merely anxious to toss Rahul aside like a used rag. “Can Angus really hurt your business so easily?”
Rahul straightened. “No,” he said. His voice became more confident as he continued. “Surely the workers at the new mills won’t enjoy working with Angus any more than I did. If I can offer them something better—shorter hours, perhaps, or better pay—I’ll have their loyalty. What good will it do to own two factories when you can’t get anyone to work in them?”
“Do you think you’ll be better off without your partners?” Dar asked hopefully.
“That remains to be seen. But I know that my partners will be worse off without me. They trust the establishment to support them, but it won’t help them for much longer if they continue to ignore the people who actually run their business.”
Rahul had often served as the translator between Angus and the staff when Angus’s pointing and yelling failed. Now Angus would have no way to communicate with the workers who traveled from rural areas to work in the mill and didn’t speak English. It was also Rahul who had bargained with the local jute suppliers, inspecting the raw materials for quality and sending them back when his standards were not met. Rahul couldn’t imagine that Angus even knew what good jute looked like, much less how to acquire it. Once the vendors realized that the mill had lost its quality inspector, they certainly wouldn’t give Angus their best material or the fairest price.
Rahul blew out one long, frustrated breath. “Well, there is one problem: we still need to raise more money to stay competitive.”
“You’re under even more pressure than I am.” Dar sighed. “There must be some way I can help.”
“You don’t have a dowry, do you?” Rahul asked sadly. He had a hard time imagining Virginia Crossing packing a chest filled with family heirlooms to ship with her daughter to India, but he could see the wheels turning in Dar’s head.
“Not exactly,” she said, “but I do have some money saved from my séances.” Dar reached into her dresser drawer, where she had stored the money she had collected on the night she and Rahul had first met, and on many nights before that. “My father was supposed to take my séance money to the bank, but he hasn’t been here to do it in quite some time.” Dar sorted the coins and bills into piles, counting them sotto voce as she went. “Do you think this will be enough?”
When he didn’t answer right away, she continued with the speed of a door-to-door peddler hoping to persuade her customer before the door was slammed in her face: “I have a lace tablecloth as well. It’s quite valuable.”
Rahul rested his hand on hers. “The kind of money my parents are asking for wouldn’t fit in your drawer,” he said. “But I’m already getting the better end of the deal.”
She squeezed his hand and then set it down. Her fingers flew up to her face to tuck her tendrils behind her ears—an unconscious habit that she had developed in the last few months since her hair had turned white. “We can’t get married here,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I have no idea how or why, but my mother seems to know about the two of us, and now she wants me to marry Senator Burns as part of some shell game with her taxes.” With everything that had gone wrong in the past few hours, she had somehow forgotten that it was she, not Rahul, who was engaged.
Rahul stared at her with an expression that made her feel shy. “But what if you are expecting?” he asked. “Wouldn’t she want me to marry you then? We were utterly careless on the beach.”
For the first time, Dar thought about what could potentially have come out of the afternoon’s activity. “I won’t know for at least a few more weeks if it’s even a possibility. By then, I could already be married to Senator Burns.” She slapped her forehead in frustration. “I had one chance to expose him to my mother, and I didn’t take it.”
Rahul paused, and then snapped his fingers. “But Mr. Cummings is a reporter. Surely, he’ll expose the truth about Senator Burns to the world.”
“That’s assuming that the senator hasn’t scared him into silence.”
“About what?”
“Mr. Cummings’s deceased grandfather told me that he would be attracted to someone at the party,” Dar explained. “I kept an eye on Mr. Cummings all night; he couldn’t keep his eyes off you.”
“He has good taste.”
Dar managed a half smile, but the humor did little to comfort her, considering Virginia Crossing’s involvement. “Senator Burns knows that Mr. Cummings’s room was connected to his, but he doesn’t know why, and when my mother suggested that they were off on a romantic weekend, Senator Burns threatened Mr. Cummings’s life. I’ve never seen anyone run so quickly out of a room before. I could practically feel the wind beneath his feet.”
Rahul weighed the potential outcomes in his mind. “Mr. Burns won’t catch up with him in time,” he said. “My bet is that Mr. Cummings ran to get his story to the printers as quickly as possible.”
“I’m not sure it’ll be enough,” Dar said. “I suppose I could try to stall the wedding long enough for the story to break, but the scandal will just stop Senator Burns, not my mother. It will only be a matter of time before she tries to marry me off again.”
“A matter of time, yes.” While Dar spoke her fears out loud, Rahul appeared to be lost in thought. “In a few days, Senator Burns will be married to you or disgraced in the tabloids or both, and in a few weeks, we could be expectant parents. The variables here are astounding.”
“There is another variable to consider.” Dar felt her pulse quicken. She dreaded hearing the answer when she asked Rahul, “When are you leaving Cape May?”
It was worse than she expected. “Tomorrow,” he said.
“I’m doomed.”
Rahul cleared his throat. “Not if we elope right now.”
“Elope?” Dar echoed in shock.
“Why not?”
Dar thought for a moment. Some states had laws that would prevent a white woman from marrying a South Asian man;
New Jersey, fortunately, wasn’t one of them. But there were other laws governing her freedom: namely mothers-in-law. “My mother has already made it clear that she won’t allow it, and without my parents’ blessing, I doubt we’d find a minister here who would perform the ceremony.” She looked at Rahul.
“I can take you back to India with me, and we can get married on the way.”
“You want me to live in India? Permanently?”
“I won’t be safe in America,” Rahul said. Stewart the desk clerk had tried to warn him, Mrs. Crossing had tried to discourage him, and Mrs. Fields had hit him over the head with a tea towel, but he knew that things could be much worse for him once the veil of his business trip had been lifted. “I’m not entirely safe in India, either, but at least there I’ll have the support of family and friends. I have obligations there as well: aging parents to care for. A mill to run.”
“Would your parents approve of me?”
While Dar possessed both beauty and good character, the newspaper ad had left out a couple of things that went without saying: Rahul’s bride was expected to be a Hindu and in the right caste. Being American, she wasn’t even in the caste system. “I doubt it,” Rahul said. “But I’m not giving them a choice. I will introduce you to them and hopefully, in time, they’ll adjust to the idea.”
“And you’d be willing to do that for me?”
Rahul leaned in and touched his forehead against hers. “Of course I would,” he said. “The mill will survive with or without a benefactor. A child won’t.”
“You’re right,” Dar said. She knew he was right, but a cold sliver of doubt raced up her spine. She looked at Rahul’s suit. He had been in the United States for only a short time, but he knew exactly how to dress, how to behave, and how to speak English long before he had stepped off the boat. “But there are so many things that I don’t know about Calcutta,” she exclaimed.
“Such as?”
“Where is it?”
“How can you not know where it is? Have you seen a world map before?” He looked at her skeptically at first and then laughed out loud when he realized that she wasn’t pulling his leg.
Dar shrugged. “What? No one ever asks me for directions anywhere outside of Cape May.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said, patting her knee. “Your entire country was settled by Europeans who didn’t know where India is.”
She swatted his hand away. “Enlighten me then!”
“Calcutta is in the Bengal province in the eastern part of India. What else don’t you know?”
“What will the weather be like when we get there? What should I wear? What should I say to your mother and father when we’re introduced? I don’t know. I’m about to be dropped into a new country that I’ve only read about in stories written by men like Angus. And what do they know about it, really?”
“It will be raining. Wear your traveling costume. Let me do the talking with my parents at first. Anything else you don’t know, I’ll teach you,” Rahul assured her. “And if you want to learn, you’ll learn.”
As her mind raced with possible outcomes and consequences, her doubts gave way to a single, wry thought: I never imagined myself stealing away in the middle of the night to do something that my mother has been wanting me to do for years.
“Even if I have to marry you on a boat with Finn officiating, I will make sure you have a proper wedding,” Rahul promised her. “You can have your white dress, your striped flags, whatever rituals American girls go through to become brides. You will be mine. And we’ll travel the world together.”
Dar smothered a laugh. “Striped flags?”
Rahul picked her up and threw her on the bed, covering her face with kisses and wrapping his arms around her waist. “Those are just for the July holiday?”
“Yes,” Dar said, her laughter escaping into her bed sheets.
“No striped flags then.”
“Now I want them.”
“Fine. Please, just think about it,” he said. “I may have put you in a terrible position this afternoon, and I would not be able to live with myself if I got back on that boat and left you here to deal with the consequences by yourself.”
Dar knew in that moment that a part of her had always been holding out for romance. And now it seemed that the outward appearances of romance—the ribbons and lace, the delicate flowers, the soft glow of candlelight—were all designed to hide the truth that not all couples felt the way she did about Rahul. True love was naked, sweaty, and waited for no one. The shores of Cape May were every bit as confining as her corset. It was time to loosen the strings and let them go.
“How?” Dar asked. “How will we escape my mother?”
Rahul pulled Dar close to him. “Tomorrow morning, Lottie will tell your mother that I never checked out of the hotel, but that my room was found empty, and that a bicycle was missing from the inn’s bicycle rack. By that time, you will have packed only the essentials in a very small bag, left your house quietly, and joined me on my trip.”
Dar paced the floor, repeating the steps of this plan in her mind. “Why will Lottie tell my mother this?” she asked.
Rahul smiled. “I will tell Lottie the truth about us,” he said. “And then I will steal her bicycle.”
Dar shook her head. “No, I don’t believe you,” she said. “You can’t expect me to ride on the handlebars. I’ll fall.”
Quietly and sweetly, Rahul sang his response: “It won’t be a stylish marriage; I can’t afford a carriage. But you’d look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.”
But Dar wasn’t sold on the trip just yet. “Once the scandal reaches the newspapers, what will stop my mother from making good on her threats to expose Mr. Cummings?” she asked. “Lottie has certainly provided enough kindle to spark her imagination.”
“I think the scandal of our elopement will be more than enough to keep your mother quiet,” Rahul said. “Once her worst nightmare has come true, she’ll have no choice but to trade her silence for nothing more than his.”
“You do have a way of making impossible situations seem easier to manage,” Dar said, leaning against Rahul’s chest. “Do you think I’ll like living in India?”
“We won’t know until you get there,” Rahul said, “but people can surprise you. I certainly never thought I’d be meditating with Carl’s sister-in-law and her friends. But we have enjoyed one another’s company all the same, and no one but your mother has called me a charlatan.”
Dar laughed. “If I had a penny for every time she called me a charlatan, you’d have a proper dowry.”
Rahul looked at her with big eyes. “She doesn’t see what you see.”
“But you do,” Dar reminded him. “Why did you stop channeling? And why have you been trying to keep me from channeling?”
“On my way to America, I met an especially aggressive missionary,” Rahul explained. “He called me a heathen, so I channeled a dead relative to try to scare him back into his cabin.”
Dar shook her head at Rahul’s description of what happened next: a haggard, bony soul with hollow eyes appeared before him and spit in his face.
“You’ve left your parents behind to rot in filth,” the ghost had said, “and you will rot alongside them in hell.”
Dar scoffed. “If that’s true, then he’ll rot alongside them all for preaching hellfire and damnation instead of peace and understanding,” she said. “This soul hadn’t crossed over yet, I assume.”
Spirits, as opposed to ghosts, came back to comfort people, not judge them. It occurred to Dar that she hadn’t spent much time with spirits who in life had followed a faith that was different than hers. This wasn’t due to their lack of representation in the afterlife, only their lack of representation in her séance room. Although many of Dar’s clients were Spiritualists, there were plenty of people in Cape May who weren’t. Elva Burns was a Ch
ristian. Stewart Goldstein, who worked at the front desk of Lottie’s hotel, was Jewish. Mr. Khan, the Indian immigrant who sold silks and other trinkets on the boardwalk, was Muslim. She must have nodded hello to these people countless times on the street, and no one from the spirit plane had ever flagged her down and asked her to convert them from one religion to another. The decision was theirs to make, not hers.
“His soul was still very much a shadow of his former self,” Rahul agreed. “But once I saw that ghosts were willing to waste their energy trying to get a rise out of me, I wanted nothing to do with them,” he said. “And I don’t feel right leaving you alone with Edgar.”
Dar shook her head. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“What if he were to grab you and steal you away, like this?” Rahul grabbed Dar around the waist and pulled her, shrieking in laughter, toward him.
The medium surrendered to his embrace with a sigh. There were no past horrors or future prophesies invading her thoughts. There was only the feel of his lips on hers, his hands on her body, and his heart beating furiously next to her own.
CHAPTER 14
A bicycle built for two
Rahul had no words to describe how he felt when he left Dar’s house to steal a bicycle in the middle of the night. He had come to America looking for adventure, and now he would leave with a wife who might already be with child. To make room, Rahul had whittled his existence to one suitcase filled with a few changes of clothes and his passport.
The carriage slowed to a halt. Mr. Fields opened the door for Rahul and sent him off with a grim nod. The devotion expressed on the face of Dar’s valet made Rahul acutely aware of how much she would be giving up to run away with him. With Senator Burns out of the picture, Dar might still have a chance to be swept off her feet by another tourist—one her mother would approve of. Maybe this new man would even have the means to keep Mrs. Crossing in her summer cottage.