Dark Road to Darjeeling (12 page)

Fond of him, and a little frightened, I mused. There had been the faintest touch of the bully about Cedric Eastley, although it had not put Lucy off marrying him. She was accustomed to being bullied. Pretty and soft and entirely guileless, Lucy was one of life’s victims, easy game for the predatory type.

Like her sister. I cleared my throat. “I had hoped to see Emma as well. Is she about?”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew they were a mistake. Lucy’s features crumpled and it was with the greatest effort of will that she drew in a shaking breath and composed herself.

“I thought Miss Cavendish would have told you.”

“Told me what? Has Emma gone abroad?”

I was wrong in thinking Lucy had not changed. Lucy of old would never have given me the short, brittle laugh that greeted my question. It was just short of hysteria, and I realised I had ventured into something unexpected.

“No, Emma is not gone abroad. Emma will never leave this cottage.”

I smiled, wondering what all the histrionics had been in aid of and thinking of Father’s newest addition to his London garden. “You mean she has become hermetic?”

Lucy gave me a sorrowful look. “No, Julia. I mean that she is dying.”

I closed my mouth with a snap. “Dying? What of? And since when?”

Lucy shrugged. “Months now. She simply lies in bed, wasting away. It began as a growth in one of her breasts.”

“Can nothing be done for her?”

Lucy’s chin trembled, but she mastered her emotion once more. “The doctor performed an operation when it first became apparent what the trouble was. It was awful beyond belief. He gave her a bit of morphia and put a handkerchief over her face before he began to cut. That is all he could do for her.”

I swallowed against the queasiness rising in my throat. I had heard of such operations before, commonplace before the advent of ether. But ether would be difficult if not impossible to secure in such a remote place, and doubtless he had done his best with his limited resources.

I said as much to Lucy.

“Oh, yes, he was as quick and thorough as he could be. But the growth had taken hold, and although she recovered well enough, it took a very long time, and she never regained her strength. By the time the scars were healed, it became apparent that the disease was too firmly lodged within her to be removed.”

“And she has been here ever since.”

Lucy nodded. “Yes. She is in terrible pain, but she tolerates it so bravely. The doctor gives her medicine for it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. Today is a rather good day, I am happy to say. She took a little porridge for breakfast and some weak tea. It is more than she has eaten in the last week. Perhaps she is rallying a little.”

It was pathetic that such meagre developments could give her hope, but I thought of Portia and knew if the situation were ours, I should hold fast to any shred of possibility she might recover.

Lucy went on. “I know she cannot survive this, but I did so want her to live out the spring. The garden is so pretty just when the season turns to summer. I should like for her to die when the roses are at their best.”

I swallowed again, too overcome to speak. After a moment, I composed myself.

“I should like to see her, if you think it advisable.”

Lucy smiled broadly, almost in relief it seemed. “Oh, she would like that! I must warn you, you will find her much changed,” she said, rising and leading me up the stairs. She paused before a closed door and rapped softly.

“Emma, dearest? Can you guess who has come to call?” She opened the door. “It is Julia. May she come and sit with you?”

There was a feeble noise from the bed, like the mewing of a newborn kitten, and at this, Lucy motioned for me to come forward. The windows were firmly shut and the fireplace blazed
away, keeping the room desperately hot. But the slight figure in the bed was piled with a dozen quilts, as if nothing could warm her slender bones, and as I settled myself in a chair next to the bed, I saw the hands flutter, as light and insubstantial as the wings of a bird.

“Hello, Emma.”

“Julia,” she said softly. Emma’s one true beauty had always been her voice, low and melodious, and she had been a gifted storyteller. Now it was rasping and thin, her wonderful stories silenced forever.

“I am glad you have come,” she told me, although her face bore no trace of pleasure, only a burning intensity. I thought of the medieval saints, the ascetics, fasting themselves to holiness through the stripping away of the flesh, and I wondered if Emma had made her peace with God. “It must have come as a surprise to you,” she said suddenly, and I knew she had been watching me closely for my reaction to her condition.

“Yes. I am sorry to know that you have been in ill health,” I told her, and I meant it, for no one should be reduced to such a state. I felt a thrust of pity for her. Born poor and slighted the whole of her life, Emma had struck out, a creature tainted by the desperation born of poverty and want, and most importantly, the lack of any real love save that of her sister. She was dying, having never truly lived, and the irony of it pierced me.

She gave a wheezing sort of sound that I supposed was a laugh. “Yes, let us be polite and use our best manners,” she said, and I was surprised, for there was no trace of bitterness in the words. “I am dying, Julia. Let us have it plainly.”

At this, Lucy burst into sobs again, and I saw Emma master her impatience. She had always taken care of Lucy, and even now as she lay dying, she had to summon her courage to protect her little sister. “I might manage a little broth, dearest,” Emma said, and Lucy hurried away with her commission.

She closed the door behind her to hold the heat in the little room, and Emma breathed hard for a moment, her eyes shut. Then she opened them, offering me a wan smile. “I am not supposed to speak of it in front of her. It upsets her so. But sometimes I tire of the pretense.”

“I understand.”

She regarded me curiously. “I think you do. You have grown perceptive, Julia. And compassionate as well. But do not waste your pity upon me. I have made my choices, and God has seen fit to take me before I have seen thirty-five. I do not care for myself. It is Lucy I fear for. She will be quite lost without me.”

That I could readily believe. Lucy had always been looked after by someone, even when she worked briefly as a governess. There had always been a stronger personality overshadowing her, guiding her. Without Emma, who would be her lodestar?

“Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?” I asked her.

She moved one of her tiny bird’s-wing hands. “Open the window. For just a moment. Lucy will not permit fresh air, and it will chill me, but I so want to breathe.”

I rose and did as she bade me, watching as she drew in several deep, peaceful breaths of the cool mountain air.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice a trifle stronger. She shivered a little and I shut the window, tucked the quilts more firmly about her, and poked up the fire. She watched and said nothing until I was seated again.

“How curious to be tended by the daughter of an earl!” she exclaimed, ending on another of her peculiar wheezes. “There was a time I would have relished it,” she said, her expression dreamy. I wondered if the medicine for her pain made her a little curious in the head, but she seemed lucid enough. “I always envied you so. And how profitless that was! So many hours lost
wishing for things I could never have. Take me for a warning, Julia. Do not long for what you cannot have. Accept what is and thank God for it, before he sees fit to take it from you.”

“Is that what you believe he has done? Punished you for ingratitude?”

“Among other things,” she said firmly. There was a sly smile playing about her mouth, and I wondered if she would ever own the blackest of her deeds.

“Have you made confession?” I asked suddenly. “I know there is no regular clergyman here, but perhaps the Reverend Pennyfeather—”

At that she began to laugh, ending on a cough that left her gasping and short of breath. She pressed a handkerchief to her lips and took a moment to collect herself.

“It was wrong of me to laugh,” she said at last, her voice much thinner than before. “But I will not catalogue my sins for the Reverend Pennyfeather’s judgement. They are my own and I will carry them to the grave.”

“I hardly think the Reverend would be judgemental,” I began, but she waved the handkerchief at me.

“No,” she said, more firmly this time, and I let the matter drop.

“Your room is pleasantly situated,” I told her. “You have a beautiful view of the peak of Kanchenjunga.”

Her eyes were soft as she looked at the snowy white wall of the mountain. “There are five peaks actually, did you know that? The name Kanchenjunga means ‘Five Treasures of the Snows.’ And no one has even circumnavigated the entire mountain yet. Is that not extraordinary? This great mountain hanging in the sky before us and no man has ever walked all the way round it because it seems to span the whole of the world. I should have liked to have walked up to that mountain, just to the base of it,
and shake hands with its majesty. I make Lucy close the shutters at sunset and when the fogs come. I do not like to think of a sky without the beauty of that mountain.”

I had forgot how much Emma loved to travel. She had been enchanted by India during a youthful journey—seduced by the beauties of the country and one of its men, if family gossip was to be believed. But the Emma who might have danced with a Rajasthani prince was long since departed, and in her place was this feeble shell with only burning eyes to remind me of what she had once been.

“Plum is sketching the mountain. I will have him sketch a view for you to keep with you, so you may see it even without your window.”

“I should like that,” she said. She closed her eyes and took a few deep, laboured breaths. “I must remind myself to breathe. Such a simple thing. You would think I could remember it.”

She kept her eyes closed and in a few minutes, I could tell she was sleeping, a deep and, one hoped, peaceful slumber. I crept from the room to find Lucy emerging from the cottage kitchen with a tray laden with tempting morsels for her invalid.

“She is asleep now,” I told her.

Lucy gave a little sigh of relief. “It is difficult for her to rest. Your visit must have done her good if she was able to sleep.”

“I hope so.”

She bit her lip, as if trying to gather her courage, then burst out. “She does not think I know how little time she has left,” Lucy confessed, the words breaking from her as water through a dam. “I do not know what will become of me when she is gone.”

I hesitated, then decided to fling propriety aside. “Lucy, it is not my place to ask, but we are kinswomen and I would not be easy if I left you in dire straits. Do you have money to sustain yourself?”

She laughed mirthlessly and named a figure not too far shy of my own inheritance. “That is what Cedric left me, and I have spent only a few hundred pounds of it. It is easy to live cheaply here.”

“Good,” I said, but even as I uttered the word, I realised that managing the money might bring an entirely new set of difficulties to Lucy. “You must find a good man of business to settle your affairs,” I explained. I had not; in fact, I had argued vigorously with my father and eldest brother that I should be allowed to dispose of my inheritance as I saw fit. But I was a good deal older and I fancied a fair bit wiser than Lucy. “If you like, I can ask Harry Cavendish. I am sure he will know of someone in Darjeeling who can save you the bother of handling these things for yourself.”

At the mention of Harry she flushed a becoming shade of pink. “I have a gentleman who has been kind enough to express an interest in my affairs,” she said quietly. “He has been an excellent friend to me, and I know he will be a great comfort to me in my trials.”

The flush was telling but if she chose not to share confidences with me, there was little more I could do. I bade her farewell and took my leave, realising as I shut the gate behind me that I had scarcely breathed the entire visit at Pine Cottage.

The situation had been so different from what I had expected, so completely unthinkable, that I was grateful for the short walk to clear my head. I reached the fields to find the pickers hard at work, elegant arms stretching to the glossy leaves and back again. I seated myself upon a boulder and watched them for a long time, wondering what it must be like to work for one’s living. It looked so peaceful, this pastoral scene, but I knew such scenes could be deceiving. There must be mornings when these hardworking folk must long to tarry in bed, holding a loved one
close, but instead they rose, day after day, to go into the fields and perform this same dance that their parents and grandparents had done. Did they never dream of a different life? Or did they even know a world outside this valley existed?

“You are looking pensive,” Portia said, coming upon me as I sat overlooking the fields.

“How is it you are alone?” I asked, settling myself anew to make a space for her upon the boulder.

“Everyone else is busy with the
pooja,
” she said, nodding toward the flurry of activity at the bottom of the field. “I saw you and said I would come and fetch you.”

I nodded toward the pickers. “Do you think they are happy?”

She regarded them a moment. “They smile rather a lot if they are not,” she pointed out reasonably.

“Yes, but is that because they are truly happy or simply because they do not know better?” I persisted.

“Introspective indeed,” she said, lifting her brows. “What is it?”

“Emma Phipps is dying,” I told her. “A malady of the breast.”

Portia pondered a long moment, then shrugged. “God’s way of settling old scores, I suppose.”

“That is very nearly what she said. But I wonder. So many people do awful things. God does not go around striking them down and calling it justice.”

“No,” she said smiling at me. “That is what he has Brisbane for. I was merely jesting you know. I do not think God personally afflicts the wretched, any more than I think he has personally gifted us.”

“We do seem appallingly fortunate,” I told her.

“I know that look, Julia,” she said, her tone taking on a familiar elder sister note. “There is no call to feel guilty that we have money and others do not. It was an accident of birth—or marriage, I suppose. But it was not something we pursued, any more than we asked to have green eyes or an excellent ear for music.”

“I do not have an excellent ear for music,” I reminded her.

“Precisely,” she said with a touch of smugness. “You do not have everything, do you?”

“I suppose not,” I said slowly.

“You are hungry,” she said, looping her arm through mine and pulling me to my feet. “You are always pensive when you are hungry. Once you are fed, this introspective mood will fall away. You will see.”

I allowed her to lead me down to the rest of the party, not entirely surprised to find that a table had been carried out from the Peacocks and set in the fields. I had heard enough about the ways of the Raj to know that our countrymen liked their comforts far too well to picnic upon the grass. But this was no picnic. At the centre of the field was a sort of altar, a table laid with a snowy linen cloth and set with enormous silver bowls of camellia buds, the most perfect specimens of the early days of the tea harvest. There were other offerings as well, flowers—orchids from the Reverend Pennyfeather’s garden I was told—and fruit, with bowls of nuts and dainty sweetmeats, and sticks of incense perfuming the air with thick, heady smoke. In the centre of it all sat a fat, smiling deity, grinning his benevolence over us all, and the pickers jostled one another to do him reverence. The English stood a little apart as the natives performed their ceremony, a dignified and celebratory affair with a good bit of chanting in their own tongues and ritual bowing that entailed folding the hands together and raising them to the level of one’s heart.