Jane Steele(68)

“May I?” he asked.

“I don’t think I can walk,” I admitted. “I’m sorry, sir. This grows tedious.”

“You find falling from potentially fatal heights tedious?” he returned, but now the tone was less strident, and if I painted it with my own imaginings, it might almost have been called tender.

So Mr. Thornfield effortlessly carried me up the stairs, and when my arms were about his neck, I smelled not only the cigar he had smoked with Mr. Singh but also a faint, clean sandalwood aroma which must have been the man himself, and made me think of steep hills overlooking dry plains, and the sweetness which must surely linger in the air after the monsoons have passed beyond the Sutlej.





TWENTY



I felt at times, as if he were my relation, rather than my master: yet he was imperious sometimes still; but I did not mind that; I saw it was his way. So happy, so gratified did I become with this new interest added to life, that I ceased to pine after kindred: my thin crescent-destiny seemed to enlarge; the blanks of existence were filled up; my bodily health improved; I gathered flesh and strength.


A month passed, reader, before my investigations progressed, partly because for the next fortnight I could not walk.

If you have never lain in bed in your dressing gown, your ankle and knee shrieking as you try to confine yourself to a reasonable amount of laudanum, teaching a bright, babbling girl sitting at the end of your bed by day and fretting by night why the master of the house’s spirits will be improved when the dead start to speak, then I am glad for you. I was full of restless energy which could be discharged nowhere, as if I were a kettle coming to boil lacking lid or spout, and if I had exploded, I should not have been the least surprised.

For a week I suffered, uninterrupted by any save Sahjara, a maid bearing meals which included an improbable dish of plum pudding on the day I reasoned must have been Christmas, and Mrs. Garima Kaur, who delivered poultices I suspected came from Mr. Thornfield. These smelt of sage and vinegar and worked wonders for swelling. If I had been an object of wonderment to the housekeeper previously, now I was a nuisance, for she coolly assisted me with an air suggesting my falling down stairs was in poor taste. The fact that the master of the house had not visited chafed terribly, but I supposed it would hardly be proper for him to pass the hours in my bedroom, and he seemed to harbour a horror of making un-English blunders in my presence.

Meanwhile, I wanted him to make certain blunders very much indeed.

By day I taught Sahjara, who brought me unceasing small presents ranging from orange flower cakes to bouquets of jolly red berries; by night, I imagined my employer making the sort of inappropriate advances which would have made most governesses flee the estate forthwith, and in graphic detail, complete with bare thighs and calloused fingers and the diagonal notches which rest so sweetly above the hipbones when a gentleman is in training, as I had no doubt whatsoever Mr. Thornfield was.

Then one morning when I was fidgeting in my sheets, silver sunlight knifing through my curtains, I heard pounding steps hurtling down the corridor which could only have meant Sahjara. A knock preceded her entrance, but she did not wait for me to say “Come in,” and the words thus overlapped with her banging open the door.

“Miss Stone!” she cried, her dark eyes alight. “There’s a chair!”

I struggled to ascertain the import of this phrase.

“Charles has just brought it back in the carriage. A chair with wheels! He went to the village to get it, I think, and you’re to make yourself ready and then you can come down!”

I swiftly dressed in plain governess black with my hair pinned as tidily as my hair ever allows; no sooner had my small charge carefully tied my boots than Charles Thornfield appeared within the open door. Seeing him again after nearly a week without was a disproportionately stirring event, for I should not have cared so much over beholding a man with whom I had passed less than twenty-four hours’ time. He crossed his arms and leant against the frame, a sardonic quirk to his lips.

“Hullo, Young Marvel. Behold the Female Prodigy,” he announced. “She can tutor the pure ones, wield knives, and fall from dangerous altitudes with equal grace.”

I opened my mouth, glanced at Sahjara, and rolled my eyes instead.

“By Jove, is she trying not to swear at me in front of the child?”

He was correct, so I laughed. “Did you really find me a wheelchair, sir?”

Mr. Thornfield straightened, advancing. I have written that he was a man of medium height, not so tall as Sardar Singh, yet it seemed there was not sufficient space for him in this wide room, so great was his effect on me.

“It took rather more reconnaissance than I’d have liked, but the village physician had one in his attic, positively wreathed with cobwebs. One could scare tell it was a chair at all. Mrs. Garima Kaur has dusted it, naturally.”

“I’m so glad you’ll be downstairs with the rest of us!” Sahjara exclaimed, throwing her arms round my shoulders.

Blushing is not a habit of mine, but I am unused to raw sentiment being lobbed in my direction. As Mr. Thornfield took in this awkward scene, his ward clinging to me and then unselfconsciously racing away to do whatever Sahjara Kaur does when she isn’t on horseback, he looked uncertain whether to be delighted or dismayed, drawing a hand over the back of his neck in what I was learning to be a habitual gesture.