CHAPTER SEVEN

India, January 1854

1

That night Lillian dreamed that the moon fell out of the sky. It didn't just drop like a ball, but it warped and melted out of shape, growing oblong and yellow as a mango before plunging into the sea. And then she was in the water herself, buffeted by waves off a barren and rocky coast. A rowboat bobbed beyond the breakers, and perched in its stern was her lover, the dead soldier who had fathered her child. His face was pale and beautiful. His hair was shorter than she ever remembered seeing it in real life, and there was a difference to his features which even in the dream wasn't easy to define at first, and then she knew; he had shaved his military mustache. Clean lipped, he seemed more vulnerable and already wounded.

Slowly, luxuriously even, he tossed perfect stones into the water, one after the other, following their descent with his eyes. His supply seemed inexhaustible.

Afraid for some imagined danger which could fall on him, and guilty both at keeping him waiting, and at the fall of the moon, which was her fault, Lillian felt herself sink through broad-leafed seaweed.

She awoke breathless and panting. The moon, still safely in the sky, was setting through her window. It was just before dawn. Guilt from the dream stayed with her and for a groggy moment she thought shed missed a meeting with Henry, until she remembered that there was no meeting, and she was old now.

A racket came from the part of the house just below her room; yells, a table falling, a breaking plate. Familiar resentment swelled at her bad luck in having the room closest to the servants quarters. She should have changed it years ago.

Calls for Pushpa brought no answer, so she got up and groped for her slippers. They wouldn't help if she stepped on a cobra, but scorpions couldn't strike through the thick leather. One slipper was missing. Her annoyance sharpened. Barefoot and feeling sullen and as sorry for herself as a cranky spinster, she followed the sounds down the moonlit stairs. A nights sleep wasn't so much to ask for, she thought.

The commotion came from the servants' common room, on the way to the outdoor kitchens. A bar of yellow light from under the closed door fanned across the corridor.

Lillian yanked open the door and found herself in a scene of bright lanterns, colors, and powerful stench. A freshly butchered sheep's carcass in a corner seeped blood over the floor and into rivulets around three prone women. The blood stained their saris as they tossed in agony. Vomit slicked the packed earth.

In a moment, she took in the piles of cut onions, the polished brass bowls, the red and pink mutton, all interrupted preparations for today's meals. In a dark corner lay a motionless older woman and Pushpa, who was just able to lift one hand toward her mistress.

Lillian picked her way over the wet floor, resisting the urge to shake her bare feet, catlike, after each step. She reached Pushpa and knelt beside her. The white cotton of her nightgown was immediately soaked with sheep's blood.

"Pushpa, what is it? What's the matter?"

Pushpa gasped a few words through blue lips. Lillian knew little Telagu, but this she recognized. The purging and fainting disease--cholera.

She gripped Pushpa's shoulders, fragile as small antelope bones under her sari.

Lillian had heard stories of other colonial settlements. Entire households could be wiped out in hours, masters and servants alike. Two winters ago, her cousin Rose died of cholera up in the hills, and soon after that, a few mild cases broke out here in the house among the servants. Her family left the island that day and didn't return for a month. But it was too late for anything like that now.

With shock Lillian realized that the grandmother by Pushpa must be dead. The flesh on her face was so sunken that the eyes bulged from the withered face.

Lillian hadn't seen any of the faces of the dead in her life; her mother, her baby, her lover. Suddenly she wondered if their deaths might have been easier for her if she had seen this expression of removal. No suffering showed on the old woman's face.

Around her, the rest of the house seemed to be waking. Lights and shouts came from down the halls, and through a window she could see a light flickering in the administration cottage where the clerks lived, separately from the rest of the Indian staff.

Lillian still held Pushpa. The girls slight weight felt comforting against Lillian's lap, and part of her wished she could have sat, without action, waiting for someone else to come and take care of everything.

At the same time she racked her brains trying to remember the home remedies shed heard of, and if any of them were here in the house. Rhubarb? Opium? She vaguely remembered that treatments for natives were guaranteed fatal to whites. Somewhere in the house was an old army medical kit.

Her father would know. He could send to the mainland for help.

"Pushpa, stay here." She realized how ridiculous the warning sounded and almost began to giggle, feeling a bubble of hysteria rising like gas. "You'll be fine. I'm going to get help." She grabbed a nearby pile of dish cloths and laid them under the girls head, then left the room, this time avoiding the bloody puddles.

Her feet left dark spots on the matting as she rushed back down the corridor and up the stairs toward her father's rooms. Halfway there she met Olympia coming from her own bedroom with a candle.

"Lillian, what's the matter? What's all the fuss? I wish they'd be quiet. I called Lakshmi but theres no answer. I'm not feeling at all well."

Her stepmother's hands returned over and over again to her stomach in stroking, pressing movements which Lillian found repulsive.

Lillian took a deep breath and tried not to look at the hands. "The servants are ill. It's probably nothing. You should try to rest." She felt like shoving Olympia back in her heavily draped bedroom where she'd be insulated from everything, but all she did was gently push her by the upper arm. But Olympia wouldn't budge.

"Ill? Did Pushpa tell you? Maybe we should go check." She frowned, skeptical. Olympia had labeled Pushpa as a malingerer. Even in her distress, she looked carefully at Lillian's ears, her neck, the buttons of the nightdress. She didn't seem to notice the mess of stains below her knees.

But Lillian's face must have given her away, because Olympia suddenly gripped her wrist and said, in a tense voice, "What is it?"

Lillian looked away and answered in a monotone. "Cholera. One of the kitchen women is dead. Three are dying. So is Pushpa."

"You were in there with them? Dear God, Lillian, you may have caught it --" Her hold on Lillian's wrist became sharper, her fingernails digging into the skin.

"Hush, don't worry. They say its not infectious." She pulled her hand free from Olympia's grip and tried once more to steer her back to bed. Olympia brushed her away with impatience.

"We've got to leave the island. Immediately. Are there enough clean sheets, and are the water tanks full? Is Henry back yet? Go wake your father and --" Olympia stopped short and lurched forward, gagging, a hand cupped over her mouth.

Her vomit gushed over Lillian's ruined nightgown. Olympia staggered to a basin in her room and kept retching until she was too weak to walk the few steps to her bed. Lillian, her own legs suddenly shaking and uncertain, had to help her to lie down. She fought an urge to gag as the stinking vomit cooled against her skin.

"We've got to leave," gasped Olympia from the bed. Her hair, wet now and glued into little points, tangled as she tossed her head from side to side.

"Just try to rest. Ill go wake Father. He'll know what we should do." Lillian set another basin on the bed beside Olympia, and ran down the hallway to the colonel's room.

He was always good at emergencies. The time monkeys had attacked her when she was twelve, a whole biting troop of them clinging to her skirts and hair, his one gunshot in the air had frightened them off. And when that fire broke out on the ground floor two years ago, he cleared the household in minutes and organized fifteen men with water vessels. Shed never seen him at a loss.

In just the few paces it took for Lillian to reach her father's room, she already felt less panicked. Besides, dawn was approaching. The coming day made things seem less catastrophic.

There was no answer to her knock so she pushed open the door and entered.

Colonel Aynsworth always slept on a camp bed in the middle of the room. It kept him from getting soft, he said. Rajan had a spot on the floor close by, between the colonel and the door. They kept these military habits even though the colonel hadn't seen active duty for years.

As Lillian crossed the threshold, from the garden there came a raucous shrieking of peacocks, backed by the caws of dozens of crows. This harsh bird song had started most mornings of Lillian's life, and she rarely noticed it anymore. But today it drummed into her ears and seemed inseparable from what lay before her in the room.

Rajan struggled to pull himself up the side of his master's cot to help him, but even as Lillian watched he fell backward and didn't move again. Her father was soaked with vomit, his sheets twisted into a sodden mass, and liquid excrement covered his bed and the floor around him.

Three steps brought Lillian to the camp bed. She raised her father's head but he looked right through her. She ran back to the door and shouted for help; her voice sounded weak and puny so she shouted again. Maybe the clerks were awake and could come. Or the rest of the kitchen staff, the ones that weren't in the room with Pushpa. But only the crows answered.

The old wooden medicine chest that she remembered satamong the neat military trunks against a wall. She pried open its rusty lid and lifted out the tin trays of bottles, scanning the labels for anything about cholera. In the second tray was "Tincture of Cream of Tartar and Rhubarb, Guaranteed for Headache and Cholera." Half the liquid remained, dark and sluggish in the old brown glass. At first the lid was stuck fast and she wrenched it, cutting her palm on the rusty metal. Finally it twisted open.

She was able to force some down her father's throat but he immediately vomited it up again. Rajan by now was unconscious, and she was afraid it would choke him.

She was torn with indecision and let precious seconds pass trying to think what to do. Should she leave her father and go around the house to search for help? Run the mile to Matapundi? Or stay here and try to get him to take more of the medicine?

Then she remembered Henry. Maybe he had returned in the night. She ran down the corridor to his room, but, as she expected, the bed was empty and unslept in.

She went to look in again on Olympia. A quick glance showed her deeply asleep. She had vomited again in the basin, but she was still without any of the terrible signs; the blue skin, the loose flesh. Her fingers were pink and her breathing was even and deep.

A feeling of disbelief began to rise in Lillian, with a suspicion that this was all happening to someone else, or that she was in the middle of a dream. It couldn't be real.

She knew the feeling. Shed had it before at times when her own actions were beyond belief; after the first time she had given in to her own desires with her lover, then again with Henry. But this was the first time events outside her own control had been unbelievable to her.

She found that she had been standing in Olympia's doorway for ten minutes, doing nothing, hardly thinking. Then a desperate sound of retching from her father's room made it real again.

She rushed back to find him barely conscious but still vomiting incredible amounts of thin gray fluid. She gave up any attempt to catch it in a basin, and simply sat by him, holding his head. The spurts of diarrhea stopped smelling foul and became as gray and neutral as the vomit.

Ill just clean it up later, she thought. Rajan might help me. If the laundry servants are gone, I can wash Out the sheets myself. I don't mind. They'll be dry by sundown. Or by tomorrow at the latest. Father will be more comfortable then.

Even though Rajan remained unconscious, she found herself repeatedly planning on what tasks his caste would allow him to help her with. The room would need to be scrubbed down; he'd refuse that chore, but she could do it herself. And her father would need to be tended to and fed for a few days until he was himself again. Rajan was good at that sort of thing.

2

The sun rose unclouded by yesterdays haze, and beat into the room. Lillian realized at one point that she couldn't hear the elephant. They must have taken him back after all, she thought. Throughout the morning, shrieks and running feet came from outside, always dashing away from the house, but Lillian paid no attention. Eventually the noise faded and the house fell silent. Even the crows stopped.

The hours passed. In her father's room, Lillian stared for minutes at a time at the maps and etchings showing famous battle scenes from around the British empire and from her father's career in India. A large scene from the field at Waterloo dominated one wall. Queen Victoria surveyed it all from a print made in the year of her coronation.

A small voice in her mind told her that she should do something, not just sit here looking at pictures: get up, run to Matapundi, anything. She couldn't envision a walk to Matapundi; it was always a headlong run down the chalky road under coconut trees, out of breath and her hand held to a cramp in her side.

She repeatedly dragged herself back to Olympia's room, where the woman still slept and seemed no sicker.

Finally Lillian returned to her father's room to find that Rajan had changed his position and now lay on his side with one arm stretched out.

"Rajan," she said. "Here's what we need to do." She stepped over to him. His eyes gaped at the ceiling, and a fly crawled across his cheek. The insect paused at the moist crust around the man s mouth, then flew up and buzzed over to the colonels head, where it landed on his lower lip and settled, rubbing its back legs against its wings.

3

Lillian sat with the bodies for an hour. How could she be sure they were dead?  Maybe she should stay and wait--if a doctor were to check them . . . But another voice told her this was foolish. One had only to look.

Her disbelief came and went like a breeze. The feeling of watching it all in a play was so strong that she had to physically shake herself to admit what had happened, even when she forced herself to look at the dead faces.

Her father's features had aged twenty years in the past hours. The angles of his cheekbones pushed up behind the gray skin so tightly that you could see the curved facets of the bone beneath. Wrinkles scored his bluish fingertips, as though he'd been bathing for a day.

Because of the flies, she finally had to act. She dragged the sheets from her own bed to cover the men. Then she left the room, pulling the door shut behind her.

Her stepmother was still unconscious, but her skin glowed pink and she didn't seem nearly as sick as the others. Lillian wiped her face with a cool cloth and left her.

Swaying now with exhaustion, she made her way downstairs, looking into all the rooms, and calling out names, the syllables sounding like nonsense and ringing in her ears. "Lakshmi? Narajan? Pushpa? Raj an? Naga? Gita? Mehta?" She knew that Rajan was dead upstairs, that Pushpa was almost certainly dead in the kitchen, but even so, she repeated the roll call in the same insistent voice, going from room to room, down the corridors, up and down the stairs.

She headed to the outbuildings, the clerks cottage, the tool house, the stables where the elephants droppings still lay by the post where he'd been chained. Out of a staff of thirty a soul must be left. But there was no one.

The clerks lay dead in their beds. Three of the grounds workers were dead too. A look into the huts beyond the stables showed more bodies, hard to see in the dim interiors.

Everyone else had vanished. One look at the dock told her how. All the boats were gone. Not just the ferry she had arrived on yesterday, but the fishing dugouts, the sailing skiffs, even the two rafts. She scanned the waters, which were empty all the way to the mainland.

Finally, under a low tree branch, she spotted a half-rotten skiff that would probably make it across the bay. It even had an oar in it. She stood for a minute, imagining the hundreds of yards from Olympia's upstairs room to the shore, wondering how she could drag the heavy, sleeping body so far. Or, if she managed to wake her, if the boat could even carry the extra weight. Only a fool would try it. And only a fool would stay here for one sick woman who wasn't even a blood relation.

Lillian actually had a foot in the boat, and was ready to make off alone for the mainland, before she turned around and slowly headed back to the house.

She dragged her feet up the stairs to check on Olympia, who slept solidly, looking peaceful and totally unconcerned. Then she made her way to her own room and sat on the edge of the bare mattress, staring into space, her hands limp in her lap.

After an hour or more she noticed the missing slipper. Its toe poked out from under the dressing table, the gilt embroidery catching the afternoon light.

The ticking of a small gold clock on the mantel broke through her thoughts. It showed three o'clock. A mail boat was due in two days. It wasn't that long to wait.

After it grew dark and she still hadn't moved, she realized she had never changed out of her nightgown. That put her into action; she tore it off, literally ripping the thin, filthy, cotton, and then washed herself with clumsy, slow movements. It seemed to take a long time. Then she caught herself staring into her wardrobe, trying to decide what to wear. As if she were going to a tea party. In self-disgust she grabbed the first thing her hand touched, a plain gray cotton afternoon dress that had never fit well at the waist, and put it on.

Without Pushpa it was hard work doing up the buttons in back.

The next day passed in giving cold tea to a recovered Olympia and in trying to hide from her the source of the terrible smells.

Lillian herself ate nothing and only felt a little lightheaded.  Olympia seemed to have no memory of the previous night.

Lillian forced herself to avoid looking down the hall toward her father's room, and to think only of immediate needs, such as her struggle to keep the fire going in the drawing room so as to boil water for the tea (which she had to find in the kitchens, cringing as she stepped over the bodies of Pushpa and the others). The servants had always done everything. It was even a mystery where to put the contents of Olympia's and her own chamber pot. She might have eaten some bread or fruit, but aside from her total ignorance of where food was kept, the entire house seemed contaminated and she was afraid.

On the second morning, she went down to the dock and paced in the sun, quickly at first and then more slowly as time passed. At last the mail boat appeared as a dark fleck on the horizon which separated itself from the mainland harbor. Lillian tried to focus on it, but small swimming dots like golden gnats hovered in her vision. Icy cold swept from her temples and over her scalp.

She took deep breaths and fought to remain standing. A tree to lean on would have helped, but only a stump remained of the mango that used to shade the dock in the days when she waited here before, years ago, for a message from the father of her son.

As the mail boat grew close enough to see the men on board, Lillian's knees started to buckle and the few steps she took toward the water wavered askew. She tried to shout, but instead she crumpled onto the rough boards of the dock.