Dark Road to Darjeeling Read online

  “Very well, Morag,” Brisbane said kindly.

  I cleared my throat. “Yes, very well, Morag, but do you think you might manage to help me dress? You are actually my maid, you know. Mr. Brisbane does have the hotel valet to assist him.”

  Morag sniffed. “Foreign devils. As if they knew how to take care of a proper Scottish gentleman. I shall have to find the pink. Keep your wig on,” she finished saucily.

  She left, banging the door behind her, and I turned to Brisbane. “She was impossible enough before you came along. Now she is thoroughly unmanageable. I ought to let you take her on as valet and find a new lady’s maid for myself,” I added in some irritation.

  Brisbane said nothing, but began to divest himself of his clothing. I gave him a broad smile. “I am glad you changed your mind about coming tonight,” I told him.

  “I haven’t,” he said, dropping his coat. The waistcoat and neckcloth followed swiftly and he began to work his way out of his collar and cuffs. “When I said I was not going, I was not referring to dinner with the viceroy, although you are quite right, as it happens. The fellow has a positive mania for drains. And railways,” he added, dropping his shirt onto the growing pile.

  With perfect immodesty, he began to disrobe his lower half and I let my gaze slide to the clothes upon the floor. Even after so many months of marriage, I was still somewhat shy about such things. Of course, I had spent the first few weeks of our honeymoon simply staring, but it had finally occurred to me that this was impolite and I had made a devoted effort to afford him some measure of privacy, although he seemed thoroughly unconcerned. I put it down to his Gypsy blood. In my experience, Gypsies could be quite casual about nudity.

  Brisbane, now completely unclothed, went into the bathroom and flung himself into the tub with a great slosh. He was something of a sybarite, and I had discovered that although he could be remarkably relaxed about domestic arrangements in general, he insisted upon a scalding hot bath before dinner, an activity we sometimes shared with vastly interesting results. But there would be no such goings-on afoot this evening. I followed him, tightening the sash of my dressing gown.

  “Then perhaps you will be good enough to clarify. If you are content to dine with the viceroy, then where precisely are you not going?” I asked.

  Brisbane took up a washcloth and cake of soap and began to scrub vigorously. “I am not leaving Calcutta,” he said.

  The sight of his broad, muscular chest was a diverting one, and it took a moment for the words to register completely. I blinked at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  He stopped soaping himself and fixed me with that implacable black stare. “I. Am. Not. Leaving. Calcutta.”

  “Yes, I did hear you the first time,” I said with exaggerated politeness. “But it makes no sense. We are supposed to depart for Darjeeling tomorrow,” I protested. “The arrangements have been made.”

  “Without my knowledge,” he pointed out.

  I felt a thorn-prick of guilt and thrust it aside. I ought not to have waited until almost the end of our sojourn in Calcutta to explain about Portia’s suspicions, but it had never occurred to me that he might simply refuse to oblige us. “What am I supposed to tell Jane? The Cavendishes are expecting us.”

  Brisbane curled a lip. “The domestic arrangements of your hostess are not my foremost concern.”

  “Pray, what is your foremost concern?” I demanded.

  “That my wife and her sister think they can twitch the puppet strings and make me dance to their tune,” he replied. His tone was light, but there was a hard gleam in his black eyes that I did not like.

  “I have apologised for that,” I replied evenly. “I myself did not know of Portia’s plans until well after Aden. What was I supposed to do then? I could not very well confess the truth to you and demand to be let off at the next port. Calcutta was the next port.”

  “You might have trusted me enough to tell me the truth as soon as you learned of it,” he said in a reasonable tone that lashed my conscience.

  I considered for a moment, then drew the sharpest weapon in my arsenal. “I understand you are put out with me,” I began. He curled his lip again and I ignored it. “But I should like to remind you that you have not always been forthright yourself.”

  He stopped scrubbing and speculation dawned in his eyes. “You know,” he said flatly, and—I thought smugly—with a trace of admiration.

  “Yes, I do know you apprehended a jewel thief on board the ship. I know the captain consulted you and requested your help and I know you unmasked the culprit at considerable personal risk. I understand the fellow was armed with an Italian stiletto dagger,” I finished.

  “As it happens, it was Japanese,” he corrected.

  “Near enough,” I retorted. “But none of those facts were related to me by you.”

  He had the grace to look a trifle less adamant than he had a moment before. “I was in no real danger,” he said finally, his expression softening. He thrust a hand through his long black hair, tousling the hair damply and causing a wet lock to drop over his brow. “And if I were, it is my lot. You cannot protect me.”

  “And you cannot protect me,” I returned. I went to him and sat upon the edge of the bathtub, putting a hand to his cheek, just touching the crescent moon scar that rode high upon one cheekbone. “I know you wish to wrap me in cotton wool and leave me on the highest shelf when you go off adventuring, but that simply will not do. I mean to be your partner in every sense of the word.”

  He rose from the steaming water and wrapped his arms about me, wetting me as he kissed me thoroughly. I put my arms about his neck, happy that he understood.

  He pressed his lips to my cheeks, my eyelids, grazed them over the curve of my ear. And whispered firmly, “No.”

  I jumped back. “What do you mean, ‘no’? You cannot just dismiss me out of hand.”

  “And neither will I recklessly expose you to danger. You are my wife. It is my place to protect you.” He stepped from the bath and strode across the marble floor to reach for a towel, rubbing himself briskly. His sleek black head disappeared into the folds of the towel, but I kept up my part of the conversation, no easy thing with the view he presented me. It was a testament to my state of mind that I scarcely noticed the long, hard stretch of the muscles of his thighs.

  “Good God, Brisbane, is that what we have become? Conventional? Normal? Is that what you want from me, an ordinary marriage to an ordinary wife? I thought my boldness was what drew you to me!”

  He dropped the towel so that just his eyes showed above it. “To be precise, it is among your most attractive and most maddening qualities,” he said.

  “You cannot expect me to sit quietly at the fireside whilst you see the world,” I told him, hating the pleading note that had crept into my voice.

  He dropped the towel and wrapped it about his waist, securing it low upon his hips. “I have given you the world these last months, have I not?”

  “A honeymoon is not the same. Your work is the greatest part of who you are, and if you will not share that with me, then you have locked me away from what is most important.”

  “You do not understand,” he began.

  I broke in, my voice harsh. “No, I do not. And I cannot. It seems the cruelest trick to offer me marriage under pretenses you knew were false.” I regretted the words as soon as I had uttered them, but of course I could not call them back. They had flown at him, and I had only to look at his face to see they had flown true and pierced him.

  “Do you regret marrying me?” His voice was deadly calm. If he had raged at me, I would have been at my ease. But this cool detachment was a mood I had seen once or twice before and I knew to be wary of it. He could not be touched when he was in the grip of one. He was polished and hard as an ebony chess king, implacable and immovable.

  “Of course not,” I said, deliberately gentling my tone. “You know the depth of my feeling for you. But I also esteem what I become when I am with you, when we are working,
hand in hand. And you seem determined never again to let that happen.”

  “And you are determined to press the matter until I do,” he countered. It was astonishing to me that he could stand before me wearing nothing but a bath towel and yet preserve as much dignity as if he’d been draped in a judge’s robes. But then Brisbane wore anything well, I reflected.

  I gave him a rueful smile. “You know me well enough to know that.”

  “Then we are at an impasse,” he observed.

  “And you will not leave Calcutta?” I asked one last time.

  “Not now,” he said gravely. “I have business here.”

  I gaped at him. “Business? What manner of business? I know nothing of this.”

  “As it happens, the viceroy has invited me to join a hunting party he is putting together. He is heading out after tigers. There is a man-eater preying upon a village near Simla. It promises to be excellent sport.”

  My mouth gaped farther still, and I shut it with a decisive snap. “You do not hunt,” I said after I had recovered myself.

  He lifted one heavy shoulder in a careless shrug. “People do change.”

  “Not you!” I cried. “It is one of the things I depend upon.”

  His expression did not alter, but I smelled something of savagery in him just then. “You will have your secrets, Julia. You must leave me mine. I will see you soon enough, I promise you that. And so we will leave it.”

  Even then I could have mended it. I could have conceded his concerns for my safety and his outrage at my sister’s manipulations, his sudden need for convention and normalcy. I could have trimmed myself to fit the mould of a proper wife. It would have taken but a phrase, gently spoken, and a smile, sweetly offered. But I had been such a wife once before, and I had vowed never again.

  So I did not offer him either the gentle phrase or the sweet smile. I merely turned on my heel and left him then, closing the door firmly behind me.

  And so I set my gaze toward Darjeeling and left with my sister and brother, my maid, Morag, and a party of porters that would have put Stanley’s expedition to shame.

  “Is it absolutely necessary to travel with so many men?” I demanded of Portia. “It looks as if we mean to claim Darjeeling in the name of the March family and establish a colony of our own. For heaven’s sake, Portia, the porters are laughing at us.”

  Portia shrugged. “They’re being paid well enough to carry Buckingham Palace on their backs if we ordered it.” I continued to needle her about the size of our party, but she did not rise to the bait. She knew Brisbane and I had quarrelled over the investigation and that her methods had been at the centre of our disagreement. Nothing more need be said upon the matter, at least not yet. Once my anger had burnt itself to cinders, no doubt I would have need of her sisterly bosom for a good weep, but for the present, I was content to embark upon the adventure we had set ourselves. I could not worry over Brisbane, I told myself sternly. He had sent his trunks with us as he required only a small bag on his trip, and I held on to the sight of those trunks as proof I would see him again soon. Besides, I reflected, there was quite enough to do just to navigate into the foothills of the Himalayas with an increasingly bitter Plum on our hands. As it happened, he had taken Portia’s manipulations no better than Brisbane had, and it had only been her pointed threats to dispatch a telegram to Father that had persuaded him to continue on with us.

  Our unwieldy party left Calcutta behind and began to wind its way slowly up the road to Darjeeling. We might have boarded the train, but Portia had taken one look at the tiny railway and stated flatly that she would not put a foot onto such a toy. Plum grumbled exceedingly at the extra time and trouble it required to travel by road, but in the end I was glad of it, for the air grew thinner and colder outside of Darjeeling, and the scenery changed as we wound our way ever upward. The first high peaks of the Himalayas hove into view, and I nearly fell from my horse when I saw at last the great snow-capped peaks of Kanchenjunga. It was the most beautiful, most majestic sight I had ever seen, and everything I had ever known before paled in comparison to that one extraordinary horizon.

  We lingered a number of days in Darjeeling town organising the rest of our journey before pressing on, passing through villages and skirting tea plantations and falling into rivers. The children were plump and friendly, and I noticed their parents were very unlike the Indians of Calcutta, for here the native folk were much shorter and with a coppery cast of complexion and broad, flat cheekbones. Portia, who had armed herself with every bit of information she could find upon the area, informed me that the people of Sikkim blended Bengali Indian with Tibetan and Nepalese, and that the language was a peculiar patois of Hindustani liberally laced with the mountain tongues. The result was a nearly indecipherable but pleasant-sounding language that rose and fell with a musical lilt.

  “Yes, but are we actually in Sikkim?” I asked.

  Portia wrinkled up her nose and pored over the map. “I think we may actually have crossed into Nepal.”

  “Nepal? Are you delirious?” Plum demanded. “We are still in Darjeeling district.”

  I peered over Portia’s shoulder. “I think we might have crossed into Sikkim, just there,” I pointed.

  “You have the map upside down. That is Madagascar,” Plum said nastily.

  “We could ask a porter,” I ventured.

  “We cannot ask a porter,” Portia hissed, “any more than we can ask the Cavendishes. It would be rude and impossibly stupid of us not to know where we are. Besides, so long as the porters know, that is all that needs be said upon the matter.”

  The one point we did agree upon was the beauty of our surroundings, wherever they might be. The landscape seemed to have taken what was best from many places and combined it to great effect, for I saw familiar trees and plants—ferns and roses and elms—and mingling with them the exotic blooms of orchids and towering, fragrant deodars. Here and there a cluster of native bungalows gave way to neat English cottages, sitting like curiosities among the orderly undulations of the tea fields. And over it all hovered the scent of the tea plants, rising above the serried rows to perfume the air. It was captivating, and more than once Plum very nearly walked off the side of a mountain because he was busily sketching scenes in his notebook.

  At last, a few days’ ride out of Darjeeling town—possibly in Sikkim, although possibly not—we crested a small mountain and looked down into as pretty and tidy a valley as I had ever seen. A small river debouched into a lake thick with lilies and water hyacinths at the mouth of the valley, and the only means of entrance was by way of a narrow stone bridge that seemed to beckon us forward.

  The head porter said something in his broken English to Portia and she nodded to me. “This is it. It is called the Valley of Eden, and just there,” she said, pointing with her crop, “that cluster of low buildings. That is the Peacocks.” Her voice shook a little, and I realised she must have been nervous at seeing Jane again. She had loved her so devotedly, and to be cast aside was no small thing to Portia. Yet though she was a prodigious holder of grudges, she would have travelled a hundred times as far to help her beloved Jane. But now, hovering on the edge of the precipice, she must have felt the awkwardness of it keenly, and I offered her a reassuring smile.

  “It is time, Portia.” I spurred my mount and led the way down the winding path into the Valley of Eden.

  Portia need not have worried. Before we had even ridden into the front court, the main doors of the plantation house had been thrown back upon their hinges and Jane, moving as quickly as her condition would permit, fairly flew down the steps.

  Portia dismounted and threw her reins to me, gathering Jane into her arms and holding her tightly. Plum and I looked away until Portia stepped back and Jane turned to us.

  “Oh, and, Julia, you as well!” I dismounted and offered her another embrace, although not so ferocious as that of my sister, and after a moment I ceded my place to Plum. We had all of us been fond of Jane, and not just for the happ
iness she had brought to our sister.

  Several minutes of confusion followed as the porters unlashed our trunks and sorted what was to be carried inside and what could be taken directly to the lumber rooms and stored, and through it all, Jane beamed at Portia. Anyone who knew her only a little would think her happiness undimmed, but I knew better. There were lines at her mouth and eyes that matched my sister’s, and a new quickness to her motions spoke of anxiety she could not still.

  “We have already had tea,” she said apologetically, “but if you would like to rest and wash now, I will have something brought to your rooms and you can meet the family at dinner. They are engaged at present, but they are very keen to meet you.” She showed us to our rooms then, scarcely giving us a chance to remark upon the elegance of the house itself. As we had seen from the road, it was low, only two floors, but wide, with broad verandahs stretching the length of both storeys. Staircases inside and out offered easy ingress, and windows from floor to ceiling could be opened for fresh air and spectacular views of the tea garden and the mountains beyond. I had not expected so gracious a home in so remote a spot, but the house was lovely indeed and I was curious about its history.

  I was given a pretty suite upstairs with a dressing room, and it was quickly decided that Morag should sleep there. Morag sniffed when she saw the narrow bed, but she said nothing, which told me she was far more exhausted than I had realised. I felt a stab of guilt when I thought of Morag, no longer a young woman, toiling up the mountain roads, clutching the mane of her donkey and muttering Gaelic imprecations under her breath.

  “I do hope you will be comfortable here, Morag,” I said by way of conciliation.

  She fixed me with a gimlet eye. “And I hope you will enjoy living out your life here, my lady. There is nothing on earth that would induce me to undertake that journey again.”