The Sandalwood Tree (15 page)

February 1857

She is expectorating blood & I begin to despair. My best efforts have failed. Could this be a different malady? In Yorkshire, she grew skeletal, but this time her face & body bloat unhealthily in spite of her lack of appetite. Even the smell of food makes her nauseous. The coughing is the same, but all else is different
.

I have confined her to her bed, & today I turned the Indian away from our door. But when I went to her, after she had heard his voice, she turned her head on the pillow & would not look at me. I am wounded. I only want what is best for her
.

There have been more protests amongst the sepoys regarding those cartridges. General Anson says he will not appease their stupid superstitions. Rather stupid of him, I think
.

February 1857

Our world has ended & a new one has begun. Felicity is with child & the Indian (now must I use his name?) is the father. I need time to digest this & cannot bring myself to sit with them when he calls. He knocks on our door, & Felicity hobbles out of her room, her face mottled with blushes that flare & fade with every step. She is too weak to stand for very long & leans on
a bamboo walking stick. I sit alone in the kitchen whilst they converse in the drawing room
.

With such widespread tension across this land, I sometimes wonder whether he is using Felicity to make some sort of statement amongst his people. But when I suggest it, she accuses me of jealousy. She is not wrong. I admit to some resentment—a hard cold thing lodged in my heart—at having our closed & idyllic world breached by him. I did not stop loving Felicity when I fell in love with Katie & we have made a life here, Felicity & I, platonic but warm & companionable, just the two of us. But he has ended all that & I am grieving. I suppose this is selfish of me & I must overcome it, but I am also frightened. Tensions between Britons & Indians are running high & I go about with a feeling of dread. Jealousy, fear, confusion … I want our quiet life back but now—a baby!

I also wonder what the Indian’s wife must make of this, if she knows. Mohammedans are allowed multiple wives, but this man is a Sikh & can only have one wife. He is an adulterer & this makes me question his character. In England this would be scandalous, but here, with race & class & politics thrown in the mix, it is quite dangerous. This is a volatile moment in history, what with the sepoys carrying on. We could be in grave danger
.

March 1857

This morning, I rode into the village to watch the natives celebrate Holi, the spring festival of colours. Holi is an invitation to abandon all inhibition, & the natives dance wildly in the road, throwing dye powders at each other & even at the goats & cows—pink, green, blue, yellow & every mixture they can make. The children splash tinted water on each other & everyone ends up drenched & painted. They eat coconut fritters laced with bhang, which is a mild narcotic, & the day ends with faces splotched green & pink, black hair streaked with blue & yellow, & everyone twirling & singing lustily to long reed trumpets & thumping tablas
.

I met an English planter & his wife, also come to watch the natives play Holi. He was red-faced & rather silly; I suspect he had indulged in some bhang fritters. She was a glum, mousey little thing, slumped on her pony &
quite disinterested in the festival. I asked whether she was enjoying it, & she said, “My baby died from a miasma that came up through the floor.” I told her how sorry I was & galloped home straightaway to tell Felicity about the planter’s poor wife. It made Felicity cry & she said, “We must put in a new plank floor.”

I think it’s a splendid idea. The white ants have made a perfect sieve of our bamboo matting, & we want no miasmas seeping up to kill our baby
.

March 1857

Today the sun was shining, & I spread the coral & turquoise afghan under the sandalwood tree for Felicity to take the air. She napped whilst I wrote my diary. As the air warmed I, too, began to doze until a loud drilling woke us. I looked up to see a crimson-headed woodpecker attacking the tree with his long pointed bill. I wanted to shoo him off, but Felicity said the tree was more his than ours, so we watched the bird’s industrious red head hammer away as he worked for his meal
.

Higher on the trunk I spied a neat oval hollow, & it struck me that it would be an excellent ready-made place to stow some of my story. It’s a capricious notion, I know, with nothing practical about it, but that is part of the appeal. I know no one in England who would read my account without judgement, & the idea of leaving it to fate pleases me. I can buy tin-lined boxes & hot-water bottles of vulcanized rubber in the village, which should protect it through a good number of monsoons
.

There has been an incident in Barrackpore. A sepoy has been arrested, but I do not know the details
.

March 1857

I have had a message from Mother. After learning that I had not returned to Calcutta for the season, she could not wait for her response to reach me by ship. She went to the extravagance of a telegram, & a post bearer brought it this afternoon. I read it aloud to Felicity
.

Return home immediately stop

Chadwicks will assist stop

Behaviour unacceptable stop

Obey or we wash hands stop

Felicity said, “No matter. My annuity is enough for us both.” She stroked her slightly rounded belly & stared out of the window, placid & content. But I felt a disturbing intermixture of joy & fear
.

This week the punkahs must go up
.

April 1857

This morning the servants appeared in an excited state. Lalita told us news had come to the village that the sepoy who was arrested is one Mangal Pandey & his name is on everyone’s lips. He attacked & wounded his British officer. He has been charged with mutiny & sentenced to death
.

I’m quite sure the profane cartridges must come into this somehow, but the servants profess to know nothing more. They affect to be shocked & disgusted, but the tension in the air is as thick as pudding, & I detect an element of triumph in their eyes
.

Lady Chadwick will not come to the hills this hot season, as travel is too risky right now. I am glad not to have to deal with her interference at this time
.

May 1857

Pandey was hanged April the twenty-second. After his execution, riots & fires broke out in Agra & Ambala. General Anson is untroubled enough to have left for Simla for the hot weather, but I think he is underestimating the significance of Pandey’s death. I fear he may have created a martyr
.

May 1857

Felicity continues to enumerate her lover’s good qualities in an effort to elevate him in my eyes. She says he cares for the poor (but he is wealthy & they are his own poor), she calls attention to his strong-boned face (but it is a brown face with a warrior’s beard & topped by a blue turban), & she makes much of his fine manners—English manners!

If their relationship became public, she would be disgraced, but he … well, Indian men would question his taste in women, & certain of our military
men might not hesitate to hang him. Their child will be an outcast, no matter where he goes. They must be terribly in love to disregard all this, but that makes it no less problematic
.

I think of Katie & know I have no right to judge forbidden love, but this man has deceived his wife & put Felicity at risk. How can I trust him?

A solitary life in the mofussil might be the most joyful way to live in India, but perhaps not the most prudent. I think of the safe, insulated drawing rooms of Calcutta & I see now that the life we have chosen is lonely & dangerous
.

Lalita tells us that eighty-five sepoys have been court-martialled in Meerut. This is not over
.

June 1857

Mutiny! The sepoys have risen en masse & slaughtered hundreds of Europeans in Delhi. A messenger has come from Simla with an invitation for Felicity & me to take refuge at the Club, but Felicity insists the villagers are friendly & we are safe here. I did not argue, because I believe she is too weak to travel, as well as unmistakably pregnant
.

Felicity is pale & peevish, her once lustrous hair is lank & dull, & she complains of headache. I cannot separate the symptoms of consumption from the symptoms of pregnancy. My lovely friend lies abed, coughing weakly, & still her belly swells with this new life. I believe the little creature inside her is surviving at her expense
.

On bad days she becomes delirious & mistakes her bedpost for the Grim Reaper. She shouts at it to stay away from her baby, & then falls into a fit of coughing. Khalid pads to the door with the tea tray, leaving it on the floor, & the water bearer passes basins of tepid water through the window. I have instructed Lalita to pull her veil over her mouth & nose when she enters the room
.

The servants are uneasy, but it is not the possibility of death that disturbs them. Death is common & swift in India, a promise of paradise for Mohammedans & a brief interlude between incarnations for Hindoos. It is this strange memsahib who is not wholly English & not wholly Indian, dying
in the mofussil whilst rumoured to be carrying a half-caste child, even as Europeans in Delhi are slaughtered in their homes & sepoys fight Britons to the death in Benares & Allahabad. It is confusing for them
.

It is confusing for me
.

I clicked off the flashlight and sat still in the dark kitchen. Felicity was not buried in Masoorla and she sounded too sick to have returned to England. What happened to her and her baby?

I pulled the afghan tight around my shoulders and a shock of recognition rippled through me. “
I spread the coral & turquoise afghan under the sandalwood tree
…” I pressed my face into it, smelling wool and dust and a faint whiff of camphor. It must have been stored in a tin-lined trunk. I ran my hand over its soft surface, marveling that Adela’s fingers had made it and that it had once rested on Felicity’s shoulders. They were
real
.

I had never noticed a hollow in the sandalwood tree, but I had never looked. I crept out of the house, down the verandah steps, and stood under the tree in the moonlight. But it was too dark to make anything out through the dense leaves and deep shadows, so I went back inside. I’d look again in the morning.

I refolded Adela’s journal pages and tidied them into a neat stack with a sense of ownership. No—I corrected myself—stewardship. I considered tying the bundle with a pretty ribbon, like a proper Victorian, and stashing them with the letters under my lingerie, but that would be an admission of my intention to keep them. I put them back in my purse, a comfortably ambiguous hiding place. I knew the next time I went to Simla I’d feel obliged to return the pages I had taken, and I also knew that I wouldn’t do it. Felicity and Adela’s story resonated with me; I wanted more.

My eyes wandered over the shadowed curves and planes of the kitchen: the old cooker where Adela made her beef tea, the blackened brick wall—it would have been new then, with only a whisper of smoke damage—and the wall clock whose modern, Art Deco
style suggested that it had probably been hung quite recently. The kitchen table looked like it came from a cottage in the Cotswolds, hewn from sturdy English oak with a trestle base and surrounded by ladder-back chairs, a style popular in the 1930s. The set must have been shipped from England, between the wars.

I stopped fussing with Adela’s papers. Where was the rest of Felicity’s furniture? The camelback sofa and the brocade chair with the teeth marks on the arm were Victorian, but almost everything else was newer. The breakfront in the dining room had the same simple lines as the china cabinet I’d left in Chicago. There was a 1920s-style lamp on a side table in the living room, and a fin de siècle mirror above the mantel.

Old journal pages might have been used to line the drawers of a chest that had been carted off to an export store in Bombay. There could be letters in a desk or wardrobe sitting in the home of our Indian landlord, who would have had his pick of things when he bought the place. The messages that Adela said came and went between Felicity and her lover might not be hidden at all, but simply forgotten in an almirah now sitting in some antique store in Kensington. The rest of their story could lie scattered almost anywhere across two continents. But hopefully, Adela’s journal, or some part of it, would still be in the sandalwood tree.

I draped the afghan over the back of the sofa, hung my purse on the bedroom doorknob, and slid back into bed. Martin had stopped snoring and his face was relaxed; no dreams tonight. In sleep, I could see the untroubled face I had loved during our early days. His waking face was a little frightened, a little angry, and habitually tense, but asleep … I stared at him. The love of my life was still there. How could I divorce the postwar Martin when the real Martin, my Martin, was still in there?

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