CHAPTER FIVE

India, January 1854

1

After Henry left the house, Lillian went straight upstairs to her room and lay flat on the bed. She was oblivious to her rank sweat and dust and thankful just to be alone.

She gazed at the cotton canopy over her head, the same dingy canvas which had been up there forever. Its stains from damp and mildew spread in familiar continent-shaped spots that were as comforting as a nursery rhyme.

The room had been only partially cleaned, and a vase of orchids she'd placed on her writing desk a week before leaving was still there. If she hadn't known that the objects it contained had once been flowers, she would hardly have recognized them, fused to the side of the glass in limp decay. A bit of slime remained in the bottom of the vase; she could smell it.

"Pushpa!" she called. There was no answer.  "Pushpa, come quickly!"

And then another thing caught her eye. Her music cabinet, full of her song books and opera scores, was open and disordered.  A drawer in the cabinet gaped unshut and had obviously been gone through.

Her heartbeat sped up and her headache came back. She sat up and hurried over to look in. There was dust on the open drawer, so it must have been like that at least a week. After a quick scan of the letters and papers she was sure that something was missing, but it was hard to know exactly what; she looked through them so rarely.

Just then Pushpa appeared, her eyes cast down. She didn't look well. She still hadn't changed out of the creased green sari she had traveled in. Her face was sunken and had turned the color of cheap paper. Probably another bout of malaria, thought Lillian. She didn't want to say anything. The last time, Pushpa had denied all her symptoms so strongly that she'd finally fainted while putting up Lillian's hair.

Lillian decided to watch her and order her to rest when it got really bad. "Take those away." She gestured to the vase. "And bring my wash water. It should have been here by now."  There was no point in asking about the open drawer. Later tonight she'd go through the old papers. It was time to destroy them.

When Pushpa returned with the water, Lillian stood by the bed and let her unhook and unbutton her dress, and then begin the slow process of removing the corset. Each unloosed eyelet allowed a fraction more relief. When the lowest was undone, the garment had to be peeled off Lillian's white skin like rind off a fruit. Red marks burned at her waist and under her breasts, where the corset had chafed, but Lillian knew better than to scratch them, and instead reached for a bottle of rosewater to rub over the area. In this climate, the slightest break of skin could turn overnight into a suppurating wound.

She looked down at her flat stomach and at the small silvery streaks on either side of her navel. She rubbed rosewater over them, too, but she knew it wouldn't help. They were part of her forever.

The whole time at her aunt's, with so little time alone, she hadn't remembered much or thought about her weeks with Henry, or the more distant past. But here, in her old room, with innocent but painful reminders all around her, the little thoughts crept back.

It was before Henry. Before her father had married Olympia.  On the day that her maid (long before Pushpa, and her name wouldn't come to Lillian now) could no longer hook the waist of Lillian's skirt, she'd told her father.  Until then, she had waited, every morning and night, for a letter which never came.  All that ever arrived was a packet of her own letters that she'd written to the man, with no message from him, no markings. She spent endless afternoons pacing under the mango tree by the dock, dizzy and nauseated and looking for the daily mail boat to come from the mainland. It might bring a note; maybe even a passenger.

Her father hadn't mentioned it for years now. Today, in the drawing room, when Henry said what he said, she'd looked over at the colonel to see his response. But there was nothing. Maybe he had forgotten, as even she did at times.

The child was born dead. They said it had been a boy. Scrutinizing her reflection now in the spotted glass -- the straight, long nose, the too-heavy brows -- Lillian wondered, once more, what he would have looked like. Would he have had his father's high forehead and dark eyes? His morbid tendency to self-examination? Would he have been tall? She wondered if she could ever think of the infant's death without a thick feeling at the bottom of her throat. It was little more than a shadow of weeping, but still there after ten years.

She had made a quick and secretive journey inland, with concealing shawls wrapped around her despite the searing heat.  With her own mother dead, and Henry and Olympia not yet part of their lives, there was nobody to ask questions. The house in the Nilgiri Hills with its two bare rooms became her entire world for a few months. A dusty plain was her only view from the narrow windows. The servants chattered at her in English and Telagu. It was nothing to them where a memsahib chose to have her baby.

At first, the worst part of the waiting was trying to hide from herself a feeling that totally confused her at the time, a feeling which she recognized now as relief. Relief that the boring cycle of days had been broken, that something would finally happen to her. Her bowed head, her silence, her tears (of anger, not repentance, but all tears look alike) were a pretense of the expected worthlessness and shame.

But as she got nearer to her time, and too big to move easily, her feelings grew softer. Her tears came, instead, over the little blankets and shirts the women had taught her to sew. There was an oddly pleasant metallic taste in her mouth that even now she could recall and associate with a sense of cherishing those fluttering kicks.

No one had prepared her for the pain of giving birth. In the first hours the pains were predictable and small. She thought that the birth would be simple; just wait until the pain ends and a baby appears. But the pains grew and began to have a life and character of their own. Rounded, almost globe-shaped, the huge pains rolled through her body in unstoppable orbits, and seemed indifferent to her survival or the baby's.

She had sometimes wondered about the mortal pain one might feel dying in battle of sword thrusts, or dying of some cankerous disease; this pain was just as deadly. After endless hours or days of it, when she was using up the last of her strength in screaming, the pain grew unthinkably worse, then suddenly vanished into a silent, wet, red infant sliding out from between her legs. Moments later she fell unconscious.

But just before the people around her faded into darkness, through the midwife's shouted commands there had been a confusing disturbance of someone arriving and a scuffle outside her room. She was sure she heard her lover's voice but she was too weak to even raise her head. Later, everyone who had been there insisted she'd imagined it. She finally stopped asking.

Then came a time of fever, confusion, and sweats that seemed to last for years. The only real sensation she remembered was of a terrible ache in her breasts, which continually saturated her bedclothes with leaking milk. Afterwards she discovered that she'd lain sick with puerperal fever for an entire month. They told her that the boy was dead, and that she herself had barely survived. That she should forget.

But the concept of the baby's death couldn't be absorbed all at once. The ideas she'd formed so slowly and carefully over the long months by herself had to topple one by one, in their own time.

The impression of a nursery hung with white lace and full of light; that had to darken. The guessed-at sensations of the baby sucking at her breasts had to fade. There would be no rocking horse in the corner, no toy drums or trumpets cluttering the stairs. The personality she'd already had a mysterious inkling of; a peaceful, introspective child who would stare at leaf shadows and listen to songs; where was that child's soul now?

One piece at a time, the world she'd imagined for herself dimmed and changed back to the world she knew.

She came home to the island to find a new set of house servants and fresh decor in her room. There were days when she could do nothing but weep. She couldn't eat, and within months her old dresses fit easily. But with no one to talk to about it, soon enough it really was as if it had never happened. Only her father knew -- her father, and whoever had been outside the door shouting, if she hadn't imagined it.

Half a year later she happened to hear the news about Jampur.  She could remember the words accurately even now.

She had been reading at a table in the garden, and her father had passed with one of the clerks.

"The entire Fifteenth Regiment, Tippu? Is it possible?" His voice had been low, secretive.

"It is without doubt, sir. Fort Munro, on the edge of the Thar desert. All those young men from last winter. The Afghan people are fierce."

"And the mutilations?"

"As always, sir. Most of them washed down the Indus afterwards, so the burials were not easy. The flag was rescued, though. That was a good thing. They retrieved the flag near Jampur."

If she hadn't overheard their words she would never have known; no one ever mentioned the battle at Fort Munro again. She might have spent years waiting for him to come back. As it was, her actual sense of loss was less than when the baby died. She'd already lost this man. But for a long time her dreams at night were spliced with terrible visions of blood on dusty mountain rocks.

Yearly visits to her aunt punctuated the cycle of tea parties on the mainland and the music lessons with Signor Bastini who was rowed over once a week from town. For the first year she went through the motions of all these events without feeling much more than the daily need to eat and sleep.

Then her father married Mrs. Bince while on a short trip to Bombay, and brought the lady and her son Henry back to live on the island.

Lillian had few memories of her own mother, dead of yellow fever at twenty-one, when Lillian was four. A portrait still hung in one of the guest rooms of a smiling blonde with a frizz of short curls and a high-waisted white dress. She held a tiny spaniel. The image of the dog had always been more vivid in Lillian's memory than that of her mother's face.

She wasn't unhappy about Mrs. Bince, a wealthy widow who was easy to get along with. To this day, Lillian could only assume that her father had never told Olympia what Lillian had done. She also knew, without his saying a word, that he had married to give his daughter some protection. To give her a guard.

The second Mrs. Aynsworth must have felt grateful toward Lillian for pretending not to notice occasional slips of grammar, and for avoiding all references to her previous husband's glue profits. In return for this acceptance she gave affection without judgment, and even now coddled Lillian as if she were a fragile innocent still in her teens, with a miraculous musical talent.

If it hadn't been for her music, and perhaps what happened with Henry, Lillian wouldn't have forgotten the past so soon.

She'd always sung well. She had been singing at the piano the first night she had met her lover, and his strong baritone voice accompanying her was the first reason he'd stood out from the rest. But afterwards, she tried not to remember that, and threw herself into musical study to escape her loneliness.

Most of the music on the shelf in her room was from that period, seven and eight years ago, when Signor Bastini's weekly visits marked her activities as nothing else could. How he had praised her voice! Such a rich alto, he'd said, perfect for Schubert lieder. He'd even tried to get up an amateur production of a Donizetti opera on the mainland, but her father hadn't approved, so she sang the parts only in private.

But her fervor for singing wore off. There was no one to listen, at least no one who understood the music. Her father had heard everything countless times, and Olympia just nodded and smiled, saying, "Lovely, dear, just lovely," Lillian tested her with wrong notes, sometimes singing an entire song a whole step higher than the piano part, but the response was always "Lovely."

If Henry were home he would stare at her as if mesmerized while she sang. He would move closer and closer to the piano, sometimes onto the bench itself, as if he wanted to breathe the air coming from her lungs. From the very beginning, she cringed at it and was sure he would give the two of them away. His mother must know he cared nothing for music. He never said a word, unless it were to whisper, "Sing another one." Soon she made an effort not to sing when he was home. And then she stopped singing completely.

Now Lillian left her seat in front of the mirror and walked over to the music cabinet to leaf through the crumbling pages. One of the thicker books, a Schumann song cycle, still bore old instructions in Signor Bastini's shaky hand: "next lesson March second," or "open upper register more. Think of a swan's neck." She touched the letters with her fingertip. There was a raised pucker where the ink had wet the paper.

2

Dinner was usually served at eight o'clock, but they waited tonight for Henry. Nine passed, and then nine-thirty, without a sign of him, so they went ahead with the meal.  None of them spoke about him or about what had happened earlier.

"They say the rains will be late this year," said Olympia, as she beckoned to Rajan for a serving of mutton.

The colonel didn"t answer. He poured himself another glass of claret.

Olympia spoke up again. "The mango tree in the side garden is producing well. That's usually a sign of rain, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't say it was producing well, dear. There were only a dozen over the last week."

"There were three on the ground today," said Olympia.

"No, dear. Only two." The colonel didn't raise his eyes from his food.

"Three. I counted them."

"I expect what you took as the third was a dead leaf."

"You must be right. At any rate, it will be a relief if the rains are good."

The elephant wasn't referred to, though they could all hear the animal, trumpeting occasionally, from the spot where he had been chained. It seemed no one had yet taken him back to the village.

The food was poorly cooked tonight; apparently the head cook was ill. The spices were too strong and bit at Lillian's throat. She toyed with the bits of chicken curry and cabbage on her plate until she and Olympia left the colonel to his bottle of port. The women returned to the drawing room, resuming the same seats as always; the faded love seat, the musty sofa.

Earlier she had pulled the book of Schumann songs from her music shelf and brought it down to the piano, thinking she might try them again someday. She was too restless to sit and do nothing, so she wandered over to the piano bench.

Dampness kept the instrument perpetually out of tune, but long ago Lillian had forced herself to endure its sour notes rather than have no music at all. She struck the opening bars of the first song, with hesitation at first, and then with more confidence she sang through it. After all this time, the Oerman was difficult to pronounce.

"Lovely, dear. What is it called? I've never heard you sing that before."

It was true; she hadn't opened the book for eight years; but she was surprised that her stepmother knew one song from another.

"It's called Frauenhiebe und Leben, Olympia. 'A woman's love and life.'  A song cycle by Robert Schumann."

"What a title! I hope it's nothing you shouldn't be singing, dear."  Olympia gave Lillian an indulgent smile, with her head to one side, and shook her finger at her.

"It's not what you think." Lillian wondered what exactly Olympia did think; that the lyrics were about some Teutonic den of vice or prostitution? "It's about marriage and children."  She left out the other subjects of most of the songs: betrayal, disillusionment, loss, and the inevitable fading of love.

She started the next song. The cycle had eight in all, but tonight she wanted to hear only the first few, before the darker ones ended the woman's story. As she sang, the colonel entered the room and stood listening at the door, his head to one side, a slight frown on his face.

When she finished the song he walked over and gently shut the book. "Don't sing any more of that, Lillian. I'll send to Bombay tomorrow for some new music."

Lillian looked up, surprised. "I don't need any new music. I have plenty, you know."

"My dear, I don't like to think that you. . ." He put a hand to his head and stopped.

"What is it, Father?"

Olympia's gentle snore came from her chair. She would sleep heavily for some time.

"Nothing," her father answered. "Just a bit of headache. That song. You used to sing it before -- before your life was so changed."

Lillian's heartbeat sped up and her hands began to sweat. At first she was too surprised to answer him. He hadn't mentioned her pregnancy for years. Like him, she had no language for it.  She said the first thing that came into her head.

"How awkward it must have been for you."  The moment she said it she was sorry; it sounded accusatory, as if he had diminished the importance of her feelings and worried only about his own. She looked at him, quickly. He met her eyes for a moment and looked away.

"Oh, sweetheart, no, no. It was an unpleasant time, but it's so long ago, and doesn't matter now.

Did he really think that? She suspected he had other thoughts he wasn't saying. "It doesn't matter? You heard what Henry said about me before he left."

"He meant nothing. He was trying to wound your stepmother and me with any vicious invention. How could he know anything?"

The open drawer in her room came to mind. "It was an odd thing to invent." She waited, hoping and dreading that he'd explain more, perhaps reveal that he had guessed about her and Henry as well. But he said nothing. 

She aimlessly turned the pages of her music. "I wondered sometimes if you'd forgotten about it."  At first her father didn't answer. Had she said too much? Maybe now he'd drop it.

"Forgotten! Dear God, Lillian, how could you think such a thing? I will never forgive myself. I think of it every day."

She thought it was herself, Lillian, he couldn't forgive. "But you never speak of it."

"And what should I say? I can hardly discuss it over dinner.  I thought you yourself would prefer it this way. Some things are too bad to talk about."

She thought of all the things they never mentioned in the family. Henry's uselessness, his gambling and violence. Olympia's love of sherry. The way that the colonel's hands and chin had begun to shake last year. The way he forgot things. All too bad to talk about.

In a burst of frustration she said, "Why can't we talk about it, ever? I still feel ashamed and foolish when I think of it, even though it's so long ago. If I could have talked about it back then --"

"Lillian, the man who --"

"I don't mean that kind of talk. Please. We should forget him. I beg you, don't ask me again."  Her face was averted from him now but when she stole a look at him she caught his expression of relief. They were both silent for a minute.

"I do think, sometimes, what he might have been like," he said. "By now the boy would be nine years old."

"You sound as if you're sorry he didn't live. It would have made it even worse, don't you think?"

Her father didn't answer.

She knew she was wrong. It would have been a blessing if the baby had lived. It would have changed her life in a wonderful way.

Lillian's throat tightened and tears filled her eyes. She hoped her father wouldn't see. She couldn't tell why she was crying. She wiped tears with the back of one hand while the other nervously stroked the keyboard.

"Hush, hush, child. I'll make it up to you, somehow."  He sat next to her on the piano bench and awkwardly put an arm around her.

This is my future, she thought. I'll live with my father and play piano for him to sooth his troubles, while Olympia dozes in her chair. Once every few years, we'll talk secretly, like this, until we've both forgotten or it's too much effort to bring it up. One day I'll wake up and I'll be old.

She looked at the backs of her hands where they lay on the keys, and saw, for the first time, how prominent were the veins and how her skin was beginning to look like expensive silk crepe. I'm old already, she thought.

A breeze came through the window and made a dry clacking in the palms outside. The perfume of plumaria was strong in the room, but along with it came in a darker, sweeter stink of decay.

Lillian noticed it at once but said nothing. Probably a dead animal in the garden.

Olympia stirred and raised her head. The colonel took his arm from around Lillian's shoulders with as much awkwardness as he had embraced her, and they didn't speak again except to say good night.

As Lillian finally left the room, her father was still sitting at the piano bench, leaning forward with his hands on his knees, staring into space.