Jane Steele(52)

A trunk.

I swear upon my copy of Jane Eyre that my interest in Sahjara’s tale was based in both fascination and goodwill; I wanted to know more about her, and I badly wanted to know more about Mr. Charles Thornfield, who had callously flouted my poor pupil’s request and stayed away longer than a few days.

“What else do you remember?”

Her eyes grew unfocused, as if peering through fogged glass. “Our house in Lahore, its balcony. It smelled like livestock and incense in the streets, which were very busy with all the Afghani horse traders, and the merchants bargaining over oranges and goats, and the fortune-tellers at tables divining from maps of the stars. I remember huge walls with heavy guns, white mosques like turnips.” She charmingly screwed her face into a pucker. “It’s still an awful muddle. I don’t even know what the wars were for.”

Mindful of my role, I cudgelled my brains and drew embarrassing blanks. The Sikhs’ Khalsa army was by all accounts a ferocious one—sharp as a pistol crack, and just as keen to hack our East India Company to bits after the first war ended as they had been at the starting gate. Predictably, they had emerged thirsty for blood two years later, and countless British and Punjabi soldiers had blown one another’s pates off before the Sikh Empire went the way of the Roman one. I knew this meant outrageous riches for Her Majesty; when I opened my mouth to unmuddle the situation for my pupil, however, I found I knew nothing whatsoever else.

“Did Mr. Thornfield never recover your trunk?”

“No, though he tried.” Sahjara stretched upon the rug like a lean little cat. “It must be lost forever now.”

Voice quite composed, I said, “Sahjara, I know we’re strangers, and you needn’t speak of your parents, nor the past—but you may if you wish, all right?”

She stood, outlined now against the dimming December sunset, for we had not turned up the lamps. “Oh, were you curious over my parents? Charles says my father was a Company man and my mother a Sikh princess. It’s horrid but I can’t recall them. There was the sword through the tent flap, and the trunk went missing, and I had horses to tend to, I think—but I don’t recall much from the Punjab other than Charles.”

Sahjara fetched her warmest cloak from where she had thrown it two hours previous, her governess too slovenly a creature to have noticed.

“Give Dalbir my best,” I instructed.

“If Charles returns, send someone to fetch me?”

“Of course.”

“Charles likes you,” she added as she skipped towards the door. “I’ve never seen him like anyone so fast. He actually shook your hand.”

Following this obscure observation, she disappeared, and I was left once more to ponder the enigmas of my new household. Then, lacking other occupation and knowing I had an hour till supper, a subtle electric pulse thrumming in my boot soles, I likewise donned my warmest things and quit the main house in the opposite direction, marching silently for my cottage and whatever—whomever—I might find there.





SIXTEEN



It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.


If you expected to find yourself in a Gothic snowscape, reader, ears tickling with spectral whispers as the plucky protagonist breaks into a cottage haunted by the shades of her past, regrettably you are mistaken.

The door was already unlocked. Opening the panel of the small lantern I had brought, I discovered that my erstwhile home was carpeted in grit and vermin droppings, and furthermore that spiders are the most industrious creatures alive.

Slowly, my ears adjusted; no ticking of clocks greeted me, no exclamations of alarm. The place had been emptied, and not merely of its few antiques—even the bedding and the better chairs were dispatched. A pang struck me at the thought of faithful, nonsensical Agatha turned out to pasture—or worse, deceased—but I could do her no better service than to press on, so press on I did.

The kitchen was mouldering, the parlour decrepit, my mother’s bedroom sacked and empty, which hurt my chest terribly, and still I could not bring myself to quit the place. Creeping up to the garret was a whim; I knew I must be back soon to sit with Sahjara over another brilliantly orange curry, swallowing questions down my gullet.

I will have a peek at the attic space, then be done.

And what did I behold but my mother’s old wooden trunk, resting in a corner. I dived for its dust-soft handle and heaved open its lid; an explosion of dry grime and a short stack of letters met my gaze, and my fingers discovered the papers were indeed corporeal. I think I had been half expecting leprechaun gold in that cottage, or at least small, strange men proposing dangerous quests. Instead I held foolscap with ink scrawled over it, ink which might very well tell me what I had inherited and what I might venture to do about it.

To escape with the sole prize I had come seeking, save Agatha herself, seemed altogether too good to be true: but I did, and twenty minutes hence had stowed my treasure under my mattress without a single person knowing I had left the main house at all.

? ? ?

What became of the original staff?” I asked, sniffing at a plate of heartily spiced potato and cabbage with mustard seeds. “Surely this place was populated by English servants, before.”