Jane Steele (23 page)

Walls tilted and furniture swam, and perhaps ten minutes later Mr. Thornfield was not shouting for anything anymore, merely gazing with dark satisfaction at what seemed a corpse and a crimson pond upon our floorboards.

The fact of my fifth murder at first slid off my consciousness like water from a goose feather; but I knew instinctually I could not remain in the same room with the dead man lazing in the pool of blood. Wrenching myself upright, I attempted a graceful exit.

“Wait a moment, Jane!” Mr. Thornfield cried.

“I can’t stay here.”

“You’re reeling from hurt and shock, you’ll injure—”

“Don’t touch me!”

We stared at each other, I in astonishment I had rebuffed him and he in chagrin he had startled me so. His thin grey gloves were covered with the other man’s gore, his shirt and waistcoat too, for he had been practicing his profession automatically, I believe, tending to the injured in spite of everything, and I was ready to splinter into a thousand mirror shards reflecting every memory of my own ugliness. Mr. Singh arrived bearing a mop and a bucket of soapy water and stopped, taking measure of the situation.

“Charles.” He passed his friend the cleaning supplies. “Miss Stone, will you let me walk beside you to the morning room?”

I started to speak, but clutched at his elbow rather than continue.

Mr. Singh ducked his cloth-bound head against my throbbing scalp in a glancing touch; Mr. Thornfield spread his arms as if in supplication, but since I could not speak, neither to protest the tainted innocence of accident nor beg forgiveness for guilt, I walked away. Mr. Singh accompanied me and, when we were in the morning room, I crossed to the divan and collapsed.

I could not see the shadow which tangled with mine as Sardar Singh hovered over me; I smelt him, though, warm nutmeg and the clean wintry sweat which accompanies a trek on horseback in January, and I fought not to weep at the strange comfort of it.

“Miss Stone, I am no doctor, but Charles will be here shortly, and in the meanwhile you’ve nothing whatsoever to fear. Are you injured in any sense we’re not aware of?”

“No.”

“Thank God for that, then,” he said as his footfalls grew fainter. “And thank God we were early in returning—we should have been here around midday tomorrow had we not been loath to leave the property unprotected.”

He knelt on the carpet before me with a glass of brandy when he returned; I swallowed it, and the searing of my bruised throat brought me back to myself. When I could focus, I saw that Mr. Singh regarded me as he might a casualty of a war he had started, and I did not think I could bear that expression.

“All this will pass,” said I, unsteadily.

“I am glad you think so.”

I wanted to elaborate—in this impossible future, I would not have just murdered yet another man, Sahjara would break mighty stallions, Mr. Thornfield would love me, and everyone would lose the look we had of folk waiting for the axe to fall.

“I think about many things that aren’t true, even say them sometimes,” I confessed instead, and his mouth tugged fathoms deep.

“Miss Stone, there is nothing I can do to relieve your pain over what just occurred. But I had a sister once, and in a way—in a very
English
way,” he amended, “you remind me of her. I don’t think that anyone who reminds me of my sister ought to feel so melancholy about herself, though I understand you must be in a state of extreme distress.”

You really cannot imagine what sort of state I am in
.

“Did I kill him?”

“Yes,” said he.

I bit my lip, that sharp hurt dulling the ache in my chest. “Was your sister beautiful?”

Mr. Singh smiled. I have visited many churchyards, both as inspiration for gallows ballads and for perverse pleasure, and it was the smile I had found on the carved angels’ faces—peaceful but eroding.

“Indeed she was. Her name was Karman, and do you know, that sealed her fate, I think.”

“What does it mean?”

“‘Doer of deeds.’ Charles will never tell you this, but I was always a pacifist at heart. Oh, I am a skilled warrior, as is our honour and the will of God. But ‘Let compassion be your mosque,’ the Guru states, and if you were to discuss compassion with a Khalsa
naik
*
today . . .” He shrugged.

I tucked my arm under my pulsating head. “But your sister was a fighter?”

“The great Maharajah Ranjit Singh would have been hard-pressed to win a battle with my sister,” Mr. Singh reflected. “Karman, from the time she was small, was wildly passionate. She loved the Khalsa in the new ways, with sharp swords and fat jewels and daring feats, whilst I loved it in the old ways, with meditation and acceptance.
‘Whom should I despise, since the one Lord made us all?’ If you were to have asked Karman, she would have spat, ‘The British and the Bengali strumpets who service them.’ Then she would have laughed and shouted, ‘
Khalsa-ji!
’ and you may have thought it merriment, but there was war in her eyes from the age of five, and later, men adored her for it. I did not blame them. I loved her before they did, after all.”

“You were a good brother to her.”

“Oh, yes,” he scoffed. “I taught her to fight with the
tulwar
, the
chakkar
, just as I did Charles, when I ought to have taught her meditation.”

“Did it grieve you, that you were so different?”

“A little—but people cannot help being who they are.”

“They can help the things they do because of who they are, however.”

“Are you merely shaken, or are you often distressed by who you are?” Mr. Singh inquired gently.

“Either.” I laughed. “Both, perhaps. I don’t know.”

“‘If I say I am perishable, it will not avail me; but if I truly know I am perishable
,
it will.’ Miss Stone, pardon me for asking, but . . . do you ever think about death?”

Only of the many deaths I’ve caused, and my mother’s, and my own, and every day.

When I held my tongue, Mr. Singh pressed my wrist. “You do, I see. Then you are far closer to God than you think you are. I must go help Charles.”

“Mr. Singh,” I called after him with tears in my eyes, “will you tell me what your name was? Before?”

Hesitating, he replied, “Aazaad was my name. It means ‘free of care.’”

“And why did you change it?”

This time, he did not pause.

“Because it did not suit me anymore, Miss Stone,” he replied, shutting the door softly as he went.

Rolling onto my stomach, I buried my head in my arms and wept. I have seen, employed as a literary phrase, that characters
wept as though the world were ending
; the world ending, I thought, would be better than continuing to deceive compassionate people, lying from dawn to dusk because to stop lying would mean ceasing to be entangled with them.

•   •   •

W
hen I awoke, I felt perfectly at ease though my pate shrieked with pain, and someone was tenderly cleaning the wound with a damp cloth.

I think Mr. Thornfield sensed my wakefulness due to my stilling rather than stirring. A knee was wedged behind the curve of my lower back, and the quilt covered me from neck to toe. I quickly realised it was impossible for him to work with such delicacy of touch whilst still wearing blood-crusted gloves.

The sea could have parted in the centre and it would not have felt as open as I did then, the whorls of his fingertips parting my already scattered tresses.

“Jane, please speak a word if only to berate me. You’ve done a damn sight more than I tonight, but grant me this single further favour.”

I could think of nothing to say, however.

“Darling? Jane, for heaven’s sake, only live and let fly at me with all the abuse you like and you’ll make me a happy man.”

My lungs produced a frightful sound, and he crossed one arm over my torso diagonally, as if protecting me from falling.

“Will you pardon me for murdering someone in your drawing room?” I breathed.

“Oh, Jane.” His voice was wracked, vibrating through me, but I shook for more reasons than I liked to think about.

He handled my hair with bare hands, though he never brushed my skin, and I registered sharp hurts, and glass draughts smelling of herbs and strong spirits against my lips and my head. He dried the tear in my scalp, and washed the blood from my locks in a porcelain bowl, and as dawn approached he lifted a tendril of my hair up to his lips even as I fell asleep in his arms, kissing it as though his heart were
breaking.

Mr. Rochester did, on a future occasion, explain it.

I
did not awaken for many hours, though neither did I sleep; my consciousness thinned into a filmy half-awareness, and when I did feel the slow burn of sunlight drifting across my face, I heard a chair creak.

“Jane?”

“Is there water?”

“Of course.”

Mr. Thornfield seemed never to have quit the room. Thirst quenched after the glass had been held to my lips, I discovered I was not as hurt as I had supposed. Yes, I had killed a man in front of two respected friends; yes, I had then acted like an abominable weakling; but, no, my cranium had not cracked, only torn, and I found myself staring glassy-eyed at a haggard Mr. Thornfield.

It would do him discredit to pretend he was unmoved, but I hesitate to set down how distressed he was in fact, his countenance as pale as if he were the one who had been strangled.

“I thought when I saw you with that pepperbox
*
against your
throat . . .” He made an abortive movement. “Jane, I hardly know how to speak to you.”

“As the governess would suit.” I sighed, shifting my knees.

“No, it bloody well would
not.
As the woman I acted a cad towards in the morgue downstairs, or the woman who saved my skin last night?”

“Please don’t, sir. You never acted a cad, and I never saved you.”

“You saved me sure as God saved Isaac.”

My mind could not seem to light upon important subjects, only trivial ones. “How do you know that story?”

“Sardar could write a book entitled
A Thousand and One Useless Meditations.
He knows all when it comes to retribution and forgiveness.”

“Not all, or he’d have taught us both to stop hating ourselves. Who was it I killed?”

“Jane, I am hesitant to—”

“Don’t I deserve to know? Sahjara and I both were at risk, and had you not arrived when you did . . .”

His flinch told me he knew I was right, but he took his time: pouring a pair of neat Scotches, passing me one.

“I am all attention, sir.”

Mr. Thornfield’s chest gave a small heave, and then he abruptly drew his hand over his mouth and sat down close beside me on the divan.

“Where should I begin?”

“Try the beginning.”

“What was the beginning? The wars were years in coming,” he said softly. “Believe me or don’t, or ask Sardar, but it didn’t even occur to the British to conquer the Punjab until the Sikh ruling class started dangling it in their faces as if they were
cunchunees.
*
It was
too well fortified, y’see. The Khalsa army was the best in the world, and they
wanted
to march—on Delhi, on London. Geography was never their top marks, bless ’em, but so long as they stayed in the Punjab, they were unbeatable.”

“Yet they were still beaten.” I sipped the amber liquid. “Mr. Singh called the Company rapists, and the Sikh royalty their pimps.”

Mr. Thornfield nodded as his knuckles met his lips. “I can still see the Khalsa parading on the
doab
*
when I was thirteen: a hundred thousand strong marching in such perfect order a Geneva watch would have dashed itself to pieces forthwith. Sapphire turbans, red feathers thrusting from round steel helms, emerald jackets and scarlet jackets and indigo jackets, every jab of the light infantry’s bayonets into the sandbags precise enough to kill a gnat. If you’ve never seen dozens of war elephants draped in crimson, there ain’t a way to describe what happens to your stomach. As for the horses—if you watched their white chargers at parade exercise, you could almost grasp why ‘He made intuition his horse, and chastity his saddle’ is in the Guru.”

“How could the monarchy have wanted to throw away its own empire?”

“They didn’t want to throw away their empire, that would have been
ridiculous
,” he drawled. “They wanted to keep it—keep the palaces and the stuffed coffers and the all-night debauches with man, woman, and donkey—and throw away their army. You build a fighting force that strong, what do you suppose they’re keen to do after breakfast and a spot of coffee?”

“Fight,” I realised.

He nodded, staring at his sleeve. “When the royals figured out they’d created an uncontrollable army, they got the trots, and arranged for John Bull to slaughter ’em.”

“You cannot mean that is truly what happened?” I exclaimed, horrified.

“I can, I was there. Anyhow. There were too many ghastly betrayals to recount, and when the Director of the Company understood that the area was about as stable as a rocking horse, years before the fighting started, he began to send . . . emissaries.”

“Spies,” I supplied.

“Oh, Jane,” he said warmly, and for a spear-flash moment, he was here with me and not long ago and far away. “Spies, yes. The Company soldiers always rather despised the politicals because the latter gorged over greasy state dinners and the former got shot full of holes, but some of these were good eggs.”

“John Clements,” I suggested, remembering the half story I had been told regarding the funeral.

“Aye, save he’d the brains of a fly whisk. In any event, Lahore grew a bit thicker with white men, though never so’s you’d notice unless you were British yourself.” The smile he attempted fell yards short of the mark. “I noticed, though, and my mother and father—didn’t
they
fleece the sheep. ‘Oh, have you seen the Pearl Mosque yet?’ and then, ‘If a pipe’s in your line, guv’ner, won’t you share one with me?’ and before long they were rooking the lot. One of these Company interlopers was, as you know, a consummate worm by the name of Augustus Sack. Sack’s assistant was John Clements, and the third player in this happy pantomime . . .”

“David Lavell,” I supplied. “Sahjara’s father.”

“Yes.” Mr. Thornfield coughed. “Yes, he was that as well. So. David Lavell . . . he was five years older than I when he arrived in Lahore, ostensibly to conduct border discussions, but really to take the measure of every toady he could tattle back to Delhi regarding. My family was brown as a nut by then, and Augustus Sack cut too ridiculous a figure for the Sikh to credit him—and if the superior is
absurd, why should they mind John Clements trailing after him like a spaniel? But David Lavell was one of your strapping soldier types. For face furniture, the man was a palace. Adonis’s brow, blinding teeth, you see the portrait I’m painting.”

As I did not trust myself not to say,
he could never be so handsome as you,
I kept my peace.

“He was also charming.” Mr. Thornfield spoke the word as if it cut his lips. “Lavell could talk an elephant in
musth
*
out of charging and, in a cunning way, there were brains in his head. Witness him flatter the jewels off a
kunwar
*
one moment! Gape as he drops a hint and ruins an officer’s chances for advancement the next! Two-faced? Whoreson bugger had a hundred of ’em, and you hardly minded when your pockets were empty and your mother cashiered.”

“You didn’t get on.”

“Is she truly teasing me?” He sighed fondly. “No, Jane, we didn’t get on, but when he discovered that the Thornfield family was quite close to Sardar’s, and that loot flowed down our street like rain down a gutter, he began popping round uninvited.”

“That is how you and Mr. Singh and the other two British politicals all became acquainted?”

“Yes, and would the Director had sent the devil himself to Lahore first.” Mr. Thornfield’s face darkened, as if I could see the spiritual bruise beneath the sun-bronzed features. He shifted, seeming to steel himself, drawing a knee up to rest on the sofa beside me. “Did Sardar ever mention to you he had a sister?”

Oh
, I thought, my heart breaking for them.

“Karman Kaur,” I replied, proud that I kept my voice steady.

Charles Thornfield’s lips wavered, but he did not shrink. “I knew
her from the cradle, as she was my closest friend’s sibling and was always besting me at sword fighting. Sardar’s physiognomy has been hidden under that magnificent bush ever since he was old enough to grow one, that’s their custom—but you can guess at it, can’t you, and she looked very like him.”

“Brown skin, grey eyes, slender nose with a fine crook to it, full lower lip. Yes, I can see her.”

“I’m glad, Jane,” he said, equally low. “It was laughable how arresting she was. Karman was all fire and fight, and if she had been Maharani instead of Jindan Kaur,
*
tens of thousands of the Khalsa would be alive today, because she would have crushed any army who dared to say boo to her.”

“Mr. Singh implied that she was considerably more combative than he.”

“Wasn’t she just!” A smile died before it reached Mr. Thornfield’s lips. “But she had a soft side; deucedly handy with children, not to mention horses—you see where Sahjara caught the itch, at least that’s part of it—and a laugh that carried clear to Kandahar. Sardar always preferred studying the Guru to the
chakkar
; he just happens to be damnably talented. Karman, though—the three of us once forded all five rivers of the Punjab on horseback as a dare to ourselves, seeing as Ranjit Singh had managed it. Sardar was half a man by the end, I nearly drowned twice, but Karman? I think the daft girl wanted to do it again.”

“You loved her very much.”

“Not enough for her to notice,” came his answer. “But yes.”

A silence followed, one tempered by the whispering of the fire and the knowledge that outside, the sun was rising and the wind singing arias to the elms. Mr. Thornfield’s sadness must have been
excruciating; but mine was strangely sweet for, though it pained me, the mere fact of the melancholy meant that he had taken me into his confidence, and so I wrapped myself in it all the tighter.

When I returned from my reverie, Mr. Thornfield was passing me another large glass of spirits. “To your health, Jane.”

“And yours, Mr. Thornfield.”

“Where to continue? Ah, David Lavell. The cur took a shine to Karman, because he had eyes in his head, and Karman took an equal shine to Lavell, thanks to that perverse rule of Nature which causes pearls to cast themselves before swine. As a female yourself, can you account for this oddity of science, Jane?”

“In some cases, it’s because the pearls know themselves grains of sand at heart, though I cannot imagine that should have been the case for Karman.”

Pained laughter escaped Mr. Thornfield’s chest. “No, her opinion of herself was middling favourable. Perhaps they shared that in common, and God knows that when it came to flattering the Sikhs, to the point of convincing ’em defeating the Company would only be a matter of three or four cavalry and half an hour’s botheration, Lavell was a master. From the moment they took up together, I was an object to be pitied, which is a state I do not care for.”

I remembered the cracked cloud cover of a London sky a few months after Clarke left me—brain pulsing fit to leak out my ears, covered in dew, observed by a silent beggar whose legs had been lost at the knees and had likewise slept rough in the park. “I understand.”

“It was piss on the wound that it was my own fault.” Mr. Thornfield took a hearty swallow. “The three of us had been inseparable—studying, shooting, riding out to the Jupindar rocks to drink French brandy filched from my parents and laugh until we were sick. I had assumed her mine already. I was a dunce, carousing with
flighty
houri
s
*
who meant nothing to me and then smoking
bhang
*
with Sardar and Karman—they were family, and I expected it all to remain the same. After three months of pining, I announced to my parents that I meant to take up medicine and packed my bags for London.”

“Afterwards you needed a legitimate way back into the Punjab, though, and so signed up for military training at Addiscombe. What happened in the interim?”

“Sardar’s letters had been played plenty close, but I could tell something was rotten,” he answered. “He mentioned that Karman and Lavell had actually married; he also said she gave birth to a baby named Sahjara, but I was too melancholy for more detail. After Charing Cross and the Aldersgate Street Dispensary were through and I’d earned a place at the Royal College, I spent a single year at Addiscombe because I knew the Punjab was about to blow like a powder keg, and I’m not puffing myself up but complimenting Sardar’s early tutelage when I say that was record time. The Company sent me straight back to Lahore, and when I arrived . . .”

I watched as his face turned to stone.

“Lavell was living it up royally. Relations there aren’t the same as in England, the elite have plentiful concubines—even the women take lovers. But Karman’s husband was hilt deep in every back-alley cat he could find, and when he wasn’t drunk, it was hashish or opium. My parents were appalled and shut him out, but it isn’t as if buying double the shite poppy can’t sustain the habit. Meanwhile, he was practically setting fire to Karman’s money, and the last straw came when Sardar spied one of these sloe-eyed tarts waltzing through the marketplace wearing a necklace that belonged to his sister. Karman
had the typical Sikh taste in baubles, by which I mean she had a disgusting pile of ’em. It was an emerald choker that got away.”

“Did Augustus Sack do nothing about this?”

“Sack wasn’t his superior, and anyway he was winning a fortune off Lavell at poker—Karman’s fortune. Lavell couldn’t sink low enough for Sack’s taste.”

“I imagine you wanted to thrash the hide off him.”

“Oh, I threatened to, Company be damned, but we went to Karman first.” Mr. Thornfield’s mouth wrenched regretfully. “She wouldn’t hear a word against the blackguard. She was drunk when Sardar and I arrived, which wasn’t exactly surprising, and she was glad to see us as ever, but she waved it all off, saying when the Khalsa marched to Delhi we would all have twenty fortunes to spend, that he was the father of her child and a man who liked to take his pleasure where he found it, and that she was no better, and that we were a set of old hens.”

“What did you do?”

Mr. Thornfield placed his brow in his hand. “We stole her jewellery collection.”