THEY COVERED MANY MILES BEFORE THE FOREST BECAME so impenetrable that the moon was obscured and it was too dark to ride any farther.

“We can be up and away early in the morning,” said Lilian, dismounting and leading her pony into the jungle. “I have enough in my panniers to provide us with a comfortable camp.” She produced a tinder box and some kindling and in minutes had their own camp-fire burning.

Mr. Hunter dismounted slowly. He felt stiff and bruised all over—in his heroic bid to drag Lilian from her horse he had sprained his shoulder, and now, having been on horseback for so long, it seared as though a red-hot iron were being thrust into his shoulder blade. He sank onto the ground beside the fire. He felt exhausted, and though he was annoyed to admit it, he was feeling slightly feverish as well. He hoped it wasn't anything serious.

Lilian was rooting in her baggage. At length she pulled out a cooking pot and a bag of rice.

“I've been in these hills before,” said Mr. Hunter, unbuttoning the dead sepoys uniform (the fellow's coat was beginning to feel like a vise about his chest). “They're wild and dangerous, you know. I mean, most of the nawabs north of here are only nominally loyal to the British. There are a few hill forts here and there—isolated places, mostly. Places John Company pretends to have coerced into toeing the Company line, but the nawabs really do just as they always did. Mind you, there might not be any of them friends of the British now.” He smiled, wincing manfully as he struggled out of his coat. “If they ever were in the first place, that is.”

Lilian nodded. In the light of the fire she began sharpening her knife on a whetstone she had produced from some corner of her baggage.

“Of course,” continued Mr. Hunter. “Most of these hill forts are at least a week's journey away, and over the roughest terrain you can find in India. I was planning to head north anyway, you know, even before … before everything happened the way it did. I need to check out the lie of the land before I mount a proper expedition—bearers and baggage and so forth.”

Lilian said nothing but tested the blade with her finger.

“Yes, a reconnaissance trip, so to speak. I need to find some new rhododendron species—they simply can't get enough of them back home, you know. Some low-growing ones would suit admirably. This corner of India is as out of the way as you can get—well, once we ‘ve traveled for a few days it will be—and no one's been to see what botanical treasures it contains. I have great expectations.”

Lilian nodded.

“It's the perfect place to hide out and the perfect place to find what I'm looking for. I stand to make a small fortune if I find varieties that travel well and that can be propagated back home.” Mr. Hunter shrugged. “Of course, it's a pity I had to leave all my things behind, but you seem well equipped. Certainly I don't see what else we could do at the moment. We can pick up further supplies from villages we pass through—most of them won't have seen white faces before, though, so we'll have to tread carefully.” He rubbed his hands together. “The place is a veritable Eden, Lily,” he said. “You'll fall in love with it.”

“I'm sure I will,” replied Lilian.

“That's settled, then,” said Mr. Hunter.

Lilian nodded again.

Mr. Hunter sighed. This was a new, economical version of Lilian he had not met before. He wondered what might be the matter with her, though it did not cross his mind to ask. Instead, assuming that his detailed monologue had been too taxing after the day's events, he switched to colorless observations about her camping skills.

“Where did you learn to light a fire like that?”

“When I go painting, I always take a tinder box,” said Lilian mechanically. “I find a cup of tea most refreshing. Would you like one?”

“Don't you have anything stronger?”

“Brandy.”

Mr. Hunter raised his eyebrows. “Brandy?”

Lilian rooted in her baggage. She tossed him a bottle. “My husband's.”

Mr. Hunter took a swig. He coughed, and squinted at the label. “Your husband had expensive tastes.”

“He could afford to, on the money my father gave him. Don't drink it all. I brought it for medicinal purposes.”

“Am I not in need of medicine?” said Mr. Hunter crossly. He rubbed his shoulder and touched his fingers to his still-throbbing nose. She had not bothered to ask how his injuries were. “You know, I feel quite feverish,” he said.

“You remind me of my husband,” said Lilian, prodding the fire. “He was always feeling unwell. Feverishness was one of his favorite complaints.”

Mr. Hunter took another gulp of brandy. It tasted slightly odd, now he thought about it, though perhaps that was simply the taste of the blood and dust that he had licked off his lips moments before. He watched as Lilian put a handful of sticks onto the fire. Why would she not comfort him? Could she not see that he was in pain? Could she not see that he was aching all over? “Where shall I sleep?” he said, watching with hopeful eyes as she unpacked a roll of bedding.

“Wherever you like,” said Lilian.

Mr. Hunter grinned. “In that case—”

“As long as it's not in with me.”

“Lily, please—” Mr. Hunter gave her a beseeching look. She seemed so distant and unattainable.

Lilian tossed him a blanket. She poured some warm water from the pot on the fire into a billy can and went over to him. Using a strip torn from the remains of his shirt, she bathed his face, wiping away the bloody slaverings that had congealed in black crusts about his hair and on his cheeks and eyebrows.

Mr. Hunter sat still and quiet while Lilian dabbed at his face. He wondered, for a moment, whether he should take the opportunity provided by this act of tenderness to seize her about the waist … but something told him that this would not be such a good idea. Besides, his head was swimming, and he was not sure whether he would be able successfully to execute such a movement without toppling onto the fire in a faint. So he contented himself with just looking at her dreamily, admiring the softness of her cheek and the curve of her lips as she bent over his face. He gave a contented sigh, blowing a draft of brandied breath into her face. Lilian gasped but said nothing. She wiped the last of the blood from his forehead.

Mr. Hunter sank back onto his blanket. Lilian's face seemed to be suspended above him, like a benign moon in a dark and troubled sky. Had he asked her to be his wife? He could not remember. He had thought about it for so long that now, as his head pounded and his vision blurred, he was almost certain that he had. “Will you be my wife, Lily?” he murmured, just to be on the safe side.

Lilian laid a cold damp hand on his blazing forehead.

Mr. Hunter repeated the question. At least, he tried to repeat it but he found that he could hardly get his lips to move and the words seemed as heavy as glue on his tongue. This time, even he didn't understand the sentence he had uttered. He began to shiver again. He stared up at her, but her face seemed to have receded into the distance. He saw her take off her turban, and loosen her hair so that it fell about her shoulders like ripples of sunlit water. How lovely she was! Would she not just lie down beside him to keep him warm? He sighed happily, finding to his surprise that he no longer desired her but was simply contented to be in her company. The pain in his shoulder had abated, and the throbbing sensation in his nose and head seemed to have gone completely. Instead, these physical discomforts had been replaced with a feeling of well-being and inertia that seemed to lap around him like a warm, soothing bath. He closed his eyes as he felt Lilian's hand stroke his brow. He reached out to touch her, to kiss her fingers or to draw her close, but he found he could barely lift his arm. He felt the rim of the brandy bottle against his lips once more, and he drank deeply. After that, he felt nothing at all.

THE FOLLOWING DAY Mr. Hunter was no better. If anything, he was worse. Thanks to the brandy he had drunk (which had been laced with opium), he had slept soundly all night. So soundly, in fact, that Lilian had trouble rousing him the next morning, and it was only by shaking him violently and shouting in his ear that he eventually resumed consciousness.

“You look terrible,” said Lilian, handing him a tin mug filled with strong black tea.

Mr. Hunter said nothing. He was, by turns, burning with heat and shivering with cold. He sipped the tea and ate some of the rice she had cooked the night before.

“Can you ride?” said Lilian, after she had packed everything away.

His shoulder was so stiff that he could hardly move his arm. Lilian helped him on with the dead sepoy's jacket. “Just in case we meet any of your comrades,” she said.

They made slow progress. The path they followed was scarcely a path at all, and now and again Lilian had to dismount and hack away some of the low-lying branches. She used Mr. Vine's saber in place of a machete, which, although designed for less horticultural duties, performed the job well enough. As she labored among the foliage, Lilian was reminded of the long hours spent pruning back the larger plants in the upper reaches of her father's conservatory. After all, the sweltering atmosphere was almost the same. At times it seemed to her as though the only thing missing was the distant throbbing of the hot-water pipes beneath their iron grids, the gentle burble of her aunts' voices as they played whist in their overgrown parlor far below, and Alice.

When they stopped—as they were obliged to do with tedious frequency to allow Mr. Hunter to totter into the bush to empty his gurgling bowels—Lilian pulled out her sketch pad and pencil. Mr. Hunter, for once, said nothing all day, apart from telling her that regardless of its appearance, the path they were on was the right one—as long as they continued in a northeasterly direction. Despite the warmth of the day he wrapped himself in a blanket. By evening he was draped across the neck of his horse, as though the heat had melted him like wax.

ON THE MORNING of the fourth day, Mr. Hunter seemed a little better. His shivers had abated and he was able to mount his horse unaided. He ate a bowl of rice and a chapatti. Thus fortified, he decided once more to ask Lilian to marry him. This time he would be sure to do so when there was no chance of being misunderstood: his brain would be unclouded by fever, his loins free from the misleading sensations of desire. He smoothed his hair and washed his face and did his best, using some spit and a rub with his sleeve, to remove some of the dirt from the dead sepoy's uniform.

When Lilian's back was turned Mr. Hunter sneaked a look at his reflection in the back of a spoon. He was horrified to see how gaunt and yellow looking he was beneath his black whiskers and beard and tanned badmash face. Furthermore, even given the distortion of his reflection occasioned by the belly of the spoon he could see that his nose was still as bruised and swollen as an overripe pear, his eyes still bloodshot from the brandy he had been drinking. He looked like a drunk after a night spent brawling in the gutter. His confidence dimmed slightly. Perhaps he should wait a few days before he made his ultimate declaration of love. At least until the sparkle in his eye had returned and he felt a little better—less tired and plagued by the residuum of aches and shivers. After all, once she had agreed to marry him he might be called upon to perform certain husbandly offices, and he wanted to have enough energy to oblige.

Mr. Hunter pushed his spoon out of sight. “I think it's a touch of malaria,” he declared. “I must have picked it up in Calcutta. The place is built on a swamp, you know. It's riddled with fevers. You must have noticed how yellow everyone looks.” He coughed lavishly and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. His bowels gurgled ominously. “Of course, the conditions in Darjeeling are perfect for cinchona cultivation. The Company could grow a whole plantation and have enough quinine to keep everyone free of malaria, including the natives. But for some reason those fools in Calcutta would rather keep shipping the stuff over from Peru at great expense and with little hope of ever having enough of it to do the job properly.” Mr. Hunter clambered onto his horse. His head was swimming and all at once he felt shivery and sick with fever. “Can't you cut us a path a bit quicker,” he said. “I can make faster progress as long as you look after me.”

“I see,” said Lilian, irritably. “As long as I look after you. You think only of yourself. As usual.”

“But I'm not well.”

“A touch of malaria is all you have.”

“It could kill me. And we must move on, or the rebels may kill us both.”

“Oh, of course,” said Lilian. Her voice had become shrill, and it grated on his ears painfully. “You just want to run away as soon as things become slightly uncomfortable, don't you? That's what you do, isn't it? You take what you want and then run away.”

Mr. Hunter looked startled. “The world has turned upside down,” he said. “How much more uncomfortable could it be?”

But Lilian was still talking. “You think of yourself first, and you leave the moment things get a bit hot. You care nothing for the consequences of your actions. You have no interest in what sort of trouble you might leave behind you. What kind of a man are you, Mr. Hunter, that you can behave in such a way?”

He put a hand to his throbbing head. He did not know what she was talking about. “It's quiet now, but that's only because we're away from Kushpur. But we're not that far away. Come on Lily, you know what's going on.”

“I thought you were friends with the natives? What can you possibly have to fear from them?” She rammed the bag of rice into her saddlebag. Her face was furious.

“There are plenty of them who are not my friends, I can assure you. And right now any one of them would be glad to slit my throat.”

“The fathers of women whose honor you've ruined, perhaps?” muttered Lilian. She threw him a dark look.

Mr. Hunter rubbed his sweating forehead. “What on earth are you talking about, Lily? Those nautch girls don't have fathers. Besides,” he added gruffly, “those days are over. I've not been there for months.”

“What are you talking about?” said Lilian crossly.

“Nothing. Those girls.”

“What ‘girls?’” Lilian looked appalled. “How many of us have there been?”

“How many of whom?” said Mr. Hunter desperately. “Why are we talking about this now? It doesn't matter, surely?”

“It doesn't matter?” Lilian's voice echoed through the forest. “I should think it matters very much. Unless I don't matter. Don't you understand? You left me. You ran away and left me in the hands of that … that … murderer ! And you think that doesn't matter?”

“Murderer? You mean Selwyn?”

“You!” shouted Lilian. “You left me to that … so-called doctor, with his cold, horrible hands and his knives and his hooks …”

Mr. Hunter blinked. How bright the sunlight seemed as it steamed through the branches of the chir pine overhead. It hurt his eyes and made them water. He knew the day was warm, but he felt as chilled as a corpse. He wished Lilian would stop talking and mount her pony. What use was there in going over the carnage they had witnessed? Far better to try to forget the whole monstrous business. “Knives and hooks?” he said. “Come now, Lily you must try to put everything behind you. You're very upset. And no wonder! You've seen some frightful things.”

“Upset!” cried Lilian. “Frightful things!”

“Anyway” added Mr. Hunter briskly “Dr. Mossly is dead. Now we really must be getting along. We can talk about all this later. Come on, Lily.”

AT FIRST, LILIAN had not intended to say anything to Mr. Hunter about her fate at the hands of Dr. Cattermole. Riding away from her bungalow (how long ago it seemed), as Mr. Hunter and the other Europeans awaited her in the parlor, she had thought that disappearing from his life would be vengeance enough. After all, did he not deserve to have his heart broken? And besides, she could hardly bear to remind herself of the events that had led to her quitting the great house and leaving Alice behind. Having to repeat them by way of explanation would simply have made her weep in front of him, and this she had resolved never to do.

But since then she had shot a man; she had almost cut another man's hand off; she had passed through a swirling sea of bloodshed, had seen brutality on such a scale unfolding before her eyes that she had been unable to turn away, but had stared at it, as though into the maw of hell, fixated with horror and disbelief. Now she found that the memory of her own butchery, and of the murder of her unborn child, had returned to her with a fearful clarity. The pain she had thought was deeply buried inside her heart had risen up, so that the words she uttered seemed to bubble with fury into her mouth, hardly coherent even to herself. Her sense of outrage, her feelings of anger and humiliation at Mr. Hunter's abandonment, and everything that had followed on from that, now blazed within her as forcefully as on the day he had left.

The acts of violence and violation that she had endured had gone unpunished; the death of her child had been without retribution.

BY THE AFTERNOON Mr. Hunter was worse again. That night Lilian gave him a large draft of brandy, just to stop him from shrieking in his delirium.

In the morning, Mr. Hunter was still asleep. He murmured something indistinct but lay without moving beneath his blanket. Lilian made a fire to heat some water. She made some tea but decided to wait until he stirred before preparing any breakfast. In the meantime, she erected her easel and took out her watercolors. Now that the sun had risen she could see through the gaps in the conifers. They were in a clearing overlooking a forest-clad valley, at the bottom of which a river twisted and tumbled. She could see wisps of cloud hanging above the trees, snagged on the tallest branches or caught, here and there, in a breezeless hollow. Other than the sound of birds and insects, and the far-off roar of the river, the place was silent.

Lilian sat before a yellow flower twined around a broken trunk and began to paint. How well the limpid blue and lilac of the morning sky set off the glowing, sunny luster of the flower's petals. The painting would be a good one, she could tell. Already she had a number of sketches and a painting rolled up behind her saddle. How was she going to get them and herself to England—to Alice—now that her carefully laid plans had come to nothing?

Poor Alice, thought Lilian with a sigh; she must be wondering what had happened. No doubt the telegraph had alerted London to the horrors of the recent uprisings and everyone at home would be sure to know about it by now. Alice would be desperate for information. Unless the news had yet to cross her father's threshold. It was quite possible that their father was so engrossed in his Collection that he had no idea what was happening in the world beyond his own front door. Certainly, this had happened before, and Lilian recalled that it was with a grunt of surprise that Mr. Talbot had raised his head from his tempest prognosticator to hear the news that there had been fighting in the Crimea …

So absorbed in her own thoughts was Lilian that she didn't hear anything until the man was right behind her. Afterward, she wondered how he had managed to creep up on her so quietly—until she came to realize that he walked everywhere in his golden slippers as though gliding over thick, luxuriant carpets. It was with a gasp of surprise, therefore, that Lilian greeted the voice at her shoulder.

“Delightful!” he cried. “That color is a special favorite of mine. It reminds me most forcefully of Oxford and the buttercups that grew beside the river in Magdalen's meadows. Only it is brighter. Much brighter, of course.”