A Proper Education for Girls (17 page)

“The only secrets in this house, Mr. Blake, are the ones I keep,” she said after a moment. “You're probably wondering whether I've seen the photographs you have hidden beneath the fabric in the lid of your portmanteau. You may also be wondering whether your relationship with Mrs. Cattermole is unknown to me. And perhaps
you believe me to be too innocent of the world to understand fully the recreational uses of ether?”

Mr. Blake blinked in the lamplight, staring at her in surprise. “Perhaps we should go to the temperate house to talk,” he said at last. “It's so very warm up here. I would like the opportunity to explain myself to you. I couldn't bear it if you thought badly of me.”

“A
LLOW ME TO
explain,” said the photographer as soon as the doors of the temperate house had closed behind them. “It's simple, really. Those photographs—I had nothing to do with them. That is … I mean … they're not mine. They belong to Dr. Cattermole. He gave them to me. He seemed to think that your father … as a man with an open mind … a man always ready to encounter the unusual, to take risks, that he would … appreciate them. Dr. Cattermole is your father's friend—and mine—he got me this commission, after all. So I brought them with me. Of course I've not showed them to your father yet. He has no idea that I have them.”

“If he did know, he would end your career forthwith,” said Alice.

“He would?”

“Oh yes. He might appear to have an open mind, but in reality this extends no further than the apparent freedoms he allows my aunts and me, and the devotion he exercises in the expansion and maintenance of the Collection. And you must have guessed,” said Alice, “that Dr. Cattermole got you the commission because of your intimacies with his wife.”

“But he didn't
know!”
cried Mr. Blake.

“Can you be sure? Why else would he recommend you to a commission that had no foreseeable end? One where you would be obliged to spend month after month in the sexless and uninspiring company of an ugly spinster and her aged aunts?”

“But Mrs. Cattermole said that her husband didn't care two hoots about her or about what she did.”

“And you believed her?” snorted Alice.

“She seduced me,” he said weakly. “She insisted. She was—she is—persistent. I came here to shake her off.”

“And now she is awaiting you upstairs.” Alice struggled to keep the laughter out of her voice. “It makes your appetite for ether seem rather insignificant.”

“I told you, I began taking ether to get to sleep. Some of the work in the mortuary was so dreadful … The images from the slab seemed burned onto my brain. Ether took me to a different place altogether. A more pleasing place. The colors I saw, the visions—” He stopped talking and put his head in his hands. “Will you tell your father these things about me, Miss Talbot?” Mr. Blake shrugged despairing shoulders. “Of course you will. You too must feel yourself deceived. You must despise me. What can I possibly do to stop you?”

“There is one thing you can do,” said Alice.

He looked up at her hopefully. “What? What can I do?”

“You can marry me.”

T
HE MONTHS PASSED.
I
N THE DISTANCE, CLOUDS COULD
be seen boiling on the horizon where the mountains began, but still no rain came. The Europeans complained about the heat, the stench, the flies, the avariciousness and dishonesty of the servants. Lilian attended prayers at the Missionary Society, Bible readings in the hospital, and hymns with the converted Christians. Despite repeated petitions from her husband, Captain Forbes neglected to tell his
sa'is
not to saddle his horse for her, and while Selwyn napped beneath the
punkah
, she still went out onto the plains with her easel and paints. At night, she met Mr. Hunter in the bazaar.

Lilian never told him what had happened after he left her in her father's house, and he never asked. Instead, she focused her attentions on learning all he had to tell about traveling through India in search of plants: the different languages, the varying terrain, the best way to pack a mule, the availability of foods and the variety and significance of native customs, the best way to dress for the mountains or the plains, the fastest way to light a campfire in the rain.

Mr. Hunter had never had such an attentive listener, and he was flattered, and gratified, by her interest. “Why are you so curious?” he asked, trying (and failing) to catch hold of her hand.

“You are so well traveled; it thrills me to the heart to hear of
your adventures.” Lilian held her hand to her breast as she spoke and looked up at him beguilingly. She stepped aside neatly as he lunged for her waist. “Tell me about the Punjab again.”

Lilian decided that Mr. Hunter's knowledge and experience was invaluable if she were ever to see Alice again. And once she had picked his brains clean, once she was certain of his infatuation, she would be ready to break his heart. She would abandon her husband and leave the turgid company of Europeans far behind. By this time she would surely have learned enough to travel alone through the jungles and foothills. As for money, every month she dispatched a consignment of paintings to Kew, and to the botanic gardens in Edinburgh and Paris, and every day she went out to paint more. Already she had accumulated a secret hoard that she was sure would soon be enough for her to live independently. She would return to England for Alice, and together they would journey back to India. It would be a life of liberty, a life of travel, and art, without the need for husbands, fathers, or any other men to sustain or control them.

In the meantime, there was plenty to do to occupy her—not least her progress with Mr. Hunter. Eventually, having insisted that he teach her Marathi, Lilian permitted him to hold her hand and kiss her cheek. Once, when he had shown her how to light a fire without the use of matches, she allowed him to squeeze her breast. She held out to him the possibility of more exciting intimacies in the future, though on the subject of when the opportunity for these intimacies might arise she was vague.

A
S FOR
M
R.
Hunter, he was both intrigued and frustrated. He could not stop thinking about her. One evening she allowed him to kiss her beneath the neem tree in the garden of her own bungalow. “Your mustache tastes of curry,” she said. Mr. Hunter watched her longingly as she threw a long, muscular leg over the window ledge and climbed in the window of her bedroom. Things were taking much longer second time around, he thought.

Mr. Hunter returned to his room at the
dak
bungalow feeling dejected and confused. Did she want him or not? Were his advances too clumsy? Too hasty? Too confident? Was he not handsome enough? Not wealthy enough? His income was more than sufficient to make him an attractive candidate, either as a lover or as a prospective husband, should she agree to leave the pathetic, insect-swatting Fraser. As for his height and bearing, why, he knew he cut a dashing figure. He rubbed a hand over his glossy back whiskers. Did his mustache really taste of curry? She had mentioned it more than once. He reached into his pocket and produced a bar of soap scented with lemon geranium. Perhaps that would do the trick.

A
ND THEN ONE
day a bearer from the
dak
was eaten by a tiger. The Europeans, rendered bored and sluggish by months of heat and inactivity, blazed into life with chatter on the subject. The beast was said to have dined on three small children from villages farther up-country, plucking them from the dust where they played, or from the hovels where they slept. Driven away by angry villagers and demented through lack of food, it was now terrorizing the countryside directly around the cantonment itself. Perhaps it had even gained access to the grounds surrounding the Europeans' bungalows?

Mrs. Ravelston claimed to have heard the beast growling on her veranda that very night. Mrs. Birchwoode had seen it stalking across the magistrate's garden. Mrs. Toomey said that her
dhobi
had refused to work until the animal was apprehended, in case he was savaged by it on his way to the well. Lilian, however, had never seen the tiger, nor any evidence that it was still in the vicinity, and she went out into the surrounding countryside almost every day that month on Captain Forbes's horse. But Captain Forbes nevertheless withdrew the use of this horse for fear that the tiger would attack it.

“It appears,” said Mr. Birchwoode one evening, “that we must
shoot the brute. We can't sit here cowering in our homes.” He rubbed his hands together. “This'll liven things up.”

It transpired that several of the officers from the barracks agreed. Despite the sweltering heat, a shooting party was organized, made up of a team of native beaters, Mr. Vine, Dr. Mossly, and Selwyn; Captain Lewis, Captain Wheeler, and Captain Forbes from the barracks; Mr. Toomey, Mr. Ravelston, and Mr. Birchwoode from the Company; and Mr. Hunter. A number of the ladies insisted on coming along, and in no time at all the hunt had turned into an excursion, complete with bearers,
ayahs
, cooks, hampers of food and drink, and various conveyances into which Mrs. Toomey, Mrs. Ravelston, and Mrs. Birchwoode squeezed their ample be-hinds, along with the more modestly proportioned Lilian, and a reluctant and nervous Mr. Rutherford.

The idea was that everyone would enjoy a picnic before the officers, along with those gentlemen who had some experience in shooting, stood in line with their guns while the beaters flushed the tiger out of the scrub and drove it toward them. Mr. Vine (who proclaimed tiger extermination to be among his accomplishments), along with Selwyn (who was sure he would
like
to have such an accolade), and Mr. Rutherford (who had no desire to see a tiger, dead or alive, and possessed no gun) would defend the ladies.

The party unpacked and settled itself beneath an acacia tree. Servants unloaded hamper after hamper of food and spread it out in the dappled shade made by the branches above. The fact that the tiger had last been seen mauling a native not half a mile away from the spot lent a degree of excitement that bordered on hysteria to the proceedings.

“I hope the blighter doesn't fancy a bit of this,” said Mr. Birchwoode, waving a chicken drumstick. “It's bound to taste better than a scrawny old Indian.”

“Why would he want a chicken leg when there are far nicer legs here that he could nibble on,” said Captain Wheeler. He winked at Mrs. Ravelston, who let out a scream of laughter and spun her parasol.

“Steady on,” murmured Mr. Ravelston, without raising his eyes from his plate of ham and cheese.

“My dear Libby” Mrs. Toomey cried to Mrs. Birchwoode, “do you think the tiger is watching us even now?”

“He'll not come near a party this size,” said Captain Lewis. “Too much noise.”

“And if he does decide to pop in for a spot of tiffin,” said Captain Forbes, who was fiddling with the camera he had brought along, “I'll get him to pose for his photograph.”

Mrs. Birchwoode, considering herself to be somewhat neglected in all this banter, chose that moment to emit a piercing scream. “There he is! Over there! Quick! Something moved in those bushes!”

Several men jumped to their feet. But it turned out to be only a vulture, which rose with a guttural squawk and made off through the branches of the acacia tree.

“How nervous everyone is,” observed Mr. Hunter, who had remained seated. “Perhaps it's time to find the tiger, rather than sitting here and waiting for him to find us.”

A
LONE WITH
M
R.
Vine, Selwyn, and Mr. Rutherford, the ladies lost some of their sparkle. They fell to chattering about the approaching cold season in Calcutta. Mrs. Birchwoode and Mrs. Toomey were hoping to be there by December, while Mrs. Ravelston would follow in the new year in the company of some of the officers' wives.

“I think you will have moved on from Kushpur by then, Mr. Fraser?” said Mrs. Toomey.

“We'll be in the Punjab,” said Selwyn. “Won't we, Rutherford?”

“How dreadful for you, my dear,” said Mrs. Birchwoode to Lilian in an undertone. “Will you not stay here, while your husband goes up-country? And you have an unmarried sister back home, do you not? Is she well? Could she not be persuaded to come out and
keep you company? We have a dire shortage of ladies out here, as you know.”