Under the Jeweled Sky

by Alison McQueen

  He had to see her. Only then would he know what to do. So he had gone north again, a thousand miles, at times feeling her presence so surely that he could almost reach out and touch her. He never once doubted that he would find her; he just hadn’t expected it to cost quite so much. His uncle’s money was now gone, all of it, and Amritsar seemed a long way away.

  18

  Sophie shook an aspirin from the bottle and swallowed it with a mouthful of water before returning to her wan reflection in the dressing table mirror. Taking up her lipstick, she leaned forward and dabbed the ruby red top and bottom before slicking it into place with the tip of her finger and pressing her lips together. She sat back and sighed at herself, opened a small drawer and chose a pair of earrings, then fastened them before reaching for the single string of pearls that had been given to her one Christmas long ago, when she had been in a dark and lonely place. She held them in her hand for a moment, turning them over, thinking of dear, sweet Fiona Ripperton. She would be an old lady now. Sophie slipped the pearls around her throat and closed the small diamond clasp.

  There would be no getting out of dinner tonight, even though she had sworn just last Friday that she would rather throw herself off a cliff than sit through another interminable evening with her husband’s cronies. Perhaps she might feel differently if Lucien didn’t insist on getting quite so drunk at these things. Not that everyone else was the picture of sobriety. Everything seemed to revolve around drinks, at any given time of day. In the morning it would be sherry, or bloody Marys if there had been a party the night before. As the clock neared lunchtime, gin and tonic would be offered, then wine with lunch, perhaps a liqueur afterward with coffee. The sherry would reappear should a caller drop by in the afternoon, then cocktails at six before facing a dinner served with the usual selection of vintages. It was a wonder anyone remained standing.

  This was not the India she had fallen in love with, this colorless comedy of manners, each morning heralding the same long, boring routine stretching dully ahead. She went through the motions, smiled when she was expected to smile, shook hands with people she neither knew nor cared about, and stood by her husband’s side when she was required to do so, running the same routines, having the same wretched conversations, eating the same food from the same table over and over again. There were times when she would sit and brush her hair in the mirror and yearn for the clatter of the typing pool and the bitter smell of burnt toast in a cramped, steamy kitchen. She shouldn’t complain. It wasn’t Lucien’s fault. She should count herself lucky that a man like him would choose her for his wife.

  She wanted a child so desperately, and she knew this now more deeply than ever. That first day, when Tessa had asked her outright if they were planning to have children, she had felt her heart burst open with the shock of her yearning. All those years locked in her own denial, unable to allow herself to even think of it, a baby, soft and warm, tiny in her arms, slumbering against her skin. How the void inside her ached.

  They had had another argument last night. Lucien had not come home until one in the morning, and instead of going to bed at eleven as she usually did, Sophie had stayed up, picking over her frustration until she was so cross that she barely knew what to do with herself. By the time Lucien came through the door, she had been so exhausted that the wind had gone from her sails. She had intended to ask him where he had been all evening, and if he was planning on making a habit of leaving her on her own like this several nights a week, but something prevented her from uttering the words. It would make her sound like a shrew, and she had sworn to herself that she would never become that woman. Instead, she had told him that he might have let her know that he was going to be so late, to which he replied that he was tired and in no mood to deal with her petulance.

  “Aren’t you ready yet?” Lucien appeared in the doorway.

  Sophie stood up from the dressing table, the train of her black evening gown spilling to the floor, and picked up the shawl draped over the corner of the bed. Delhi was cold at this time of year, and it was damp and foggy outside. Lucien flicked his eyes over her slender form for a moment, then turned and walked away. It seemed that only yesterday he would have sat with her while she dressed, helping her fasten her zipper, placing jewelry around her neck, patting her bottom affectionately. Sophie took up her small evening bag, a black velvet pouch with a pearl clip, and dropped her lipstick inside with a gold compact and a lace handkerchief.

  Outside, Lucien was waiting for her on the porch, smoking a cigarette. “At last,” he muttered as she stepped out to join him, sliding her hand into the crook of his elbow as they headed toward the waiting car.

  “Do try not to get too drunk this evening, darling,” she said gently. “It’ll only make you feel ghastly in the—”

  “Oh for God’s sake.” He lifted his arm clear of her hand. “You’re not going to start all that again, are you? Because if you are, then you can bloody well stay here with your damned headache.”

  “No!” Sophie forced a smile and caught up with him. “I’m sorry, darling. It’s just that I—”

  “What? Just that you can’t stop yourself from being a nag? Because that’s what you’re turning into. Nobody likes a nag. It’s a bloody bore.”

  Sophie quieted and slid into the back seat behind the driver, Lucien walking around to the other side and wrenching the door open irritably before climbing in beside her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Lucien glanced down at his wife’s hand over his and ran his thumb over her wedding ring, circling its looseness around her finger. There had been more of her when they married in the early summer, and he remembered a time when she had filled her evening dress with soft curves and promising glimpses of smooth alabaster flesh. That first night after the simple ceremony in the somber surroundings of Marylebone register office, as he admired her in the moonlight, he could barely believe his good fortune. She was like a Canova, her skin almost translucent in its delicate paleness, her breasts soft and rounded like perfect fruit. With his eyes closed, she could almost have been Catherine.

  • • •

  “There you are!” Tessa Wilde negotiated her way through the crowd and took hold of Sophie’s arm. “For a horrible moment, I thought you weren’t coming!”

  “So did I,” said Lucien, placing a kiss on Tessa’s cheek. “Where’s that husband of yours?”

  “In the billiard room, talking shop with David Appleton and his entourage. Oh! Will you look at that!” She lifted her hand to his face and wiped away the tiny flash of lipstick she had left there with her thumb. “There! Much better! We can’t have you wandering into battle wearing half my make-up, now can we?” Lucien took his handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed the spot of skin briskly.

  “See you later,” he said, disappearing into the throng.

  “Well!” Tessa huffed. “Thank God you’re here. My face is positively aching from all that smiling. Don’t those men ever stop talking?” She took two glasses of champagne from a passing orderly and handed one to Sophie. “I wouldn’t mind so much if it stopped at the door, but of course Stephen will want to give me a blow-by-blow account of every little thing that was said when we get home.” She shook her head and took a sip from her glass. “I don’t know why he thinks I’m interested.”

  Sophie tipped her eyes in agreement, encouraging a sense of camaraderie between them, as though she too had to endure hours of tedious detail from her husband rather than the long silences that had ceased to be uncomfortable. She had given up any pretense of real conversation, preferring to stick to the safe ground of what was in the newspapers or who was coming to dinner. Lucien had not the slightest interest in her views and had displayed a penchant for making her feel stupid when she aired them anyway. “What do you know about it?” he would say, flexing an air of superiority. “That’s the trouble with you women,” he would remark. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
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  Tessa let her eyes wander the room. “Good heavens,” she hissed under her breath. “Whatever is Ros Appleton wearing?” Sophie waited a moment before stealing a glance, only to be caught red-handed. Tessa clasped hold of her arm, cursing her behind gritted teeth as they moved toward the offender. There was no other way out of it. “Ros!” Tessa said brightly. “What a heavenly dress!”

  • • •

  That night Sophie lay in bed nursing a hot-water bottle. Her period had come again.

  1948

  Cuttack, Orissa

  19

  The palace seemed very far away. For two days, Sophie and her father had traveled, crossing the vast expanse of India’s central regions, heading east, over the heartlands of Madhya Pradesh, then into Orissa, almost as far as the Bay of Bengal. Under the hours of darkness, as the sleeper train crawled through the landscape, Sophie would watch the moon from her bunk, listening to her father’s steady breathing, the carriage clattering slow and heavy from track to track, rocking her gently as the moon shone down on her, full and white, heavy in the night sky, the film of dirt on the window smudging a dewy halo around its glow. While watching the moon, Sophie thought of Jag, under this same moon somewhere, bathed by the same blue light that rendered everything beneath it so fragile.

  The journey passed in a haze. Trains and rickshaws and waiting rooms and functional meals eaten without either of them noticing what was served or which town they were passing through as they neared their destination; the place at which she would be left to bring her child into the world. Last night, they had reached Cuttack and had stayed in the dak bungalow, where Sophie had lain sleepless again through the darkness hours, listening to her father’s breathing, wondering if he too were awake, dreading the prospect of tomorrow.

  At noon the next day, they arrived at the mission, its door set firmly into the windowless rust-red wall that ran half the length of the narrow street. There could be no mistaking it, the landmarks all as described: the stonemason’s workshop on the previous corner, the flame tree with the missing limb. The street was quiet, one small tributary in a maze of winding passages that ran like a catacomb off the beaten track. The door to the mission was much larger than all the others, with an ornate frame, a square viewing hatch set within it. The aged wood, wrung out by the arid landscape, bore tendrils of cracks where the sun had baked it dry. The masonry around it had decayed here and there, but that was to be expected for a wall of such age, and its general fabric seemed in a far superior state of repair to most of the other buildings that crammed the street. A tangle of electricity cables, threaded precariously from house to house, fed the erratic power supply. Dr. Schofield checked the piece of paper on which he had written the address. He found that his hand was shaking, and he struggled to decipher his own handwriting, then examined the door again.

  “This must be the place,” he said. He recognized it from the description, the carved flowers cut deep into its timbers, but apart from that, there were no outward signs to announce its existence, no plaque on the wall, not even a name. It was all exactly as the shopkeeper had said, pointing them in the right direction while eyeing the suitcase he carried and the young woman who stood nervously at his side, knowing why they were there. Everybody here knew what that house was.

  Dr. Schofield knocked on the dry wood with the head of his cane and concentrated hard on the door, willing it to open quickly, unable to look at his daughter, to see the fear and uncertainty on her face.

  Sophie leaned a hand briefly against the wall to steady herself on the uneven ground. It had been a wearying morning, the last leg of their long journey a jolting, sickening ride in a hopelessly inadequate cart drawn by a ripe-smelling camel. She felt wrung out and so tired that she would happily have lain down in the street if she thought it would bring her some respite. Sleep eluded her at every turn. She would lie awake night after night, tossing and turning, listening to her baby, unable to imagine the fate that awaited them. She had heard about these places, where fallen women were made to scrub floors and work in steaming laundries and were forced to suffer every humiliating waking hour in penance for having conceived, regardless of how and by whom. She had considered ending it all. She could kill herself, but that would have meant killing the child too. His child. Their child.

  Perhaps she had known all along what she was doing, that night in the water garden, but in that moment nothing could have stopped her. She had wanted to, and she had wanted him. She had yearned for him with every bone in her body, and although she had known that she would surely pay for it for the rest of her life, she didn’t care. But the baby, the baby she had not thought of, not for a moment. It had never crossed her mind, and now she would have to bear the consequences. The baby felt it too, unsettled inside her, sensing her fear. And now they were here, at the place her parents had refused to discuss, the place that had been referred to only as going away, her father staring at an imposing door in a sprawling town set within a barren landscape, unable to look at her.

  From somewhere deep down, Sophie’s panic began to rise. She could burst into tears and throw herself upon his mercy and beg her father to take her home. He would be unable to refuse her. He had been nothing but kind to her from the outset, and he would surely not let her down now. But she couldn’t ask it of him. He had been crushed by the news, his face contorted as though he had been punched in the stomach. She had broken her father’s heart, and the shame of it had eaten her alive. She couldn’t even look at him, because every time she did her eyes would fill with tears, and she too would feel her heart breaking.

  She had thought about her father every day during those years he was away, watching out for him constantly in the hope that she might see his figure appear in the street, tall and handsome in his uniform, dropping his kit bag and scooping her up, swinging her around as she smothered him in kisses. And then it seemed almost as if she grew up overnight, and that she had become the woman at the door, waiting for the man to return from war, her mother staying in the house as she always did. In their misshapen normality, father and daughter would embrace on the garden path, and she would lead him into the kitchen where her mother would stand from the table and look at him as though he were a stranger. Then her mother would turn her back on him and prepare something for supper, and a cloud would descend upon them all. It was the same black cloud that had descended the morning Dr. Reeves had told her father that she was in trouble, when Sophie’s mother had flown at her in the drawing room, first with a stinging slap that had knocked her to the floor, then with a rain of blows that seemed to go on for ever until her father finally dragged her off, kicking and screaming. Sophie’s bruises had been terrible, and her father had had to make something up about how she had tripped on the hem of her dressing gown and fallen down the marble steps outside their apartments.

  At least he had been there to intervene. Sophie thought of the child growing inside her and found herself thinking of all the occasions when there had been no one to protect her from her mother’s fits of rage, like the time she had picked up a tortoiseshell brush and broken it over her head. Sophie had dared to flinch while her mother tore through the knots in her hair, so she brought the brush cracking down and said, there, that’ll give you something to cry about. It didn’t happen when her father was around. Sophie could breathe easily then, his presence alone enough to ensure her safety. Not that she had ever said a word about it to anyone, but sometimes her father would go quiet, frowning over the top of his newspaper, then ask her to come closer so that he could take a look at the back of her legs, or the top of her arms, or a bump on her head. Sometimes he would bring out his doctor’s bag and let her play with his stethoscope while he dabbed with cotton wool or applied a little ointment and gave her a special bandage tied with a bow. And then her parents would not talk, sometimes for days. Not that Sophie minded. It heralded better times when they did not speak. Her father would keep her close to him, taking her for outings, p
erhaps to have a glass of lemonade in the local pub while he enjoyed a pint of beer, or to visit a friend of his, to see a man about a dog as he liked to say, although rarely was a dog ever involved. She would be with him all the time, barely seeing her mother at all, but then the war came and he was sent away, and the cloud descended once more. Now the cloud had returned, and this time Sophie knew it would never lift.

  Out in the noonday sun, Sophie realized just how parched she felt and wished that she had accepted the cup of sweet chai from the shopkeeper. She could have sworn that she had put a small flask of drinking water in her bag before they set out that morning, but where it had got to was anyone’s guess. She concluded that she must have either forgotten to pack it in the first place or left it behind at the dak bungalow with the kind lady who had sung to her softly and helped her to dress while she cried her eyes out.

  The January sun seemed much fiercer out here in the narrow street, the close proximity of its high walls trapping and baking the air. Dr. Schofield knocked on the door again, a little harder this time, and looked around self-consciously as the rap from his stick amplified around the ancient houses that lined the other side of the street.

  “Come on,” he muttered to himself. He jolted as a bucket of water was thrown from a nearby window, splashing to the ground a few yards from their feet. Even as it moved toward the gulley it began to evaporate, the dark marks of the furthest droplets disappearing almost instantly. Sophie squinted up at the faceless window and felt herself dissolving. She looked back at the door anxiously, knowing that she would not be able to stand for much longer. The baby was asleep inside her, unmoving. She stole a glance at her father’s reddening face. He sighed at the door in exasperation. Perhaps no one would come, she thought, and they would have to turn back. She closed her eyes and prayed.