Anila's Journey (30 page)

I need not have worried.

“This is last order,” the driver said to me, in a mix of Bangla and English. “House of new doctor. Many herbs for here. Fruits too.”

He spun the cart, now so much lighter, so that it ground deep tracks into the sandy area in front of the house. The door opened and two little boys raced each other to greet us, followed by two house servants. A fair-headed lady with no bonnet or hat came out to stand on the steps. I recognized Mrs Herbert.

She clapped her hands to her mouth when she saw me.

“Oh, mercy me. It's Anila, is it not? Come in, you must come in. John, take Miss Tandy inside to the salon while I see your father's herbs delivered to the surgery room.”

I thanked the driver, who nodded, without saying a word. The two boys grasped my hands and pulled me inside, little Kit just as boldly as his brother. He bore no trace of his injuries, I was glad to see.

They took me into a large bright room, so plainly decorated that it put me in mind of our salon at Garden Reach after everything had been taken from it. There were no oil pictures or mirrors on the walls here and only a clock and some brass instruments were displayed on the one sideboard the room contained. A round cotton rug adorned the floor but this was severely rucked up by a bamboo pen that stood proud in the middle of it. Inside the pen was the lovely little girl I remembered. She beamed at me, more gums than teeth.

“Georgie can walk now so she has to be kept in the crib,” John told me. “Are you going to be our teacher? My aunt is tired of giving us lessons.”

“Hush, John. Bring the cushions for us, you and Kit.”

Mrs Herbert herself was carrying a tray with glasses of lime juice. She bent to set it on the floor and must have seen surprise in my face for instantly she said, “I love the Indian way of hospitality. Come sit with me, Miss Tandy. My sister-in-law is away visiting today, a welcome respite for her, I think.”

John and Kit staggered forward with big calico cushions for us to sit on, on the floor just as we were. They came again with another for themselves, on which they perched like little blond princes until they started to slide off and giggle.

We drank in silence for a moment. Then I spoke.

“Anoush gave me a message from your husband, just yesterday. That is why I came and I am sorry if it is inconvenient. You were very kind to think of employing me. I could think of nothing I would like more except that, you see, I shall be setting out for Madras in a week.”

Mrs Herbert's gentle face looked strained for a moment. For all the world I did not want her to think I felt myself above the kind position she had offered me. So, while the boys grew bored with their cushion and moved away to play, I told her I would be joining my guardian in Madras.

“I understand, of course,” was her response. But if anything she looked more concerned and I did not think this was merely because her little daughter had begun to cry. “It was a great hope we had, that is all.”

She rose and lifted the baby out of her pen, making ready to nurse her. I had not heard that English women fed their babies so.

“My husband will be home shortly for dinner,” she said. “He attends the Company in the mornings, and in the evenings all persons are at liberty to come here for the treatment he offers. You must stay to eat with us and George himself will tell you about a separate matter.”

THROUGHOUT OUR DINNER I
marvelled at how gentle the doctor and his wife were with their children. After a grace was offered, all three were free to talk and babble as they wished. There were no reprimands for their small failures in table manners. When little Georgiana in her highchair started to throw rice at her brothers her mother simply distracted her with a jelly sweet and asked the boys to wipe the grains up themselves. I saw no ayah for the baby, but the table servants were spoken to as if everything they did was a kindness and much appreciated.

They asked after Anoush and Mrs Herbert clapped her hands in delight when she heard of the outcome of Christmas Day.

“Such a brave and lovely girl,” she said. “And so obliging, whenever I see her. Oh, she must have a wedding gift from us, George.”

For my part, I did not tell them anything of my own story, or Carlen's end, or even of the rescue of Manik, for the boys were too small to learn about such cruelty. But I told a little of our river adventures and Mr Walker's quest for an unknown bird. I wished I had my notebooks with me to show them what I had been employed to do, my one true skill. But that thought brought another twinge of guilt with it.

The doctor stood up when we had finished.

“Come into my surgery room, Miss Tandy,” he said. “Not of course that you are anything other than the picture of good health, but the boys will not disturb us there.”

I followed him into his quarters, a small room to the back of the house. There were cabinets all round this room, their shelves crammed with labelled jars and pots and strange glass utensils in vegetable shapes. A brown delph bowl and pitcher stood on a table by the window. This looked onto a lawn where there was a latticework gazebo, pitched slightly askew. I thought suddenly of my little iron tea house and wondered if I might ever see it again.

I was offered a small armchair and the doctor himself went to sit behind a desk as large as a bed and piled high with ruled notebooks. He took from a drawer a pair of round spectacles and put them on. With these and the straight grey hair that he wore long, he was the very picture of a Persian wizard that I had imagined from the stories.

“I am very glad you received my message, Miss Tandy,” he said. “I was concerned how I might reach you when I found I needed to consult with you. You see – a situation has occurred.”

I was puzzled for Mrs Herbert had already told her husband that I would be travelling to Madras, that I could not be the children's teacher. But I could see he had a method in telling his tale and in this he would not be hurried.

“I work for the Company and I also work for myself, hoping to do what good I may here and also to learn as much as I can of medical practices that exist outside Europe. You may have observed that I bring here many of the native herbs for trial.”

I nodded for I was listening properly, but I confess I was also beginning to calculate how long my journey back to the city would take. The impulse that had brought me here had now used up almost the day and I feared greatly that Mr Walker might be hurt by my neglect of his work. Clearly, there was no urgent matter here for me at Alipore.

It was while the Herberts waited in Madras for their sailing to Calcutta that the Company charged the doctor with his first case on their behalf, he told me.

“I was called to give an opinion in a case of amnesia.”

Was that a kind of fever? I had not heard of it.

“Amnesia is a loss of memory,” the doctor explained.

My heart turned over.

“Now let me be direct, Miss Tandy. When we made enquiries of Mrs Panossian about the possibility of employing you as a tutor to our children, naturally she gave us your name and a little of your history. Do not worry. I did not share any information with her but I had to ask myself if perhaps there might be a link between you and this patient. You see, he bears the same name, and it is not such a common one. If there were a connection, well then anything you could tell me about his background and circumstances might assist me. Especially now that you are leaving the city.”

He looked at me over his spectacles, enquiringly. But I was too shocked to speak. Outside in the garden the boys were shouting, running, but their clear high voices were fog in my ears. I felt as though I had been thrust down a deep well. I was cold.

The doctor clapped his hand to his forehead.

“Oh, Miss Tandy,” he said. “I have given offence. I should of course have told you that the patient's condition is not a disease. He acquired it as the result of an accident. There is no cause for worry, should you be kin. He–”

“Doctor Herbert, you are talking about my father,” I interrupted at last. “Oh, please, he is not ill? Please don't give me any bad news, not now, not when I travel to meet him only next week.”

But what could
please
ever do?

The doctor flushed a deep red. For a horribly long moment, he was the speechless one. He took out a piece of white linen from his waistcoat pocket and wiped his brow. Then he spoke, almost in stutters.

“But, my dear girl, Mrs Panossian, she told me, that is she told us, that your father was dead, she was assured of it, she said. I thought that this patient I had met might possibly be a brother of his, or a cousin, you know. The desire to travel to distant lands often runs in families. I would never have spoken so–”

“Is my father all right? Please, that is all that matters to me.”

He sighed.

“He
is
ill, Miss Tandy, but at the same level of illness that he has borne with courage for some years, apparently. Your
father?
Well, of course you must know, but…”

As briefly as I could, I told him what I had not spoken of at dinner-time. Carlen's revelations, Mr Walker's discovery of my father's plan that we should have our own little income, my own beliefs and fears ever since my father's departure. The doctor was completely disarmed by my story, I could see that, but I was entirely impatient to know his. After Carlen, here was the last person to have met my father. And so recently!

He put up his hands, finally, to stop my questions.

“Miss Tandy, my wife always tells me that I wear seven-league boots to tramp over a story, and she will be confirmed in that, doubtless, this time. But I know that what I should tell you first is this. I have committed this patient, your father, to my care. And, since my care cannot be in Madras, Mr Tandy is, even now, travelling with an orderly serjeant to Calcutta. There was no passage for him on the ship we took ourselves. I expect him here at Providence House any day, you see.”

He went to the delph jug and poured water into a cup which he handed to me. My fingers brought it to my mouth but I hardly knew how this happened.

“We seem to take turns astonishing one another, my dear,” he said, gently. “Your prime question, whether your father be all right, is answered by my yes, my qualified yes. But now I will tell you the way of it all.”

“But why did they call you, a doctor, to see my father if he is not very ill? Why can he not stay in Madras? You say he is not any worse than Carlen's letter told me?”

He nodded.

“Best I can tell, my dear,” he said. “Nonetheless, what the Company wanted me to do was to recommend that Patrick Tandy be incarcerated for life in a lunatic asylum. And, since no proper such place exists here yet, what they required was that he be returned to England, posthaste, to an institution called Bethlem, or Bedlam, as people call it. A most fearful place where medicine treats mad people as if they were monkeys.”

“No!”

My dream suddenly came to mind, that vision of my father shrinking to nothing. Perhaps some things were worse than death. Was this how it would end after all?

“You are right. He is not mad,” the doctor said, his voice steady, as sound as I could wish. “But you see, even the king himself is not protected from receiving cruel and improper treatment when such an infirmity is suspected. For the royal mind has suffered so in recent years. I take a special interest in such malady, you see.”

He tapped a pile of his books. I could read titles handwritten on the spines of some of them.
Melancholia. Mania
. But no
Amnesia
that I could see.

“I could clearly see that your father is a man of sensibility and honour. That he is respected, even venerated, by those he consorts with. That he can still work in a fashion far more useful than many in this city can and do. That he remains, in short, a person with a purpose who–”

“That is exactly what Carlen wrote in his letter,” I said, cutting him short.

Doctor Herbert looked puzzled. As well he might, for of course now I couldn't remember exactly what were the details I had blurted out only minutes before.

“When Mr Walker's man met my father in Madras he said that he made money painting pictures of ships.”

“Indeed so,” said the doctor. “I watched him at work. Look at this.”

He reached for one of his notebooks and turned the pages until he found a slip of drawing paper. He held it up so I could see a small sketch of a fishing boat pulled up on the shore, lying to one side.

I got out of the chair and took the drawing from him. I ran my fingers down the fine lines of the boat, and over the bold tiger eyes my father had made to stare from its bows. I wanted to touch the perfect little boat to my cheek. Oh, there was such joy in that simple slip of paper!

When I looked up again the doctor was watching me, as thoughtful-looking as if I were one of his patients.

“Another matter was this,” he said. “There was an unseemly urgency about the Company's request, which made me certain that it was intended to benefit them at the expense of the patient. The person I was dealing with was bound for London himself and keen to oversee this proposed removal in person. A man called Crocker. He took a fury when I told him that I could not in conscience export the patient, your father, to Bedlam.”

Crocker! In the Gardens, so long ago it seemed now, Mr Walker had called this man an apocalypse. How right he had been.

The drawing paper slipped out of my hands and as I bent down to pick it up I heard frogs begin to croak outside, a sign that evening was approaching. I placed it on the desk and the doctor smiled at me but I was too stricken to respond. I was shivering. He came round his desk then, and took up my right hand into his two warm ones, pressing it firmly.

“Forgive my clumsiness, Miss Tandy. That name seems to mean something to you. But you mustn't worry. This Crocker did not win his case, far from it. Not only is your father now my patient but his transport and his care are to be entirely at the Company's expense. They had to accept this condition or lose my services.”