relief.
“Well, then … now I feel absolutely she’ll be safe with you, because of your grandmother’s name.”
“My deepest thanks, madam.” His mood changed again and it was clear he was laughing at her.
“Wait! What does the name mean in English? I’ve forgotten.”
“It means love.”
There was a faint snort of derision from Charles, but Sara was thoughtful, and sad. The memory of the old man’s drowning came over her in a rush.
“Then someone must have loved her very much, to give her that name.”
She watched Sabran’s mouth compress, as though he was going to smile, but only his eyes gleamed as he waved his hypnotic ring before her eyes once more.
“I’ll look forward to your visit, madam; it’s not often we have such a charming addition to our barbaric shores.”
“But where do you live? You must give me your address.”
“Fitzroy knows where I am. Everyone knows my house, though some may pretend otherwise.” He gave Charles another derisive look.
“It’s ‘Sans Souci’, or, if you prefer the English, ‘Without Care’.
Then he was gone, the faint sound of his laughter echoing in the distance.
An exhausted and uncomfortable silence descended upon the occupants of the carriage as they turned from the hot dusty chaos and noise of the port. Lady Palmer sat with her lips firmly compressed in a disapproving grimace, every now and then looking at Sara and snorting loudly, while Cynthia lay back under her parasol with her eyes closed, waving at her hot face with her tiny fan. Charles kept his gaze fixed ahead, seemingly unaware of Sara sitting by his side. She stole a quick glance at his averted face then slipped her fingers through his.
He started and stared at her, his face showing shocked surprise.
It was almost as if he had forgotten she was there.
They moved into a wide street bordered by centuries-old tamarind trees, their dark sinuous branches meeting overhead and intertwining to form a refuge from the heat of the relentless sun.
Civilisation in the form of English rule had asserted itself in the prosperous, mostly new buildings. They passed the High Court with its peculiar lighthouse built on top.
“That is where I hope to hold ultimate influence one day.”
Charles raised his chin high as they passed, and for a moment Sara thought he might even salute. She’d never really given his work as District Magistrate very much thought before, being so blinded by love she wouldn’t have cared how he earned his living, but now she saw how very important his work was to him. He was ambitious and, she realised with a sudden small tweak of clarity, he expected her to be ambitious too.
Pepper pot minarets adorned several other buildings, flashing in the morning sun and giving the town a cheerful feeling of domesticity and a sense of safety from the great wild expanse of India. Though, despite the monumental solidity of the buildings and the well-dressed Europeans going about their errands with their attendant servants, there was the strange ever-present feeling the grip was fragile, and it could all disappear in a heartbeat, as though a genie had transplanted a foreign world into an incompatible landscape. Even the colours of nature had an otherworldly air of unreality. It seemed impossible that such hues could exist outside of heaven, despite the fine layer of yellow dust reducing the landscape to a watercolour wash.
“I feel as though I’m in a tale from the Arabian Nights.” Sara squeezed his hand, forgetting to be shy in her happiness. “I didn’t realise it would be so beautiful.”
“Mount Road,” said Charles as they passed a wide thoroughfare leading west of the city. “Of course there was nothing here till we British came.” He waved his arms wide as though to embrace the whole street. It was as if he had built it himself.
“Yes, of course.” She frowned, trying to summon up a memory. The name was there somewhere in her cloudy past, though the road itself had changed so dramatically from the once dusty path she vaguely recalled from her childhood.
Her eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. There, in the far distance, shimmering through the dust, was a small hill. “St Thomas Mount,” Charles said, reading her thoughts.
“Oh, yes.” Sara remembered now. “Isn’t that where it was believed the saint was murdered after he had been sent by the Lord to convert India to Christianity?”
“That’s all a lot of nonsense, of course.” Charles scoffed, “but the Indians believe it absolutely. They claim they have the remains of the Saint’s finger in the church.”
Sara smiled to herself as she remembered, with sudden clarity, her father taking her to the church built on the site of Saint Thomas’ martyrdom, and being shown the very cross he was believed to have clutched to his chest at the moment of his death. The cross itself was reputed to sweat blood at various intervals, but, tired out from watching and waiting for the phenomenon to occur, she had fainted dead away, very much impressing the pilgrims who had gathered there, claiming she had experienced a vision.
Though now, as she looked around her, Sara felt none of the influence of Christianity, despite the Protestant churches built by the British. The heat itself seemed designed for a religion based more in nature than anything conjured by man. Even the twisted primitive shapes of the trees seemed to reflect the animism of the Hindu religion. They spread their thick tendril-like branches into the air and snaked along the ground, forming little arbours decorated with scraps of silk and flowers housing small figures of Ganesh the Elephant god, and Hanuman, King of the monkeys, or Shiva himself, Lord of the Dance, despite his human form, adorned with the horror of his myriad snakelike arms.
Beneath this shaded canopy, the people of this underworld had set up their homes and businesses, little makeshift boxes containing whole worlds of domesticity and industry. Glimpses of humble home life passed them by. A child, standing naked beside his home of rusty tin and grey rags, as his mother sat squatting in the dust before him, her bracelets jingling as she scrubbed him from head to foot with soapy water, inches away from a stream of running stinking waste. A faded turquoise sari nailed to a tree lifted in the faint breeze to reveal a sleeping place for a group of small children, watched over by their grandmother as she made chapatti on a cooking fire burning in the corner.
Sara welcomed it all, despite feeling a little detached as she sat next to Charles in the woven cane landau, a relic from the beginning of the nineteenth century, pulled by a pair of small sturdy horses, her parasol raised against the already blazing morning sun. She was still reeling, with not only the unusual sensation of finding her land legs again after weeks at sea, but also the conflicting emotions of her dramatic encounters of the past hour. Then the climax in the form of Ravi Sabran as he’d swept away with the child on his hip, his servants running along behind, trying to keep up with his impatient step. It seemed as though more had happened in one short hour on Indian soil than all the years she’d spent in England.
She thought of Sabran’s parting words: “Sans Souci.” An almost frivolous name for a house but alluring too; she would visit there as soon as possible.
Every now and then she stole a glance at Charles’s averted face, not quite fully being able to believe she was actually with him at last.
Her mood darkened as she was all of a sudden overcome with a sharp twinge of anxiety. “Who is this man I have married? Do I still love him?”
A beam of sunlight broke through the intertwined overhead branches and illuminated the scene before her.
It was a festival day, and armloads of brilliantly coloured flowers were being made into garlands for temple offerings. A young girl of almost mythical