excited by the lewd possibilities, Sara laughed out loud. “Surely you exaggerate. He must sleep some time. Poor man, he must be exhausted.”
Lady Palmer rushed to defend her daughter. “My daughter does not exaggerate!”
Charles whispered an explanation for Lady Palmer’s unusual attitude.
“It is Lady Palmer’s particular concern. She believes the dancing girls are responsible for the moral breakdown amongst some of our young single men.”
Lady Palmer’s lips had shrunk into a thin line. “I most certainly do. Waving themselves about, practically naked, in front of our boys. It’s outrageous!”
Sara felt a warning nudge from Charles, but her spirit rose within her.
She laughed again, trying to make light of the situation. “Well, I suppose I’ll find all this out when we go to visit the child.”
A teacup hit a saucer with a loud crash.
Charles cleared his throat and was about to speak, when Lady Palmer uttered the words for him. “You can’t be serious, my girl. You can never visit her … ever, especially not alone.”
“But Lady Palmer, times have changed. Why, in London now it’s not so unusual for a young lady to make visits alone, or to work, and even to have her own rooms.”
“Well, in that case she most certainly isn’t a lady!” Lady Palmer was emphatic.
Sara turned to her husband for support. “Well, I’m sure Charles will accompany me, to protect me from Monsieur Sabran’s rather florid compliments.”
She smiled, with not much humour, hoping to encourage Lady Palmer in a returned smile, but the woman only snorted her disapproval.
Sara watched Charles’s averted face, but there was no reaction.
“Charles?”
“Sabran isn’t received anywhere,” he said at last. “At least not in any decent home.” He lowered his voice to a whisper.
“He keeps a woman, but, instead of being discreet about it, he flaunts her, and she’s already married … She was with Sabran today …”
Sara remembered the glimpse of the beautiful face, one not easily forgotten.
“Her husband’s a very great Maharaja, and very useful to us in the collection of taxes from the farmers in his district. So you can see how I’m placed in a difficult position. He’s insisted I help return her, even though she’s the lowest of his wives.”
“‘The lowest of his wives!’ How cruel, if she means so little to him, he should let her go.’”
“It’s a matter of honour for him, and it’s not my place to have an opinion on the matter.”
“Perhaps he was unkind to her,” Sara persisted.
“I want to tell you more about Paris, Charles …” Cynthia had moved a little closer, hoping to turn the topic back to herself.
Charles mumbled an apology then returned to Sara. “It’s none of our business. My business is to return her to her husband, and Sabran flatly refuses.”
“He must love her very much.”
“Love! What a hopeless romantic you are, darling. He could afford a hundred such women. He keeps her to annoy me! That’s the sum of it. The man is arrogant beyond belief, and it’s not clear where he gets his money … We think he has some interests in opium …”
“Opium!” Now it was Sara’s turn to drop her cup too loudly on the saucer. “But if he’s so bad, why would he bother with a stray child?”
“Well, it’s not as though he’ll ever see it … One of his servants will take care of it, and he’s as rich as Croesus, and he takes good care to see we British won’t be getting any of it.”
She felt the frustration rise once more. “Even so, I must see the child once more, just to be sure. Then I’ll have discharged my responsibility.”
He spoke slowly, as if to give more weight to his words. “Darling, you must never visit him. Things are different here, it’s a small community and people talk. A woman’s reputation is very important, even more so than in England, and remember you’re the wife of the District Magistrate. We must set an example to the natives, otherwise they’ll lose their respect for us. Anyway, he’ll have forgotten about you by now. Your promises mean nothing to a man like Sabran.”
“He doesn’t seem to like you much either.”
“He has no reason to like me. We’ve clashed often over various legal issues. He simply won’t accept English justice … fights tooth and nail to defend the indefensible. But I don’t want to talk about him. I’d much rather talk about you.” He bent to kiss her again, giving her at the same time a particularly tender glance. “But we can’t avoid seeing him sometimes, even if I wish him gone to the devil. He’s managed to get his polo team to the finals. There’s the last match of the season in a few weeks and I intend to thrash the brute.”
“He plays well then?”
“Too well. So far we haven’t managed to beat him … But this time …” Charles banged his fist down on the table, making the teacups shake.
Sara was shocked by the anger in his voice. He seemed almost obsessively determined. “Is it really so important you beat him? Really, Charles, does it matter that much?”
He answered her with a silent nod, then turned away, the conversation at an end.
Charles rose to join Cynthia on the other side of the room, and Sara’s spirits sank within her. She unconsciously pulled at the neck of her blouse as she looked around Lady Palmer’s over-furnished drawing room. The brilliant day had lost its beauty, and what she had so recently thought exciting and exotic appeared shoddy, ugly and dull.
She toyed with Charles’s gift of jasmine she had tucked at her waist so to admire it better. Already it had turned brown and hung lifelessly from her belt, its once heady fragrance now sickly and rancid.
Sara hated herself for her failure to like her new home, even though it was one of the largest and best built in the community, and, at her first sight of it, had to struggle to hide her dismay, though Charles spoke with unmistakable pride in his voice.
“What do you think of it? I like to see it as our own little patch of England.”
The house was an exaggerated version of a Surrey country cottage, burdened with both mock Tudor features and a prim picket fence. There was something ridiculous about it, like an Englishman Sara had met on the ship, who wore heavy tweeds despite the heat and always carried an umbrella.
A dainty path bordered by half-dead roses snaked from the veranda across a faded yellow lawn to the front fence. It was clearly her husband’s pride and joy and as he paused at the front gate he solemnly contemplated the grass, poking at the bare patches with his walking stick.
“My home,” she murmured, but even to her own ears the words seemed wistful.
The servants appeared to welcome them, laughing and generously bestowing blessings on their new mistress. She was swept towards the house while fragrant flowers were thrown in her path. Only one servant hung back, unsmiling and watchful, her eyes fixed on Sara. Even the drab brown of her servant’s sari couldn’t disguise the fact that she was lovely in a way that set her apart from the rest of the servants.
Charles seemed not to notice her beauty. Her presence seemed only to inspire him to anger. “There you are! Quick! Come here at once and meet your mistress.”
The girl crept forward and prostrated herself on the ground before