Jane Steele

by Lyndsay Faye

  It was a gilded palace at the end of a pure white pier surrounded by sapphire waters—an impossible place, a dream breathed from a dawn pillow.

  “To have left this behind—you must miss it very much,” I mentioned, wisely refraining from commentary regarding homes from which I myself had fled.

  “God has his seat everywhere,” Mr. Singh returned without inflection, as if quoting a text.

  “I thought from the advertisement that Mr. Thornfield had been in the wars?”

  An invisible shutter closed over Mr. Sardar Singh’s face. “Who has not been in a war? Yes, Mr. Thornfield trained as a doctor but obtained an army commission after military training at Addiscombe.”

  Mr. Singh strode off and I pursued, anxious lest I had given offence on my second day. We turned left down a corridor, right down another, until I knew we stood before the billiards room, and he rested his fingers upon the door handles.

  “Forgive me, I never meant to—”

  Air burst into my face as the butler revealed the room; but I could not enter, such was my astonishment at the narrow fraction I beheld.

  “After you, Miss Stone,” Mr. Singh demurred.

  A steel palace, the inside of a diamond—how shall I best describe a billiard room transformed into a war display? Swords—straight, curved, broad, tapered—lined every wall, polished to a sheen echoing the pain of the blade itself. Their handles were inset with ivory carvings, their hilts embellished with golden flourishes, their points angled into queer triangles or hollowed into deadly sickle shapes. Shorter daggers hung above the liquor cabinet, and the hearth was festooned with weapons I could scarce comprehend—tri-pronged silver objects with needlelike points, axes so beautiful I could not fathom using them, bizarre metal circlets which gleamed at us like eyes. I had never viewed such a fascinating collection of murderous devices.

  “Oh,” I breathed, delighted.

  “Do they interest you?” Mr. Singh sounded pleased. “These are the weapons of the Khalsa, and I’m afraid we are all quite adept with them.”

  “Mr. Thornfield has a cuff like yours,” I noted, too alight with inquisitiveness to care whether I was being rude.

  “You are observant. Yes—he is a Sikh, just as I am.”

  “However is that possible?”

  “There is no Hindu; there is no Mussulman,” he answered, and I again had the impression he quoted scripture. “If there is no Hindu and no Mussulman, and all can form a single brotherhood, then there is no Christian either. I beg your pardon, as that is not a popular opinion in this country.”

  I could reach only one conclusion: Mr. Charles Thornfield was improbably born in the Punjab, took medical courses, gained a military commission, and at some point embraced an entirely foreign culture. The master of the house (temporarily, anyhow) was the pitied and often despised sort who had allowed his Britishness to fade in the searing desert sun, politeness and gaslight and snobbery leached into the dunes. During my newspaper scoutings, I had often glimpsed accounts of such hapless folk, as we were forever at war with somebody: London was pockmarked with men who professed a respect for the Buddha, women who had converted to—horror of horrors—vegetarianism.

  “I shock you, Miss Stone.”

  I laughed. “You don’t, on my life you don’t. Which of these are you best with?”

  Mr. Singh emitted a happy puff through his nostrils, pointing at one of the shining metal circlets. “That is a chakkar—a steel throwing ring honed into a blade. Members of the Khalsa used to hurl these at their foes before enemies rode within striking distance. Now experts are almost unheard-of.”

  “Save yourself.”

  “I am considered passable,” he demurred, but his eyes sparkled.

  My attention snagged upon something still more extraordinary, and I approached where it hung above a rack of billiard cues. The object had a rosewood sword grip; where the blade was meant to emerge, however, a metal band was coiled in upon itself and tied with thick black leather, so that it resembled a hilt attached to a lengthy ribbon of steel wound into a tidy ring.

  “What on earth … ?” I stretched to the tips of my toes to look more closely.

  “What excellent taste you have in exotic weaponry, Miss Stone.” Instantly I relapsed onto my heels, wondering whether it was too late to affect disapproval. “No, no, I cannot fault your appreciation for what may be the most extraordinary collection of Sikh artefacts in England. This is an aara, and only highly advanced warriors are trained in them. Essentially, you regard a combination of a whip and a sword—when unrolled, the metal strip divides flesh as if it were butter. I need hardly add that foolhardy fascination with this weapon leads only to missing fingers or worse.”

  I allowed my pupils to lose their focus in the aara’s shining whorls—half recalling all the times in London when a strange man had approached, the jaundiced light of malice in his eyes, and imagining that I could have snapped the blackguard’s head off from twelve feet distant.

  “Will you show me, sometime, when your schedule permits?”

  “I regret I must decline.” Mr. Singh held the door open for me, signalling a need to return to his tasks. “I was once considered formidable with the aara, I admit, but fell out of practice. For that pleasurable spectacle, you will have to await the return and good humour of Mr. Thornfield.”

  • • •

  I’ve finished, I promise. Now I must see that Dalbir’s hoof has been tended properly.”

  Five days later, Sahjara and I sat in a converted schoolroom which would have elevated most eyebrows—draperies of orange and amber embroidered with flowering trees lined the walls, conjuring an impossible forest when outside all was grey and snow-softened. There were also chalkboards, paper and ink, drawing utensils, plentiful books, and a pianoforte which look neglected and obligatory.

  “If you’ve finished translating the entire passage, I’ll correct it—then of course you may check in on Dalbir.”

  Sahjara’s pony, Dalbir, was named “brave soldier,” a moniker I should have thought droll for a pony had he not been more along the lines of a petit dragon, dappled-grey and wonderfully irritable with everyone save Sahjara and myself; the unfortunate beast had suffered a badly chipped hoof that morning.

  My pupil ambled over with her French essay, handed me the papers, and then unselfconsciously sat upon the luxurious carpet with her head against my knee.

  I patted her awkwardly at first, then drew my fingers over glossy braids smelling of the almond oil she used to smooth out the tangles. Sahjara was demonstrative with everyone, adorably so, and it did not mean anything, I told myself; she probably expected a tyrant, but I recalled tyranny and preferred rebellion. Anyhow, I had neatly solved the problem of attention to her lessons by making each and every subject horse themed. She painted horses in watercolours, explored their anatomy, learnt geography specific to legendary cavalry marches, and translated French passages about horses, as she was doing now.

  “We will be great friends, won’t we?” she mused as I shifted to correct her work.

  “I hope so. Did you expect a shrivelled old crone with a cane and a pocket Bible?”

  Sahjara shrugged against my calf. “Not precisely. I feared someone who would think me unnatural, though.”

  This gave me pause, even as I marked an improper conjugation of avoir: she was almost exactly the age I had been when I left Highgate House, and Sahjara in five short days had already revealed her character; she was headstrong, impulsive, recklessly affectionate, and had gifted me with thirteen possessions of Mr. Thornfield’s to date. What did a murderess four times over care if Sahjara was browner skinned than I, forward in her speech, and was familiar with the housemaids? If surnames were to be taken as given, they could be her aunties for all I knew.

  “Would you have seemed unnatural at home—or do you remember?”

  “That’s a hard question,” Sahjara said slowly. “The Punjab comes out all jumbled when I try to remember. I see pictures without any story
to them.”

  “Do any of the pictures stand out?”

  “The flap of the tent was ripped by a sword, and I was afraid of who would come through the gap, but it was Charles, and he carried me away and fed me. I was very hungry, I recall. And soon after, I was sent to England for safety’s sake. I was five.”

  Well, there is a remarkable fragment indeed.

  I pressed, “Did England improve matters?”

  “Oh, yes!” she exclaimed. “Yes, before England, men had always been asking me questions. How was I faring, but also Where is it? and I hadn’t the faintest, you see, and so kept quiet. Keeping quiet made them very cross.”

  “I can imagine.”

  Where is it? is a very specific question. Had Sahjara been caught in the middle of the First Anglo-Sikh War and interrogated at so young an age as five? A startling surge of protectiveness coursed through me. I liked Sahjara and wanted her to erase the other little girl, the one who had wandered these halls suffocating on her aunt’s hatred.

  “Look, I’ve scored eighty percent!”

  “You have indeed. What were the men looking for?”

  “A trunk,” said she, taking her translation and glaring at the errors. “It had my dolls in it. Though they couldn’t have wanted my dolls, so perhaps they thought something else was inside—there was a terrible row when it went missing, I know. I just wanted my dolls back, as I was only a chico.”

  “Perfectly natural.”

  “I was very upset over losing them.”

  A trunk.

  I swear upon my copy of Jane Eyre that my interest in Sahjara’s tale was based in both fascination and goodwill; I wanted to know more about her, and I badly wanted to know more about Mr. Charles Thornfield, who had callously flouted my poor pupil’s request and stayed away longer than a few days.

  “What else do you remember?”

  Her eyes grew unfocused, as if peering through fogged glass. “Our house in Lahore, its balcony. It smelled like livestock and incense in the streets, which were very busy with all the Afghani horse traders, and the merchants bargaining over oranges and goats, and the fortune-tellers at tables divining from maps of the stars. I remember huge walls with heavy guns, white mosques like turnips.” She charmingly screwed her face into a pucker. “It’s still an awful muddle. I don’t even know what the wars were for.”

  Mindful of my role, I cudgelled my brains and drew embarrassing blanks. The Sikhs’ Khalsa army was by all accounts a ferocious one—sharp as a pistol crack, and just as keen to hack our East India Company to bits after the first war ended as they had been at the starting gate. Predictably, they had emerged thirsty for blood two years later, and countless British and Punjabi soldiers had blown one another’s pates off before the Sikh Empire went the way of the Roman one. I knew this meant outrageous riches for Her Majesty; when I opened my mouth to unmuddle the situation for my pupil, however, I found I knew nothing whatsoever else.

  “Did Mr. Thornfield never recover your trunk?”

  “No, though he tried.” Sahjara stretched upon the rug like a lean little cat. “It must be lost forever now.”

  Voice quite composed, I said, “Sahjara, I know we’re strangers, and you needn’t speak of your parents, nor the past—but you may if you wish, all right?”

  She stood, outlined now against the dimming December sunset, for we had not turned up the lamps. “Oh, were you curious over my parents? Charles says my father was a Company man and my mother a Sikh princess. It’s horrid but I can’t recall them. There was the sword through the tent flap, and the trunk went missing, and I had horses to tend to, I think—but I don’t recall much from the Punjab other than Charles.”

  Sahjara fetched her warmest cloak from where she had thrown it two hours previous, her governess too slovenly a creature to have noticed.

  “Give Dalbir my best,” I instructed.

  “If Charles returns, send someone to fetch me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Charles likes you,” she added as she skipped towards the door. “I’ve never seen him like anyone so fast. He actually shook your hand.”

  Following this obscure observation, she disappeared, and I was left once more to ponder the enigmas of my new household. Then, lacking other occupation and knowing I had an hour till supper, a subtle electric pulse thrumming in my boot soles, I likewise donned my warmest things and quit the main house in the opposite direction, marching silently for my cottage and whatever—whomever—I might find there.

  SIXTEEN

  It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.

  If you expected to find yourself in a Gothic snowscape, reader, ears tickling with spectral whispers as the plucky protagonist breaks into a cottage haunted by the shades of her past, regrettably you are mistaken.

  The door was already unlocked. Opening the panel of the small lantern I had brought, I discovered that my erstwhile home was carpeted in grit and vermin droppings, and furthermore that spiders are the most industrious creatures alive.

  Slowly, my ears adjusted; no ticking of clocks greeted me, no exclamations of alarm. The place had been emptied, and not merely of its few antiques—even the bedding and the better chairs were dispatched. A pang struck me at the thought of faithful, nonsensical Agatha turned out to pasture—or worse, deceased—but I could do her no better service than to press on, so press on I did.

  The kitchen was mouldering, the parlour decrepit, my mother’s bedroom sacked and empty, which hurt my chest terribly, and still I could not bring myself to quit the place. Creeping up to the garret was a whim; I knew I must be back soon to sit with Sahjara over another brilliantly orange curry, swallowing questions down my gullet.

  I will have a peek at the attic space, then be done.

  And what did I behold but my mother’s old wooden trunk, resting in a corner. I dived for its dust-soft handle and heaved open its lid; an explosion of dry grime and a short stack of letters met my gaze, and my fingers discovered the papers were indeed corporeal. I think I had been half expecting leprechaun gold in that cottage, or at least small, strange men proposing dangerous quests. Instead I held foolscap with ink scrawled over it, ink which might very well tell me what I had inherited and what I might venture to do about it.

  To escape with the sole prize I had come seeking, save Agatha herself, seemed altogether too good to be true: but I did, and twenty minutes hence had stowed my treasure under my mattress without a single person knowing I had left the main house at all.

  • • •

  What became of the original staff?” I asked, sniffing at a plate of heartily spiced potato and cabbage with mustard seeds. “Surely this place was populated by English servants, before.”

  “I regret to say that they were made to feel rather unwelcome.” Mr. Sardar Singh spooned out portions of chicken curry and saffron-scented rice to Sahjara and me; twice before he had dined in our company, and I found myself avidly hoping he would do so again. “We brought with us an unknown master, foreign tastes … their defection was natural.”

  “But never forced?” I questioned, envisioning my elderly Agatha scrubbing floors in some rot-ridden dispensary.

  “Of course not—heavens, I hope none of them ever felt so. Some had family they wished to return to, others dreams of travel. They were all of them dismissed with a thousand pounds, after all.”

  “A thousand …” I echoed. It was the sort of money a titled landholder or a City purveyor of stocks might have brought in yearly, and it was a princely figure to a domestic worker.

  “Miss Stone, I hope that I haven’t overstepped the bounds of English propriety. The figure is irre—”

  “Of course it isn’t irrelevant—Mr. Thornfield could have got away uncensored distributing bonuses at a hundredth the price.”
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  “The master of the house saw no need to be parsimonious,” he returned, but I saw he was pleased.

  “Not often the way,” I quipped, “with masters. Please do sit down.”

  Mr. Singh laughed, seating himself several places distant and helping himself to the steaming dishes. “At any rate, there were alterations to be effected, and long-time occupants are always dismayed at usurpers renovating their domain.”

  Mr. Singh was correct; the cellars, at least, were being subjected to significant changes, and it dismayed me. Workmen arrived before I rose in the morning, greeting me with the distant invisible clink, clink of chisels and spades as I walked to the morning room to breakfast with Sahjara; at five in the afternoon when I released her, they filed by me out the servants’ entrance, anointed with mineral-smelling mud. Twice had I begun marching down the dank stairs I already knew so well, but a member of the staff always materialised with a cordial Might I assist you? and all attempts at reconnaissance rendered thereby impossible.

  The work rankled. Our cellars had been inhospitable, the remnants of ancient foundations—neither crypts nor vaults, simply stones and pillars. I did not know what Mr. Thornfield could possibly want with caves not even fit to store wine properly (a failing of which Aunt Patience was surpassingly proud).

  “When did the cellar renovations commence?”

  “Three months ago,” Sahjara replied. “Six months after we moved in and began redecorating—the place was dreadful, all stuffy chintzes.”

  I smiled, for I agreed with her. “Is the cellar to house a wine collection? Mr. Thornfield seems to own a connoisseur’s soul.”

  “He does indeed,” Mr. Singh agreed.

  This was less than forthcoming.

  “Is it for storage, then? This household—the exotic spices, the incense—it must be difficult to maintain here in England?”

  “Not so difficult as you might imagine. Mrs. Garima Kaur, who is a highly competent individual, travels monthly to London to meet with merchants who import Punjabi essentials. She sees to it that Mrs. Jas Kaur is kept in basmati and dhal and so forth, and the rest we can easily buy from neighbouring farms.”