by David Mellon
Taking Adi by the strap of her uniform, the maitre d’ marched her through the kitchen doors and pushed her over to the girls’ dressing room. “Hurry up,” he said, shutting the door. “I’ve got a restaurant to run.”
She leaned her head against the door, speechless at the pace at which her life had turned upside down. She pulled off her apron and uniform and dropped them on a hook. Taking her dress out of her cubicle, she noticed a little bottle and an envelope tucked in the back.
Where did that come from? she thought, pulling her dress over her head.
Before she could look closer, she remembered her tips in her apron pocket. She scooped up a fistful of little brown ones and the two beautiful gold coins: 1786, it read under the profile of, perhaps, a Spanish king.
At least there’s this, she thought. The coins clinked in her fist.
“What’ve you got?” said the maitre d’, poking his head through the doorway. He snapped his fingers and held out his palm.
The change went into the tip jar for the tea girls. The gold went into the pocket of the maitre d’s red vest. Xavier’s new shoes and the shepherd’s pie and pudding they might have had for supper vanished as quickly as they had appeared. The maitre d’ handed her a paltry ten francs and held open the alley door.
• • •
Leaning against one of the great stone lions guarding the steps to the school, Adi noticed that the buttons on her dress were mixed up. She redid them, but they kept coming out wrong. She slid to the pavement, her eyes welling with tears.
What am I going to tell them? Dismissed. After four and a half days. All because of that stupid bottle of—
Stop it, she ordered herself, wiping her eyes. They’re going to be here in a minute.
So what! Let them see me. If it weren’t for them . . . I’d . . .
She looked over at the lion’s face, staring at her with those big solemn eyes.
She wanted to yell at the boys. At the maitre d’. At her grandmother! Deep in her heart, though, she knew who she was mad at.
• • •
Three months earlier, five thousand miles to the east, in the city of Kanpur, India, Adi’s father had arrived at her little house unannounced. Her servant, Gita, seated him in the drawing room and brought him his gin and quinine. He attempted small talk, but the woman would have none of it.
“Your daughter will be returning from school soon,” she said and left the room.
Adi appeared, pretty and proper in her crisp white blouse, tie, and navy blue uniform. With no more greeting than an incline of her head, she seated herself before her father.
“I have a job for you,” he said.
“A job?” asked Adi.
“The boys are nine now. Their mother and I think it’s time they go abroad, to a proper school. You’re fifteen. It’s high time you went as well. I want you to take them.”
“Me? Take them where?”
“To Europe, of course. To my mother’s house in Alorainn. She’s excited to see you. To have you stay with her for a while.”
So it was arranged.
• • •
In 1914, the early summer trip from Bombay to Europe by ship could be uneventful, even pleasant. This was not the case for Adi and the twins.
A storm off Arabia. Their ship broke down halfway through the Suez Canal. Xander’s trunk was stolen in Brindisi. She and the boys squabbled.
But the greatest blow of all was that instead of being greeted by their grandmother, Adi and the boys came down the ship’s gangway to find the Italian polizia and the coroner. Their grandmother, Tillie, had taken the train from Alorainn to collect them, but she had a heart attack in the dining room of the charming little pension, two days before the ship docked.
The woman had come to India years before to visit, when the twins were toddlers and Adi just eight. The boys didn’t remember, but Adi certainly did.
The woman had shown up one hot, dusty afternoon, depositing a pyramid of trunks on the steps of the little house in Kanpur, where Adi lived alone with the servants.
“I hope you don’t mind,” announced the woman, with her shock of white hair and rather terrifying overbite. “I’ll be staying with you for a while.”
The only explanation she gave Adi as to why she had left her son’s home in Lucknow was that “children who can’t hold up their side of the conversation are of no use to anyone.”
Adi suspected there was more to it than the woman was telling her; she might have been only eight but she already knew better than to believe the stories adults told.
Whatever the reason, for the next four months, Adi had a grandmother. “You may call me Tillie,” she said to the child. “I don’t need to be reminded of my age every time I’m addressed.”
She wore eccentric clothes—sometimes even trousers. And she seemed to take it as her mission to clear up any conventional notions that Adi might have acquired. She informed the eight-year-old, in no uncertain terms, that “nothing good in this world would ever come from men.”
Often, she would swoop in and kidnap Adi from school and take her into shadowy parts of the city to search for the bronzes and little paintings of Indian deities she treasured. All the while, she enthralled Adi with stories of her adventures: how she had left her husband, scandalized her neighbors, and fled England to live in Alorainn, the tiny principality in eastern France.
If it sounded like something out of a romance novel, this was appropriate, as romance novels were pretty much the only thing the woman read. Of the many trunks with which she traveled, one was filled to the brim with books. She’d brought along Andrew Lang’s “Coloured” Fairy Books for the children. But after Adi devoured those, Tillie began recommending Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. Soon it was Red Pottage and Lady Audley’s Secret. When Tillie departed she left the trunk with Adi.
• • •
Adi had spent the first few years of her life with her father and mother, in a house on the banks of the Gomti River in Lucknow, a city in northeast India. That her father was a British soldier and her mother an Indian woman was of no consequence to the child. She remembered they were happy.
Adi’s mother, a nurse in the employ of a maharaja in the Northern Territories, had (so the oft-repeated story went) saved the soldier’s life after he was found at the gate with a broken arm and a bullet lodged in his left lung, the result of an ambush in the mountains. The doctor was away; the task of attending to the wounded soldier fell to her.
The beautiful, dark-eyed Priyanka Patel, schooled in medicine at the University of Madras, told the soldier he was most likely going to die. Happily, she was mistaken. Michael Stuart Whitachre Dahl recovered his health, but lost his heart. He and Priyanka were married. Adi was born—short for Aditi, meaning “boundless” in Sanskrit. She arrived at the end of June, along with the rains of the monsoon.
Years later, when Adi was seven, Lance Corporal Dahl was back with his regiment in the mountains east of Srinagar when cholera swept through the maharaja’s kingdom. With the maharaja’s wife and daughters in danger, Adi’s mother returned to care for them. Adi stayed with the servants in the house, an arrangement she would become familiar with.
The maharaja’s family survived the cholera. Priyanka did not.
By the time word reached Lance Corporal Dahl, he had already missed his wife’s funeral. He stayed with Adi for a week, much of the time with a glass of gin in hand, before he told her he needed to get back to his regiment. The next morning, packed and ready to leave, he pulled his gold pocket watch from his tunic and handed it to her.
“But that’s the watch Mother gave you.”
“I want you to hold on to it for me,” he said. “It’s my promise to you that I will always return.”
Adi hadn’t been aware that a promise was required in this regard. She gripped the watch tight in her hands as he rode away.
The visits became less frequent, the excuses for his absence more slight, until for most of the next year, he didn’t come
at all.
• • •
The city of Lucknow was flooded, but no one was complaining. It was the end of June and after eight and a half months without a drop of rain, the monsoon had finally arrived. Adi woke in the middle of the night to a rapturous deluge; the air, ashen and foul for months, had been restored by an ocean breeze from a thousand miles to the south. Gita did a puja for Indra the god of storms and she and Adi danced in the yard in their nightgowns.
Three days later, Adi returned to find her father’s horse hitched up inside the gate and her father sitting on the porch. Despite her umbrella, she was soaked through.
She ran up the steps through the water cascading off the roof. He told her to change into something dry, but seeing the present with a big bow next to him, she gave him a drenching kiss and dropped down beside him on the porch swing. He inquired about her day, letting her ramble on until he interrupted and informed her that he had a new wife.
That day, the captain (now no longer a lowly lance corporal) told Adi a new story. It was not the fairy tale that she had heard as a child.
The part about the beautiful nurse and the brave soldier was still there. She had saved his life. He was grateful. They fell in love and got married.
But as things often are in real life, he said, it’s more complicated.
In a perfect world, everyone would have embraced them. A perfect couple. A beautiful child. But in the 1890s, neither India nor Britain was anyone’s definition of perfect.
The captain’s family opposed the marriage, vehemently. His father, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, took to claiming his son had been killed in action. Vehement was too mild an utterance to express how Priyanka’s family felt about her choice. It was as if she had never been born. The British army was no more open-minded.
Tracing his finger around the rim of his glass, the captain said, “After your mother died, I was . . . well, I met a woman. The daughter of my commanding officer.”
Feeling foolish now in her dripping clothes, Adi listened to the rain, her fingers wrapped tight around the watch she wore on a chain around her neck. Even with the downpour splashing upon the pavers, she could still hear her father.
“We married and we have twin boys, your brothers. You should see them. Of course you will see them. Soon. I promise.”
Adi picked up the present, tore away the bow and paper, and lifted out a lovely cream-colored boater. She looked at the hat for a moment and then flung it through the curtain of rain out into the yard. Pulling the chain from around her neck, she dropped the watch at his feet and ran crying into the house.
The captain’s new marriage was a disaster. The only thing he had in common with the general’s daughter was white skin. She was as beautiful as a rose in winter and as arrogant and pretentious as her father. Neither of them was ever going to accept a child with brown skin, no matter how bright or beautiful she might be.
To get his family fortune back, to advance his career, there was only one thing Captain Dahl could do: renounce his youthful error and abandon Adi.
• • •
The children began pouring out of the front doors of the school before the second bell had tolled.
Among the multitude of kids, Xavier and Xander, with their wide-set eyes and burnt auburn locks, would have been easy enough to spot. That they were as alike as two sparrows, made it inescapable. Adi dressed them differently in hopes of telling them apart, though they often switched clothes to confound her.
They were surprised to see her.
Dropping his books to the pavement, Xavier clambered up onto the back of the stone lion.
“Sister Charlotte said we weren’t to climb on the lions,” said Xander.
“I thought you were going to meet us at the park?” Xavier said to Adi, ignoring his brother. “Why aren’t you wearing your work clothes?”
“It was slow,” she said, looking across the boulevard at the cathedral. “They let us go early.”
The boys shared a look. Adi spotted scratches on Xavier’s cheek and a bruise under his eye. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Xavier?”
“I told you. It’s nothing.”
Their father, in the brief time he’d spent preparing Adi for the journey, had let it be known that Xavier had had the “occasional rough patch.” Occasional was the word he had used.
This was news to Adi: the Little Princes—not perfect?
But other than his fascination with American outlaws and his ability to pick the lock on the cabin door aboard ship, she had seen little evidence to support her apprehension.
“They don’t want us here,” said Xander.
“Of course they do. They’re just—”
“No,” he said. “We got kicked out.”
“What do you mean, you—”
“I got into a fight,” said Xavier.
“And they’re expelling you? Did you hurt the other boy?”
“Wasn’t a boy,” said Xavier. “It was Sister Agnes.”
“Xavier! What do you mean?”
He didn’t respond. She turned to his brother.
“Sister Agnes,” said Xander, “she saw you dropping us off this morning and said mean things about you. In Latin. But Xavier’s good with Latin. Almost as good as you. He said things back. Sister Agnes got upset. She went after him with her ruler.”
Adi didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t even sure if this was true. They made stories up constantly. He was all scraped up, though.
She looked over at the school. “You’re going to have to go apologize.”
Xander slid down off the lion. “She’s the one that needs to apologize. Aren’t we s’posed to be standing up for our sister?”
“Oh, for goodness sakes, Xavier. I hardly even count as your sister.”
“Maybe. But you’re the only one we’ve got.”
Adi shook her head. “Get your books. We’ll . . . worry about it tomorrow.”
• • •
As they walked, Adi reached into her pocket and brought out chocolates wrapped in red foil, marked with the name of her former place of employment. She’d grabbed a fistful of them on her way out the door.
“You said school in the summer was going to be fun,” said Xander, unwrapping his candy.
“I lied. It was the only way they’d let you start in the fall. It was hard enough to get them to agree to that.”
Xavier looked at the wrapper from his chocolate. “You got fired, didn’t you?”
Adi stopped. “I broke a bottle. It was old and expensive.”
“Not our most brilliant day, I guess,” said Xander.
“Doesn’t seem like it,” said Adi. “At least I wasn’t fighting with a nun.”
• • •
For most of her life, Adi had hated the boys, blaming them for taking her father away from her. She had pictured their perfect little lives, the chatty family meals, the birthdays and Christmases filled with presents and laughter. Someone always there, praising them for their accomplishments, drying their tears.
Looking at them now, it was dawning on her that the boys’ lives weren’t much more of a fairy tale than hers. They knew all too well what being raised by servants was like. Being sent to Europe wasn’t a holiday, it was a banishment. Their mother had no more use for them than she did for Adi.
They stood on the sidewalk of the wide boulevard, marveling at the motorcars; in India, you’d be lucky to see two in a day.
Without thinking about it, Adi grabbed them by the hands, shouting, “Hold on!” They ran, hooting and laughing, across the street between fast-moving automobiles. Not until they were safe on the other side did it occur to her that she was holding hands with them. Clumsily, she pulled free.
• • •
At a dizzying height above the street, Coal sat next to a weathered gargoyle on the cupola of the cathedral. The great stone dragon, cracked and covered in lichen, had perched there for four hundred years. It was no surprise tha
t it was loose from its mooring.
The sky had cleared, though more dark clouds were moving in from the north. For the moment, though, the sunlight forced Coal to squint to see the figures on the walkway below. He pushed his shoulder against the gargoyle; the brittle tiles beneath it splintered under the sudden weight.
He stopped.
“Is this the best you can manage?” he said. “She won’t even know it happened.”
For a moment he considered the idea that dropping a gargoyle upon the girl might be excessive, even for such an excellent bottle of cognac.
But more, it showed a troubling lack of invention for occupying himself for the few days he had before he headed south.
He wiped the dust off his hands. His plan had been wrecked, his bottle broken. But, as he was given to say, “If you don’t have a backup plan, you don’t have a plan.” He’d heard a man say that right before the man jumped to his death. He always wondered if he was being ironic. Or did he simply know something that Coal didn’t?
Chapter 3
Three days later
In the moonlight, the half-eaten fig rinds littering the ground were just visible beneath the old tree. A few yards out from the kitchen windows, its roots had buckled the foundation of the rundown little cottage, giving the house a topsy-turvy appearance. All the windows were dark now, the smoke gone from the chimney. The only sound was the crickets and frogs, still exuberant over the afternoon showers.
Coal had been sitting in the tree for so long that a cluster of jackdaws had taken up residence for the night. As he dropped from the bottom branch, the birds burst from the tree and flew away into the fields. A fox, with a mole clutched delicately in its teeth, looked up to watch the shadow crossing the yard to the front entrance.
Coal’s hand, ghostly in the moonlight, reached for the door handle. Not locked. The door swung open. The shadow slid into the house.
As he stepped over the threshold, the moonlight through the door illuminated the tiger.
Coal paused, taking in the fearsome eyes and formidable teeth. Stretching out his hand, he tapped lightly upon the nose of the ceramic beast.
He closed the door behind him and looked around the room.
