The Jasmine Wife

Now there was no escaping the endless censure and, with the departure of Charles, there was nothing and no one to look forward to, just endless days of boredom or visiting her aunt’s stuffy friends and walking the pekes. She’d developed a hatred of the poor things.

The next morning, in an attempt to recapture her lost pride, she put forward the idea of going to India by herself.

“Hundreds of girls do it.” She raised her chin and glared, even though she knew she might have gone too far. “Why should I have to wait for a husband to take me …?”

Her uncle was moved enough by her outburst to put down his newspaper in a way calculated to increase her fear of him. “So, you would join a shipload of common shopgirls, to trawl amongst the rabble of India for a husband? Simply because you can’t find one here … or won’t,” he added, referring to the time when she had refused what was seen as a perfectly good offer from a country parson with a generous living because she couldn’t bear the way he blew his nose then examined the contents of his handkerchief.

For almost a week she was hardly spoken to; the outrage was too deep.

It was while she sat, frozen with humiliation, staring down at her untouched breakfast, that the maid had entered and announced Mr Charles Fitzroy was waiting in the library.

“Perhaps he forgot his hat?” her uncle remarked cattily as she flew out of the room. In the hallway she took a moment to tidy her hair and compose her face into what she thought was an expression of pleasant unconcern before she opened the door to face him once more. Even so, her voice came out husky and cracked. “Mr Fitzroy? I didn’t expect to see you again.”

He was standing by the window staring out at the garden, still covered in a thin layer of morning frost, then, with what seemed an enormous effort of will, he turned to face her.

“I’ve been thinking …” He took a deep breath and swallowed hard, unable to look at her while rolling his hat around in his hands. “Look, I can’t accept you’ll marry this other fellow. I had it in mind that you might marry me.”

She held onto the back of a chair for support. “You didn’t mention this before,” she answered at last, her voice shaking.

“It didn’t seem fair to ask you to give up your life here, but it seems if I wait any longer you are lost to me. Though if you love this other fellow …”

“No, I don’t love him,” she managed to blurt out, “I never have. I was going to refuse him.”

He took a step closer. “Are you going to refuse me?”

She had just enough self-control to pause for a respectable time before answering, then to allow him to take her in his arms and clumsily brush their lips together.

Then the relief, the blessed relief, to be able to announce she’d received a proposal of marriage from Charles Fitzroy, and that she’d accepted him.

It was decided to arrange a special licence so they could be married almost at once, then sail for India together on the same day of the marriage, therefore saving the cost of a honeymoon.

Later, when the first throes of excitement had died down, Sara examined her reasons for accepting him. She was fairly sure she loved him, of course, although it had taken her some time to realise it. He’d been lured to the house by her ever-hopeful aunt, as had many other young men before him, and placed as an offering at her feet. Knowing she was expected to encourage him, she’d felt a stubborn resentment, telling herself he was no different from all the others.

Then, while they’d been playing tennis in the garden and he’d paused to take a breath, he was, without warning, suddenly illuminated. He stood with his shoulders back, his chest heaving from the pace of play, one hand on his hip and the other holding his racquet nobly by his side in the attitude of a Greek god. In the soft afternoon light, with the sun shining on his bright blond hair, he appeared almost unbearably heroic.

For a few moments it was as though the world had stopped spinning, and she remembered the flash of realisation.

I love him! I’m in love!

With that insight everything changed, and she couldn’t be easy around him any more. Just brushing her hand by accident on his caused such an intense mingling of pleasure and fear, she felt sure he must know. Even her laughter became forced and unnatural, and she couldn’t look into his eyes without blushing and turning away.

He was different to the other men in her narrow circle.

He was on leave from India for only a few weeks and brought with him into the stuffy air of parsons and bank clerks a lingering atmosphere of adventure and glamour. He told of cobras found asleep in the billiard room at the club, of tiger shoots and playing polo in the shadow of faded pink palaces. But, most of all, he intrigued her with his tales of the Indian people, their strange customs and powerful beliefs, transporting her back to her childhood and the world she so longed to recapture.

As a child she’d gone to bed each night hungrily devouring library books written by yet another female traveller, either fictitious or factual, braving it alone in foreign climes. The women she admired rode disguised in flowing robes on testy camels over vast deserts, or roamed the South Pacific in search of their tropical destiny.

She’d wanted to be one of those women, but how she would go about it was uncertain until Charles had appeared.

For Charles, it was a revelation to watch her shining eyes and rapt expression every time he spoke. It occurred to him it would be very pleasant to come home every night to such an infatuated creature. Though he couldn’t know it, it was not so much his masculine charm that caused her face to light up whenever he spoke of India. It was India itself and the prospect of adventure, or perhaps discovering something of her past, that held her spellbound.

He almost visibly shuddered when he thought about some of the girls he’d met in India. Like the other men in his crowd, he cast a calculating eye over the cargo of English girls, the so-called “fishing fleet”, who arrived every October and stayed till the beginning of the hot season in the hope they’d find suitable husbands. He found the idea of choosing from amongst them impossible, as even the plainest and poorest of them showed an unbecoming haughtiness. For the first time in their lives, these girls found themselves in demand, and were going to make the most of it, despite the fact most of them, in his eyes, were only just passable.

After a few years of rejecting all those put before him, he decided to return to England on his next leave and find a wife for himself.

Sara Archer was not exactly beautiful, though certainly far from plain; she was what was called attractive, despite being a little overweight. He thought she was too tall for absolute beauty, as he usually liked petite women. Her teeth were very good though, and her hair lovely, despite being of a colour he was not particularly fond of, as he much preferred blondes.

He thought her eyes were rather lovely, even though framed by thick, almost black eyebrows, but she was undeniably intelligent and highly accomplished. Several nights spent listening to her play his favourite pieces on the piano was proof of her talent, that and the fact she had lived in and survived India, when so many children hadn’t, made her a far superior candidate for marriage than any other woman he’d met in England.

Despite her shortcomings, he saw her as a potential wife because he was sure she adored him, even though she did at times have an annoying habit of contradicting him on matters he felt she should know nothing about.

Being an orphan only added to her charms. There was no doting parent to make demands on her time and take her away from her wifely duties and, despite the fact her parentage was a little cloudy, he’d been assured her father had been educated at Eton, was English through and through, and had left his daughter a small annuity for her personal use only, the comfortable sum of five thousand pounds, which would be his on the day of their marriage.

Though when faced with the real prospect of marriage, there was the sudden realisation he might not be able to please himself any more. He’d momentarily forgotten about the pleasures of his club, and the freedom bachelor life brought. It was pleasant to be always available to balance the table at dinner parties, and to be surrounded by admiring women hanging on his every word.

Then there was the thrill of big game hunting, the drinking till all hours with his male friends, whose company, he had to admit, he preferred more than any woman he’d ever met. And, of course, there were all the other delights India had to offer. A thrill ran up his back at the memory of past pleasures. There were indeed compensations for a life spent as a single man, and a wife would be sure to get in the way of all that.

He’d decided after all to return to India and resume the pleasant life he’d always lived. It was only when Sara had told him about her potential engagement to another man that he had felt a sudden pang of regret. Somehow, he’d always imagined her as his own to take or leave as the whim seized him, and now there was someone else in the picture he felt as though something had been stolen from him. The thought of the other man being in the way meant nothing to him. He felt sure she’d choose him over anyone else, regardless of the consequences.

When she agreed to marry him, though, it came as a shock. But, like a man, he accepted it and there was no turning back, despite at first an almost overwhelming urge to run in the other direction.

In the end, though, it was his desire for a son and heir that finally convinced him he’d made the right choice. And he liked her, really liked her. She’d be a splendid companion for him. Now, all she had to do was fulfil the role that was expected of her, and there was no reason why their marriage should not be a success.

For Sara, alone in her room at the end of the momentous day where she had at last fulfilled the destiny expected of her, she stood before the mirror and closely examined her reflection, running her fingers over her face as though to smooth away the lingering signs of doubt. The blinding realisation had come to her as quite a shock. She’d agreed to marry a man she didn’t really know and would go to the other side of the world to live with him.

Only a few months before, the question might not have arisen, but now she asked herself … What would the ladies from our Female Emancipation group say?

It was while she had been running errands for her aunt that Sara had been stopped by a young woman bearing a placard saying, “Women of the World Unite!”

She was almost mannish in her dress and clearly not wearing stays.

“Come on in,” the girl said, laughing. “We don’t bite, and you look like it might do you some good.”

The church hall was almost empty; even so, the speaker talked with a truth and passion difficult to resist. She spoke of the unfairness of the marriage laws, and why women should have the vote; the terrible injustices inflicted on their sex, and of the foolish and restrictive nature of the female dress. For Sara, it was the beginning of an understanding she had always been dimly aware of, but, once enlightened, had changed her thinking from that day forth.

Now she saw tyranny everywhere, especially in her own home. It appalled her to see how her aunt had to pacify her husband in order to keep him content. Where once she’d grudgingly accepted the petty rituals of warming her uncle’s slippers before the fire, or listening silently while he expressed his opinions, she now eyed him with a deep and bitter resentment, longing to say what she really thought, but having to bite her tongue for the sake of peace.

The young woman in the plain blouse and skirt, known to her later as Mary, had shouted out her warnings with a raised fist, and Sara was very aware of the truth of her words.

Though she was sure she was in love with Charles, deeply in love even, and she was equally sure she was marrying a man who loved her. Also, it was three days before her twenty-third birthday, considered far beyond the turning point of being either an eligible young lady or a hopelessly lost old maid.

But it wasn’t just the fear of spinsterhood driving her to accept him.

There had been a terrible row, a row that had caused such a storm she felt it was impossible for her to stay in her aunt’s home a moment longer.

She had been secretly meeting with the Ladies Emancipation group under the pretence of attending bible studies with other so-called respectable girls when she’d been discovered.

Someone had mentioned Sara had been missing from the bible meetings for some time. Then a pamphlet on women’s rights had been found in her room and placed before her outraged uncle. For a moment she considered denying it was hers, then she admitted it and, what was more, admitted it proudly, and announced she would continue to go to the meetings no matter what.

For her uncle it was the final straw and he washed his hands of her, only making it clear he wanted her out of his sight as soon as possible.

Now, though, none of that mattered.

She could go back to India at last, India! Mother India! Her lost home that lately had haunted every thought and called her with an urgent and relentless cry, even as she slept.

They married on the day of their planned departure, in the church Sara had attended for nearly seventeen years, knowing a few hours later they’d be together for the rest of their lives.

She took a furtive look at him through her silk veil, hoping for a look of reassurance, as she was almost overwhelmed with sudden feelings of doubt. Though, when he felt her eyes upon him, instead of a returning smile, he seemed to visibly pull himself together, straightening his shoulders and swallowing hard.

Her heart sank. It seemed to her that Charles was steeling himself for something unpleasant, something he must endure, and see it through to the end at all cost.

A screeching note from the organ made her jump, and her stomach gave a sickening lurch. It came to her in a blinding flash. She may not love him after all! And perhaps he didn’t love her! And was already regretting his choice even though he’d just spoken the words, “I will” in an almost inaudible shaky murmur.

When it came her turn to speak she hesitated, caught between a desire to make a run for the open door of the church and a yearning to cling to the man who offered her a lifeline to a new world.

She glanced around in a frantic effort to find an answer, but saw instead the face of her aunt, alarmingly pale, though smiling bravely, and her uncle, nodding furiously at her with a tight grimace on his lips, clearly willing her to get it over with.

She must have responded, as the final words, “I now pronounce you man and wife”, were uttered at last, but Sara, at the threshold of what she felt every young woman must desire, instead of feeling the expected rush of joy, felt an overwhelming sense of doom.

Then, as she turned to walk down the aisle towards her new life, her aunt seemed to haul herself to her feet as she reached out to the new bride for a congratulatory kiss, swayed a little, then, grasping the folds of Sara’s gown in her fingers, fell in a crumpled unconscious heap at the feet of the bride and groom, clutching a torn piece of silk from the wedding veil.

The illness was serious, and inevitably fatal. When her aunt begged her to stay to help nurse her it seemed unfeeling to do otherwise and, even though she expected Charles to protest, he was remarkably accepting about the prospect of travelling to India without his bride.

“In some ways it’s a good thing,” he said as he tried to reassure her.

“My house is a mere bachelor’s hut and this small delay will give me a chance to find you something more suitable, and you can brush up on your Hindi. Tamil will be beyond you, I feel. But Hindi will come in very useful in dealing with the servants. Also—” he gave her a furtive glance “—my position demands my wife be well dressed. Lady Palmer entertains on a regular basis and you’ll be expected, as my wife, to make a bit of a splash.”

“Oh …” Sara blushed as she looked down at what was meant to be her going away outfit, an ill-fitting mustard-coloured dress which did nothing for her complexion, adorned with oversized leg-of-mutton sleeves too tight under the armpits.

All her clothes had been made by her aunt’s dressmaker, a lady who specialised in a style that had died out in Paris at least twenty years before, despite still flourishing amongst the vicars’ wives and spinsters of Hampstead, and any suggestion that poor Miss Blunt might be exchanged for someone more modern was quickly suppressed.

Though her fears about the suitability of her clothes seemed trivial compared with the cruel reality that Charles would be leaving her any moment, her husband but not a husband, not till they spent a night together under the same roof.

In an agony of misery she threw her arms around his neck, unwilling to let him go. There was no question of his staying; he’d extended his leave already and was anxious to return to his duties.

He reached up to remove her arms from his neck, gave her a final brief kiss, then hurried away without looking back, while she flung herself down on the settee and cried as though her heart would break. To be so close to freedom, then to have it taken away, was almost more than she could bear.

Later, when her tears were exhausted and she felt nothing but an empty despair, she’d climbed wearily to her feet and made her way upstairs to the sick room.

Chapter 2

The shoreline moved closer still, and the mirage formed into a blinding reality. They would be there soon. Sara pulled a mirror out of her bag and examined the clear light topaz eyes squinting back at her. They appeared unimpressive in that harsh white glare, but she knew they would be lovely again once she was in a softer light. Her eyes were the only feature on her face she wouldn’t change, and the rest of it she found more acceptable now, with the miraculous clearing of her skin and an equally miraculous dramatic weight loss.

The first small signs of improvement had come soon after the marriage ceremony. She had lost at least fifteen pounds in only two months, forcing her to buy a completely new wardrobe, and her doctor pronounced her excess weight and her skin condition as being based in nervous tension, hinting it was not unusual for single women to improve in looks with the marriage state.

She didn’t tell him that, even though she was a wife, she was still technically a virgin, and perhaps the real reason for the improvement was she was no longer made to feel ashamed whenever the subject of marriage was mentioned.

After being at sea for eight weeks, including a further month spent in the Canary Isles due to having to mend a split mast, where she’d gorged herself on fresh fruit and vegetables, the almost constant faint rash around her nose had miraculously disappeared. Then the fine red bumps on her cheeks and forehead had faded completely, revealing a surface with the fresh even tone of rich cream.

Her true beauty however, lay in her bone structure, a beauty that would last long beyond the freshness of youth. Without the excess weight, her face became more refined, making her eyes appear much larger. Her posture had always been good, and her straight back and long neck gave her elegance, far from the clumsy girl of her youth.

Though it was the new shape of her once heavy eyebrows that gave her the most pleasure. Never could she have imagined such a small change could have produced so dramatic an improvement to her face. The mysterious ritual of threading, performed by an Arab woman in a tent in a Canary Isles market, had turned her shaggy brows into a blackbird’s wings, giving her face a striking new beauty. Now she secretly plucked them to keep their shape, knowing her aunt would be horrified had she known, believing a lady must learn to live with her imperfections, and any thought of artifice was vulgar in the extreme.

Sara had no such feelings as she smiled at her reflection and smoothed her skin with a cautious finger. She hoped fervently the hated rash had been banished forever, though; it seemed the further she travelled from England, the healthier and lovelier she became.

Her much improved looks were a novelty still, and sometimes she found herself studying her face in the mirror for longer than necessary.

Though, as time wore on, she trained herself not to think too much about her new-found charms, but secretly enjoyed the long slow looks men gave her as she passed them on her walks around the deck of the ship.

She snapped the mirror shut and slipped it back into her bag. While she’d been dreaming, the shoreline had drifted closer still. The clear blue waters had changed to a dirty yellow, and the once vague outline of the distant bank had turned into buildings set amongst tall waving palms and enormous trees spreading their branches along the baking paths like engorged pythons.

Some of the structures were prosperous and ornate, more bizarre, romanticised reflections of their respectable English cousins, while others, mere piles of other people’s cast-off rubbish and the fallen branches of coconut palms, were turned into little caves to huddle under for a moment’s respite from the merciless sun and the endless mass of humanity.

Towering over even the grand buildings of the British were the temples, shimmering through the damp heat, many storeys high, barbaric and mysterious, intricately carved with unlikely gods and decorated with gaudy impossible colours and gold leaf. There were dozens of them, punctuating the tropical landscape every few hundred yards and soaring towards the heavens like the wild and fantastic imaginings of a dream, monumental and overwhelming.

Remembered snatches of whispered stories of ancient and primitive rituals carried out in the dark recesses of the temples crept back into her mind, making her shiver: stories too horrible to be spoken of out loud, used as a weapon by the servants when she was naughty, to frighten her into good behaviour.

Sara stared out towards the shore, her eyes squinting in the fierce sun. There, rising and falling with the motion of the waves, something floated on the surface of the water.

She peered over the side of the ship, then reeled back, shaken and drained of colour. Afloat in her funeral bier, a woven basket lined with a mass of faded flowers and wrapped in white gauze, slept a perfect child of a few weeks old.

A loving hand had placed the fragrant flowers around the halo of the child’s head and over the little body, before releasing it into the sea. An unwanted girl, perhaps, who’d died conveniently, but had clearly been loved by someone in her short life.

The child floated past, an image of unbearable loneliness at the beginning of her journey. Sara’s eyes followed the little voyager, smarting with painful tears till the yellow water turned deep blue again, and for a brief moment she was comforted by this.

Then her stomach lurched, and for a moment she thought she was going to be sick. She clutched the rail and squeezed her eyes till she saw stars, praying with a sudden fervent superstitious fear, to crush the image lingering in her mind.

She began to pace again, now with a more urgent step. It seemed they would never reach land and the shore was further away than ever.

Then, slowly, as she watched, the scene before her sprang to life. A tree swayed in the gentle breeze, and the thousands of coloured dots moving along the shore evolved into human beings.

Children began to play, running back and forth on childish missions. Thin wisps of grey smoke rose from the cooking fires where women sat, draped in vivid saris, their movements impossibly elegant for such humble everyday tasks.

Then the first sounds, laughter and shouting in Hindi, and Tamil, and music, a strange off-beat medley to western ears. There was a procession somewhere.