and a cheat never appealed to me,” Mr. Thornfield admitted. “My parents are crafty rather than malicious, but damned if I share their tastes—medicine meant studying mortality, in a sense. The Sikh holy book contains plentiful passages about flesh, and since my parents were about as interested in religion as they were in sobriety, I learnt from Sardar and his family. ‘We are vessels of flesh. . . . The soul taketh its abode in flesh. . . . Women, men, kings, and emperors spring from flesh.’ Sikhs are very—how shall I put it delicately?—straightforward about flesh. It was a comfort to me that they thought souls separate from lungs and livers, this sack of bones and blood we daily maintain, and I thought there was romance in medicine’s efforts to stave off the inevitable. This was when I was young and thick as a marble bust, you understand,” he added with a dour expression.
“I adore the macabre,” I confessed. “I used to supplement my governess’s income by selling last confessions in tea shops and the like.”
“Good Lord! Miss Stone, I find it difficult to picture you peddling gallows doggerel.”
“No more should you, sir, for it was prose, and I always chose the most poignant subjects, as if by placing hard words upon a page, like so many stones, my own heart would not be so heavy.”
Mr. Thornfield ran a finger over his chin. “If your writing was half as good as what you just said, Miss Stone, then I should very much like to read it.”
“Oh, they’re long gone,” I demurred, though my eyes must have shone at the praise. “They harmed no one and interested me—what sort of occupation could be better?”
“Well, there you have it. Medicine was honest work, and I had always wanted to see the place where my parents met, so I fled the Punjab at precisely the wrong time, in order to pursue a career which I’ve never practised outside of a war.”
“Surely you saved lives when you returned?”
He made no reply, his face so fixed that I imagined that I had turned him to stone.
“A few, perhaps,” he said at length.
I knew better than to press this point. “What did you think of London?”
Relieved I had shifted topics, Mr. Thornfield answered readily. “It’s filthy, and wet, and hides a brutal soul behind majestic walls. Its people are alternately snobbish or base, and if I didn’t come from a culture of warriors, I’d say it was the most savage city I’d ever seen. I thought it glorious, of course, from the instant it sullied my boots.”
“I loved it as well.”
“Yes, and if there are bits of yourself which you should prefer to toss in the gutter . . .”
“You can shed your skin.”
“And no one the wiser.”
“Still. It was by far the most crowded place I’ve ever been lonesome,” I added, staring into my glass.
“That ought not to have been the case, Miss Stone,” he said quietly. “I know very little about you, but I know you would be absolute rubbish at solitude. Your relish for companionship is clear as print.”
Tripping steps sounded, and Sahjara entered the room with her face alight, wearing a dressing gown over her nightdress. Rushing to Mr. Thornfield, she tugged at his sleeve. “Charles, I’ve had the most wonderful idea, and Sardar says he’ll only do it if you promise to join him, and of course I will as well though I’m not so good as either of you, but I’ll make up for it on horseback I’d wager, and Miss Stone will be so pleased after having been cooped up indoors for so long.”
“What is she jabbering about?” Mr. Thornfield asked irritably, swallowing a measure of Scotch. “She speaks English, I know she speaks English, she learnt the tongue in the Punjab from my parents and perfected its nuances here when she was five.”
“Charles, don’t be dreadful, we’re going to put on a demonstration!”
“A demonstration of what, you ill-mannered imp?”
“Of everything!” She turned to me, her smooth cheeks flushed with enthusiasm. “Riding, in my case, and perhaps archery. The chakkar, the tulwar, the aara—”
“Has she lost her mind?” Mr. Thornfield exclaimed. “You want to stage a mock fight Khalsa-style in the middle of the British countryside?”
“Yes!” She clapped her hands together decisively. “Yes, the way Sardar says you used to practise outside Lahore’s gates, only we’ll do it on the grounds, and Miss Stone will love it.”
“Miss Stone will be entirely put off by our foreign antics and