Mist of Midnight (32 page)

“So this is why you did not want me to enter the chapel till you could bring me yourself,” I said in awe.

“Even the good Lord found that love is a risk. Paradise lost. Paradise regained.”

I hugged him. “Luke! This is the best gift you could have given me. When did you think of it?”

We sat down on a pew, Mrs. Ross several rows behind us.

“The morning you'd gone to London, I came looking for you, to thank you, to love you, for speaking up for me with my brother.”

“I recall,” I said with a little shame.

“Do not be ashamed; it was then that I knew I could not let you go,” he said. “When you were not at home, I came to the church to pray.”

“Truly?”

He nodded. “And in the midst of it, I knew I had to restore the chapel, whether I won you back or not. It was, perhaps, a bit like you. Placid and cared for on the outside. A bit undone inside, at the heart. I wanted to change that . . . for it, for you.”

He reached over and slipped my gloves off my hands, then removed his own gloves so we could hold hands, skin to skin.

“Henna?” he seemed surprised.

“Just a little,” I said. “Not enough to make a spectacle. In India, a bride has an intricate design created on her hands or feet before her wedding day. The design is meant to have no clear beginning and no end, like the relationship itself.” He
turned my hand over in his own to verify that he could not see a termination in the design. I used my other hand to point out a tiny
L
and
R
in the design.

He traced it, then reached over to kiss me, firmly enough that our cheekbones pressed together, and we did not part.

Mrs. Ross cleared her throat. “The ceremony has nae taken place yet, ye know.”

We looked at each other and laughed before standing up, closing the church door behind us, and running joyfully in the snow.

T
he wedding service had been beautiful and everyone had made their way back to the house for the breakfast. Mrs. Knowlton sat in the place of the bride's mother, directly across from Lady Ledbury, which amused me. I'd asked Mrs. Blackwood to ensure that there were swans carved of ice in the middle of the buffet.

“Swans,” I said, and Luke smiled.

“When you first shared why you wouldn't hunt them, perhaps that was when I began to fall a little in love.”

“Not when we first danced?” he teased.

“I admit that provoked, perhaps, a more natural response.”

He grinned and pulled me to him for just a moment before mingling with our guests. I'd kept on my white dress, and even the veil, though I'd pulled it back across my hair. I went to meet Mrs. Ross in her room just after the tables were cleared so we could say our good-byes in private.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Do you need a carriage ride?”

“I doona need a ride; it's best this way, lassie,” she said.

Someone from the kirk must be shortly arriving to take her back to town.

“You are married to a guid man.” She looked at my veil, trimmed in my mother's lace. “Your mother and father are content, I'm sure.”

I looked her in the eye and asked softly, “Do you think they know?”

She nodded and took my hand in her fat warm one. “They know,” she said. She hugged me and then opened the bedroom door to walk out. I started to follow her down the stairs, but, stubborn Scotswoman, she held up her hand and indicated that she wanted to do it alone.

I looked around her small, neat room. On the small bureau next to the window was a bottle of Dr. Warburg's Tincture. It must have been the one that had disappeared! I went over to inspect it. Empty, clean, dry, and the only thing left in her room. She had wanted me to find it. How had she known it needed to be removed, to keep others safe from its consumption?

I stood at the top of the stairs just as she closed the great door behind her. I walked, as quickly as one could in a billowing, binding white cloud, down the flights and into the main hallway hoping to catch and ask her.

I opened the door and stepped out onto the landing, but she was gone. I walked farther out but there was no sight of her to be found. No footprints nor carriage tracks marred the freshly fallen drifts.

Luke came up behind me and wrapped his arm around my waist. “Come inside, darling. It's cold out here.”

I looked up and down the way once more, seeing nothing. And then, an extra shimmer in the snow, which reached heavenward and was met by an extra shimmer in the clouds.

Then I understood. Mrs. Ross was no ordinary chaperone, overseeing my comportment and guarding my reputation. She
had been sent, protecting and ministering to my very being by divine decree, as Scripture claims—and I, unawares. It was why she felt so familiar; she'd been with me all along.

Thank you, Lord.

I melted into my husband's side like a snowflake on a warm hand and we walked together into our house. Our home. ­Headbourne.

EPILOGUE

SUMMER 1863

A
nnie helped me close the remaining trunk. It was stuffed beyond capacity, really, and a testimony to her industriousness that everything had been accommodated in the cases Luke had allocated for the trip. Annie had, at the last moment, plucked out Marie, who had been making an attempt to stow away. Daniel brought around the carriage, and Matthew helped me in.

“You'll help Daniel take care of everything in our absence?”

“Yes, ma'am, Miss Rebecca.” He still called me that, and I did not chide him, because it brought back lovely memories from the time before he was a member of our household. I stepped up into the carriage first and then Peter was handed to me. Mercy, at four, followed, then Luke, and lastly, Luke's valet, Thornton.

“Better than the improving book?” I teased.

“Oh yes, ma'am, infinitely,” he said, barely able to contain his boyish excitement at the trip.

Shortly after we'd boarded ship and were settled, we pulled away from the harbor, at sunset. I stood on deck, two-year-old Peter in one arm, and holding Mercy's hand.

“I shall ride a painted elephant, shan't I, Mummy?” She jumped up and down. “Or shall I shoot a tiger?”

“We'll see when we arrive,” I said with a smile. I had longed to return to India, and now we were going back together.

“But then we shall return home to Headbourne, is that right?” Mercy asked, a bit anxiously this time. I squeezed her hand. I, too, had once been an anxious, eager young girl pulling away from Southampton on my way to the unknown.

Her father gathered her in his left arm. “Yes, dearest, you needn't fear. We shall return home.” He put his other arm around my waist, drawing me near. The water shimmered its release of day and embrace of night as gentle mists floated above the land in the distance; I closed my eyes in thankful bliss as Luke whispered Milton in my ear.

“Joy, thou, in what he gives to thee, this Paradise, and thy fair Eve.”

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I
love Gothic romances, a little creepy around the edges, the kind of book wherein you devoutly hope the hero is who you want him to be, not who you suspect he might be. I especially love those with a historical and British bent, with a heroine who is both vulnerable and strong. I've fond memories of sharing Victoria Holt's books with my grandmother.

My interest in this particular story ignited when I read a biography of the first wife of William Carey, the man often considered the Father of Missions. Dorothy Carey was an unwilling missionary. She did not want to leave England, but her husband persisted and planned to take their eldest son with him, perhaps forever, leaving her home with the younger children. Dorothy was finally convinced to accompany her husband (or perhaps was bullied into it). Suffering first from what we would call depression, she was an unhappy woman who was locked inside, crying, while her husband baptized their son and his first Indian convert. Her illness progressed and she ended her days in paranoia, psychosis, and misery after the death of their son Peter from dysentery,
which she herself suffered from throughout her life. Carey, who seemed to have been both driven and a man seeking relief, as well as confinement, for his wife, went on to marry another woman after Dorothy's death, a woman suited to mission work. They lived and worked together happily.

This interest next led me to the Mault family. Among the earliest missionaries from England to India, sent from the London Missionary Society, both Charles and Margaret Mault were admirably, happily suited to missionary work. They joined Margaret's brother, Charles Mead, and his wife in South India. Mrs. Mead and Mrs. Mault worked together to open schools that taught both academic and practical subjects to girls in a state where girls never went to school. Mrs. Mault, an accomplished lace maker from Honiton, shared her skill. Lace making offered Indian girls financial freedom, dignity, and the ability to climb the social, if not the caste, ladder. Their lace was proudly displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London and sold throughout the world.

Although I drew from hard history and inspiration from those named above, conflating them in some ways, my story is (and my characters are) purely fictional. I did keep Mr. Mead's true name, rather than fictionalizing him, to honor him. He was removed from the London Missionary Society after marrying an Indian Christian woman some years after his English wife's death. He remained in India, serving, and died there.

There is no better lead than that to show the complexities of nineteenth-century missions. Many missionaries gave up lives of comfort and ease to follow a call to share their faith and their God, very often at great, lifelong, and final cost to themselves. And yet when you read the history, there are also serious cringe-worthy moments: the marking of others as “heathen” and high-handed paternalism among them. Sometimes missionaries arrived
before, with, and after colonialists, which further complicated interpretation of motives. The story of missions is the story of Christianity writ small, striving to achieve and do good to others, and for God, often succeeding but also succumbing from time to time to the clay feet we all have.

To place in context the redeeming work of nineteenth-­century missionaries to India, I offer some insight from Indian Christians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In a 2014 interview in
Christianity Today
, Gary Gnidovic talks with Dr. M. A. Raju, who presides over an Indian hospital founded by Christian missionaries. Gnidovic acknowledges, “When it comes to the history of missions, we often think in terms of all the mistakes that have been done, in India and other places where there's been cultural insensitivity.” Raju responds, “The missionaries came on the backs of the colonists. When the missionaries arrived, they didn't find a unified India. They found nearly 70 major kingdoms, warring against each other.

“How did India get a new identity? Missionaries mastered the languages of India. In eastern India, William Carey and his associates mastered Bengali and Sanskrit. German missionaries mastered Tamil. English missionaries mastered Malayalam. American missionaries mastered Marathi. The first dictionary, for example, in Tamil and Bengali was written by missionaries. And they did it because they wanted to master the language in order to translate the Bible into the language. But they were also interested in teaching people to read and write.”

Raju continues, “So they taught Bengali. They taught Tamil in the south. They taught Malayalam in the south. In the west they taught Marathi. The languages developed, and people learned to read and write. They needed people to read the Bible, so they started schools. And they taught English, and the result was a
highly Anglicized community of higher education of regional communities of language learning, codifying the script. So language and education went together.”

Later in the article, Raju says, “Christians also spoke against the caste system. Abolishing the caste system is a big blow to Hinduism, because if you abolish caste, you're basically saying there's no rebirth, and you're allowing people to go up and down the social ladder. Low-caste people weren't allowed to go into Hindu temples, but now they are allowed to go into them. There were all sorts of reforms to Hinduism because of Christianity.”

Finally, he highlights the “impact their [Indian Christians] missionary forefathers had, on language, education, Indian identity, health, and the treatment of women, outcasts, the poor.”

In
A Forgotten History
, by Joy Gnanadason, Dr. K. Rajaratnam proposes the following insights: “The entry of the Brahmins [in the tenth century] coupled with feudalism caused dissensions among the people. The oppression of the so called ‘low caste' by the upper class people started. It was only by the end of the 19th century when the missionaries infused into them the spirit of dignity and courage through education and the Gospel message that they could shake off their bondage. Ironically, it is the same race of people who had enslaved India through the East India Company, who also helped the exploited to free themselves!”

Even before Protestant missionaries arrived, Catholic missionaries arrived, in 1510. Still earlier, it's been reliably claimed, Jesus' disciple Thomas arrived in Malabar, where he ministered and was later martyred. The miraculous story of the petals, as told in the book, has been faithfully handed down through the ages and can be found referenced in
National Geographic
magazine's March 2012 issue, among other sources. Syrian Christians in India spring from Thomas' ministry.

In the nineteenth century, many Indian people found their way to England, and most were in difficult circumstances upon arrival. According to the Open University on its website in its Making Britain section, the Ayahs' Home “had been founded by a committee of women who had resolved there should be a place to house stranded ayahs in England.” The Ayahs' Home appears to have been founded in 1825 in Aldgate by a Mrs. Rogers (according to an advert in
The Times
on December 1868, although there are conflicting reports about the exact date and manner of foundation). “It provided shelter for ayahs whose employment had been terminated upon arriving in Britain, and found employment and passage back to India for them with British families who were travelling there. The employer who brought the ayah to Britain usually provided the ayah's return ticket, which was surrendered to the Home. The matron then ‘sold' the ticket to a family requiring the ayah's services and in the meantime, before the travel date, the Home would use the money to pay for the ayah's board and lodging.”

The Home was mission run for a number of years.

Poor Delia Dainley was in good company. There really was a fishing fleet of young women hoping to reel in a respectable husband, usually one posted to India, an area parched of young En­glish roses. Women in the Victorian era were still dependent upon fathers, brothers, and husbands unless they were women of their own means or widows. Happily for our heroine, she caught the heart of Captain Luke Whitfield. Whitfield was loosely based on Lieutenant Frederick E. B. Beaumont, who was granted a patent for improvements to the Adams revolver.

Nineteenth-century India was a time and place of tumult, and there were indeed missionaries killed in the Uprising of 1857, though not the families I loosely based my book on. I read many
accounts of the Uprising, but the one that most impacted my book was
The Memsahib and the Mutiny,
a firsthand account by R. M. Coopland. Although my book is fictional, I drew heavily on her writing, not only for accuracy but because I did not wish to imagine and then impute violent acts to any person or people who did not commit them. There were villains and heroes on both sides. I retained the name of the real Muslim bearer (butler), Musa, as well, in order to honor, these many years later, his selfless actions.

The Hussars have a reputation as horsed ladies' men, but I must credit Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for the observation, put in the mouth of Michelene, that the men run away from them and the women toward them!

There really was a large-hearted man named John Pounds, of Portsmouth, who despite his own difficult circumstances reached out to impoverished and overlooked children. His actions led to the foundation of the “ragged schools,” which provided food, lodging, schooling, and trades for hundreds of thousands of the poorest children.

Finally, the portrayal of dear, shortbread-eating Mrs. Ross was inspired by my own interaction with who I believe to be a guardian angel in London (complete story on my website, ­
www.sandrabyrd.com
. In spite of my firm belief in the angels of Scripture, without that encounter I might not have had the desire to write one so directly on the page.