Zemindar (5 page)

Mr Roberts must have seen the apprehension in my face.

‘Alas, I fear I have alarmed you,’ he said contritely.

‘I asked for reasons.’

‘We can still hope that my anxiety is unfounded. Certainly you will find many brave gentlemen in Calcutta who will tell you so.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I am known to be somewhat pessimistic in my approach to most things, somewhat too cautious by nature. A “croaker” in fact. I must hope for all our sakes that in this case my denigrators are right. And there are a great many enjoyable things for you to look forward to, both in Calcutta and up-country. You will find among us Anglo-Indians a spirit of kindliness and hospitality. Most of us have had to spend enough time in our own company to learn the value of society, and you will be quite overwhelmed with invitations and entertainments. I have no doubt Mr Flood has provided himself with useful introductions, but if I can be of any service, please believe I am at your disposal.’

I expressed my sincere thanks and the hope that we would often meet in Calcutta—he had already made known his intention of waiting upon us as soon as we had settled in. As I turned to leave him, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘I’m afraid you did not discover very much more about Mr Erskine, so in case it will further your conjecturings, I must tell you that he is one of the few who would agree with my prognosis of the state of the country, and he, Miss Hewitt, has forgotten more about India than I will learn in a lifetime.’

‘But I thought you had never met him?’ I pointed out somewhat tartly.

‘It is not necessary to meet Mr Erskine to know his views. He, like me, has many detractors in Calcutta.’ And, with a polite bow, the provoking man left me.

After luncheon, while Emily rested in the saloon, I went down to the cabins and completed the packing of our effects in readiness for disembarkation. Several trunks already stood in the companionway outside our doors, but I had still to empty drawers and cupboards of all those small things that cannot easily be dispensed with until the last moment. The furniture in the cabins—cupboards, tallboys and beds—was our own, purchased in a ship’s chandlers for use on the voyage as is customary, but it was unlovely stuff, and one of the ship’s officers had told us we could dispose of it at a fair profit at the usual auction of such effects held soon after a ship put into port. The inhabitants of Calcutta, so the officer informed us, more wealthy than particular, were always anxious to buy anything that could be said to have been ‘brought out from Home’. In any case, we did not expect ever to make such a long voyage again, since Mr Roberts (who had himself used the service on his journey to England) advised us to return by the overland route through the Red Sea and thence from Alexandria to Constantinople by dray which took no more than two months if one used the East India Company’s new fleet of steam packets plying between Bombay and Suez.

I had left the door of my cabin ajar while I packed, in order to catch the least movement of air, and as I was looking around for almost the last time, making sure I had forgotten nothing and with a feeling oddly akin to nostalgia, Elvira Wilkins sidled in and asked in her apologetic, breathless way if I would mind going to her mama for a moment, since she wished to thank me for my kindness during the voyage. This was the last thing I wanted, but of course I had to comply.

Mrs Wilkins, dressed in a gown of purple satin, and with a dolman of the same satin trimmed with jet beads and bugles hung carefully on a chair beside her, was sitting bolt upright on her bed, cooling her fat red face with a palm-leaf fan. Her hair, freshly dyed in henna, was of a startling orange, and Elvira had arranged it in almost the latest style—for a young girl. Elvira herself, though I guessed she was several years older than me, wore a gown of limp white muslin with blue bows at the hemline and forget-me-nots round the neck. Her sparse straw-coloured hair was screwed into a mass of small curls, but the damp heat was already destroying the effect of the tongs.

The purple dolman was removed and I was asked to take a seat on the chair, facing Mrs Wilkins.

‘You must forgive me for asking you to come in here,’ she commenced. ‘I know I am intruding on your time, but Elvira and me wanted to thank you special for all you have done for us, and we thought it would be better done in private.’

I made polite noises and hoped I did not look as uncomfortable as I felt.

‘You have been very good to my poor Elvira and me, Miss Hewitt, in spite of not caring for us,’ she added almost shyly, and then as I made to deny this assertion, held up her hand and silenced me, laughing good-naturedly. ‘No, no! No apologies! We are all what the good Lord made us! You are what you are, we are what we are, and I don’t suppose the Almighty ever intended us to be bosom friends. We don’t deny, Elvira and me, that we would like to be counted as your friends, but we can well see that maybe you would wish otherwise. Now if the Major, my husband, had been with us, maybe you would have thought higher of us. He’s a proper gentleman, my husband, with book-learning at his fingertips just like you and that Mr Roberts. He can talk about politics and that just like the best of ’em, even if he did start life in the Band. Brains, you see! That’s what he has—brains! And it’s brains that makes the difference in life, even more than birth and money. As he always says to me, “What’s the use of a high place in life to a man who hasn’t the sense to make use of it?” ’

‘Oh, absolutely!’ I murmured. ‘I certainly wish I could have met Major Wilkins.’

‘Well, perhaps you will, perhaps you will. I heard Mr Flood say that you was all hoping to be in Lucknow by the cold weather, and, if that’s so, then perhaps we shall see you, as the Major is stationed for the moment not far outside the city, and no doubt we will have to be in Lucknow for some of the coldweather functions y’know—
levées
and banquets and that, that has to be attended by anyone in the Major’s position. When a man has to make his way, he can’t afford to neglect such engagements, however much he prefers his own hearth and home, and the Major is a real home bird—and I don’t mind telling you that I believe in putting myself out to keep things cosy for him, just like when we was first married.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you do!’

‘Yes, but that’s not what I wanted to tell you about, Miss Hewitt, and you must be thinking me just a gossiping old woman wasting your time. Maybe you’ll laugh when you hear what I
do
want to say, but, though Elvira and me have been poorly all this long voyage almost, we still have eyes in our heads. Now I know that your fine relations will do all they can for you, Miss Hewitt, but Elvira and me has talked about things and come to a certain conclusion. We see that you are a young, single lady come to a strange and often cruel land. You have no way of knowing how things will turn out for you while you are here. Of course you have no intention of separating from your relatives, we know, and we hope they are as kind to you as you deserve, which no doubt they are, but there’s all kinds of sicknesses and misadventures out here, Miss Hewitt, which you wouldn’t hardly credit. Why, I’ve known as many fine young men and women cut off in the flower of their days as would fill a fat book. God forbid that this should happen to any of you, but it might, Miss Hewitt, it might. And this isn’t a country in which any young lady should be left alone, which is why Elvira and me want you to know that you can count on us, and the Major of course, for any sort of help you might ever need.
Any
sort of help!’

Here Mrs Wilkins heaved herself forward, and seized my hand.

‘You are a real Christian young woman, Miss Hewitt, and just between the three of us, Elvira and me doesn’t think a great deal of that hoity-toity young cousin of yours, who uses you like a lady’s maid and orders you about just because she has a husband, and money too, no doubt, and you haven’t! Yes, of course you must deny it, dearie, and that’s only proper seeing as how she is your cousin, but I can see otherwise. Now I’m not saying anything, mind, not suggesting nothing, but if it so happened that some time you wanted to go home without her, maybe, or she fell ill and died say, and you couldn’t properly stay alone with the young gentleman, or if anything happened to make you need more money than you had, well then I want you to remember Gwendoline Wilkins.’

Embarrassment and chagrin fought for precedence in my mind as Mrs Wilkins’s pudgy moist hand clasped mine tenderly, and her boot-button eyes regarded me earnestly from under the fringe of orange curls. I had thought all my secrets so safely kept, and yet somehow this coarse, kind and acute woman had discovered them. A change had indeed taken place in Emily since her marriage; I had observed it with some surprise at first—are we not all surprised to see the people we love grow up and grow away from us? Emily had always been petted and spoiled and I had never thought twice of her habit of ‘ordering me around’, as Mrs Wilkins had put it. In the early days at Mount Bellew I had complied with her petty dictations as the rest of the family had, and now it was habit. Less easy to forgive were the condescending airs she had assumed towards me since becoming a wife, her sometimes deliberate lack of consideration when requiring some service from me, and a tone of voice nicely blended to convey contempt and irritation. I had put it down to the headiness of her new state in life, not wishing to think her capable of considering me inferior because I was dependent, but during the voyage it had become increasingly clear that, whatever my status might have been when I left home, my position in my cousin’s household was likely to become that of a superior domestic rather than a favoured friend. If I allowed it to! There had been times when I was genuinely hurt by her attitude; when I wished I had not allowed myself to be overruled by my relatives, and that I had persevered in my intention of obtaining a post as governess in some genteel household.

‘I am sure you are most kind,’ I said, somewhat stiffly, ‘but I assure you I am not in want of any material aid, nor can I imagine any circumstance which would make me so.’

‘Aye, I’m sure you can’t, m’dear, but then you haven’t seen as much of life or of India as I have. Now’—and she dismissed the matter of Emily from her mind—‘I have something I want to show you, just so that you don’t think my promise of help is another polite nothing. I have a little hoard of my own, which I can do with as I please without taking the bread out of my family’s mouth. Be sure the door is shut fast, Ellie!’

Elvira turned the key in the lock, and stood with her back to the door and her arms crossed over her flat bosom, like a soldier on guard.

Mrs Wilkins lowered her voice to a whisper.

‘I have a fortune in my garter,’ she breathed.

For a moment I wondered whether her protracted suffering from sea-sickness had unhinged her mind, and could only look on in silence as she began to draw up her purple skirts until she had exposed to my view one stout leg clothed in a white cotton stocking and fastened just below the knee by a wide black garter.

She unclasped this band and held it out for my inspection.

‘Go on, look at it!’ she urged.

I examined the garter. It was made of black satin bordered with lace, and was unexceptional enough. I surmised that Elvira had embroidered her mama’s initials on it, and turning it over discovered the inside was quilted with the same pink silk used in the monogram.

‘Yes, that’s it, that’s it,’ chuckled Mrs Wilkins. ‘On the inside.’

I ran my finger round the quilting, and, as I was beginning to suspect, my touch discovered a series of hard lumps, and on a closer inspection found that some of these were large enough to be visible to the eye. I handed the thing back, unable to repress a smile at Mrs Wilkins’s patent triumph.

‘Eighteen pearls in there,’ she whispered as she refastened the garter below her knee. ‘And four diamonds; an emerald like a pigeon’s egg, and seven fine rubies! A small fortune for anyone, and a big one for me! My husband took ’em off a dead man on a battlefield—sewn all over his jacket they was, and the emerald in his turban. Oh, no! Don’t look like that’—as I shrank back—‘it all happened so long ago, before we was even married in fact, when the Regiment was fighting in one of the states, it was. You’ve no need to worry about the man who wore ’em. He was quite dead. There used to be two more pearls, but one I sold to get passage money when my first baby died, and one to get weddin’ clothes for my Ellie, but the marriage never did happen.’

‘I am so sorry,’ I said to Elvira.

‘Yes, tragic it was!’ continued her mother with the complacent enjoyment that the mention of disaster produces in certain women. ‘A beautiful man ’e was too! Charlie was his name, with a flowing golden beard almost down to his waist. ’E died!’

‘Shot?’ I hazarded politely, my mind still wandering on jewel-strewn battlefields.

‘Cholera!’ volunteered Elvira in a subdued voice.

‘Yes! Dead as mutton six hours after ’e took it! But don’t mind that now. What I want you to remember is this, dearie, that if ever you are in trouble or want for anything that money can buy, you have only to write to Gwendoline Wilkins! There’s not many as would have done as much as you have for as little cause, Miss Hewitt. Well do I remember that port-wine jelly that you made for us down in the hot galley when the whole ship was bucking like a bee-stung horse. Settled a treat on my stomach did that jelly, even if it was a mite too wet, the first thing in days that did, and only due to your goodness. Now that’s not the sort of thing that can be repaid with money, not any amount of money, but things being as they are, us coming out of different boxes like, my little nest egg is all that we have to offer you, so, believe me, it’s yours for the asking. The jewels will be safe enough there,’ and she patted her leg chuckling, ‘for I’m a saving sort of woman, can’t abide waste, whatever my other faults may be. I’ll not squander ’em, so they’ll be ready for you when you want ’em.’

It was difficult to know what to say. I was overwhelmed by shame at the arrogance and lack of feeling that had allowed me to jeer—only in my own mind, I was relieved to realize—at these two warm and genuine women, whose lack of education and social finesse were so amply compensated by honesty and generosity. I did the only thing possible under the circumstances. I bent down and kissed Mrs Wilkins’s patchouli-scented cheek, and then, turning, did the same to Elvira.