A Proper Education for Girls (19 page)

Lilian leaned out of her window. Already the garden had been transformed into a pond, the earth being too hard and dry to absorb such a quantity of water in so short a time. Even as she watched, the rain grew heavier, obscuring the neem tree behind an avalanche of water that thundered onto the ground. For the rest of that morning Lilian and Selwyn sat on the veranda watching the inky-black water
falling from the sky. The sound of it hammering on the roof above was deafening and served to render what passed for conversation between them impossible. Selwyn rejected lunch, complaining about the humidity. He retreated into his study.

Lilian stayed out on the veranda and carefully composed a letter in code to Alice. She had no idea whether it would ever reach her, but she knew that she had to try something. She was becoming increasingly distressed by Alice's lack of communication and surprised by their father's continuing diligence in policing his remaining daughter's behavior. She suspected Dr. Cattermole's influence lay behind this censorship, and this filled her with a sense of foreboding.

It took her more than an hour to write her coded letter. She went over it again and again until it sounded as bland and innocent as possible, its hidden message brief but to the point. After such a length of time outside the paper seemed to have absorbed the moisture in the atmosphere like blotting paper, so that the words looked as though they had been darned onto the page with black wool. But she had no time to write another if she was to sneak it, undetected, into Selwyn's post bag. As an afterthought, she slipped into the envelope the photograph Captain Forbes had taken.

Afterward, she brought out her sketchbook and leafed through its pages, looking over her drawings.

“Lilian!”

She looked up. The rain had stopped, though the sky still seethed angrily with large black clouds. Mr. Hunter was standing in a pool of water beneath the neem tree. Lilian had been busy finishing her paintings and packaging them up to be sent home and had not been to meet him in the bazaar for almost seven days. He approached the veranda across the sodden lawn with a dejected but hungry look on his face.

“Can you meet me tonight?” he whispered. “I've been waiting every evening this past week and you have never come.”

“I've been busy,” said Lilian. “And the rain … it prevents me from going anywhere.”

“Please, Lily.” Mr. Hunter made as though to mount the steps of the veranda.

“Good heavens, Tom. Someone will see you,” cried Lilian. What risks he was taking! The garden was not overlooked, but a bearer could appear at any moment and there was always a chance that native gossip would reach the ears of Mrs. Birchwoode. She hurried down to stand beside him on the grass, so that she might whisper her reproaches. Her shoes sank into the mud. “You must go. You can't come here like this. And look at you. You are soaked to the skin!” She put out a hand to push him gently back the way he had come. Her feet, clad only in a flimsy pair of morocco leather slippers, slithered on the filthy ground. All at once, startled by the unexpected movement, Lilian lost her balance completely. She cried out as she was catapulted violently into Mr. Hunter's outstretched arms.

Mr. Hunter squeezed her ecstatically to his breast. “Oh, Lily!” he whispered. “My darling.” He kissed her hair, her eyes and cheeks, seemingly overcome with joy that she had flung herself at him with such ungoverned enthusiasm.

“No,” cried Lilian. She thrashed about, trying to extricate herself without causing them both to topple over into the mud. Mr. Hunter held her tightly. His breath was warm and eager against her cheek. He kissed her neck, nibbled her ear, and ran a hand over her slim, uncorseted waist. “Run away with me,” he whispered.

“Run away,” snapped Lilian before she could stop herself. “That's what you do best, isn't it?”

“What?” Mr. Hunter froze. He had been attempting to bury his face in her bosom, but he raised his head now and blinked at her in surprise. How angry she sounded. And shrewish too!

Lilian groaned at her unguarded stupidity (and immediately hoped that Mr. Hunter might mistake the sound for a moan of desire). She could not falter now. Without hesitating, she pressed her lips to his and pushed herself against him in a way she knew he enjoyed. She extricated one of her arms, and rubbed energetically at the front of his breeches with her hand, as though attempting to
entice a genie from a lamp. This too, she recalled, had always distracted him. Mr. Hunter gasped and closed his eyes.

And then, to Lilian's relief, the rain started again, the monsoon waters thundering down upon them to wash his ardor into the mud.

T
OWARD DINNERTIME, THE
rain stopped once again, though it was obvious from the ferocious blackness of the clouds that this was simply another hiatus. Lilian found Selwyn asleep in his study. When she woke him he was twitchy.

“What is it, woman? Can't you see I'm sleeping? And no, I don't want anything to eat. Nothing edible comes out of that cookhouse anyway.” He closed his eyes again and swallowed painfully, rubbing the back of his neck. “My throat hurts and my head is throbbing. Just leave me in peace—unless you're going to tell me that you've a piece of toasted cheddar on warm soda bread for me. No? Well then, go back to your scribbles and daubs and shut the door behind you. And mind you, don't slam it—even the sound of your voice sets my nerves a-jangling.”

When asked later, Lilian had been unable to say whether her husband was any more irritable than usual that evening. The fact that he had complained of a headache and a sore throat was, again, not unusual. Indeed, she would have been more surprised if he had not grumbled about some aspect of his health, as every day he seemed to be afflicted with one malady or another that demanded rest, or a few drops of laudanum, or a cold compress to the forehead, or a nap on his
charpoy
beneath the cooling waft of the
punkah
. So she had left him in his study and dined alone without thinking anything of it, listening all the while to the sound of the rain hammering on the roof and pouring into the muddied torrent that had once been her garden.

As she finished her turkey breast
with pilau
and curry, Lilian noticed that the rain had stopped again. The air was dense with a suffocating moisture, so that she began to wonder whether such sweating dampness was an improvement, after all, on the dry, burning
heat they had endured over recent months. She got up and opened the screens over the windows. A small insect flew in, coming to rest on the tablecloth beside her left hand. She looked at it closely. It appeared to be some sort of white ant with wings. As it landed, however, it shook its wings free, leaving them discarded on the tabletop. As she watched, another one landed next to a dish of pickles and a third and fourth beside, and in, the water jug. Another fizzed and crackled as it plunged directly into the flame of the lamp on the table. Lilian suddenly sensed what was to follow, and she called to a bearer to put the screens back over the windows. But it was too late. Even as she spoke a cloud of flying ants poured into the room. In less than an instant they were everywhere—in her ears and eyes and hair, filling her open mouth, crawling across her hands and her clothes, and shedding their thin paper wings to gather like drifts of confetti about the room. As Lilian sprang to her feet another plague of them surged in, dousing the lamp with a splutter, their charred bodies filling the air with a sickening sweetish smell. In no time at all the floor and the tabletop, the mantelpiece, the plate she had only recently eaten from, were littered with papery wings and seething with hastily moving bodies.

“Get the screens up,” cried Lilian again. “Quickly.” And yet even as the swarm of ants abated they were followed by a different pestilence. A cloud of flying beetles burst after them as though in pursuit—small black buzzing things whose tiny legs tickled her skin as they scurried over the backs of her hands, around her neck and down her arms. As she swept them away in disgust they emitted a terrible smell, so that she was forced to hold her hand to her mouth as she dashed from the room leaving the bearers to struggle with the screens as best they could in the whirling half dark.

In the hall Lilian brushed the remainder of the insects off her skin and out of her hair. She shuddered. It was the smell from the beetles rather than the quantity of them that appalled her—that and the tickling of falling wings and tiny feet … And then, from behind the closed door of Selwyn's study she heard a scream.

Lilian opened the study door and peered into the gloom. Selwyn
was in the middle of the room with his fly whisk in his hand, spinning round and round and surrounded by a whirling tornado of ants and beetles. He was dressed in his shirtsleeves, as the evening had been warm and sticky, and the gleaming whiteness of his flapping garments seemed to be drawing the creatures hungrily toward him. Since they had already extinguished one lamp with the weight of their embraces, Selwyn's shirt appeared to them as another, more benign light source, a glowing, billowing whiteness that they could not resist and that they circled and fell upon and clung on to lovingly. Selwyn gave another cry and whirled among his insect tormentors like a dervish, his fly whisk flailing in his hand. And then Lilian noticed something else. Her husband's face was rigid, set in a grinning rictus of anguish. His body jerked and flapped, but she could see that there was something uncontrolled about his movements. He spun without stopping, his eyes staring, his grin ghastly between cheeks dark with crawling beetles. And then he fell down, still jerking like a marionette, onto the floor. Ants and beetles swarmed and fizzed over him like a coat of bubbling treacle.

Lilian heard herself screaming for help. She rushed to him and swept aside the sea of insects, but more came instantly to replace them, and still Selwyn twitched uncontrollably beneath her hands. Although it seemed an eternity, it was only a few moments before she and two bearers were dragging him into the hall, slamming the study door behind them.

By the time the doctor came, Lilian had managed to remove all the insects from Selwyn's person, and he was stripped and lying on his
charpoy
beneath a clean sheet. He seemed to be quieter, but his body still convulsed painfully. More disconcertingly, his teeth remained clenched tight, the tendons in his neck stretched taut beneath the skin like rigging, his lips drawn back in a leer so grotesque that Lilian could not bring herself to look at him.

Dr. Mossly put his bag on the washstand. He took one look at Selwyn and shook his head. “Lockjaw,” he said grimly.

He examined Selwyn's hand where the tiger had grazed his knuckles.

“And what can you do for him?” Lilian forced herself to look at her husband's grinning face.

Dr. Mossly shrugged. “Sedation. Bleeding to remove the poisons and relax the system.”

“And these treatments are successful?”

“Well, it depends how extensively the poison has traveled through the body. I must say the convulsions and other symptoms have manifested themselves after quite a long period, which leads me to fear the worst.” He rolled his sleeves up. “I have a jar of leeches in my bag, Mrs. Fraser. If you could provide me with some linen to mop up afterward, I would be much obliged.”

F
OR THE NEXT
fourteen days, Dr. Mossly spent much of his time with Lilian at Selwyn's bedside. He would arrive with his leeches—shiny strips of black slime in a jar—and leave with them as fat and round as billiard balls, each bloated with Selwyn's poisoned blood. Every few hours Lilian or Dr. Mossly would try to dribble water and laudanum between Selwyn's clenched teeth and would sponge his thrashing, twitching limbs with cool damp cloths. Every movement in the room, every sound they made, awoke in his body a convulsion of such violence that it seemed as though his sinews would snap. His
charpoy
was continually soaked in sweat so that Lilian had to change the sheet beneath him again and again, despite the jumping of his limbs caused by even the slightest touch from the bearers who lifted him.

In the intervals between deluges of rain, Mrs. Birchwoode, Mrs. Ravelston, and Mrs. Toomey visited Lilian and fortified her with tales of recovery—soldiers who had endured the amputation of entire limbs, who had developed blood poisoning and gangrene and lockjaw all at once, had risen up to fight another day. Lilian thanked them for their concern and they went away, convinced that poor Mrs. Fraser had been encouraged by these fictitious solicitations.

Captains Wheeler and Lewis from the barracks also paid a visit. They had with them the tiger skin, which they had brought in the
hope that the sight would cheer up Selwyn. But the
sepoy
who had cured it had been less proficient than either man liked to admit. They unrolled it, causing Dr. Mossly to gag into his bandage box at the stench of rotting flesh, turpentine, and mildew. The officers hastily rolled it up again, claiming that such a smell was quite normal from cured skins and that it would disappear in only a few days. They left it in a bundle outside on the veranda. As soon as they were out of sight Lilian ordered it to be taken away and burned.

Regardless of all Dr. Mossly's efforts, Selwyn continued to decline. His face became gray, his breathing became labored, his body grew thinner and thinner. Lilian sat at Selwyn's bedside, his favorite ivory-handled fly whisk in her hand, swiping at the mosquitoes that buzzed speculatively back and forth above him. She looked at his grinning face and staring eyes and found she had got used to this fearsome expression. But even when she contemplated his impending death, which she knew to be almost certain, she felt nothing for him at all.