The Sandalwood Tree (4 page)

Cannibalism or not, the belief that the food we eat transcends the physical has deep roots in the human psyche. Ritual cannibalism attests to a primal human urge to consume what we covet—an atavistic pull like the sound of the sea—and religions that symbolically eat the body and drink the blood are an echo of those primitive and literal customs. It is not unnatural to wish that we could simply ingest power, love, redemption, and all things desirable. It occurred to me that if Martin were to die, having a pinch of his ashes in my food might even be comforting. I murmured, “You weren’t monstrous, Felicity.”

I searched my mental archives for India in 1856. Tension between Hindus and Muslims was long-standing, but “malcontent sepoys” triggered a fuzzy memory from a world history class, some incident having to do with anti-British sentiment. The details eluded me.

I went to the vacant space in the brick wall and peered into the dark recess, checking for anything I might have missed.

Nothing.

I examined the wall for another loose brick.

Nothing.

I stood in the middle of the room, holding the letter and staring out my sparkling kitchen window. The sun was beginning its westward plunge behind the white-capped Himalayas, and in a few hours the icy peaks would turn copper and then dim to lavender. I
loved to watch that, but it was always over in a couple of minutes; night descends swiftly in India. Any other day the brief spectacle might have made me think about impermanence, the fleetingness of life, but not that day, with my Victorian letters flying in the very face of impermanence.

I refolded and retied the packet of letters and thought about stashing it in a kitchen cabinet, but that felt too casual, almost disrespectful. I considered the drawer of a side table in the living room, but that seemed somehow too public.

There had been a time, before the war, when I would have left the letters scattered on the kitchen table, eager to show them to Martin. I remembered when we had shared joy as easily as breathing, and that is what I thought our marriage would always be. But since the war he’d become so intractably sullen that my first thought was to hide the letters from him. I didn’t want him to cast a pall on my excitement. To be in his presence was to be sucked into a dark place by a magnetic pull; I was tired of him extinguishing my enthusiasm, and exhausted by the effort of fending off his gloom. It was fertile ground for a seed of bitterness to sprout, and though I resisted, it flowered. I found myself becoming as secretive as he was shut down, and I fell into the irrational habit of keeping things to myself to balance his withdrawal.

In the end, I tucked the letters into my lingerie drawer, pillowed between silk panties and satin bras. They belonged with my intimate things. I didn’t yet know who Felicity and Adela were, but I wanted to keep them close, to protect them. I patted my secret cache and closed the drawer. Martin could go boil his head. They were
mine
.

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1846–1851

A
t St. Ethel’s, Felicity and Adela had become accustomed to sleeping in the same dormitory and so, when they returned to Rose Hall each Christmas, they shared Adela’s big four-poster bed, a custom that would continue through the years. If they had had separate rooms, Adela would not have been able to pet Felicity’s hair while they talked of Fanny Parks. In the morning, they would not have been able to share the tea tray Martha brought, laden with boiled eggs and rashers and toast and Cook’s special marmalade. They would not have been able to conspire while Martha built up the fire and, outside, triangles of snow collected in the corners of the wavy windowpanes.

Martha made a Christmas kissing ball—a double hoop covered with evergreen boughs and decorated with holly, apples, and ribbons. A sprig of mistletoe hung from the center and anyone who wandered under it had to pay the price of a kiss. On Christmas Eve, Felicity and Adela walked under the kissing ball and Adela covered Felicity’s face with soft, urgent kisses. Felicity laughed and said, “Enough, Adela. That’s enough.” That Christmas, Adela often caught Felicity beneath the kissing ball; it almost seemed as though she was lying in wait.

Felicity was voluptuous by fourteen. Her voice deepened to a smooth and womanly tone, while her complexion remained radiant and her rose-gold hair grew thicker and more lustrous. Her school uniform strained across the bosom, nipped in at the waist, and rounded over her hips.

Adela was not beautiful in the ordinary sense, but intelligence and striking green eyes animated her expression. Her body, however, remained all bones and knobs. Her dresses fell as flat as glass on her chest, and her hands and feet grew large and ungainly. Her lack of femininity was compounded by the fact that Adela remained abnormally bookish. Mrs. Winfield lifted a lock of her daughter’s limp brown hair and let it fall with a sigh. She said, “A man doesn’t like a girl who thinks herself more clever than he.”

Adela sniffed. “Then let him read a book or two of his own.”

This was the year Mrs. Winfield engaged a young lady’s maid to look after the girls during the holidays and otherwise help around the house. She was a plain Irish girl, Kaitlin Flynn, who smelled strongly of lye soap. She had coarse, ruddy skin and curly black hair escaping from a white mobcap. Mrs. Winfield handed Kaitlin her uniform, saying, “See if you can’t do something with poor Adela’s hair.”

“Yes, madam.” Kaitlin curtsied prettily and gave the girls an arch smile that seemed to say she was on their side. After she disappeared up the servants’ stairway, Adela said, “I don’t think Kaitlin is much older than we are.”

“No,” said Felicity. “And I think she has a touch of mischief about her.”

They smiled at each other and said in unison, “Thank God!”

Amid the flurry of Christmas preparations, only Adela and Kaitlin noticed that Felicity seemed listless. When Felicity began coughing, Dr. Winfield spent half an hour in her room with his black bag, thumping her back and asking questions in a low murmur, then came out and somberly diagnosed consumption. He
touched a knuckle to his mustache and bowed his jowled head like an undertaker. Adela rushed to Felicity’s side and crawled into the sickbed with her, but her parents pulled her away, saying she must not expose herself to the illness. Still Adela sneaked back whenever she could, youth and love making her reckless.

Felicity lay in bed for weeks, limp, hot, and coughing, with pink spots burning high on her cheeks. Adela would wait until her mother was occupied with visitors or gardening to creep into Felicity’s darkened room with a cup of beef tea, which she spooned between the patient’s parched lips with great patience. When Dr. Winfield visited Felicity, Adela hovered outside the door, pressing him for assurances he could not give.

Kaitlin, however, walked boldly in and out of the sick room at will. She waited with a washbasin and towels, humming an Irish ballad under her breath, while Dr. Winfield listened to Felicity’s chest. When he finished, Kaitlin sat on the bed to sponge Felicity’s face and arms saying, “Here we go, miss. You’ll feel ever so much better after I freshen you up.” One day, as Kaitlin leaned across her patient to adjust the pillow, Felicity said, “You shouldn’t come so close, Kaitlin.”

“Don’t you go worryin’ about me, miss.” Kaitlin plumped the pillow with her characteristic good cheer. She squeezed out the washcloth with strong, chapped hands and swabbed Felicity’s neck and shoulders with practiced movements. Kaitlin had been in service since she was twelve, and before that she’d been her mother’s right hand at home, cooking and cleaning for a family of eight, making meals out of wilted cabbage and old potatoes, and carrying back-breaking loads of peat to warm their two-room stone cottage. Hard work was all she knew and she took pride, even pleasure, in being useful. Adela watched Kaitlin minister to Felicity, marveling at the girl’s unfailing good nature, sure that she herself would be bitter to have been born into similar circumstances. Felicity said, “Really, Kaitlin. At least cover your mouth and nose when you come near me.”

Dr. Winfield, putting his instruments in his bag, said, “That might be a good idea, Kaitlin.”

“Now I said you’re none of you to worry about me and I meant it.” Kaitlin smiled. “Me brother had the consumption, and I tended him for a year before he passed.” She pushed a stray wisp of hair off her face with the back of her hand, adding, “I’m a hardy one.”

Dr. Winfield nodded as he snapped his black bag shut. “You’re one of the lucky ones, Kaitlin. Some people seem to have a natural immunity.”

Adela, standing in the doorway, suspected she might also be one of the lucky ones. Even Felicity didn’t know how often she sneaked into the sickroom to kiss her friend’s fevered brow—Felicity was often asleep and sometimes delirious—but Adela had never coughed once.

Felicity grew gaunt, and when the fever threatened to consume her they called the bishop. While he ministered to Felicity’s soul, Adela locked herself in her room and balled herself up on the floor, in a corner, trying to come to grips with the idea of a world without Felicity. It would be like a world without light, without the possibility of joy.

When Felicity’s fever broke, Mrs. Winfield allowed Adela to bring morning tea into the sickroom. Adela pushed Felicity around in a squeaky wooden pushchair, first around her room, then out in the hallway. When Felicity tried to stand, her legs, weak from lying so long in bed, buckled and gave out under her, but Adela caught her and held her up. After that, Adela came every day to wrap her arms around the patient and walk her around the room in a sort of clumsy dance. They did this every day, then twice a day and soon the girls were able to walk about together, hand in hand. In time, the sound of girlish laughter once again echoed through the house, and the doctor pronounced Felicity cured.

On Christmas Eve the following year, when the girls were fifteen, they were allowed a cup of wassail with dinner. Cook’s recipe called for hot ale mixed with hard cider, sugar, spices, and clove-studded apples. The girls thought it tasted bitter and much too strong, but they drank it anyway, suppressing grimaces, to show how grown up they were.

Later, in their shared room, they undressed for bed as usual by candlelight. Adela watched Felicity, in her white cotton bloomers and silk chemise, sitting in front of the oval mirror as she brushed a sheaf of glowing hair over one shoulder. Felicity still wore her pearls, which glowed in the candlelight, and the sight of her—it might have been the wassail, or Felicity’s small breasts browsing under the silk, or the pearls on her bare skin—the sight of her made Adela’s knees go weak. She felt confused and upset without understanding why, so she slipped on her nightdress and slid into bed, pretending to fall asleep immediately. Felicity thought it must be the effect of the wassail, and she eased into bed quietly, trying not to disturb her friend. The punch had indeed been strong, and she fell asleep very soon herself.

That night Adela watched Felicity sleep, and for the first time she acknowledged the true nature of her feelings. She held a trembling hand inches above her friend’s sleeping form, moving it over the contour of Felicity’s shoulders and along her arm, dipping at the waist, rising over the hip and down the length of her leg. There seemed to be a warm prickling current between her hand and Felicity’s body, which made Adela feel tingly and a little sick in the pit of her stomach. She took a long shuddering breath, then lay down and pulled the covers up to her chin. She wept as quietly as she could.

But she wasn’t quiet enough. Felicity woke to the rhythmic shaking of the bed and heard Adela’s stifled sobs. She didn’t have to turn and ask what was wrong. In a cloudy, half-understood way, she knew. She had noticed the soft-eyed way Adela looked at her and it was not the way girls normally looked at one another. She had felt
Adela’s hand lingering longer than necessary on her neck when she fastened the clasp on her pearls, and she had puzzled over the pressure of Adela’s thigh against hers when she sat close on the settee. She had only an imprecise grasp of what it all meant, but she knew Adela loved her differently from the way she loved Adela. She also knew Adela was good, Adela was her friend, and Felicity would not judge her.