A Great and Terrible Beauty, Page 2

  There’s nothing to do but swallow my pride, make my way back and apologize. If I can find my way back. Nothing looks at all familiar to me. Two old men sit cross-legged on the ground, smoking small, brown cigarettes. They watch me as I pass. I realize that I am alone in the city for the first time. No chaperone. No entourage. A lady unescorted. It’s very scandalous of me. My heart beats faster and I quicken my pace.

  The air has grown very still. A storm isn’t far off. In the distance, I can hear frantic activity in the marketplace, last-minute bargains being struck before everything is closed down for the afternoon shower. I follow the sound and end up where I started. The old men smile at me, an English girl lost and alone on Bombay’s streets. I could ask them for directions back to the marketplace, though my Hindi isn’t nearly as good as Father’s and for all I know Where is the marketplace may come out as I covet your neighbor’s fine cow. Still, it’s worth a try.

  “Pardon me,” I ask the elder man, the one with a white beard. “I seem to be lost. Could you tell me which way to the marketplace?”

  The man’s smile fades, replaced by a look of fear. He’s speaking to the other man in sharp bursts of a dialect I don’t understand. Faces peek from windows and doorways, straining to see what’s bringing the trouble. The old man stands, points to me, to the necklace. He doesn’t like it? Something about me has alarmed him. He shoos me away, goes inside and shuts the door in my face. It’s refreshing to know that it’s not just my mother and Sarita who find me intolerable.

  The faces at the windows remain, watching me. There’s the first drop of rain. The wet seeps into my dress, a spreading stain. The sky could break open at any moment. I’ve got to get back. No telling what Mother will do if she ends up drenched and I’m the cause. Why did I act like such a petulant brat? She’ll never take me to London now. I’ll spend the rest of my days in an Austrian convent surrounded by women with mustaches, my eyes gone bad from making intricate lace designs for other girls’ trousseaus. I could curse my bad temper, but it won’t get me back. Choose a direction, Gemma, any direction—just go. I take the path to the right. The unfamiliar street leads to another and another, and just as I come around a curve, I see him coming. The boy from the marketplace.

  Don’t panic, Gemma. Just move slowly away before he sees you.

  I take two hurried steps back. My heel catches on a slippery stone, sending me sliding into the street. When I right myself, he’s staring at me with a look I cannot decipher. For a second, neither of us moves. We are as still as the air around us, which is either promising rain or threatening a storm.

  A sudden fear takes root, spreads through me with cold speed, given wings by conversations I’ve overheard in my father’s study—tales over brandy and cigars about the fate of an unescorted woman, overpowered by bad men, her life ruined forever. But these are only bits of conversation. This is a real man coming toward me, closing the distance between us in powerful strides.

  He means to catch me, but I won’t let him. Heart pounding, I pull up my skirts, ready to run. I try to take a step and my legs go shaky as a calf’s. The ground shimmers and pitches beneath me.

  What is happening?

  Move. Must move, but I can’t. A strange tingle starts in my fingers, travels up my arms, into my chest. My whole body trembles. A terrible pressure squeezes the breath from me, weighs me down to my knees. Panic blooms in my mouth like weeds. I want to scream. No words will come. No sound. He reaches me as I fall to the ground. Want to tell him to help me. Focus on his face, his full lips, perfect as a bow. His thick dark curls fall across his eyes, deep, brown, foot-long-lashes eyes. Alarmed eyes.

  Help me.

  The words stick fast inside me. I’m no longer afraid of losing my virtue; I know I must be dying. Try to get my mouth to tell him this but there is nothing but a choking sound in my throat. A strong smell of rose and spice overpowers me as the horizon slips away, my eyelids fluttering, fighting to stay awake. It’s his lips that part, move, speak.

  His voice that says, “It’s happening.”

  The pressure increases till I feel I will burst and then I’m under, a swirling tunnel of blinding color and light pulling me down like an undertow. I fall forever. Images race by. I’m falling past the ten-year-old me playing with Julia, the rag doll I lost on a picnic a year later; I’m six, letting Sarita wash my face for dinner. Time spins backward and I am three, two, a baby, and then something pale and foreign, a creature no bigger than a tadpole and just as fragile. The strong tide grabs me hard again, pulling me through a veil of blackness, till I see the twisting street in India again. I am a visitor, walking in a living dream, no sound except for the thumping of my heart, my breath going in and out, the swish of my own blood coursing through my veins. On the rooftops above me, the organ-grinder’s monkey scampers quickly, baring teeth. I try to speak but find I can’t. He hops onto another roof. A shop where dried herbs hang from the eaves and a small moon-and-eye symbol—the same as on my mother’s necklace—is affixed to the door. A woman comes quickly up the sloping street. A woman with red-gold hair, a blue dress, white gloves. My mother. What is my mother doing here? She should be at Mrs. Talbot’s house, drinking tea and discussing fabric.

  My name floats from her lips. Gemma. Gemma. She’s come looking for me. The Indian man in the turban is just behind her. She doesn’t hear him. I call out to her, my mouth making no sound. With one hand, she pushes open the shop’s door and enters. I follow her in, the pounding of my heart growing louder and faster. She must know the man is behind her. She must hear his breath now. But she only looks forward.

  The man pulls a dagger from inside his cloak, but still she doesn’t turn. I feel as if I’ll be sick. I want to stop her, pull her away. Every step forward is like pushing against the air, lifting my legs an agony of slow movement. The man stops, listening. His eyes widen. He’s afraid.

  There’s something coiled, waiting in the shadows at the back of the shop. It’s as if the dark has begun to move. How can it be moving? But it is, with a cold, slithering sound that makes my skin crawl. A dark shape spreads out from its hiding spot. It grows till it reaches all around. The blackness in the center of the thing is swirling and the sound . . . the most ghastly cries and moans come from inside it.

  The man rushes forward, and the thing moves over him. It devours him. Now it looms over my mother and speaks to her in a slick hiss.

  “Come to us, pretty one. We’ve been waiting . . .”

  My scream implodes inside me. Mother looks back, sees the dagger lying there, grabs it. The thing howls in outrage. She’s going to fight it. She’s going to be all right. A single tear escapes down her cheek as she closes her desperate eyes, says my name soft as a prayer, Gemma. In one swift motion, she raises the dagger and plunges it into herself.

  No!

  A strong tide yanks me from the shop. I’m back on the streets of Bombay, as if I’d never been gone, screaming wildly while the young Indian man pins my flailing arms at my side.

  “What did you see? Tell me!”

  I kick and hit, twisting in his grip. Is there anyone around who can help me? What is happening? Mother! My mind fights for control, logic, reason, and finds it. My mother is having tea at Mrs. Talbot’s house. I’ll go there and prove it. She will be angry and send me home with Sarita and there’ll be no champagne later and no London but it won’t matter. She’ll be alive and well and cross and I’ll be ecstatic to be punished by her.

  He’s still yelling at me. “Did you see my brother?”

  “Let me go!” I kick at him with my legs, which have found their strength again. I’ve gotten him in the tenderest of places. He crumples to the ground and I take off blindly down the street and around the next corner, fear pushing me forward. A small crowd is gathering in front of a shop. A shop where dried herbs hang from the roof.

  No. This is all some hideous dream. I will wake up in my own bed and hear Father’s loud, gravelly voice telling one of his long
-winded jokes, Mother’s soft laughter filling in after.

  My legs cramp and tighten, go wobbly as I reach the crowd and make my way through it. The organ-grinder’s tiny monkey scampers to the ground and tilts his head left and right, eyeing the body there with curiosity. The few people in front of me clear away. My mind takes it in by degrees. A shoe upturned, the heel broken. A hand splayed, fingers going stiff. Contents of a handbag strewn in the dirt. Bare neck peeking out from the bodice of a blue gown. Those famous green eyes open and unseeing. Mother’s mouth parted slightly, as if she had been trying to speak when she died.

  Gemma.

  A deep red pool of blood widens and flows beneath her lifeless body. It seeps into the dusty cracks in the earth, reminding me of the pictures I’ve seen of Kali, the dark goddess, who spills blood and crushes bone. Kali the destroyer. My patron saint. I close my eyes, willing it all to go away.

  This is not happening. This is not happening. This is not happening.

  But when I open my eyes, she’s still there, staring back at me, accusing. I don’t care if you come home at all. It was the last thing I’d said to her. Before I ran away. Before she came after me. Before I saw her die in a vision. A heavy numbness weighs down my arms and legs. I crumple to the ground, where my mother’s blood touches the hem of my best dress, forever staining it. And then the scream I’ve been holding back comes pouring out of me hard and fast as a night train just as the sky opens wide and a fierce rain pours down, drowning out every sound.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “VICTORIA! THIS IS VICTORIA STATION!”

  A burly, blue-uniformed conductor moves through on his way to the back of our train, announcing that I’ve arrived in London at last. We’re slowing to a stop. Great billowing clouds of steam sail past the window, making everything outside seem like a dream.

  In the seat across from me, my brother, Tom, is waking, straightening his black waistcoat, checking for anything that isn’t perfect. In the four years we’ve been apart, he has grown very tall and a little broader in the chest, but he’s still thin with a flop of fair hair that droops fashionably into his blue eyes and makes him seem younger than twenty. “Try not to look so dour, Gemma. It’s not as if you’re being sent to the stocks. Spence is a very good school with a reputation for turning out charming young ladies.”

  A very good school. Charming young ladies. It is, word for word, what my grandmother said after we’d spent two weeks at Pleasant House, her home in the English countryside. She’d taken a long, appraising look at me, with my freckled skin and unruly mane of red hair, my sullen face, and decided that a proper finishing school was what was needed if I was ever to make a decent marriage. “It’s a wonder you weren’t sent home years ago,” she clucked. “Everyone knows the climate in India isn’t good for the blood. I’m sure this is what your mother would want.”

  I’d had to bite my tongue to keep from asking how she could possibly know what my mother would want. My mother had wanted me to stay in India. I had wanted to come to London, and now that I’m here, I couldn’t be more miserable.

  For three hours, as the train made its way past green, hilly pastures, and the rain slapped wearily at the train’s windows, Tom had slept. But I could see only behind me, whence I’d come. The hot plains of India. The police asking questions: Had I seen anyone? Did my mother have enemies? What was I doing alone on the streets? And what about the man who’d spoken to her in the marketplace—a merchant named Amar? Did I know him? Were he and my mother (and here they looked embarrassed and shuffled their feet while finding a word that wouldn’t seem too indelicate) “acquainted”?

  How could I tell them what I’d seen? I didn’t know whether to believe it myself.

  Outside the train’s windows, England is still in bloom. But the jostling of the passenger car reminds me of the ship that carried us from India over rough seas. The coastline of England taking shape before me like a warning. My mother buried deep in the cold, unforgiving ground of England. My father staring glassy-eyed at the headstone—Virginia Doyle, beloved wife and mother—peering through it as if he could change what had happened through will alone. And when he couldn’t, he retired to his study and the laudanum bottle that had become his constant companion. Sometimes I’d find him, asleep in his chair, the dogs at his feet, the brown bottle close at hand, his breath strong and medicinally sweet. Once a large man, he’d grown thinner, whittled down by grief and opium. And I could only stand by, helpless and mute, the cause of it all. The keeper of a secret so terrible it made me afraid to speak, scared that it would pour out of me like kerosene, burning everyone.

  “You’re brooding again,” Tom says, casting a suspicious look my way.

  “Sorry.” Yes, I’m sorry, so sorry for everything.

  Tom exhales long and hard, his voice traveling swiftly under the exhalation. “Don’t be sorry. Just stop.”

  “Yes, sorry,” I say again without thinking. I touch the outline of my mother’s amulet. It hangs around my neck now, a remembrance of my mother and my guilt, hidden beneath the stiff black crepe mourning dress I will wear for six months.

  Through the thinning haze outside our window, I can see porters hustling alongside the train, keeping pace, ready to place wooden steps beside the open doors for our descent to the platform. At last our train comes to a stop in a hiss and sigh of steam.

  Tom stands and stretches. “Come on, then. Let’s go, before all the porters are taken.”

  Victoria Station takes my breath away with its busyness. Hordes of people mill about the platform. Down at the far end of the train, the third-class passengers climb off in a thick tumble of arms and legs. Porters hurry to carry luggage and parcels for the first-class passengers. Newsboys hold the day’s papers in the air as far as their arms will stretch, screeching the most enticing headlines. Flower girls wander about, wearing smiles as hard and worn as the wooden trays that hang from their delicate necks. I’m nearly upended by a man buzzing past, his umbrella parked beneath his arm.

  “Pardon me,” I mutter, deeply annoyed. He takes no note of me. When I glance to the far end of the platform, I catch sight of something odd. A black traveling cloak that sets my heart beating faster. My mouth goes dry. It’s impossible that he could be here. And yet, I’m sure it’s him disappearing behind a kiosk. I try to get closer, but it’s terribly crowded.

  “What are you doing?” Tom asks as I strain against the tide of the crowd.

  “Just looking,” I say, hoping he can’t read the fear in my voice. A man rounds the corner of the kiosk, carrying a bundle of newspapers on his shoulder. His coat, thin and black and several sizes too big, hangs on him like a loose cape. I nearly laugh with relief. You see, Gemma? You’re imagining things. Leave it alone.

  “Well, if you’re going to look around, see if you can find us a porter. I don’t know where the devil they’ve all got to so fast.”

  A scrawny newsboy happens by and offers to fetch us a hansom cab for twopence. He struggles to carry the trunk filled with my few worldly belongings: a handful of dresses, my mother’s social diary, a red sari, a white carved elephant from India, and my father’s treasured cricket bat, a reminder of him in happier days.

  Tom helps me into the carriage and the driver pulls away from the great, sprawling lady that is Victoria Station, clip-clopping toward the heart of London. The air is gloomy, alive with the smoke from the gaslights that line London’s streets. The foggy grayness makes it seem like dusk, though it’s only four o’clock in the afternoon. Anything could creep up behind you on such shadowy streets. I don’t know why I think of this, but I do, and I immediately push the thought away.

  The needle-thin spires of Parliament peek up over the dusky outlines of chimneys. In the streets, several sweat-drenched men dig deep trenches in the cobblestones.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Putting in lines for electric lights,” Tom answers, coughing into a white handkerchief with his initials stitched on a corner in a distingu
ished black script. “Soon, this choking gaslight will be a thing of the past.”

  On the streets, vendors hawk their wares from carts, each with his own distinctive cry—knives sharpened, fish to buy, get your apples—apples here! Milkmaids deliver the last of the day’s milk. In a strange way, it all reminds me of India. There are tempting storefronts offering everything one can imagine—tea, linens, china, and beautiful dresses copied from the best fashions of Paris. A sign hanging from a second-story window announces that there are offices to let, inquire within. Bicycles whiz past the many hansom cabs on the streets. I brace myself in case the horse spooks to see them, but the mare pulling us seems completely uninterested. She’s seen it all before, even if I haven’t.

  An omnibus crowded with passengers sails past us, drawn by a team of magnificent horses. A cluster of ladies sits perched in the seats above the omnibus, their parasols open to shield them from the elements. A long strip of wood advertising Pears’ soap ingeniously hides their ankles from view, for modesty’s sake. It’s an extraordinary sight and I can’t help wishing we could just keep riding through London’s streets, breathing in the dust of history that I’ve only seen in photographs. Men in dark suits and bowler hats step out of offices, marching confidently home after a day’s work. I can see the white dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral rising above the sooty rooftops. A posted bill promises a production of Macbeth starring the American actress Lily Trimble. She’s ravishing, with her auburn hair loose and wild, a red gown cut daringly low on her bosom. I wonder if the girls at Spence will be as lovely and sophisticated.

  “Lily Trimble is quite beautiful, isn’t she?” I say by way of trying to make pleasant small talk with Tom, a seemingly impossible task.

  “An actress,” Tom sneers. “What sort of way is that for a woman to live, without a solid home, husband, children? Running about like she’s her own lord and master. She’ll certainly never be accepted in society as a proper lady.”