Jane Steele(70)

This surprised me. “I thought she knew very little English?”

“Spoken like a true colonialist—didn’t matter a fig back then, there were only a pocketful of us. She probably figured it beneath her, never did warm to whites much, come to think of it. She speaks Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, and Pashto something spectacular, and that’s all Sardar required.”

“And now she’s a housekeeper.”

“Well, what with Sardar a butler and all, she can’t be too miffed.”

Smiling, I leant my head against the cushion of my chair. “Tell me more.”

“More of what, you impudent elf?”

“Anything. Everything. Your parents survived the wars, I take it, since they still needed a staff? And why did you leave them in the first place—why study medicine?”

“Miss Stone,” he drawled, “if I did not know better, I would think I intrigued you.”

“You do intrigue me.”

I said this without a trace of guile. A British chap might have been chagrined over such an open display, but Mr. Thornfield only settled farther back into his armchair.

“Do you know, Miss Stone, that you are exceptional?”

“I have been told so, but never in complimentary light.”

Mr. Thornfield’s jaw twitched. “That was undeserved on your part, and therefore I will answer you. My parents are still in Lahore, and survived both wars without so much as a scratch. I should be proud of them if it were the done thing to be proud of privateers bleeding Company executives dry; I ought to be delighted, in fact, as it all comes to me in the end and now they have ten times the population of expatriates to drain to the dregs. Pardon, you might mistake me; I cherish my parents, but they are not suitable subjects for small talk.”

“Neither are we.”

This time he laughed freely. “Quite right, Miss Stone—if misfits cannot converse amongst themselves, then who can? Very well, my parents are brazen criminals and I elected to study medicine because I have always been fascinated by the impermanence of the human body. Does that answer your question?”

I shook my head, waiting for him to continue.

“Becoming a charlatan and a cheat never appealed to me,” Mr. Thornfield admitted. “My parents are crafty rather than malicious, but damned if I share their tastes—medicine meant studying mortality, in a sense. The Sikh holy book contains plentiful passages about flesh, and since my parents were about as interested in religion as they were in sobriety, I learnt from Sardar and his family. ‘We are vessels of flesh. . . . The soul taketh its abode in flesh. . . . Women, men, kings, and emperors spring from flesh.’ Sikhs are very—how shall I put it delicately?—straightforward about flesh. It was a comfort to me that they thought souls separate from lungs and livers, this sack of bones and blood we daily maintain, and I thought there was romance in medicine’s efforts to stave off the inevitable. This was when I was young and thick as a marble bust, you understand,” he added with a dour expression.

“I adore the macabre,” I confessed. “I used to supplement my governess’s income by selling last confessions in tea shops and the like.”

“Good Lord! Miss Stone, I find it difficult to picture you peddling gallows doggerel.”

“No more should you, sir, for it was prose, and I always chose the most poignant subjects, as if by placing hard words upon a page, like so many stones, my own heart would not be so heavy.”

Mr. Thornfield ran a finger over his chin. “If your writing was half as good as what you just said, Miss Stone, then I should very much like to read it.”

“Oh, they’re long gone,” I demurred, though my eyes must have shone at the praise. “They harmed no one and interested me—what sort of occupation could be better?”

“Well, there you have it. Medicine was honest work, and I had always wanted to see the place where my parents met, so I fled the Punjab at precisely the wrong time, in order to pursue a career which I’ve never practised outside of a war.”

“Surely you saved lives when you returned?”

He made no reply, his face so fixed that I imagined that I had turned him to stone.

“A few, perhaps,” he said at length.

I knew better than to press this point. “What did you think of London?”

Relieved I had shifted topics, Mr. Thornfield answered readily. “It’s filthy, and wet, and hides a brutal soul behind majestic walls. Its people are alternately snobbish or base, and if I didn’t come from a culture of warriors, I’d say it was the most savage city I’d ever seen. I thought it glorious, of course, from the instant it sullied my boots.”

“I loved it as well.”

“Yes, and if there are bits of yourself which you should prefer to toss in the gutter . . .”

“You can shed your skin.”

“And no one the wiser.”

“Still. It was by far the most crowded place I’ve ever been lonesome,” I added, staring into my glass.

“That ought not to have been the case, Miss Stone,” he said quietly. “I know very little about you, but I know you would be absolute rubbish at solitude. Your relish for companionship is clear as print.”

Tripping steps sounded, and Sahjara entered the room with her face alight, wearing a dressing gown over her nightdress. Rushing to Mr. Thornfield, she tugged at his sleeve. “Charles, I’ve had the most wonderful idea, and Sardar says he’ll only do it if you promise to join him, and of course I will as well though I’m not so good as either of you, but I’ll make up for it on horseback I’d wager, and Miss Stone will be so pleased after having been cooped up indoors for so long.”