A wry smile briefly lit his eyes. “You’d have managed.”
An answering smile touched her lips. Tom knew she was a managing female. That he didn’t seem to mind it was rather miraculous. She pressed his hand. “Goodnight, Tom.”
“Goodnight, Jenny.”
She was still smiling when she closed the door.
The next morning, at eight o’clock precisely, she and Tom set out for the hospital in a gharry.
It was a smallish building, housing no more than fifty beds—less than half of which were presently occupied. The entire enterprise was run by a frazzled surgeon-major by the name of Bartlett. He wasn’t particularly keen on having his morning routine disrupted.
“Come, come,” he said, ushering them into his small office. “I haven’t much time to spare.” And then—five minutes later: “There’s nothing I can do to help you, Miss Holloway. Had Captain Lord Castleton been injured at the siege rather than killed outright, he’d have been treated in the field. At the depot hospital, not here.”
“I’m aware,” Jenny replied. “We spoke with one of the field surgeons who served at the depot hospital yesterday. He has no record of having treated Lord Castleton.”
“Nor do I, ma’am.”
“Yes, but…is there no one working here who might have helped care for the wounded after the siege? A nurse, perhaps. Or a native servant.”
The surgeon-major massaged his temples. “You’d be well advised to speak with Lieutenant-Colonel Tremaine at the fort.”
“We have done. And he—”
“Well, there you have it. If Tremaine can’t help you, I don’t see how I can do so.”
“You can permit us to speak to the hospital staff,” Tom said. “The Earl of Castleton was a gentleman of great importance. His sister, Lady Helena, expects us to pursue every available avenue.”
“As that may be, sir, I won’t have you making nuisances of yourself in my hospital. And I won’t permit any aggravation to my patients. However…seeing as how this is a matter concerning the peerage, you may as well speak with the matron. She can direct you to the appropriate medical staff.”
Jenny and Tom spent the next four hours questioning the hospital matron and every other person they could find at the hospital who was remotely connected to the siege. No one remembered Giles. Not the nurses or the man in the dispensary. Not even the few natives who were willing to speak with them.
What they did remember was the siege. Each of those willing to talk to them had some version of the same tale to tell about the diabolical brilliance of the rani, the storming of the fort, and the destruction of the city.
Jenny felt she was beginning to know the story by heart. It had only been two years ago, after all, in this very same month. In the bright light of day, amongst so many polite and industrious people scurrying about at their work or pausing to sip from their cups of tea, it was difficult to imagine the blaze of cannon fire and smoke and the screams of the dying and wounded.
It felt as if the full furies of hell had been unleashed, Colonel Anstruther had said.
A nightmarish thought.
“Let’s return to the guest house,” Tom said as they left the hospital.
Jenny stopped to open her parasol. “What about the church?”
“We can visit closer to sunset. It’s too hot to be traipsing all about the town at midday.”
She couldn’t disagree. Even the gharry they hired to take them back was flagging. The poor horse looked as if he were about to expire. When the gharry-wallah began to use his whip as encouragement, Jenny touched Tom’s arm. “We’re close enough to walk, aren’t we?”
Tom called for the gharry-wallah to stop. After he helped Jenny out, he went back and spoke to the man.
“What did you say?” Jenny asked as the gharry rolled away. The gharry-wallah was no longer plying his whip.
“Very little. My Hindustani is execrable.” Tom paused before adding, “I gave him a ridiculously large tip in addition to his fare. One hopes he’ll have the good sense to take his horse back to the stable and call it a day.”
Her mouth curved in a sudden smile. One of her love-smitten smiles, no doubt. But, at the moment, she didn’t care one jot. “Do you always do the right thing?”
Tom gazed down at her. For an instant, she might have believed him as smitten as herself. “Hardly ever.”
“Liar.”
“Not at all. I told you I was selfish. It upset you for him to strike the horse, so I made him stop.”
“How is that selfish?”
“Because it pleases me to make you happy.”
His words brought a flush of warmth to Jenny’s cheeks. She bent her head as she proceeded down the street, hoping her parasol shielded her blushes from view. Heaven’s sake, she was an aged spinster, not a green girl.
Tom walked along at her side. “I wish I could solve all the rest of this with as much ease.”
“Perhaps it’s already solved. That may well be our problem. We’re asking questions about something to which we already have the answer.”
“Anstruther’s account.”
“I don’t like it any more than you do, but thus far he appears to know more about what happened the night Giles died than anyone here.”
“We haven’t spoken to everyone yet.”
“No. There’s still the chaplain and whoever might have been involved in assisting with burying the dead. As for the villagers, I don’t hold out much hope. Giles only arrived with his regiment during the battle. It isn’t as if he was stationed in Jhansi before the uprising.”
Tom was silent for a long moment. “Perhaps I was too hasty in urging you to come here.”
“Nonsense. Though I think you suspected as well as I that it might come to nothing.” She glanced at him. “I’m not a fool, Tom. I could tell you were merely placating me. After how I behaved that morning at the Westbrook—”
“I don’t make it a habit of placating people, Jenny.”
“Not even ladies who cry themselves to sleep on your shoulder?”
“Ah. As to that…” A glint of humor flickered in his eyes. “It hasn’t happened often enough for me to make a formal study.”
“I trust not. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if it had. You have a very supportive shoulder.”
“It’s yours whenever you need it.”
She took his arm. “I’m obliged to you, but with any luck I won’t be needing it anytime soon. I’ve wept enough for this journey.”
The guest house loomed ahead, the chipped brick exterior with its shabby awning beckoning to them in the dry heat. It wasn’t going to be much cooler inside, but it was better than nothing.
She sighed heavily. “What an absolutely awful way to end our adventures. Stranded in all this dust and heat, at a disreputable little guest house in the middle of nowhere.”
“I don’t mind it.”
“Rubbish. You’re miserable.”
“How could I be miserable when I’m with you?”
An unexpected surge of emotion rose in Jenny’s breast. “How indeed?”
Tom looked at her, seeming to comprehend exactly what she was feeling. How could he not? Surely he must be feeling it, too. The inevitability of their parting. “You and I need to talk.”
She moistened her lips. “Yes.”
“Perhaps this evening, after dinner? I can come to your room.”
No, she should have said. It isn’t a good idea.
But none of this had been a good idea. None of it, from the very beginning. And yet, here they were. She and Tom, together.
“Very well,” she said.
Tom gave her a thin smile. It was one of encouragement. Either that, or commiseration. “Just to talk. And then—”
“At last,” Ahmad said.
Jenny looked up with a start. The su
n cast a heavy glare. She hadn’t even seen Ahmad standing in front of the guest house. He detached himself from the shadows beneath the awning and came to meet them.
“I’ve been waiting for you to return for the last two hours.”
She dropped Tom’s arm, her pulse quickening. “Have you discovered something?”
Ahmad’s face lit with a rare smile. “That I have, Miss Holloway.”
“Well? What is it? Have you—”
“Let’s go inside, shall we?” Tom’s hand came to rest on the small of her back. “None of us will be of any use if we expire from the heat.”
Jenny followed Ahmad through the doors and into the coolness of the reception area, Tom close at her side. There were no other guests about. Only a native servant was present, an elderly man garbed in a dhoti, engaged in sweeping the floor.
“What did you find out?” she asked again.
“Initially, nothing. But you were right about the market. I met a gentleman there. A healer of a kind, peddling medicinal herbs. He told me that after the siege there was a woman who helped with clearing the dead and the wounded.”
Jenny’s heart pounded. “The British wounded?”
“Natives, mostly, but he seemed to remember rumors of a white man or two being among those she helped. He couldn’t recall the particulars.”
Tom’s expression was grave. “And he simply volunteered all of that?”
“Not without cost,” Ahmad said. “I had to purchase a great many of his herbs.”
Jenny looked between the two of them. “Well? Who was this woman? And where is she now?”
“For that information, I had to purchase an entire bag of dried tulsi.” Ahmad’s mouth hitched. “Her name is Mrs. Kumar. She works at the mission. If the peddler is to be believed, she’s still there now.”
The structure that housed the mission at Jhansi was in better repair than the rest of the buildings in the city. Built of brick and lime mortar, it stood, small and efficient, on the outskirts of the city. On entering, Ahmad exchanged words with a young native woman in the vestibule.
“She says that Mr. McKidd is in charge. Has been for the last year. He’s away in the village at present, condoling with a family who has a sick child.” Ahmad continued to speak with the woman, pausing at intervals to translate for them. “She says that Mrs. Kumar is Mr. McKidd’s assistant.”
Jenny’s stomach tightened. “Is Mrs. Kumar here?”
“She’s in the schoolroom.” Ahmad inclined his head to the native woman. She gave Jenny and Tom a wary look before departing down the hall. “We’re to follow her.”
Jenny took Tom’s arm as they trailed after her. She led them through a painted archway and into an open room with a matted floor. There was a table along the wall with food and drink arrayed upon it. A wizened elderly lady in a sari leaned over it, covering a dish of rice with a piece of cheesecloth.
The young woman approached her, speaking to her in hushed tones, and pointing in their direction.
The elderly lady turned to look at them. Her hair was liberally streaked with gray, her face adorned with a thick pair of spectacles.
“Mrs. Kumar?” Ahmad approached her, offering a greeting in Hindustani.
“I speak English well enough, young man,” she replied, her voice rising and falling in a musical lilt. “Bibha says you have come to ask me about a British soldier?”
“We have.” Ahmad withdrew the daguerreotype from his pocket and snapped open the case. “Miss Holloway is cousin to this man. His body was lost after the siege.”
Mrs. Kumar adjusted her spectacles before peering down at the portrait. “Ah. Him. He was a handsome gentleman. I remember.”
Jenny’s pulse pounded. But she wouldn’t hope. She daren’t. “You saw him?”
“I treated him,” Mrs. Kumar said. “Not here. This mission is newly built. We had another mission then, closer to the city. It was destroyed during the rebellion. For a time we housed the wounded there. Until the roof was caved in and then…” Her mouth tightened. “So much death and destruction. A terrible tragedy.” She looked up at Jenny. “Was he an officer, then? He had no coat when he was brought to me. No insignia. I sent word to the depot hospital, but no one came to claim him.”
“Yes, he…he was a captain. He was also the Earl of Castleton, a gentleman of some importance.”
“We are all important in God’s eyes.”
“Yes, of course, but he—” Jenny broke off. “You said no one claimed him. Do you mean…no one claimed his body?”
“He wasn’t dead, Miss Holloway. Not when I attended him.” Mrs. Kumar crossed the room to a wooden desk. She proceeded to shuffle through a pile of papers, as if she hadn’t just knocked Jenny’s entire world on end. “He was in a terrible state. But worse was to come. We had an outbreak of cholera that spring. The men who had not yet been stricken were removed.”
“He was one of them?”
“He was unconscious. He had lost much blood. We did not expect him to last a week.” She shrugged. “I assume he died upon arrival. If not from his wounds, then from the cholera. God rest his soul.”
Jenny’s mouth went dry as ash. “Arrival where?”
Mrs. Kumar looked at her as if she were a simpleton. “To the hill stations. It is where many go to recover their health. The climate is cool and the air is fresh.”
Tom stood at Jenny’s side, his hand at her back. “Which of the hill stations?”
“Him? To Darjeeling, probably. At the time of the siege, I had an assistant—Zaina—whose parents worked at a tea plantation there. She escorted the wounded on their journey. A good girl. Smart. She never came back, more’s the pity.”
“But he was alive when you last saw him?” Jenny pressed. “He was alive and…you’re sure—absolutely sure—it was the man in the picture?”
“I am old, madam, as you see,” Mrs. Kumar said. “But there is nothing wrong with my memory. Yes, the man I treated after the siege was the man in this portrait of yours. And when I last saw him, he was very much alive.”
Tom leaned against the wall, arms folded, watching Jenny pace the confines of her room on the second floor of Mr. Bhat’s guest house. Since leaving the mission, she’d been too restless to be still for more than a few seconds at a time.
He should have known then that keeping his promise to come to her room was a bad idea. When he’d first broached the subject, he’d thought the search for Giles was near its end. He’d hoped they could finally have a serious discussion about their future. There was so much he’d wanted to tell her. So many things he’d planned to say in order to persuade her to come home.
Instead, from the time he’d discreetly entered Jenny’s room half an hour ago, the conversation between the two of them had revolved entirely around Giles.
“We must go to Darjeeling, obviously,” she said. “We’ve come too far to give up now.”
He raked a hand through his hair. Somewhere between meeting Ahmad outside the guest house and leaving the mission, he’d lost control of the situation. He was at a loss as to how he might get it back. “Let’s just… Let’s wait a moment. We need to properly think this through.”
“What’s there to think through? Mrs. Kumar recognized Giles from his portrait.”
“An unreliable identification at best. The woman must be pushing eighty. And did you see the lenses of her spectacles? They were an inch thick, at least.”
“What’s that to say to anything? She obviously wasn’t blind, else she wouldn’t be working at the mission.”
“It isn’t only her age and eyesight that call her identification into question. The whole account she gave beggars belief.”
“It sounded perfectly reasonable to me.”
“You truly believe that, if Giles had been alive, even for a day, no one from his regiment would have come for him? She claims to have sent word
to the depot hospital, and yet—”
“Perhaps, in all the chaos, her message went astray?”
Tom wasn’t convinced. He didn’t want to be convinced.
“Or perhaps,” Jenny continued, “it was Colonel Anstruther who received the message. He didn’t strike me as the kind of man who would have given Giles’s welfare priority. Not if he believed Giles was a threat to his marriage. Is it so difficult to imagine that he might have ignored Mrs. Kumar’s message? If Giles was expected to die regardless, he mightn’t have felt any urgency to retrieve him.”
“It’s possible.”
“Exactly. And a possibility is all we’ve ever had to go on. Not a probability. The entire idea that Giles might have survived the siege has never been more than the flimsiest hope.”
“It still is.”
“But less flimsy than it was two hours ago, surely. After speaking to Mrs. Kumar, we have more reason to hope than ever, not less.”
He exhaled a heavy sigh. “Were time and distance no concern, I’d agree with you. But we’ve already spent months on this adventure. Were we to travel to the hill stations—”
Jenny stopped pacing to look at him. A hammered-bronze oil lamp stood on the wooden table beside her bed, its low flame illuminating her face in shadows of rose and gold. “I don’t expect you to come with me.”
“Of course I’ll come with you.” His voice was harsh, almost angry. “Do you imagine I’d leave you here to make the journey alone?”
“You’ll have to leave me eventually. If not in Jhansi, then somewhere else.”
“Yes, eventually. But not yet. Not now, at any rate.”
“Tom—” She broke off, giving him a look. Such a look.
He crossed the room, reaching her in three strides.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“That I’m going with you? Yes.” He framed her face with his hands. The warmth in her eyes went straight to his heart. “About all the rest of it? No.”
She circled his wrists with her fingers. “I’d never ask it of you. I’d never expect—”
He bent his head and kissed her.
Jenny’s hands tightened on his wrists, even as her lips softened. They parted beneath his, sweet and warm and welcoming.
A Modest Independence Page 29