The Mountain of Light (24 page)

“What do you want?” he said roughly in Persian.

“Leave him to me,” she said. “I will take care of him.”

They had moved Henry's bed to the courtyard of Jahangir's Quadrangle—Kingsley being unsure of whether his fever was contagious or not. And there Henry had been alone, shifted into the coolness of the adjoining pavilion during the day, brought out under the sky at night.

“Go away,” John said, raising a pale, haunted face to her.

“Is he getting better, Jan Larens?” she asked.

“No,” John moaned. “Oh, God, no.” Then more quietly, “I could not bear to lose him like this. What will I tell Lettice . . . and Honoria?”

“Your sister? Your mother?” she said. “Strange fashion you English have of calling your mother by name. You will tell her that Henny Larens survived his fever. And he will, if you let me.” As John knelt doggedly by Henry's side, she said in a clear voice, “Do you want him to die?”

He moved away then to the edge of the lawn and sat down on the warm stone. The night passed and he watched, smoking cigarette after cigarette, the stubs thrown around him.

She had brought in ten attendants and spoke only when it was necessary. A gesture, a movement from her head, and they seemed to understand what needed to be done. They lifted Henry's quiescent figure from the cot and laid it on the ground upon a white sheet. Then they changed out all of the bedclothing, piling new sheets upon the cot, restuffing the pillowcase, erecting a rectangular frame around on which they slung a thin, white, and airy mosquito net. They put Henry's cot in the middle and set four lanterns on the floor.

The girl, the woman, stripped off Henry's clothes, and not flinching, she washed his body with a silk cloth dipped in rosewater, camphor, and cinnamon. She clicked her tongue when she saw the unhealed gashes along his arms, where Kingsley had bled him copiously, called for a jar of iridescent paste, applied it on the wounds, and bound them loosely in muslin. The men then dressed Henry and pulled a sheet over his inert form. Henry took in a deep, rasping breath, and the sound caused a stab of pain inside John.

She had a golden box brought to her, selected a cherry-size, round ball of some dark stuff, and forced it between Henry's lips. He resisted, but she leaned down and talked to him gently, and he allowed his mouth to close over it and began to chew. Fifteen minutes later, he was in a profound sleep, his chest rising and falling with a constant rhythm that John hadn't seen in the past week.

“What was that?” he asked from his spot near the pavilion, his voice carrying loud over the courtyard.

“Opium,” she said. She rose and came up to him. “You must go and get some sleep also, Jan Larens. He will get better, not soon, but definitely.”

“What is wrong with him?”

She shrugged, a graceful movement. “Who knows? A fever, chills, the arm . . . it could be one of any number of things. But, if he eats, and sleeps, his body will fight it. Tomorrow, I will bind his shoulder; it must not be moved while it heals. I have not”—and here he heard a smile in her voice—“the benefit of an English medical education, but I have looked after many women in the
zenana
.”

“I'll stay.”

“As you wish. I will be awake through the night.”

And if she was, he did not know, for a few minutes after this conversation, fatigue felled him too, and he slept as he sat, head hung over his lap. In the morning, discomfort rode down the back of his spine; his dreams had been colored by images of his brother's death, but when he awoke it was to find the woman gone and Henry still deeply, sweetly asleep.

From that day onward, John Lawrence went back to the work Henry and he had left undone. Misr Makraj mentioned casually that all the heavier Toshakhana items—tent hangings, curtains, coverings, poles—were in one part of the stables, and John went thumping out into the Diwan-i-am and beyond to the stables. Sure enough, one of the stalls had a cheap wooden door, and a creaky padlock. John had this opened and stood there in awe as the camels from the artillery peered in curiously over his shoulder, their rancid breath fanning his hair. The tent poles were encased in gold and silver, studded with diamonds and emeralds. The tent hangings were perfectly matched—carpets underfoot, curtains, throws, covers, embroidered on every inch of downy and very expensive cashmere fabric. A painting stood facing the wall. John picked it up. It had a solid gold frame, shells and rubies embedded in it, and out of the painting Queen Victoria, slim,
doe-eyed, looked at John in her coronation robes. He wiped the dust off and set it down—how had Ranjit Singh got this painting? Who gave it to him? Memory stirred. John remembered that the Governor-General's sister, Emily Eden, had painted a portrait for the Maharajah Ranjit Singh. Was this it?

This other Toshakhana, scented with the aroma of camel droppings and damp hay, absorbed all of his interest as he unearthed treasure after treasure. Strange, inexplicable ones, like a copy of the New Testament that Henry Martyn, an Anglican priest, had translated into Persian forty years ago. The flyleaf was inscribed “From Lady William Bentinck to Joseph Wolff.” Bentinck had been Governor-General of India, but who was Joseph Wolff, and how had he come to present his Persian testament to the Maharajah?

Every now and then, John lifted his head and wondered how his brother was doing.

•  •  •

A desk and a chair had been brought to Jahangir's Quadrangle and set up against the latticework sandstone screens of the pavilion, which looked out over the Ravi River. Once, the river had flowed a few feet from this northern edge of the fort, but in the late 1600s, after continual flooding of the lower apartments, Emperor Aurangzeb had had a bund, an embankment, built along the whole north wall. And he had diverted the river's flow to a couple of miles farther north, leaving just a slim canal in its original path to route water for the fort's use.

July's and August's monsoon rains had filled the canal, but it was already fast drying up—great sandbanks silting its edges and a silk floss tree inclined over the canal as though seeking more water to store in the spiny thorns that climbed its trunk. The silk floss was in full bloom; it had been undeterred by the long wait for the monsoons, fiercely drought-resistant,
and at the first sprinkle of rain, the whole cap of the tree had mushroomed into pink, fleshy flowers.

This was the view Henry saw every day when he lifted his head from his work. If he half-closed his eyes and blurred his gaze, sections of the latticework screen became pink with flowers of the silk floss behind, brown with the scrub of the bank, green where the broad-leaved shrubs had taken hold after the rains, blue in the upper reaches, where the sky was.

Behind him, on the very edge of the platform of the pavilion, stood a line of red dispatch boxes like a row of soldiers on guard. Henry glanced back at them, and the bright sunshine of the courtyard beyond, and sighed. He had to look through the mass of papers in each one of them, put his initials on some, a signature on others, an official stamp on yet others. Two weeks in bed with a fever and a delirium had piled up the paperwork—no one in Calcutta knew that he had tarried at the edge of death, and once he was better, they wouldn't care that he had, only that the papers needed to be attended to.

As it should be, Henry thought, in India especially. In Calcutta there was a tradition of leaving calling cards in boxes hung on gates after the summer had been passed in the cooler hills by those fortunate enough to get away from its steamy, unhealthy heat. The cards informed friends and acquaintances not just of your return but of your well-being, more specifically that another summer had passed and you were still, very much, alive.

John sat against one of the red sandstone pillars of the pavilion, half in the sun, half in the shade, his head bent over the mail which had been brought in from Firozpur, which had in its turn traveled all along the breadth of India from Calcutta, and by ship from England—via France, Egypt, Ceylon, up the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta.

Henry put his pen down. “Who was she, John?” He could hear his brother sifting through the letters.

John said, “Here's one for you. Lettice, I think; it looks like her handwriting. What's this, September? Then she wrote it in January at the latest—snow, cold, fires, fog, a white landscape. How I miss those!”

Henry laughed, the sound surprising him when it came out of his chest. “What bosh, John. You've been in India how long? Eighteen years? Something like that. What do you remember of an English fire or landscape? Could you even live in England now?”

John grinned. “It would be dull. Where else would we have the excitement of battling about cattle?”

Henry sobered and turned in his chair, its legs scraping the inlaid marble floor of the pavilion. “Who was she?”

“Here,” John said in reply, sending the packet flying through the air to land at his feet. “Read it; I see Letitia hasn't written to me; you were always the favorite brother. I wonder how she fares with that dreary husband of hers. She's now Mrs. Hayes, isn't she? And he's fifteen years older than her—what
does
she see in him?”

“She fell in love with him,” Henry said mildly. He bent to pick up the letter, slid a knife under the seal, and laid the pages open on his lap, but felt no inclination to read. He glanced at John, absorbed in one of his own, holding it up to the light as though he couldn't see very well.

Henry's sight had returned gradually, after the first night when he had fallen asleep and woken without a dry mouth, a pounding ache in his shoulder, or sweat-sodden bedsheets. Everything around him in the gardens had taken on a new hue, no longer a blinding white, not even gray. He could see the blue of the sky above, the greens of the trees, the pale jade of the pond in the center of the gardens, the fresh whites of the marble platform. It had felt, for the first time since his illness, as though he was alive, breathing, and conscious of the world he inhabited.

The fever had come back during the day, and at night.
He hadn't opened his eyes but could feel the cool, soft hands of a woman smoothing his hair, her fingers firm as she lifted his shoulder and bound it, over and over again until the pain had lessened into a dull throb. He had felt her feed him a ball of opium again; it had tasted tart on his tongue, and even for this sensation he was grateful. He could identify—forced his sluggish brain to identify—the tang of tamarind, the grit of coarsely ground sugar, a wedge of cashew, the ridges of dried raisins and apricots.

A few days later—when, he couldn't rightly remember—he had looked up and seen the moon in the sky as a tiny sliver of a crescent, the rest of the circle outlined in a ghostly white, and knew that it was nearly time for the new moon—two whole weeks since he'd seen the harvest moon. That was how he had counted time each night, by the shape of the moon.

The woman had been veiled most of the time, but one night, as she was bending over to wipe his face with a cloth dipped in rosewater, the edge of her veil had caught on one of the buttons of his shirt. She'd cursed softly, wrestled with the silk, and tore at it with an impatient gesture. And then, she'd pulled it from her head and pitched it away. And Henry, still not knowing if he was dreaming, or alive, or awake, had seen her face in the light of the lanterns. His heart had almost stopped at her beauty, and he'd felt hilarity bubble inside him. He was, indeed, alive, if he could react to the sight of a woman's beautiful face, and he could see very well also—there was nothing wrong with his eyes.

She had an oval face, velvety skin that took on the sheen of gold in the lantern's glow, carefully arched eyebrows, and pale blue eyes, colored like springtime skies. Her eyelids were lined with kohl that swung out toward the tips of her brows. There was a dusting of gold glitter on her cheeks, which caught the light as she turned, and a flush brought on from the cursing and the flinging of the veil. Her mouth was sweet, lush, her teeth perfectly straight when she caught her
lower lip between them. His mind had cataloged every bit of what he could see, and he'd begun to think that, perhaps, he
was
dreaming. His gaze had then dropped down her smooth throat, to the diamond and emerald necklace around her neck, to the edges of her embroidered
choli
.

She had drawn back then, suddenly, and when she'd reappeared in his range of vision, she was veiled again. He must have made a disappointed sound, for she'd leaned over, flooding his nose with the scent of frangipani under a hot sun, and said, “You must sleep now.”

“I've slept enough,” he'd said, the sound cracking through his lips. They were the first words he had spoken since the night he fell ill—all else had been the mutterings of a delirious man. “I'm hungry.”

“You are?” It was a sound of pure delight. “Of course you are.”

She had clapped her hands, and when an attendant leaned over, had said something to him. He'd returned with a bowl of stew—tender chicken pieces cooked in a clear broth, flavored with pepper, salt, cumin, and some ground ginger.

Henry's pillows had been piled up against the bed and she'd raised him herself, wouldn't let him even lean on his left hand for support. And then she'd fed him, her head tilted under the veil as he chewed, wiping a drop of the stew from his chin.

“More,” he'd said, greedy, ravenous.

“No more,” she'd said firmly, sending the bowl away with the servant. “More tomorrow perhaps. We'll see. Sleep now?” This time there was laughter in her voice.

Henry had slept. He'd woken during the night and seen her there, some distance from his cot, her knees drawn up to her chest, her chin resting on them. She'd been unveiled, her eyes gleaming in the half-darkness, her gaze steady upon him. He'd gone to sleep again.

She'd come only during the night, Henry had realized
as the days passed and he grew stronger, even able to walk with his hand on John's shoulder, most of his weight on his brother as though not trusting his own feet. As he'd become more alert, he had watched her carefully, waiting for her veil to slip, peering under its edge when he could. And then one night, she did not come, but it was a night when Henry did not need a caretaker anymore. And after that, he hadn't seen her again.