The Linnet Bird: A Novel (50 page)

But Somers was furious that I’d invited Faith. I’d known all along that he would be, and I would suffer the consequences, but I accepted that fact. I purposely didn’t tell him about Faith joining us until the night before we were to leave. He was on his way to the Club when I stopped him at the door and informed him.

He frowned, then shook his head. “No. As you well know, I’ve already arranged for Mrs. Partridge to accompany you,” he said, fuming, turning his hat in his hands. His thumbs made deep imprints into the soft fabric. “You had no right taking this upon yourself. You know I spoke to Colonel Partridge about it a good month ago, and Mrs. Partridge was going anyway, and so is quite willing to share a bungalow with you, and be your—”

“Minder? Somebody to watch my every move, Somers?”

“Your companion. That was the agreement, that you go to Simla with a companion. And now you’re muddying the Ingram name by keeping up your association with that woman. You’ll just have to find some way to cut her out.” He put his hand on the doorknob as if the matter was concluded.

I pulled at his sleeve. “No. It can’t be done. I’ve invited her, and she’s agreed to come, so it’s settled. It will have to be the three of us, and you have no further say in it.” I held my breath, then, having learned that now I need only provoke Somers with the smallest thing to bring out his violent behavior toward me. And
for some inexplicable reason I sometimes found myself goading him purposely. I knew full well what I was doing as I corrected him in mixed company, or went against his wishes with some domestic request, or some other equally simple action. It was as if I wanted to see how far I could push him before he would react; I knew by the look on his face when he was reaching his limit, and yet I kept on, finding a perverse pleasure in baiting him. I think now, looking from afar on my strange behavior, that it was a way of drawing Somers’s attention—even if it brought me nothing more than trepidation and fear of physical pain. I wanted to reach him in some way, in the confusing push and pull of our relationship, and perhaps this was the only way I could make him respond to me.

Now he grabbed me by the arm and swung me around. He punched me in the jaw with his knuckles, and as I fell he left, slamming the door so hard that a gilt-framed painting of King William IV also fell from the wall, its glass smashing on the stone floor beside me.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
March 15—the ides of March—was hazy and warm. Faith, Charles, Muriel Partridge, and I stood on the muddy riverbank, watching the trunks and boxes being loaded onto the long, flat barge that would carry the servants and supplies for the next three weeks. A makeshift tent toward the back of the barge would serve as a sleeping shelter for the servants and bargemen. Faith and Mrs. Partridge and I would ride on a smaller budgerow, a flat combination of houseboat and barge.

Mrs. Partridge was a sour and affected woman. But she had been to Simla for the last two years, and although I found her bossy and unlikable, she had been helpful in advising us what we would need for the journey as well as during our stay. Her husband was as fussy and snobbish as she, as if his past position in the army—he’d retired the year before—entitled him to his pompous righteousness. We’d entertained them occasionally, and I’d taken an immediate dislike to both of them.

We had three travel trunks apiece, with our clothing packed neatly between flannel and wax cloth. We shared a huge chest of bed linens and towels, two cases filled with cooking and kitchen utensils, and a large case containing my books and writing portfolios and Faith’s sketch pads. We had also organized a trunk of warmer clothing for the servants to wear in the thin mountain air. We had brought our own ayahs, our own
dhobi,
and two household sweepers to accompany us to Simla, and hired a cook and two coolies for the journey itself.

“Looks like an awful amount of paraphernalia,” Charles said. “I can’t imagine conveying it uphill on those narrow mountain paths.”

Mrs. Partridge sniffed. “This is only half the amount most women take.”

“You will send a message back as soon as you can, saying you’ve arrived safely, won’t you?” Charles asked Faith. His blue eyes looked young and worried.

“I said I would,” Faith said. “Please try not to fret over me. Everyone goes to the stations now; there’s really no danger.” I saw that her gloves were buttoned improperly, and her hair had lost all of its shine.

We all looked at Mrs. Partridge, standing at the edge of the bank shouting at a small man sitting on one of the loaded trunks.

“Off! Get off there! You mustn’t sit on our luggage!”

The man ignored her, crossing his arms over his chest and looking the other way as Mrs. Partridge continued to bluster and rant.

“Besides,” I said, “no one would dare bother us with Mrs. Partridge along.”

Charles laughed boyishly, the smile leaving as his eyes settled on my bruised jaw. He said nothing more, but cupped Faith’s chin in his hand. I bent and fiddled with Neel’s leash, but watched discreetly while he kissed Faith a final time. Charles’s mouth was gentle on Faith’s, and after they’d kissed he lowered his face to the crook of her neck, as if breathing in her scent one last time before they were separated. I saw Faith’s arms tighten around Charles, and as they stood there, uncaring that they embraced in plain sight of anyone who might care to see, the love they felt for each other was clearly visible. I felt a brief stab of something like sorrow as I thought of how Somers and I had parted.

He had stopped by my room before he left for the office early that morning. I was still in bed. He stood at the doorway, making a great show of buttoning his jacket.

“Well,” he finally said. “Safe journey.”

“I’m sure it will be.”

“Right, then.”

“Right,” I echoed, and he was gone.

Standing on the slippery mud of the Hooghly now, listening to the cries of the sweating men loading barges all along the bank, I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly, pushing away that last image of Somers. I would be away for five months—a month each way for traveling and three months at Simla. I was almost as excited by the prospect as I had been when we’d first arrived at the docks in Calcutta a year and a half ago. Now I would truly be discovering the India I longed to know more of.

F
OR THE FIRST FEW DAYS,
when the riverbanks weren’t too covered in tall coarse grass as high as two men, I asked the agile bargemen to pole close to the bank so I could jump off and walk along briskly. Neel loved to frisk at my side, although I kept him on his lead after the first time he dashed into the bush after a rodent. I begged Faith to walk with me, but she wouldn’t, seeming content to sit on a small rattan chair tied to the barge and gaze at the river going by. I sensed her retreating further and further and was desperate to have her come back to me. She was my one true friend, and even though I’d kept my past life a secret from her, in an odd way it made me feel even closer to her. She had always believed in me, in who I was—or had become—and this complete trust gave me a sense of pride that I had never known. I couldn’t imagine my life without her; where once she had been an anchor for me, now I felt that it was me keeping her steady when she was in such obvious danger of drowning in some unseen darkness. I was determined that our time in the cool green of Simla would rouse her from this state of sorrow. Simla was sure to remind her of home, and then perhaps I would once more recognize the vibrant, funny girl I had met at the butterfly lecture, which now seemed such a long time ago.

We had left the Hooghly and were traveling through the delta of the Ganges, a vast ragged swamp forest called the Sundarbans, which I learned from one of our bargemen meant
beautiful forest.
There was a different smell to the river now, something deeper and more earthy as we traveled north, and the breeze would occasionally carry the smell of a dung fire from an unseen village. I continued to walk along the riverbank when I could, but Mrs. Partridge noticed a bamboo pole with a bushy branch tied to it sticking out of the marshy ground I stepped through.

“You! You!” Mrs. Partridge shrilled, pointing at the man working the pole at the front of the barge. He was the obvious leader, able to speak some English. He turned, and she redirected her finger at the bamboo. “What is that?” she demanded.

The man glanced at it. “Oh, lady sahib, that is merely a sign.”

“A sign of what?”

“Others are telling us that on that spot a tiger has taken a man for his dinner,” he replied nonchalantly.

“Stop the barge!” Mrs. Partridge roared.

I smiled at Faith, rolling my eyes. From her chair she returned my smile with a tiny one.

“I am sorry, lady sahib, we cannot be stopping. Barge behind will run into us. We must always move ahead.”

“Mrs. Ingram!” Mrs. Partridge screamed, her small eyes wild. “Get back here immediately.” At her shrieking, a huge flock of tree bats that had been resting in a large jungle thorn near the bank flapped up in alarm and glided away.

I picked up Neel and ran alongside the barge, easily leaping onto it. “Mrs. Partridge. That bamboo looked as if it has been there for months. I’m sure we were in no danger,” I said.

“You’re not stepping off this barge again,” Mrs. Partridge said. “What have I been thinking? Of course, the Sundarbans are home of the royal Bengal tigers. I will not have you fall prey to some wild beast while you’re under my supervision.”

“Your supervision?” I asked.

“Mrs. Ingram,” Mrs. Partridge said, puffing out her bosom. “I am the senior lady on this journey and I have taken it upon myself to ensure that the voyage is a safe one. You young women, relatively new to India, may have difficulty accepting that behavior you employed while at home in England does not work here. Now there will be no more said about it. You will stay on the barge. And please, Mrs. Ingram, pull your solar topee further over your face; your nose is quite pink.”

There seemed little recourse.

We continued on the twisting, turning Ganges. I watched the wiry men gracefully poling hour after hour, seemingly tireless. Passing villages and meager towns, the river would briefly become a busy highway of barges and boats, always crammed with men and boys.

When away from the population, we slid by small and humble rice fields, walled with mud to keep in the water necessary for the plants’ growth, and I watched women with their saris tucked about their hips, ladling each tender plant with clumsy wooden scoops. There were larger cultivated fields, yellow with mustard, and always jute, growing high and wild. Here, the brown river was deserted and lonely under the glaring sun. I sometimes saw the pointed, blunt-nosed head of a
mugger
—a crocodile—poke up, watching our progress with filmed eyes. For much of the time the river’s still surface was broken only by bubbles from a hidden water creature or sudden groups of furiously paddling water beetles.

Faith occasionally read, but didn’t bring out her sketchbooks. One afternoon, while Mrs. Partridge slept in the shade at the far end of the budgerow and Faith and I sat in our chairs, she turned to me.

“When do you expect you will have a child, Linny? You and Somers have been married over a year now.”

I reached down to rub Neel’s ears. “I don’t know.”

“Are you not anxious about it?”

I thought about the English children—those who existed in spite of the adversity of first their birth and then the heat and disease. The ones who survived were often too pale, listless. They wore their little solar topees and were shrouded in layers of clothing as they went for their riding lessons, their polo lessons, as they learned to order their ayahs about. There were no English children beyond the age of six to be found in India, as Meg had first informed me shortly after our arrival in Calcutta. I thought about all those tiny graves in the churchyard at St. John’s. I thought about baby Frances, under the holly bush. I knew, by the choice I had made, that I would never know the feeling of a baby’s movement within me again.