Not Quite a Husband

by Sherry Thomas

  She raised her face, her expression incredulous. “Where did you get that idea? My father is as indifferent to me as I am to him.”

  “You are not indifferent to him. You are angry at him. And he is not indifferent to you: He has no idea what to do with you.”

  “He didn’t need to do anything with me. He only had to be there. He could have written his books anywhere.”

  “So he wasn’t there. So he was a grieving widower who ran away from the place where he’d once been happy. But don’t you see, once he came back, he gave you everything you ever asked of him.”

  “What do you mean?” She looked at him blankly.

  He was beginning to have the impression he was going after an iceberg with a match. “When it became known that he’d agreed to let you go to medical school, all the neighbors thought he was mad. You are the granddaughter of an earl. Granddaughters of earls do not dissect cadavers or touch strange men to whom they haven’t been properly introduced.”

  She dismissed it outright. “He let me go because he knew that if he didn’t let me go then, I’d have gone once I came of age and took control of my inheritance.”

  “You would not have come of age for another four years. Quite frequently people do not want the same thing at twenty-one that they wanted at seventeen. Most fathers would have gladly taken those odds and forbidden you to go. But he gave you permission.”

  “You are wrong.” She was obdurate, her mind firmly closed. “My father does what is most convenient for him, always. He said yes to me because it was the most expedient answer under the circumstances. He could see that I meant it and he didn’t want to be pestered again.”

  He felt strangely like crying. Between himself and Geoffrey Asquith, there existed an unspoken kinship. They were both men who had failed her, who could not seem to recover from that failure no matter what.

  Her good opinion, once lost, was lost forever.

  “So you go back, he recovers, and you buy a ticket on the next steamer out of England.”

  “Probably.”

  Despite all her strengths, there was a certain brittleness to her. Sometimes she retreated into her keep. Sometimes she ran away. But she did not forgive and she did not forget.

  He raised his face to the cloudless sky again. “Rain is coming,” he said.

  “Is it?”

  “As early as this evening, according to Imran. But there is a dak bungalow ahead, so we should be fine.”

  He did not look at her, but his sorrow was there, in the set of his shoulders, the strain in his jaw. It touched her, in some inexplicable way, that he cared about the chasm between her father and herself. No one else did—even Callista had long ago accepted it and moved on.

  But he had tried to bring them closer together from the beginning. Had invited her father and stepmother to dine at their house. Had answered her father’s occasional letters from the country, when she could not be bothered to read them.

  He had so many qualities, this man, that she’d never noticed. Suddenly she could not bear to look at him, the same way she could not stare directly into the sun.

  She wanted that he should always be there to expect better from her than she expected from herself. She wanted to play a thousand more games of chess with him. She wanted them to grow old together, to gaze into each other’s clouded eyes and peck each other on the cheeks with lips sunken over toothless gums.

  “You are not worried about the trouble in Swat, are you?” he asked, abruptly.

  She caressed the hat he had bought for her. “No,” she said. “It’s the last thing I worry about.”

  Mountains of black clouds, like something out of the Old Testament, crested over the valley as they reached the dak bungalow. The main monsoon season in Dir was in winter. Leo had hoped not to run into the more unpredictable summer rains, but now the vanguard of the summer rains was upon them.

  Trees had become scarce along this stretch of the Panjkora. They still covered the upper slopes, but the lower slopes of the valley were often shoddily clad, brown bare earth amidst a scarcity of greenery that could have been the result of either thin, barren soil or, more likely, deforestation.

  After the rain, the condition of the road was certain to deteriorate. But at least tonight, at the dak bungalow, they did not need to worry about tents blowing away, small-scale mudslides, or other such unpleasantness of traveling in inclement weather.

  Dak bungalows were simple structures of a few rooms built and maintained as rest stops for the men who labored on behalf of the Empire’s mail service. Travelers who wished to avail themselves of rooms in the dak bungalow paid a rupee for each room and extra for meals.

  In Kashmir, there were dak bungalows every fourteen miles. Some dak bungalows where Leo had stayed had a chicken coop looked after by a murghi wallah, a few cows cared for by a gowala, and a khansama who cooked for and served the travelers. This particular bungalow had no resident attendants or barnyard animals, but in most other respects, it was very much a standard dak bungalow, a one-story masonry house with a central vestibule and the rest of the space subdivided into bedroom-and-bathroom suites. A wide wraparound veranda provided plenty of space for the coolies to bed down, protected from the elements.

  Saif Khan made chicken curry, steamed vegetables, and chapatis. Leo and Bryony dined in the small, white-plastered vestibule that held, besides one table and the rickety chairs on which they sat, nothing else except a stand on which rested a book of register, for travelers to sign their names and offer any remarks they had on the condition of the bungalow.

  After dinner she suggested a game of chess. He agreed, even though the sight of a chessboard hit him like a cudgel, to think of all the games they could have played. And everything else he would not have lost if he had not been so stupid.

  She played fast. She had a vision of the board that he could only envy, an instinct for the game that made his more deliberate strategizing seem cumbersome and lead-footed.

  Tonight she played more sloppily than usual. But then, in their previous game, she’d let him have every piece of importance and then checkmated him with nothing but three pawns.

  “You are not guarding your right flank,” he said. “Is it a trap or are you not paying attention?”

  “Of course it is a trap,” she said.

  She sat with her chin pressed into the palm of her hand, her long lashes casting mysterious shadows over her eyes. She lifted those lashes, and his heart skipped several beats, for her eyes were full of hunger.

  He took her king bishop pawn. “Well, trap or not, you’ll pay for it.”

  She moved her queen rook pawn. “Be my guest. Take everything.”

  He’d never known her to speak seductively. And indeed she did not here either. But her words, coupled with the way she looked at him, long, intent glances, set siege to him. Within his thin defenses, his desire ran amok.

  He abolished her queen rook pawn. “What else have you got?”

  She picked up her king rook, set it down, picked up a pawn, set it down, picked up her queen, and set it down. Finally she looked up at him again, some unknown agitation in her eyes. “You said you wanted me to stay in London.”

  “I think you should have a place to call home again,” he answered cautiously.

  “Are you willing to offer me some incentives?”

  Was be willing to offer incentives? “What kind of incentives?”

  “Cambridge is only an hour from London. Perhaps we can find a chess club with mixed membership and meet for a game from time to time.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said instantly.

  His answer seemed to flabbergast her. She must have thought he’d welcome something of the sort.

  “What about by correspondence?” she said more tentatively. “It eliminates the inconvenience of meeting in person and we can keep a dozen games going at the same time.”

  It seemed such a little thing to grant, chess games by correspondence. How harmless could they be, a few missives
here and there, pieces of paper with nothing on them but algebraic notations of chess moves?

  Except between them, it could never be only chess.

  He could see himself reaching for the post, discarding everything but the note from her. He’d take it to his study, where he’d have the games set out, and shut the door. Once assured of privacy, he would linger over the boards, savor her every move, and then spend his evening planning counterattacks: here a smooth ramming of a knight, there a bold insertion of a rook, and now and then a naughty thrust from a bishop.

  A moment of tremendous satisfaction when he had everything arranged just so, his moves recorded, his reply ready to go. And then, heartbreak, at this absurdity that passed for lovemaking in his life, at the futility of it all.

  “No.”

  She was bewildered. “Why not?”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t write a letter?”

  “I cannot be your friend.”

  She rose abruptly. He came to his feet. “I’m sorry, Bryony.”

  She shook her head, her teeth clamped over her lower lip. “My mistake. I thought—I thought perhaps you would like a second chance.”

  She did not give second chances—she had as good as told him that in the afternoon. This was her physical lust speaking. When her ardor cooled, when they hit that inevitable rough patch, she would retrench again deep into herself.

  “I would have, at any point during our marriage.”

  If he’d known what was the matter, he’d have groveled. He’d have atoned. He’d have handed over the scalpel himself if she’d demanded his testes as penitence.

  “Isn’t it better late than never?”

  “Some things are not meant to be. We are not meant to be.”

  She took two steps toward him. Her hand reached out and caught a strand of his hair. He froze. But she did not stop there. Her fingers caressed his ear. Then she cupped his cheek, and rubbed her thumb over his lower lip.

  “We were not meant to be, perhaps. But people change and grow up.”

  If their previous conversation taught him anything at all, it was that she hadn’t changed. That she remained as adamantly unforgiving as ever.

  He took her hand and returned it to her.

  Her reaction was to kiss him, a kiss hot with both lust and confusion. God help him. Arousal came to him as a tidal wave. He was hard and ravenous. He wanted her. He wanted to bury himself in her and forget everything.

  He yanked away from her. “Bryony, please. Don’t.”

  Perhaps if she had not made love to him that night, he might have succumbed, believing that surely she could not offer her body without having first forgiven him. But she had made love to him while the memory coiled within her like a disease, like the malarial parasite that could conceal itself for years before emerging in a devastating attack.

  Her face crumbled. “So all that talk of loving me for years and years, I guess it doesn’t matter after all.”

  The knife in his heart twisted.

  “Sometimes love isn’t enough,” he said. “Look at you and your father.”

  Except Toddy, everyone she’d once loved she’d eventually shuffled off to the fringes of her life, ignored or banished outright.

  “What does my father have to do with anything?”

  “If you can’t forgive him for neglect, how can you forgive me for having done you active injury?”

  She looked away from him to the bare wall. For a minute she said nothing. “What are you trying to convey, precisely?”

  “It is not possible for us to build a new life together. You need a saint, Bryony. You need someone like Toddy, someone who has never done and will never do you wrong, who will never anger or alienate you, in whom your faith never needs testing.”

  She glanced at him, her gaze ice and shadows. “You imply that I am not capable of love.”

  He hadn’t meant to imply that. But the thing was, talk long enough, and one’s beliefs manifested themselves one way or another.

  “I don’t believe you are capable of the kind of love that can withstand the weight of what we bring to it.”

  He didn’t believe either of them was, frankly.

  “And you would not give us a chance to prove otherwise?”

  “Would you board a train knowing that the rails end over a cliff? Or a steamer that already leaks?”

  “I see,” she said, her voice bleak. “I’m sorry for wasting your time. Shall we finish the game now?”

  The storm broke shortly afterward and raged through the night. The wind eventually died down toward dawn, but the rain continued unabated.

  Bryony was not a fidgety person, but that morning she could not remain still. She paced in her room like a caged wolf, opened and closed the shutters with a rhythmless aggression that would have occasioned much note-taking had she been the inmate of an asylum. When she was convinced no one could hear her, she banged the back of her head against the wall—in frustration as well as in misery.

  How ironic that had they been rained in one day earlier, she’d have been secretly overjoyed that nature had stepped in to extend their time together. But now she only wanted to finish the rest of their travels this minute, to not remain a second longer than necessary in the company of a man who was as determined to remove her from his existence as a dedicated butler going after the tarnish on the silver in his keeping.

  The rain finally stopped in the middle of the afternoon. Bryony was ready to depart immediately. But Leo insisted on first sending the guides ahead to check the condition of the road.

  “The tree cover on the slope is insufficient. There is a possibility of substantial debris swept down in a storm like this,” he explained.

  She nodded and turned to go back to her room.

  “Bryony.”

  She stopped, but did not turn around. “Yes?”

  He was silent for several seconds. “No, it was nothing. Please don’t mind me.”

  A blistering sun emerged as the clouds dissipated. Faint curls of steam rose from the ground. The guides returned far sooner than Leo had anticipated and brought with them a group of travelers—not Dir levies, but sepoy messengers from the Malakand garrison, carrying sacks of letters and dispatches for the Chitral garrison. Leo offered them tea and probed them for news.

  The Malakand garrison, located eight miles southwest of Chakdarra, with a strength of three thousand men, held both the Malakand Pass and the bridge across Swat River at Chakdarra.

  In recent days the bazaar at Malakand had been wild with rumors. But as the sepoys were Sikhs, the traditional adversaries of Muslims, their attitude toward the Mad Fakir and his followers was one of disdain rather than fascination.

  “Let the Swatis march on Malakand,” said the oldest of the sepoys. “The Indian army will destroy them. And then we will have peace for a generation.”

  “Are the officers aware of the problem?” Leo asked.

  They were, the sepoys acknowledged. The political officer at Malakand had issued a warning two days ago on the twenty-third of July. The troops had rehearsed alarm drills. But no one believed anything would really come to pass, and even the warning only stated that an attack was possible, but not probable.

  The Swatis invited the English to settle their disputes. They were happy about the services the small civil hospital at Chakdarra provided. And their valley was a green sward of prosperity, everyone’s coffer fattened by feeding and otherwise supplying the garrison. Why should they be so foolish as to throw it all away on the advice of someone who was very likely insane?

  Leo nodded his head, happy to have the frothing rumors put in such rational and blunt light—even if the Sikh sepoys’ opinions were biased, they were still based on information obtained much closer to the source.

  And then the sepoys went on to describe just how unconcerned the camps as a whole were about the prospect of an uprising. Apparently, alarm drills aside, the daily routine for the soldiers had not changed at all. Officers from Chakdarra
Fort and the Malakand garrison played polo every evening on an open field miles away from the protection of their cantonment, armed with nothing but unloaded pistols.

  The sepoys related this last with nods of approval at their British officers’ sangfroid, not noticing that the smile had started to fade from Leo’s face. They spoke briefly of the condition of the road—which after the storm was something between an inconvenience and an annoyance. Their tea finished, the sepoys thanked Leo and resumed their journey.

  The entire conversation had taken place on the veranda outside Bryony’s room, so she could hear their discussion via shutters kept ajar. Now her shutters opened fully.

  “Shall we get going then?” she said, her impatience barely contained. “The sepoys managed the road without any problem. Surely we can muddle through too.”

  “It’s late in the day, Bryony.”

  “Nonsense,” she retorted. “We can get in a good four hours. That’s at least one march.”

  She rarely spoke in such a strong tone. In fact, he’d never seen her in a fractious mood. But she was now. She had no desire to cooperate with him. She wanted to leave. And she wanted to leave this moment.

  In which case, she would not like what he was about to say to her.

  “I don’t think we should go on.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that?”

  He took a deep breath. “Have you ever read any accounts of the Great Mutiny?”

  “Of course. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Because I’m reminded of it. It wasn’t that we had no warnings as the mutiny approached; it was that the people in power refused to believe that such a thing could be possible, that those they considered happy lackeys could rise up against their sage masters. As it turned out, the masters weren’t so sage and the lackeys not so happy.”

  “That was forty years ago. There’s nothing comparable here,” she said.

  “There was fighting in Malakand around the time of the Siege of Chitral. The Malakand garrison was established only after that, to hold open the road to Chitral. It is highly improbable that in two years’ time, the Swatis would have forgotten their former hostility altogether.”