CHAPTER FOURTEEN

London, August 1854

As Lillian rang the bell for the maid it happened again, like a hiccup. She felt yet another moment of disorientation where in the middle of a simple act, such as lighting a candle, or putting on stockings, she lost all sense of where she was. She recited in her head the schoolroom litany she'd relied on before: eight o'clock, south window, front room, second floor, Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, London, Middlesex, England. Earth. Solar system, universe. By the end she was placed.

When she first arrived in London in late March she felt as if she were hovering in one of the hundreds of glass fishing floats her steamer had passed throughout the Mediterranean. She was walled off and immune, invulnerable, separated from all the filth that had been that last month in India. Her rented London house seemed as immaculate as a royal nursery. The servants gave her no sense of hidden disasters, and for the initial busy time all she saw was organized and elegant.

And there was another immunity as well, a sense of release from expectations and routine. Olympia would probably never ask her to finish that satin stitch altar cloth she'd started last year, or to complete the series of hideous shell boxes she'd begun as a gift for Aunt Flora, in another lifetime. Everything that had happened in the past six months was better than any excuse she could have dreamed of to avoid the boredom of her old life. She had a sense of fresh beginnings.

But within days of her arrival, Olympia's cousin, Dr. Greeley, told Lillian of cholera in London. Her initial response was to believe he was wrong. Some ignorant person must have made a mistake. After all, what could they know of cholera, here in civilization? It was as if she had forgotten what she saw on the boat. She didn't want to remember it. She wanted to feel surprised. The bubble still floated around her.

When the cases increased, she conceded that there might be cholera in London. Of course, it's a human disease. But not near me, she thought, not where people like us live.

Then, just yesterday, she had spotted a black rag on the knocker of Number Six, two doors up. She asked the butler. Cholera, the whole house dead.

Now everything felt dirty; her skin, the air, the flecks of street straw on her boots. Her eyes wandered to where the candle reflected off rich tapestries on her bed, curtains with gold weave, the ornate crystal jars on her dressing table. She wished she had bare floors and a military cot like her father's old room, things plain and easy to scrub. Who could tell in Olympia's tasteless opulence where disease might be hiding?

What a waste it all seemed. Lillian had allowed her stepmother full indulgence in the decor of the entire house, using Lillian's money. At first she was appalled at what the workmen were doing but it gave Olympia so much pleasure that it seemed cruel to make her change it. Lillian had come upon her stepmother fingering the gilded wallpaper with delight, or turning back the bed in her room just to see once more the high quality of the French-hemmed sheets. It seemed to ease a lingering resentment Olympia harbored against her now-wealthy stepdaughter.

And what did waste matter, anyway? It was likely that cholera would kill them all whether the walls were covered with maroon velvet or peacock blue enamel.

It wasn't just cholera that shattered her protective glass globe as if it had been tossed on a barnacled rock. Cholera was only the first in a chain of three calamities. Soon after they arrived, the second shock came to her: when they were still staying at Dr. Greeley's house, a plain letter had arrived for her, not with the regular mail, but delivered by a messenger whose looks the housemaid was unable or unwilling to remember. It was short, but long enough to ruin her day.

I am waiting for you. Soon I will be rich and then I claim you as my bride. God speaks through me and he names you as the false harlot; but all will be forgiven if you bend to my wishes. I was on the ship with you and my mother. I will be everywhere you turn. I have all your letters. I know every detail of your life. I know your heart.

As she had read the note in disbelief, then read it again, she remembered so clearly the image of her letters washing into the sea, but on forcefully recalling the scene in her mind, she had to see them pulled in by the backdraft of the boat's forward motion, so that they fluttered onto some inner deck instead of the water. What had tossed on the whitecaps that night was only sea foam.

It was impossible not to see before her the music cupboard in her room in India, and her own hands as the smooth white hands of an eighteen-year-old, on the day she decided to save the letters. At least once a year since then she had tried to destroy them, and couldn't. Even now she couldn't tell herself why she had waited so long. The man was dead, the boy was dead. She would never marry. She would have no children to teasingly reveal them to when she was a dying old woman, as her only romantic secret. Yet they held some meaning for her; perhaps a proof that love could happen, if only for a short time. And she knew that whatever the man had chosen to do in the end, for whatever reason, he had certainly loved her. For a time. His hands and the way they touched her; his mouth, the very breaths he took when close to her; all spoke an unmistakable language. She had seen it since then, rarely, in other couples, but never for herself.

After the day at Dr. Greeley's when the message came from Henry, there was no sign of him and no more letters arrived. For all she knew his letter could have been posted from Bangkok, not London.

The maid had arrived behind Lillian, appearing in the mirror in a limp black dress, impatient and hot, holding out a few slim cases. "Which necklace, ma'am?"

Lillian almost heard instead, Which life? Which purpose? Which solitude? and didn't answer but went on staring at her reflection in the gilt mirror.

She had changed. Her face was thinner now, her cheekbones more visible. French lacquer and combs weighed down her hair. Her colonial tanned skin a thing of the past, her cheeks and shoulders were now as white as the blancmange she'd had at lunch.

"Ma'am, the carriage will be here in ten minutes." The maid's voice rose in irritation. Lillian still hadn't been able to think about necklaces.

Olympia, dressed in full formal mourning and ready an hour ago, entered the room. In her widow's black she had the image of a charred but still edible wedding cake, all black frills, black puffs, black ribbons and ruffles.

"The messenger just got back from the opera house. The performance is still on. The party afterwards, too."

Olympia's voice had a girl's delight in it. There had been rumors of cancellations because of cholera. Then she saw what Lillian was wearing. Her hands went up in protest.

"Lillian, my dear. I can understand you might end your mourning so quickly. But not with that dress."

"It's been six months." Lillian smiled, ready to humor her.

"For the opera? It's just not, well, enough."

Lillian looked up in a moment of doubt. It was so hard to sort Out Olympia's judgment. She was from London, it was true, and knew with accuracy a certain limited type of social behavior. But most of it was from twenty years ago. Not only was there the old and the new for Lillian to sort through, but there were odd notions of Olympia's own, personal ideas such as "don't use words with ‘k' sounds in them," or "don't eat stewed figs if they're offered for dessert, it's too suggestive."

On top of that, Lillian had to discern between the social rules she herself didn't care about and the ones she did. She hardly wanted to do something that would put a tea party in an uproar, or make someone lose their appetite for dinner, but a mere raised eyebrow didn't bother her in the least.

Just when she thought she had the table manners learned, the subtly different things, she would make some terrible mistake. There was a recent dinner at Dr. Greeley's that she cringed to remember.

She had been tense the entire time, thinking that Henry might soon contact Dr. Greeley, whom he had known years ago during his two-year stay in London, for money, or help. It might have been Lillian's unease which had caused her mistake at dinner that night.

The dessert included ripe fresh pears, which were new to her. She'd eaten them chutneyed, preserved, dried, and pickled, but had never seen them fresh. She covertly watched the others and the way they held the fruit with a fork while they carefully peeled it and speared pieces into their mouths.

"These cholera theories of Dr. Snow's are quite interesting for a young unknown, Olympia," Dr. Greeley had been saying.

Lillian had tried to listen but was also concentrating on her fruit technique. At her first attempt she flipped pieces of pear sideways, knocking over a glass and smearing Dr. Greeley's dinner jacket with pear juice.

It was then that she noticed one thing no different from the colonial British life; the controlled nonreaction. Just as at home, no one turned around or even looked.

Dr. Greeley had simply removed the pear slices from his lap and dabbed once at the front of his coat, before going on with what he was saying. "This Dr. Snow seems to be close to a proof that water carries cholera. It won't go over well with the Deputy Minister of Health, I can tell you that. I asked Sir Philip to come tonight, so he could meet you. A late session of Parliament prevented him." And Olympia had yawned, trying to look interested. It was as if nothing had happened.

After that Lillian snuck fruit up to her room and practiced secretly until she could do it with her eyes shut.

Whatever her own failings, tonight's dress, she decided, was perfect for the first stage out of mourning, and she was well in the bounds of the half-year minimum for a father's death. Using thirty yards of watered gray silk, the dress had cost more to make than a year's wardrobe in India. Black Belgian lace trimmed its plain skirt and low neckline. The lace was even more exorbitant than the silk.

After the cheap labor in India, Lillian had been shocked to find how expensive life was here. Her income was two thousand pounds a year, but it took almost all of it to keep them in style. Their cook charged twice as much as they had paid an Indian family of eight to work in the kitchens.

The high prices affected more than just her wardrobe. After the heaped tables and four meals a day at the Governor's house, the meagerness of the food here astonished her. At Dr. Greeley'she same dwindling leg of mutton was brought out cold for lunch four days in a row. He carved small bits off as jealously as if it were suckling pig. And at breakfast, when she was always hungry, he watched the table like a thrifty farmer's wife.

"Here, let me get these out of your way," he had said one morning in reference to three sausages she had been about to serve herself. He had handed the plate back to the sideboard.

"Your necklace, ma'am?" The maid had reached a fury of impatience. This was another thing Lillian still wasn't comfortable with, that servants wouldn't stand and wait for an hour in silence while you chose a dress or wrote a letter. They had schedules of their own.

"The pearls, I suppose."

Olympia drew nearer.

"Lillian, not those boring old pearls. They need to be cleaned and restrung."

Lillian's grandmother's jewels had been pulled out of a strong box at the bank when she first arrived from India. These pearls were yellowed and still in the plain Empire style which probably copied something Empress Josephine had worn. They were impressive, though; six strands of five hundred shining drops, with the full parure of earrings, bracelet, brooch, and even a belt.

"You're right, Olympia," Lillian started to say, and began to reach for a different box, but the impatient maid had already put the necklace around her neck and fastened the catch. It was heavy and cool against her skin. The maid's fingers brushed lightly across the nape of her neck and sent a shiver down her back. Lillian looked in the mirror.

She was beautiful. Her reflection in the old pearls and the heavy silk was of someone else. The old Lillian who had swatted at lizards, watched her father die, and sailed naively to England no longer existed. And as she stared at her reflection, she remembered that it wasn't just her looks that were changed.

The third thing which had happened, besides the cholera in London, and besides the letters from Henry, had altered her entire view of the world.

Three nights ago she had been sitting like this, before the mirror, letting Olympia brush out her hair before going to sleep. They had been talking of their plans for the next day and Lillian had hardly been listening.

"We must try to have you meet more people. I can understand that you might need to rest sometimes, but try to make an effort, my dear."

Lillian had been depressed that afternoon, sunk into despondency by the heat and the news of cholera close by. She'd spent two hours lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling.

"I meant to tell you. Another colonial lady came for tea. So elegant, so kind. One of my dearest friends, really, in Bombay before I met your poor father. Mrs. Fanner? Booner? Connor?" Olympia paused in her brush strokes, her eyes on the ceiling.

"We were speaking of our old times together. And she talked of that terrible day at Jampur, and all those nice young men who had been quartered in Cochin the year before I arrived to marry your dear father. You probably didn't know about Jampur, though; I can tell you India wasn't all tea parties, believe me.

Jampur. Across Lillian's vision flashed sheets of blood, a blur of flies, skulls hacked like coconuts. No, she hadn't seen it. But Henry had heard about it and described it to her with typical, yet insane, relish, and she'd never forgotten. Could he have known what agony it caused her? One of those skulls... she repressed a sudden wave of nausea and asked, surprised at how controlled her voice was, "What did you say? Her son was at Jampur?"

"Yes, that's right. Fancy your remembering a name like that. You have such a way with those languages, dear." She began brushing again, pulling at a tangled section.

Lillian gently shook her head to pull the lock from her stepmother's hands.

"How sad for her. Her son."

"Oh no, her son was with her. Today, while you were resting. There were some survivors, you know," continued Olympia.

"No, I didn't know." Lillian couldn't understand why the room seemed to be revolving around her, the lights moving, everything in motion the way vultures might circle in the sky over a battlefield. She put a hand on the edge of the table.

Olympia put down the brush. "My dear, I can see you getting paler by the minute. Your stays today must have been too tight." She started to rummage among Lillian's cast-off underclothes to check the laces of her corset. Lillian watched her intently.

"But no one survived. No one." Lillian spoke as if the complete slaughter of the regiment were a thing promised to a child, a treat or an outing, suddenly snatched away. Her knowledge had been so sure and had explained everything for her these last ten years. And the familiar, sad thought of the dead baby rose slowly in her senses, like a loose water weed floating to the surface.

"Calm yourself, dear." Olympia began adjusting the laces while Lillian sat rigidly, hardly breathing, waiting.

"Apparently, according to this lady, you know I just can't remember her name. Was it Mrs. Bonning? Or Donning? So sweet, too, and her sister was so —"

"Olympia, please. What did she say?"

"You must learn not to interrupt, dear. Her son was with the Fifteenth regiment. And just between us, a few of them got out. Decamped. Retreated. Scattered. I don't know all those words they use."

"Deserted?"

"Yes, that was it.

"Are you sure that's what she said? Deserted, not reversed or restricted, or ... regrouped?"

"No, dear, that was it. Deserted. And sounds sensible to me, too."

Sensible. Olympia wasn't so far off the mark. He wasn't a man to turn down an opportunity that came up. It came back to her, those weeks she had watched him before she fell in love. He had been out of place. Not from the upper classes. But at Aunt Flora's no one could tell, or maybe they didn't care.

He played piano well enough for those musical afternoons of Flora's. Only a snob would have sniffed about having him there. Aunt Flora certainly didn't; she was glad enough to have one more handsome young officer in her salon. And he sang in a good, solid baritone. That was how Lillian had started watching him so closely in the first place.

At their third afternoon party together she had heard him announce, "Poems. I'm reading a lot of them lately. It takes so much less time than a novel."

A guest, an older, established poet who knew Byron in his youth, had laughed loudly. Lillian knew the young man hadn't meant it as a joke, and was surprised to see him start to laugh too. Along with her sense of being coolly observant of his secret embarrassment, she felt a moment of obscure intimacy from knowing how his mind worked. She shared a secret with him. From this secret, one-sided intimacy, it was only a small step to love.

"So you'll wear the pearls, ma'am?" The maid's voice was less grating, almost admiring. It brought her back to the present.

Lillian looked at her reflection once more. In this necklace, it was as if she were looking into another time, some other person's past, or her own cloudy future. She saw a woman glowing with a private fire.

The first time they had been alone together she probably had looked like this, she thought, only young. And happy.

He had found her on one of her solitary walks and she knew without him telling her that he had searched for her, hoped to find her. When he took her arm she didn't feel her usual indignant resentment, but a relaxed sinking into his strength. After a mile or so, when he kissed her behind a screen of young banana trees, she knew she had no more control. She would do whatever he asked.

When she went back to Cochin and her father's house a month later, by luck the man's regiment went as well. Good luck or bad, even now it was hard to say. At any rate, two months after that, she knew she would have a child, and she never saw him again.

The pearl necklace warm around her throat, she kept staring at herself in the mirror. How would he feel if he saw her again? "I think I will wear these pearls after all," she said. "We can take them to the jeweler's tomorrow." The maid nodded an approval Lillian would never have admitted she was anxious for.

It could be that dirty pearls were another false step she didn't know about. At least they weren't paste. No one would see them, anyway. Lillian didn't believe the messenger's answer. The opera house would be empty, the party deserted. Cholera was everywhere. They were fools to go out.

"Ma'am, the carriage is downstairs." The maid, her brows down again in annoyance, held Out Lillian's pumps and knelt to slip them on. Lillian looked down at the back of the woman s head, the neck muscles taut with displeasure. Probably she would give notice tomorrow. So far no servant had lasted more than two weeks.

2

At the opera house, gaps showed in the private boxes. The orchestra seats were half empty, but the upper galleries where you could buy a seat for a half crown were packed, as always.

The company was doing Mozart's The Magic Flute. Lillian loved Mozart. She owned the scores to several of his symphonies and operas, including this one. She had never heard The Magic Flute performed, and it had been years since she had tried working out the various vocal parts of the opera on the piano. She remembered most clearly the occasional appearances of the three celestial boys, who sang their innocent encouragement in exquisite three-part harmony.

Once the performance began she felt swept up in its fairy-tale charm and hymnlike chorales. Then, during the scene when the supposedly evil Sarastro reveals himself to the heroine as her kind and all-knowing father, Lillian looked up to a box across the theater. A shock went through her, an actual stinging sensation pulsing down her bate arms and into her fingertips.

He was there.

She took a deep breath, and another. Swallowed. She picked up the opera glasses from Olympia's lap and looked again.

There was no doubt. He was older, heavier, and his hair had receded, but it was the same man. His skin was white rather than the campaigner's brown she had known, and his face looked as if he had lost interest in everything in his life. Or maybe it was just that his face wasn't interested in her anymore.

An old dream came back to her. It had been the turning point. Until she dreamed it she had watched him in the drawing room with pity. In the dream, he had been throwing stones into a pond. Round, translucent, the stones were alike and symmetrical, yet each was preciously different. And each stone was just for her, the thrust of his arm as he tossed it gently into space, the arc of the thing as it fell onto the glassy surface. It was as if she had heard him sing to her, with a soaring voice like this man on the stage. Each toss had its own phrase, its own melody and cadence. It was a passion in stones.

She had always remembered that dream, because when she woke up from it she was in love with the man. And now that she thought about it, at no point in their passion was any sensation as wonderful as the dream had been.

She wanted to tell herself that it was the cowardice that appalled her, his desertion of the battle and of her, that a man who could do such a thing was worthless. But an inner voice taunted with the truth. That these things didn't matter at all, if he had still been as handsome as he was in the dream of the stones, she would have gone through the door of her box, trotted down the corridors, and burst in on him, claiming him back.

Her pain, which she'd cherished like an heirloom for ten years, seemed to float up to the domed gold roof of the opera house, where it vaporized and disappeared. Lillian stared, unseeing, at the final act of the opera, and fingered her necklace.

She hadn't been aware of how tightly she was pulling at the pearls until they broke. She let out the quiet, embarrassed mutter of someone slipping on a wet floor.

The pearls fell like slow hailstones, all five hundred of them, running down the folds of her skirt, over the velvet seat cover, onto the sloped floor of the box seats. She pulled up a lapful of satin to save the few she could but in her confusion, as she stooped to gather more, the ones in her lap spilled out too. They splashed over the lower edge of the box. A few landed on the heads of the surprised audience five feet below and the rest bounced silently down the banked floor of the opera house and were lost among shoes, dust balls, umbrellas, and the bassoon cases and music stands of the orchestra pit.

The strings hung limp around Lillian's neck, rotted with damp and age. Olympia had dozed off, her head slumped to one side and her hair arrangement askew, and when the audience's final applause woke her she had missed the breaking of the necklace as well as most of the opera.

"I'm afraid Mozart is a little dry for me, dear." She yawned and licked her lips, trying with one hand to rearrange her falling hair. "Shall we get an ice before we attempt to push through the crowd?"

For answer Lillian held out two pearls that she'd been able to retrieve from the front of her dress.

Olympia sought out the house manager and explained, in the hopes that a few might be returned. Lillian put the broken strings in her bag. Her neck felt naked and vulnerable. After struggling through the crowds they left for Lady Tewksbury's party.