Forty-One

On the way home, George feels freer, younger, for having said it. He needn’t worry any more about gaining the Residency. He needn’t worry about having to work under this preposterous, bloodthirsty E.W. Perhaps he needn’t work much at all, depending on what Finch and the Home Office could arrange for him. And then, God willing, they could finally start a family.

He enters the house with a bang of the screen door. Shrugs off his outerwear, props his umbrella in its stand. “Memsahib?” he asks Suria, who has ambled out to greet him.

The ayah points upward, an anxious look on her face.

He takes the stairs faster than he has in weeks. He’ll bed her, then tell her his plan. It’s enough to have the plan; dates and times and details can be sorted later. The plan is solution enough.

Hannah is not in their bedroom or bathroom. Nor the guest bedroom. The only other room, what would have been the nursery, is shut and locked. “Hannah?” he calls through the door. “Are you in there?” Floorboards creak. “Why have you locked yourself in there?”

Another long minute passes. At last the door swings open.

Cautiously, he steps inside. She has not bothered to conceal the tubes of paints and rags strewn over the bare floor. Brushes, a palette, lying on the top of the dresser. A canvas in progress is on an easel facing them. He can’t quite parse what he is seeing as he walks toward it, trying to decipher the colored shapes and forms. Finally, he recognizes a face—a scarred, ugly, swollen face with a cleft palate—sitting upon a heap of limbs and breasts and body parts. The girl on the canvas stares back at him, daring him to believe.

“Disgusting,” he says.

His wife is standing, observing him, a long brush between her fingers. Her sultry eyes lower to his chest. They are weapons—hostile, single-purposed things. Her chin is smudged with red-brown paint. Her feet and hands are bare. Strands of her unwashed hair have come unpinned and lie lank upon her neck.

“Disgusting,” he repeats, pointedly this time.

What in God’s name is she doing painting! He asks her this.

“I’m doing…what I must do,” she stammers. She doesn’t appear remorseful at all. Dazed, more like.

He then notices the postcard photograph propped in front of the canvas. She must have stolen it from his study! Seeing it transports him back to the doctor’s cabin: the fermented scents, the tools and maps, the drawer of faces. Before that, this very house girl shoving him off like a boat from a dock. And earlier still, hurrying through the Peterboroughs’ stable, finding his family’s bullock, as expected. Seeing the police mount—unexpected. The chestnut mare with its white marking. The chestnut mare with its white marking.

“He was there that day,” George realizes. “Sergeant Singh.”

Hannah listens, her eyes luminous, her whole being luminous.

“And you spent so much time away… So much time.”

She continues to study his face.

“You were painting there,” he suggests. “You were trekking there. That very day I visited. With that Kling.” He laughs; something odd has popped into his head. “You know, Finch once tried to tell me those darkies were debating metaphysical matters, out there on the high street. The truth is our police force has nothing better to do than stand about and scratch their balls. Or, or, or...ingratiate themselves with our women.”

“Ingratiate themselves.” She seems to have woken. “‘Our women.’ So you’ve figured everything out for yourself, then. Do I get to speak, George?”

“Why should you? You say whatever serves, then do as you please.”

This jab seems to register.

He moves closer. It’s like toeing an abyss. “Here is a question for you, Hannah. Have you and that sergeant been alone together?”

Her eyes fall to the photograph for a moment before she raises her head, drawing herself up almost regally. “Yes,” she says. “I was painting at Idlewyld all summer. In the house, with Eva’s permission. And on their property, out of doors.” The reek of paint must be getting to him. He puts his sleeve to his nose. “In the forest, with Darshan Singh.”

Darshan Singh. In a blink the two of them are fording a stream, pulling off each other’s clothes, lying in each other’s arms. George’s own arms are numb at his sides. “Is that…well, is that…all you have to say for yourself?”

“No,” she murmurs. “I called off your hunt.”

George backs out of the room, his chest burning. When he reaches the stairwell, the fury hits him. He marches back to the nursery. “Get out!” he shouts into the room. “Get out of this house! Whore!”