Forty-Four

Hannah times her return: away long enough that the colonel will have cooled off considerably, not so long that her brushes are irreparable. In the public gardens, she delays herself, huddled from the drizzle under a sycamore, schooling her imagination in the colonel’s pain and humiliation. She will need to speak with him and apologize fully and sincerely. Then try to reassure him—of what? That she is not a monster. He won’t trust her again. How, then, could she ever give him what he wants? It’s a riddle she cannot solve, so at last she resolves to ask George himself.

Darkness has fallen by the time she arrives home, and it is only once she’s indoors that she realizes quite how wet and chilled she has become.

“Come, mem!” Suria appears at her elbow to take her coat.

“Good grief, you must have been hiding in the closet.” Hannah’s heart bumps belatedly from the surprise. Slipping off her overcoat, she rubs her arms. “What’s the matter?”

The old woman says nothing. Throwing Hannah’s coat over the banister, she pulls her by the hand, leading her through to the kitchen. The room is quite warm, the stove still hot from the supper preparations. Hannah sighs with relief, stepping up to it to be warmed. But Suria moves her aside to twist open the oven door. She jabs a finger at the glowing coals. Weightless ashes swirl in the in-rushing air.

“What? For pity’s sake, what are you trying to show me, Suria?”

The old woman looks petrified by the cast-iron stove. “Tuan make us burn them. Anjuh and me. Your big paintings, mem. Tuan watch me do it. Ooh, such a look on his face, mem, I think he asks me to climb in after.”

Hannah sinks to her knees at the oven door, squinting into the wave of heat. Nothing. She sees nothing at all. That can’t be right. “What are you talking about, Suria? They were on stretchers, on frames. These were canvases. Some of them quite big canvases.” She draws rectangles with her arms as if they are playing charades.

“Yes, yes! Anjuh break with the axe. Tuan, he gives me garden scissors.”

“My paintings? You’re saying he had you chop up and burn my paintings?” Tuan might as well have taken the garden shears to her lungs. It was breathtaking. And deliberate. For this would have taken some time to accomplish. If only she’d come straight home, instead of stewing over how to make amends with the colonel’s precious feelings. She might have saved some of them!

“Where is the case?” she manages to ask. Monsieur Godot gave her the leather portfolio as a leaving present. The real learning, he’d said to her, will be outside these walls. “Suria, where is the actual case?”

“In,” she says, nodding fearfully at the stove.

“And…and what about the new painting? It was on the easel in the—”

“Mm.” Suria sucks her thumb. “He do that one himself, first.”

Hannah looks around the room. The colonel could be spying on the two of them now, standing quietly against a wall, to witness her in agony. Had he torched all of that effort, all the undiscovered and undocumented specimens, all of her precious learning, and simply gone to sleep? “Where is he? Where is sahib now?” she demands.

Suria raises her eyes to the ceiling.

“And my copybook? The book!” It was one fresh horror after another.

Before the ayah can reply, Hannah bolts upstairs to see for herself. The nursery is bare except for a bundle of paint-smeared rags. On the third floor, in her writing garret, all of the crates have been shifted and pillaged. Her satchel has been pulled-open, plundered, her notebooks are missing. Her copybook? Gone, too.

Nor is there any sign of the colonel. Except, as she treads toward their bedroom, the soft clunk of a key being turned in the lock.

At some point, Hannah pours herself a brandy and sits at the dining room table.

“Mem.”

“What? What now?” What is the woman still doing, hovering, awake? Why had she bothered waiting for her arrival in the first place? The paintings, everything, is gone and nothing could be done about it. Hannah lifts her head.

The lamp lights Suria’s creased forehead and high cheekbones. “I very sorry for you, mem. Very sorry.”

She nods, exhausted. “It’s not your fault, Suria. I realize that.”

“Maybe not. Still, I am telling you I am very sorry for you. For what happens to you.”

“Thank you, Suria.”

“I’m telling you, too,” says the ayah, bending to Hannah’s ear, “about the box of the paints and the brushes. Sahib want, but I save. In Anjuh and my room, I hide them under our mattress.”

“What?” Why had the old woman chosen to save the paints but not the paintings? Or the copybook? Hannah would never be able to replace her paintings, unique as they were. Yet the brushes and the box, the paints, these things could have been purchased again!

Suria’s shaky smile opens into a grin. As is the custom with the natives, her teeth have been filed to points, and they are stained red from chewing betel paste. A devilish effect. “I tell tuan I not know where. And I am think for you, memsahib.” She taps her temple. “With paints and brushes, she can make more paintings.”

Hannah squeezes the old woman’s hands. It does have a certain logic. Besides, Suria has risked her job, and likely her skin, to disobey the colonel. “Well done, Suria. Thank you. Truly. I’ll get them from you in the morning.”