Once and Always

by Alyssa Deane

  Watching her, Roxane recalled Unity's grief at learning of Collier's duplicity, and her confusion in finding Roxane in Olivia Waverly's company. That had, indeed, been an odd circumstance, a perverse twist of fate, but one for which Roxane was after grateful. She had liked Olivia. In lucid moments, she recognized that it was most definitely not the girl who was to blame for what had occurred.

  Somewhere inside, vaguely in the center of her chest, Roxane still felt the cold, burning ache that put her in mind of the way her skin had felt, when it had adhered one winter to a frozen pipe. She still bore the scar, though it was slight, on the underside of her right arm. Other than that, she felt nothing at all. There was no inclination to weep, to scream, to hate or mourn. Indeed, she was quite numb and knew, in that part of her brain which registered the sense of things, that she should be immensely grateful for that.

  “He—he has—has been committed—committed elsewhere—all this time,” Unity had hiccuped.

  “Do stop talking about it, Unity,” Roxane remembered commanding in a flat tone. “I do not want to know."

  Upon return to the Stantons’ residence, there had been no stopping Unity from bursting out with the entire story. Roxane did not stop her. It no longer mattered. She sat in a chair, her back straight, hands clasped in her lap, as Unity sobbed out her tale to Augusta, her voice ofttimes inaudible, muffled in her mother's lap as Augusta gently stroked the flame of the girl's hair. Above Unity's head, Augusta stared across the room at Roxane, and Roxane had stared back, almost without blinking. After a time, she turned her head to look out the window at the deep velvet-blue of the evening sky.

  “Well,” said Augusta, when Unity's voice had trailed away, and there was only the occasional, shuddering sigh, “I suppose you would have no objection, now, Roxane, to Colonel Stanton speaking with the captain's superiors? At least, let us get to the bottom of this."

  “I understand the situation very well, Mrs. Stanton,” she had told her, though it was only half true. “Even if I were to believe his affections do not lie elsewhere, I know his honor does. He was affianced before ever we met, and he spoke out of turn. As for any claim to affection, I can only wonder now at his conscience."

  Unity was suddenly at her side, clutching at her hand and recalling her from reverie.

  “Come with us to Simla,” she urged. “It is so much more pleasant than being here, in the heat and the rain."

  Roxane smiled down at her, gently disengaging her fingers. “I must stay, Unity. I came to India for a purpose, and I mean to see it through. If my father and I are to make amends, it would not be practical to do so by false starts and stops."

  “I understand that, Roxane,” said Unity, “but I am worried about you."

  “Worried? Why on earth would you be worried about me?"

  Unity stepped nearer, stretching up on tiptoe to speak in Roxane's ear. “Roxane, you cannot deny that he has hurt you."

  Roxane backed away. “Can I not hurt as well here as elsewhere? I would much rather be making useful strides forward than basking in self-pity in some hill station."

  Unity frowned, cocking her head to one side in puzzlement. “Self-pity? I see none of that. Indeed, you seem quite dispassionate, Roxane. You have not even cried."

  “I have no intentions of doing so,” Roxane assured her. “I told him that, Unity."

  “Then you knew?” Unity was aghast.

  “I knew nothing,” said Roxane, “although I believe there were several occasions when he tried to let me know...” Her voice trailed off, and she turned to pluck a stray bit of straw from the stiff, brown hide of the buggy horse.

  Lowering her voice, Unity moved nearer to the animal's head, lacing her fingers through the traces.

  “He loved you, Roxane. Anyone could see that."

  Loved, thought Roxane. Already it was spoken of in the past tense. As if a prior commitment made years earlier under unknown circumstances could, upon announcing itself once again into his life, alter the condition of his sentiments, just like that. Perhaps it had. Did not devotion to honor and its searing, gilded demands mean more to a man than devotion to a woman? Or he might possibly never have loved her at all. Perhaps he had never truly felt the passion to which he swore himself. However, if he had sought to gain anything from her through that device, she could at least rest easy in knowing she had not satisfied any ignoble appetite.

  And if he did, indeed, love her? Roxane mused, as she continued along the horse's flanks, wiping straw and bits of debris from its coat. What did a man do with that affection, once he had chosen another course for his life? To what place in his heart did he retire it, so that it would not, in the years to come, grieve or trouble him? And what of Olivia Waverly? What, then, would she trade, and what get in return, if it be not love?

  She would not concern herself with that. She would not think of Collier, of his pain, or of his guilt, or of his confusion. She would not think of her own grief. There was much to be done, and learned, and taken in, for here all was new; she was a vast distance from Calcutta, and further still from London. Yes, Unity was leaving, but they would meet again. Roxane had made a friend, too, on her journey to Delhi—Ahmed Ali, one of the King of Delhi's grandnephews, returning from an education in Europe. He had promised that he would arrange for Roxane to learn Court Persian. Although Augusta Stanton had been mildly scandalized at the idea of befriending the son of a native prince, she was also quietly impressed. It was not, after all, unheard of. In true Unity fashion, the girl was delighted, and found another source of diversion for her overactive imagination. Life would continue, as more than mere existence. Roxane would not make the mistake of reducing life's experiences to earthbound fragments of simple survival.

  Once she had watched the Stantons drive away in a cloud of dust, Roxane returned to her father's residence. Her home now, too. For although she had retained the house in London, it was closed up, and she did not know when she might return there. Strolling through the high-ceilinged rooms, she found there was nothing of feminine presence, no hint that her mother had ever co-existed with her father in this world. But of course, she reminded herself, they did not live together under this roof. He had been stationed elsewhere before their return to England, before her own birth.

  There were books everywhere in the house, and several smoking pipes, two on stands and one balanced on the edge of a tray designed to collect the ash. On a rickety table in the sitting room sat two empty bottles of soda water beside a corked decanter of brandy and a deck of playing cards, fanned out and face down. The paintings on the walls were not of landscapes, unless hunting was involved, nor of still life. The china was plain, the chintz plaid, or striped, never, of course, floral. A disreputable-looking fancy shawl lay draped over one of the cane chairs, as if it had been dropped there some time ago. In the corner, in a brass stand, stood a hog spear, a buggy whip, and a hunting crop. Earlier this morning, it had also held her father's regulation sword, but he had taken it with him, buckled onto the belt of his uniform. All in all, the house was austere, as befitted, she supposed, an officer with no family.

  A portrait hung over the mantel, of a male in uniform, russet with white webbing and black accoutrements. The man carried his hat beneath his arm. The smile on his face was close-lipped, the eyes above the long, aquiline nose green, and the hair a dark reddish brown.

  That was how she remembered her father, a young man in his prime. Fifteen years in India had aged him considerably. She would not have known him, when first they met yesterday, had it not been for the eyes. They were the same eyes which looked out at her every day from the looking glass. The same eyes that had daily looked at her mother. How, Roxane wondered, had her mother felt, with that constant reminder of a faithless man staring back at her from the face of the child she loved?

  Unlike the portrait, Maxwell Sheffield's countenance was now as browned and wrinkled as a nutshell, and his hair, once a lustrous auburn, was entirely gray, thinning at the pate. He appeared shorter, to
o, although this, she knew, was to be accounted for by the fact that she was no longer a child at his knee. The smile had changed, was less studied and swaggering and more at ease and inclusive of those around him. The shoulders beneath the uniform jacket were slightly stooped. He walked with a slow, deliberate gait that nearly hid the fatigue which was its origin.

  In the fifteen years of separation, he had grown old. And in the process of aging, the image of the man against whom she had harbored such anger and enmity had vanished. In his place was, indeed, a stranger, and it was far harder to bear that degree of ill will against a man she neither recognized nor knew.

  Passing through the turkey-red cloth hanging over the door into her father's office, Roxane stopped short. A tiny child, hair as black as oil falling around one shoulder as she bent her head over the desk, was scratching out a message on a piece of creamy paper. Outside, men drilled in brief parade in the comparative cool of the evening, though inside such a silence prevailed that Roxane could hear the scratching of the quill over the surface of the paper and the labor of the girl's breathing, in concentration. Her small, pointed tongue slipped in and out of the corner of her mouth between the silent movement of her lips, following the scrawling of her left hand. In the scant illumination thrown through the slats of the chik, the girl's complexion seemed pale and smooth, like blanched almonds. A Eurasian child, it would seem; one of those unfortunates who could be of neither society, scorned by the European community of their fathers and by the native culture of their mothers, for the mixed heritage of their birth. Roxane noted the tiny gold crucifix about the girl's throat, and remembered that the religions of India could not accept the taint of their blood.

  Roxane must have made some noise at the door, for the child looked up, startled. She clutched the note to her chest, smearing a bit of ink across her blouse. Roxane stepped into the room.

  “I am Roxane Sheffield,” she said. “Who are you?"

  The girl wriggled down from the chair where she had been kneeling and crossed the floor to stand in front of Roxane in miniature kid boots. She held the piece of paper out in her hands like an offering.

  “This is for you,” she announced sweetly.

  “For me?” Roxane played the game. “What is it?"

  “Read,” said the child.

  Obediently, Roxane did so, moving nearer to the window for light. It was a brief note, in childish script, welcoming Roxane to her father's house and expressing a hope that the child and Roxane could be friends.

  “Well, of course we can be friends,” Roxane agreed, crouching over her heels as the child approached. “And thank you for the welcome. However,” she added, “if you are going to do it correctly, you must keep your wording straight. See here? ‘Pleased to have you in my father's house'? It should properly read ‘pleased to have you in your father's house.’ Do you see?"

  The tiny Eurasian child took the note soberly back from Roxane's hands, frowning at it. After a moment, she shook her dark head.

  “No, please,” she said, politely and carefully, with a long pronunciation of the i's like e's, “is correct. Sera is pleased to have you in my father's house."

  Roxane straightened her knees. With her left hand, she smoothed her skirt over her hip, while with her right she lifted the window covering on the tip of her finger. Sunlight splashed into the room and over the girl, causing her to blink and turn away. When she looked back, she raised her heart-shaped face. Inky black, loosely plaited hair fell away from the girl's shoulders, exposing small ears pierced with blood-red rubies. The features of her countenance were diminutive, graceful, and lovely, and markedly eastern in arrangement, with the exception of her eyes which were more round than ovate, surrounded by heavy, dark, double-grown lashes. They were also, Roxane noted, a distinctive, telling color, a translucent green, a green like glass.

  “What did you say your name was?” Roxane inquired softly.

  “Sera,” said her father's half-caste daughter, with an elegant movement of her hand before her face. Looking down at the pretty child, Roxane wanted to recoil in cold and puerile horror. She took a deep breath, forcing a smile to her lips.

  “Sera,” she said. “That is a very lovely name. Where have you been since I have arrived? Why did we not meet sooner?"

  “I have been in my mother's house,” she answered, matter-of-factly.

  “Where is that?"

  “Behind this house. You see the roof if you look from upstairs window."

  Behind the house were the whitewashed mud huts of her father's servants, where his groom, his bearer, the gardener, the cook, the laundryman had their quarters. Roxane strolled back to the desk, lowering herself into her father's chair. “She does not live here, then, Sera?"

  The child scrambled up onto the desktop, pushing aside all manner of objects with imperious indifference, and sat down, tugging her skirts for a few moments about her thin legs.

  “She not live in this house, Roxane,” Sera explained, once she had settled herself. “She would be shamed."

  “Shamed?” Roxane echoed. “How so? I do not understand."

  “Because she and Colonel Max ... ah, they do not marry,” the child said, after apparent thought on the delicacy of her reply.

  “Hmmm,” Roxane demurred. “And you?"

  “Me?” The girl made a little jump on the scarred surface of wood. “No shame. Colonel Max love me."

  Roxane had, of course, been inquiring as to the living arrangements, to satisfy her own curiosity. Sera's answer had been more to the heart of the matter and explained possibly a good deal more than Roxane, in her initial shock of revelation, cared yet to know.

  “Of course he does,” Roxane responded, in distraction. She lowered her hand to the desk, tapping her fingers in rolling succession along the edge. Sera watched her with eyes wide. She was, Roxane decided, a patient child, for she asked no questions.

  The sound of male voices startled Roxane from her contemplation, and she looked up to see the curtain swing wide, admitting her father and two other men.

  “Colonel Max!” cried Sera, jumping to the floor. Hastily, she tried to put the desk to rights. Roxane laid her hand on the child's arm, stilling her frantic attempts. Looking from the colonel's expression to Roxane's, the two men backed from the room, excused themselves, and departed.

  “Roxane—"

  “When,” said she, without rising, “did you feel would be the time to tell me this?"

  Max Sheffield came further into the room, dropping into a chair just inside the doorway. He held his shako between his knees with one hand, mopping brow and neck with a cloth in the other. He coughed, into his handkerchief.

  “It was awkward, Roxane—"

  “Awkward? For whom? You, or those you had left behind?"

  “I could not change the past, Roxane."

  Roxane frowned. Her cheeks felt hot of a sudden, and her eyes moist.

  I will not weep, she had told Collier, not for you, nor any other man.

  She straightened her spine. Sera, made uncomfortable by the baffling exchange, had crept behind the chair. Roxane reached back, taking the girl's tiny hand in her own.

  “I grant you that, sir. The past you could not change. But you knew that I was coming. You, sir, had asked me out here. Forewarned might have been forearmed."

  Max ducked his head, scratching a dry patch of skin on his forehead, his elbow on the arm of the chair. “Forewarned,” he said, looking up from under his hand, “might possibly have been the death knell, for me. Would you have understood, do you think? Would you have forgiven?"

  Brows lowered, Roxane met his eyes in a silent, sober summation, breathing through slightly parted lips.

  “At the very least,” he said, “I have done my duty here, even if I failed before."

  “Somehow,” said Roxane, “the end result, no matter how noble, does not make me feel all that much better. What is it which allows a man to guard secrets of such magnitude, only to pass them off, upon inevitable detection,
as trivial? Is it self-deception, would you suppose?” Rising, she walked to the doorway, Sera in tow, and paused, looking down at the man who was her father—who was, in point of fact, father to them both. She touched his shoulder, lightly, with the tips of her fingers.

  “Had I known of this sooner, I cannot promise I would have either understood or forgiven. We lived too long apart, separated by more than distance. I would have judged you without seeing. Now, I can only try to see, without judging. It is the best that I can do, at this late date. I grew up wanting the love which you have chosen to give freely to this child. I am an adult now, Father,” She took a deep, steadying breath. “I ... I no longer am that child who craved your affection. We must make our amends with an altered framework. I think it may be done, if we work very hard to see it done."

  Maxwell Sheffield looked up at his older daughter, laying his fingers over her own in a minute contact. When she left, she took his little Sera with her, leading her by the hand with gentle solicitude, wearing about her unwittingly that emblem of tender passion which a woman holds in reserve for a child. He remembered he had been jealous of it, all those foolish years ago.

  Chapter Ten

  To alleviate the strangeness of the situation and the pain of a hurt which would not find its ease in dwelling upon the cause, Roxane threw herself wholeheartedly into caring for her father's house. An officer paid his servants from his salary and maintained his house as well. Max Sheffield had an income from inheritance and so was better off than most, employing a multitude of servants who initially resented her intrusion as much as did the colonel, but she overrode them all, and soon it was she to whom they came in deference for their orders and with their complaints.

  In the Stantons’ home, she had been a guest, and the running of the household had been in Augusta's hands; here, however, she used the knowledge she had gained under her mother's instruction to full advantage. Cleanliness became the order of the day rather than an option, and menus were planned to consist of foods which would return the color of health to her father's countenance. In a letter to Unity, she wrote, “I did not heretofore understand why the multitude of servants were necessary in such a small household as your own; but here we are even fewer, and the reason has come to me clearly. They will not do another's work, no matter how much you might in error importune them to do so. Culture and religion prevent their tasks from being interchanged. My goodness, the syce would lose caste by sweeping the floor, and the gardener would never lift the dead crow from the garden."