Once and Always

by Alyssa Deane

  Within a week, she had arranged for time to tutor Sera in math, reading, and music. She met Sera's mother, Cesya, as infrequently as possible. After the first week, the shawl disappeared from the sitting room and did not return.

  Roxane's guilt concerning that matter was minimal. She could not help that she wanted no part of the woman who had usurped her mother's place. Sera was an innocent in that entire affair, and Roxane became very protective of her half-sister. She accompanied Roxane wherever she went, whether it was an early morning ride, or to the library, or church, or on the occasional visit to the wife of a married officer. Such was Roxane's demeanor when Sera was with her that the women accepted the appearance of the half-caste child among their own without complaint, or Roxane did not return. She cared little either way.

  At night, Roxane occasionally enjoyed the local theater, which consisted of the young men and women of the European community as actors. Roxane herself opted to play a part one evening, but the dark-haired young officer to whom she played opposite was too forward, and though he greatly resembled Collier in appearance, she had no interest and avoided his company thereafter. More than once, she had her father's butler turn away this gentleman or that one, who had come seeking her audience on some excuse. She was, of course, the newest female addition to the cantonment, and the usual wagers were going round.

  Given her own, Roxane was an admirable hostess; her father's biweekly engagements became respectable, and though the men grumbled about the change in tenor, their wives were more than delighted, and frequently attended. Much taken with her looks, though a little baffled by her tenacity, they attempted to arrange meetings for Roxane with the most eligible bachelors among their husbands’ acquaintances. She politely declined every offer, yet willingly exposed herself to both criticism and envy when she accepted the invitation of Ahmed Ali to learn Court Persian under his direct tutelage. His summons to Roxane arrived one morning, formally delivered by a servant of the palace; after that Roxane went, by appointment, every other day at nine in the morning with Sera and the ayah her father had insisted she engage, accompanied by a subaltern, to a comparatively small apartment in the palace in the city, there to spend an hour learning to speak the royal language.

  Thus filling her days and nights to near capacity, Roxane had little time to wonder about Collier Harrison, and if she thought of him at all, she was very quick to think of something else.

  * * * *

  In the third week of June, the rains began in earnest, the rains which men called the monsoons. Roxane walked out of the house in the early morning hours and looked up to discover that the sky, which had for days on end been a vast expanse of incandescent white, entrapping heat as in a dome, had become quite gray, coloring all the land with its eerie, argent light. Unshed moisture in the heated air pressed down unbearably, causing even the birds in the trees to sit motionless, beaks agape, while the slightest movement on Roxane's part brought the perspiration streaming to the surface of her skin, as though she had just stepped from her bath. The night before she had seen a pair of elephants—and how casually she thought of them, now, as one might have viewed the sight of a dog or cat, or a trap pony in London—using the delicate tips of their trunks to cast sand over each other in an attempt to cool off and shed the flies which hovered in clouds around their crinkled, hairless gray hides.

  As she watched the sky, a livid green flash ran east to west across her line of vision, followed by a cry from one of the native servants. Then the first of the drops came down, as large as coins, striking the ground with the density of a stone and pocking the dry earth. Tiny puffs of dust flew up. These first drops were quickly followed by others, and still more, until the enormous drops were falling everywhere, spattering against leaves and soil and thirsty, dying flower heads in a cacophony of sound, cascading from the roof like drum roll.

  Roxane flinched at the noise. Her nostrils filled with the gloriously wet smell of dust being laid to rest. She put her hand out, extending it beyond the roof of the verandah, to find that the falling rain was as warm as bathwater. Impulsively, and without hesitation, she stepped out into it, twirling with her arms to the sky in sheer, childlike joy as the rain soaked her hair and skin and clothes. Steam rose from the garden walks and from the tile of the roof. The cook and her father's butler appeared on the verandah, staring wide-eyed and silent at Roxane before creeping warily away.

  Later, her father admonished her for confusing and frightening the servants, and behaving like a heathen rather than a proper Englishwoman.

  “A young woman of your age should have more dignity,” he reminded her.

  “You may be right,” Roxane answered him, not taking her eyes from the sock she was carefully darning. She had dried her saturated hair with a towel, and it lay in a shining, combed mass down her back, soaking into her dry gown.

  “What possessed you to splash about like that in the rain?"

  “It felt good. I was hot, and the rain felt good. What better reason than that?"

  “Did you not consider how it might look, or how it might affect the servants?"

  “I don't suppose that I did,” Roxane admitted, biting the thread with her teeth.

  “That type of impulsive behavior is unseemly in a young woman."

  “Do not,” Roxane quietly objected, “attempt to instruct me as a father at this time in my life, sir. As for my performance today, I did nothing of which I need be ashamed. How anyone might choose to judge my actions is entirely within their purview. If they do not care for me, all the decorum in the world will not alter that."

  Max Sheffield was silent a moment, and then he laughed. “I can see that you are as mule-headed as I, dear girl. Even when you were a toddler, your mother feared you had inherited that trait from me."

  Roxane said nothing, but gathered up her sewing.

  “Roxane, is there a reason why you have not wed?"

  “Yes,” answered Roxane, leaving her chair, the sewing box tucked neatly under one arm, the darned sock dangling from her hand. “Choice,” she said. “It has been by choice, Father."

  Dropping the colonel's sock into his lap, she exited the room.

  The initial exhilaration of such a monumental downpour faded when the torrential rains showed no signs of subsiding. Before long a dank smell pervaded the house, which no amount of perfume or incense could dispel. Anything made of cloth, especially sheets and towels, remained perpetually damp. Shoes and similar items left too long in the cupboard were soon black with mold. In the dhobi's washhouse, where the clothes were dried on wicker baskets over a charcoal brazier, the scent of scorched fabric mingled with the cloying damp. Insects thrived, mosquitoes rising in dark clouds from standing water, and green flies maddeningly invading the house along with crickets that one could not avoid crushing beneath one's feet as they swarmed against the verandah steps and under the doors.

  The rainy season, Roxane soon discovered, was a period of sickness also: dysentery, boils, strange agues, and fevers. She learned how to tend these ailments as first her father, then Sera, fell ill. One night, Sera came seeking Roxane's help with her mother, who was malarial. Dutifully, as the lady of her father's house, Roxane dosed her father's concubine with quinine water and stayed by her side until the fever had passed. Cesya, as a convert to Christianity, accepted Roxane's ministrations and medicines without qualm. Not so other household members, whose caste forbade them eating or drinking anything from Roxane's hand.

  Her father's chowkidar, an elderly man whom he had employed as a night watchman, grew gravely ill during this time, until it was apparent that he was going to die. His family came for him and brought him down to the river. There, through the rain and the infrequent periods when the sky hung heavy and gray without falling, they remained with him by the banks of the Jumna, waiting for the moment of death, at which point they would release his body to the waters. Roxane went down to the river, once, to speak with the man, but he was too far gone to hear her, and though his family did not ma
ke her unwelcome, it was obvious that her presence was an intrusion. She stood for a few minutes, listening to the throaty, rolling call of the muezzin in the mosque near the Red Fort crying out in the dawn, “La! il-lah-il-ullaho! La! il-lah-il-ul-la-ho! There is no god but God!” and then she made a gift of her umbrella to the old man, to further shield him from the rains, and walked the two miles back to her father's house, once again soaked in her clothes. Her father had no words of remonstrance.

  September came, and the constant deluge ceased, so that there were whole hours in which no rain fell, or threatened to fall, then days consecutively. In the dampness of a steaming, drying land, the tiny lizards which clung to the walls inside the house grew fat on insect hordes, without seeming to deplete the source. The world was more green than it would ever be without the nourishing rain, verdant, lush, and overgrown. Muddy brown and swollen, the Jumna rushed to join the Ganges. The bridge of boats had been pulled up until such time as the river receded, the lighters lying belly-up on the banks, thick ropes of jute curled into large, barrel-like masses, with heavy planks of wood warping in piles beside them.

  One day, the sun did shine, precursor of many like days to follow, and the green world was touched with vivid gold. Roxane stood on the ridge, looking down toward the city of Delhi. The red stone was awash with bronze tints; the water flowed, gilded, beneath the gates; trees bore a patina like copper; and above it all a sky arched as blue as a robin's egg. Every man and beast, miniaturized by distance, was a brilliant paint stroke in motion. Roxane was touched by the singular beauty of the scene; she thought of Collier, in the garden, when they had stood together watching the sun rise.

  I should very much like to show you all the beautiful things in this world, Roxane, if you will let me.

  She thought of him quite often, now, for the numbness with which she had cloaked herself had crept away from her in the long, lonely night following the receipt of a letter from Calcutta.

  The script on the envelope had been feminine and unfamiliar, enclosing a brief message and an article from the local British newspaper.

  “Dear Roxane,” the note read, “I thought this might be of interest to you. It seems we both were duped.

  “Yours, R. P."

  The clipping, cut neatly from the paper, was a belated announcement of the engagement of Horace, Lord Waverly's daughter, Olivia, to one Captain Harrison of the Native Infantry. The wedding was due to take place in December, it said. There were several more sentences, relating to family background. Roxane did not bother to read them. As she had been standing in the washhouse when she opened the letter, she tossed the entire packet into the brazier and watched the paper reduced to heavy ash.

  Alone in bed that night, she had refused to weep, would not loose the tiny, spinning ball of pain from the place where it had buried itself deep in her soul; long ago, she had wept in anguish over her father, and had learned quickly that tears availed nothing. For all the weeping in the world, he had not returned to her mother, nor come back to her.

  But the memories of Collier could no longer be contained, and the smallest nuance brought him leaping before her mind's eye. Turning her back on the lovely view of the Emperor's Palace and the walls of Delhi, Roxane returned home to where, she knew, Sera patiently awaited her music lesson.

  * * * *

  Roxane immersed herself in the planning of the garden. Her father's gardener was a fully capable man, but the colonel was not interested in the conception, only the resultant enjoyment. Roxane sat down with the gardener, going through packets of English seeds, choosing certain ones for color, harmony, hardiness, height, or spread. She discussed with him the various types of native plants, and where best they could be planted, or moved, to achieve the effect she desired. The English seeds were sown in shallow earthenware pans for propagation, kept in bamboo structures on stilts. In the evenings, the roofs of matting were rolled back to permit the cool air and morning dew to touch the seedlings. When they had grown strong enough, they were transplanted, either to the garden or, like the sweet peas, pansies, and sweet sultans, into pots that were set along the verandah. Ahmed Ali procured some blood-red roses for her, from Bahadur Shah's own, which received a place of honor along the walkway leading to the front steps. Every day, the graveled paths were swept with twig brooms. The area of green lawn was beaten gently each morning to remove the dew, lest the tender shoots burn in the sun. And though Roxane nearly always got the last word when it came to the garden, she always permitted the gardener to believe he had done so. He knew her ruse as well as she did, but he was a prideful man when it came to his duty and recognized the respect she accorded him. In return, he became as protective of her as he was of his plants. Roxane was both quietly amused and genuinely appreciative of this unlooked for guardianship.

  In her forays into the city, Roxane came to know many of the merchants, and they her, calling to her deferentially in greeting. There was a great disparity between the two communities, which she did not fully understand. Collier, she thought more than once, would have been able to explain it to her. There was no getting a direct answer out of Ahmed; his education in Europe seemed sometimes to have blessed him with binary allusions. As for Roxane's father, he did not see the difference as anything of importance, but merely the natural state of the universe. If nothing else, the very fact that the relatively few members of the European community were ensconced in the same size area which held, nearby, thousands upon thousands of a native population, seemed too bold a display of proprietary opportunism. Roxane could not, however, find anyone who was less than offended by that particular argument, and she soon relinquished it as a topic of dinner conversation.

  In October, on the tenth day of the month, Sera turned eight years old. Roxane celebrated the anniversary by giving the girl a colorful paper kite purchased at the bazaar, and purposefully put out of her mind that she had been thirteen years old when her half-sister was born, half a world away, to the man from whom she had received yet another communication stating that he would not be returning home for the coming holidays. It was the last year, Roxane remembered, that she had bothered to ask.

  The days grew balmy, the nights cool, and logs were ordered from the depot for burning in the fireplace. Unity and her family had returned, once more, to Calcutta, tarrying for several days with Roxane and her father. Sera was ever present among them. What Augusta Stanton thought of the green-eyed Eurasian child, she refrained from speaking. Unity was enchanted, and her father, quite frankly, inquisitive, though he contained his questions for those occasions when he and Sheffield were alone, indulging themselves in brandy and cheroots on the cool verandah, while their women remained inside, out of the night air. Roxane skillfully steered feminine conversation to topics that could not touch those places where pain lingered, and so no inquiries were made of Sera's parentage, even if the women had possessed the temerity to ask, and no mention was made of Collier Harrison, nor of his impending marriage. At night, however, as Roxane floated in the realm of Morpheus, she began to dream of him, repeatedly and without release.

  * * * *

  The clock struck the hour, overloud in the silence of the room. Roxane was alone, reading with particular attention a certain passage illuminated by the December sunlight angling steeply through the window; reading it over and over, for she seemed not to be able to grasp the meaning, as if her mind were yearning elsewhere. She squinted up at the brass numerals on the clock face, and then back down at the curled page.

  Four o'clock, she thought, staring blindly at words that blurred, of a sudden, in her vision; he is wed.

  She shut the book with one hand on top of the other. The breeze of the closing pages stirred the lace edge of her sleeve. Outside the window, Sera's small voice was cajoling “Colonel Max” to take the much-patched kite up onto the roof; there was a steady, gentle breeze that would lift it easily high into the sky. She heard her father agree, with mock gruffness, and then their footsteps through the open front door, one slow and heav
y, the other near to silence, like a doe. In the foyer, they paused, side by side, hand in hand, before ascending the stairs.

  “Roxane, are you well?” Her father's tone was kind, quite paternal.

  “Never better,” Roxane lied, and knew, immediately, that she had done it badly.

  “Why don't you come up with us, to fly Sera's kite? Conditions are perfect."

  “Yes, Roxane, please do.” This from Sera, several steps ahead of their father, tugging imperiously at his arm while looking with earnest entreaty at Roxane.

  Roxane set aside her book. “Very well,” she said, and followed them to the roof.

  The kite rose with gratifying alacrity into the evening sky, circling on the string which anchored it to the earth, held in Sera's adhesive grip. She crowed and coaxed and shouted at the kite as if it were a pet bent on ill behavior every time it dipped down toward the cantonments; Max would reach out and tug carefully with his finger on the string for her, and the kite would soar skyward once again.

  Roxane leaned against the chimney, wordlessly observing the two of them and the colorful kite which bound them together in mutual labor. She spoke little, if at all, as the pain she had kept so diligently confined grew in weight and size to the measure of a stone within her breast. She felt she could scarcely breathe for its magnitude.